680 jobseekers took part in the research and we think the infographic below does a pretty good job of summarising the results.

Key findings

• Two thirds are actively seeking new opportunities
• The biggest challenge facing jobseekers is a lack of jobs and opportunities
• 72% use social media to aid their career or jobs search
• 59% of jobseekers are happy with their work-life balance
• 36% search for jobs on their smartphones

Download this infographic

Embed this infographic

<a href="="http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/simply-better/2013/05/16/infographic-what-do-jobseekers-think/">
    <img src="http://www.jobs.ac.uk/enhanced/careers-images/infographics/jobseeker-survey.png" alt="Infographic: What do jobseekers really think?"/>
</a>

The results reveal some important statistics that shed light on the attitudes and expectations of current job hunters. Job competition still remains fierce but it’s encouraging to see that jobs.ac.uk is offering some help with nearly three quarters of respondents having found their job via jobs.ac.uk.

What do you think of the results? Sound off in the comments below or contact me directly at carl@jobs.ac.uk

This new networking day features a superb line-up of speakers that will provide delegates with practical advice, useful examples and top tips on how to develop an effective recruitment strategy and the latest developments on UK immigration.

Plus there will be an opportunity to meet and network with the speakers and other HR professionals.

Register your place for just £75+VAT today.

Our Expert Speakers

• Thomas Price, Client Director, Enhance Media
  Building a powerful employer brand
• Audrey Elliott , Partner, Eversheds
  The latest updates and guidance on changes to Tier 2 policy of the UK immigration system and how to prepare for UKBA audits
• Craig Mc Gregor, Head of Commercial Services, ContentETC
  Copywriting: using words to attract top talent
• Richard Bunkham, E-Recruitment Specialist, University of Oxford
  An insight into the University of Oxford’s e-recruitment strategy & how to optimise your recruitment processes by using an evidence based approach

The networking day will run from 9:30am to 3:45pm on Wednesday 17th July 2013 at University of Warwick.

Who should attend?

If you are responsible for your organisations recruitment strategy, writing job adverts or descriptions, or you implement activities to attract international academic and research staff, this is a must attend event!

All delegates will leave the event feeling motivated and full of great new ideas to employ in the workplace.

How to book

For a limited time only, registration is only £75+VAT per delegate and includes access to the full speaker programme, refreshments, a hot carvery lunch and lots of opportunities to network with the speakers and your peers.

Places for this highly topical and information packed workshop are going fast so register your place today to make sure your institution doesn’t miss out

To register your place, please complete booking form by clicking the button below:

For more information, please contact our Events Marketing Officer, Rupinder Cremins, on rupinder@jobs.ac.uk or call 024 7615 0852.

The research was also designed to provide recruitment professionals with useful benchmarking information to help make more informed recruitment decisions, such as identifying the most effective candidate-attraction methods.

In April, we asked 