Launched earlier in the year, Vine is great little video app that lets you shoot ultra-short looping videos (only six seconds or less) to share easily across Twitter and other social media.

Like Tweets, Vine videos (Vines?) are easily consumed and highly shareable videos that inspire lots of creativity in trying to create engaging content inside a six second window!  You can read more about Vine and see some examples of great vine videos here.

But what does Vine mean to the recruitment world?

Well, using online video for recruitment is nothing new, but Vine does provide some interesting options which utilised effectively could make you stand out from competitors as a more innovative and engaging employer!

Although it should be noted that using Vine to describe a new job opportunity in six seconds or less may be a challenge for the even fastest of talkers!

Here are our 5 top ways to use Vine for recruitment

1. Campus/office tour – shoot mini videos of your office, campus and location to give jobseekers a peek in your workplace and what it’s like to work there. This could be especially useful for organisations looking to recruit internationally!
2. Benefits video –if your organisation has some great employee benefits such as childcare, a gym or a beautiful campus – why not shoot a vine video of it?
3. Employee videos– record behind-the-scenes videos of employees (or other brand advocates) talking about why they love working for you. Great for humanizing your employer brand!
4. Short and sweet promo videos – Opened a new facility or department? New research grant or funding? Use Vine to promote your organisations recent successes to get jobseekers excited about working for you.
5. Live careers events coverage – record real-time updates of your exhibition stand and other happenings, such as news and on the spot interviews with delegates, at careers events. Combine with the events official Twitter hash tag to help attract more delegates to  your stand

With only six seconds to play with, the goal of a Vine video then is to catch the jobseekers attention with something creative and inspirational that perhaps sparks off a conversation or ultimately gets them to explore your organisation and the opportunities offered further.

But before you head off to create your own recruitment vines, here are our top tips:

• Before creating the video, ask yourself (ideally in one sentence), what you hope a viewer will take away from the video
• Use sound to easily explain what you’re doing in the video
• Use Vine’s hashtags to make your video posts even more visible
• Always provide some context to the Vine in the body copy of the tweet/social message that your using to share the video
• Finally….KISS (Keep It Simple Sweetie). Vine is not the right medium for communicating complex concepts or messages.

Have you used Vine? Can you think of any other uses of Vine for recruitment? Let us know your vine stories at carl@jobs.ac.uk – I would love to hear from you!

In fact, talk to your colleagues over in marketing and you’ll probably hear a similar focus around the latest hot trends from branding, mobile and social media to customer engagement and video. The tools and the principles are arguably the same.

So what lessons can recruiters take from the marketing mind-set? Here are just 5 ideas:

1. Be across all channels: Just like marketing, there’s no magic bullet in recruitment. Recruiters should use a combination of multiple channels, from job boards and social media to events and mobile, to create an effective strategy. But don’t forget to measure (see below) and ensure that there is a consistent, uniform “brand” and “hiring” message across all channels!
2. Copywriting: Creating effective copywriting and powerful messaging is a vital part of marketing. In the hands of a recruiter, effective copy can help to attract better candidates, discourage weaker candidates from applying and reduce time and money wasted on large numbers of irrelevant applications. Good copy should have a strong headline that attracts attention (the job title), a short narrative to sell why the job is compelling (the description) and a clear call to action (how to apply).
3. Employer branding: In a world saturated by lots of jobs and fierce competition, basic job ads alone are no longer enough to attract the best candidates. Get creative and use branding to catch the attention of more jobseekers and differentiate from other recruitment messages. What’s your brand story? Why should jobseekers choose you? Does your brand create a connection with jobseekers?
4. Lead nurturing: Marketers use the process of lead nurturing to build relationships with qualified prospects with the goal of earning their business when they are ready to buy. This principle can also be applied to recruitment by way of talent pooling applicants. These applicants have shown they are actively interested in your organisation so keep banked/speculative applicants warm and engaged by sharing the latest, relevant news about your organisation and the opportunities offered. Most applicant tracking systems even help to automate this process!
5. Measure, measure and measure: Marketing folk are fanatical about measuring marketing campaigns to help them make future decisions. The same applies to recruitment. Measure your campaigns to determine where successful recruits come from. Are your media, agencies & head hunters delivering value for money? You can then use this data to help you spend more time planning for success and less time filtering applications from poor performing channels!

Recruiters love them too. Do a quick search on Google or Pintrest for “recruitment infographics” and you will find lots of informative recruitment infographics covering everything from recruitment trends to social recruiting.

But how about using them as part of your recruitment process?

We came across a superb infographic by an organisation in Belgium called Kite Consultants who used an infographic to help recruit consultants – see the infographic in its full glory below.

The infographic does a great job of giving the jobseeker lots of useful (and fun) information about the employer and the role itself – and is almost certainly likely to be shared by others for the clever use of marketing, if not for the job!

Here are 5 benefits of using infographics for recruitment:

• Create viral magnets – people love to share clever infographics on websites, blogs and social media – all generating valuable awareness for your vacancy. In fact, infographics are 9 times more likely to be re-tweeted or liked on Social Media!
• Improve SEO and traffic – the viral nature of infographics, means you create more ‘noise’ in search engines (Google loves social signals) which in turn means more traffic will be driven to your careers site or careers blog
• Increase employer brand awareness – that new infographic you created for a ‘Professor in Biology’ has just gone viral – along with your employer brand! Infographics therefore help to promote your employer brand to a wide, global audience.
• ‘Images paint a thousand words’ – Its proven that humans absorb imagery much faster than text information so you can use infographics to convey job information much more effectively to jobseekers
• Look like a leading employer – A clever infographic can make you look much more innovative and forwarding thinking than the competition

Kite Consultants Infographic

Seen any good infographics? If you’ve seen or even created any useful recruitment infographics, please sound off in the comments box below and share your favourites

Anna Grundy (left)

Anna joins jobs.ac.uk as our new Office Manager and is responsible for leading and managing our large adverts team who carefully categorise and enter all job adverts onto the site.

Anna has extensive managerial experience in the telecommunications field and when not being busy for jobs.ac.uk, enjoys walking her dogs, Sonny and Monty, and is a keen participant in most sports, including windsurfing and snowboarding!

Kerry Walker (right)

Kerry joins our UK sales team as an Account Executive for Higher Education and is responsible for developing customer relationships with our University customers in the South by helping to identify their recruitment needs.

Kerry comes from the world of media, having worked as an Account Manager for printed and online publications for a number of years, and recently relocated from the Cotswolds to live in Birmingham with her better half (a born and bred ‘brummy’). In her free time, she loves going to the gym, music festivals, food, wine, Vegas, shopping, fashion, design and family!

Ceri-Louise Downes (left)

Ceri-Louise joins our UK sales team as an Account Executive and will be responsible for developing accounts within the FE, Public Sector and Commercial arm of our business across the UK.

Ceri-Louise has mainly worked in specialist recruitment, which she has done across the UK, Holland and Australia, more recently working as a Business Development Executive within the FMCG space. Ceri-Louise lives in Rugby with her husband, Ryan, and enjoys going to the gym, horse riding, surfing, socialising with friends and family, travelling and shopping!

We all hope that Anna, Kerry and Ceri-Louise will enjoy their her new roles at jobs.ac.uk and being part of a friendly and exciting team!

Some other notable statistics from January:

• 7,909,119 page views
• 138,405 visitors to our careers advice section – 176% up on last year!
• 40% of our audience were new to jobs.ac.uk
• 30% of our audience came from overseas
• 17% of our audience used mobile devices to access jobs.ac.uk

Why the increase?

At jobs.ac.uk, we’ve always got our finger on the pulse and ever aware that the global landscape for staff recruitment is constantly changing. We’ve therefore been busy improving our website, increasing our exposure worldwide and engaging with more jobseekers than ever before!

These latest figures help to demonstrate that we’re continuing to grow and attracting more jobseekers from more countries for our advertisers vacancies – so providing even more bang for your ‘recruitment buck’!

Naturally we believe advertising your jobs online is the first step to ensuring you have access to a relevant and extensive pool of high-qualified jobseekers.

To help you improve the success of your online recruitment advertising, we’ve put together a handy guide which contains essential best practice, tips and advice - and all for free.

Our free ebook covers the following areas:

• How to choose the right online media for your vacancies
• How to write effective job adverts for the web

So whether you’re new to online recruitment, or an experienced user, our free guide will help you to immediately get more from your online recruitment advertising campaigns.

You can download your free ebook here

As one of Europe’s biggest (and longest running) online recruitment conferences, the event is always of good quality and a great opportunity to mingle with the 450 or so other HR professionals, recruitment suppliers and job boards.

Yet again, the conference attracted some big name speakers from the likes of Virgin Atlantic and LinkedIn to Nestle and Telefonica and whilst ironically specific “online recruitment” content was often sparse in some sessions, there were some thought-provoking ideas that came from the conference.
Some highlights:

Craig McGregor, Head of Commercial Services, ContentETC.com

• Recruiters need good copy to attract better candidates, discourage weaker candidates and reduce time and money wasted on unsuitable applications
• With the rise of smaller screens (e.g. tablets, mobile phones), there are even more distractions for jobseekers and increased competition
• Don’t forget that copy is a conversation between two people

Mervyn Dinnen Content & Community Manager, jobsite

Latest findings from independent review of UK recruitment found that:

• Jobseekers still favour job boards over other channels
• Knowledgeable staff and sector specialism was more important to recruiters than pricing
• Smartphone usage increased from 43% (Feb 09) to 74% (Sept 12)
• 40% of jobseekers use smartphones for jobseeking

Giles Guest, Director, Enhance Media

• “Joined up recruitment” is big challenge in 2013
• Recruiters have lots of fragmented recruitment strategies (social media, PPC, careers websites etc)
• Fragmentation is result of more attraction channels, emerging channels and complexity within recruitment
• As recruiters, we need a ‘joined up strategy’ which brings all of our strategies together and allows for a more uniform, efficient way of working and recruiting (e.g. making our content work hard across all channels)

Whilst the content wasn’t truly ground-breaking, there were some great stand out messages:

• The importance of the employer brand, both to improve day-to-day recruitment and sustain competitive advantage
• The increasing value of research and data to support decision making in an increasingly complex recruitment environment
• The need to focus on the basics, including copywriting and the whole candidate experience
• The challenge of creating an efficient and effective joined-up strategy to link together the different elements of your online recruitment

Overall, our team really enjoyed the day and came away brimming with ideas for jobs.ac.uk so we look forward to the conference next year in 2014!

We are one of the sectors oldest job boards – created in the height of the dotcom boom and around before Google was even launched! However, from our early beginnings of providing a more cost-effective, recruitment advertising service for universities, in 15 years we’ve gone from strength to strength.

Today we advertise academic, research, science and related positions for over 7,000 organisations in over 250 countries including universities, research institutions, public sector bodies, government departments, charities and commercial organisations.

To mark the occasion, we are celebrating all things fifteen! So here are fifteen facts about jobs.ac.uk you may not have known:

We’re rightfully proud of the reputation we’ve built…but we don’t rest on our laurels. Throughout 2013 we will be busy making even more improvements to our website, increasing our exposure worldwide and engaging with more jobseekers than ever before. What does this mean? It means we will be attracting more and better jobseekers worldwide for your vacancies on jobs.ac.uk!

So all that’s left for me to say is a big thank you to all our customers, jobseekers and staff, you’ve been very loyal and a great help and support over the past fifteen years.

Here’s to the next 15 years of finding great jobs for bright people!

The conference attracted over 120 HR professionals from Higher Education Institutions across Australia, New Zealand and as far afield as Africa – and was a great opportunity for jobs.ac.uk to speak to University customers on the other side of the pond!

The theme of the conference was “Developing a High Performance Culture” and covered various buzz topics including HR leadership, organisational development trends, employee performance and employee engagement.

jobs.ac.uk also took to the stage to co-present an informative and practical session called ‘Tools for High Performance Recruitment’ with our friends from Griffith University.

The session provided delegates with tips, tools and advice on how to build an effective recruitment strategy including an insight into the development and success of the jobs.ac.uk and Griffith University Campaign Site – http://www.griffithknowmore.com

If you would like to see a copy of the slides, feel free to email me directly at carl@jobs.ac.uk.

As with the previous year’s event (which jobs.ac.uk also sponsored), the conference was incredibly well organised and took place in a rather lovely venue – the award-winning Surfers Paradise Marriott Resort and Spa.

The quality of the conference also extended across to the Gala Diner which took place at the nearby Seaworld resort and began with a spectacular Dolphin show; making for a unique dining experience and great opportunity for networking.

All in all it was a fascinating two days, which delivered a solid balance of HR theory and practise, ideas and inspiration and was a great opportunity to speak to international Universities directly about their recruitment needs.

We look forward to the next Conference in 2013 – which is earmarked to take place in New Zealand; another part of the world where jobs.ac.uk is widely used!

The free app allows jobseekers to search over 3,500 vacancies from universities, research institutions and commercial organisations worldwide directly from their mobile phone. In addition, the advanced job search allows jobseekers to save search results, shortlist favourites and email jobs to friends.

The new app will make it quicker and easier for jobseekers to find and apply for jobs on jobs.ac.uk and will ensure that recruiters continue to find the best people and fill vacancies more quickly.

The app is the first in a series of mobile developments by jobs.ac.uk and follows a significant increase in mobile users to the website, which has seen a 100% growth since June 2011. This trend is expected to increase further with the wider adoption of smart phones and the growing number of jobseekers using mobile devices to perform job searches.

Paul Bartlett, Director of jobs.ac.uk commented “We are very excited to have launched our first mobile app to allow our jobseekers to search for jobs on the go. The number of jobseekers using mobile devices to access jobs.ac.uk has increased significantly over the past 12 months, so the new app will provide our mobile audience with the best access to relevant jobs wherever they are”.

jobs.ac.uk’s mobile app can be downloaded for free using the link below:

Apple App Store for iPhone
Google Play for Android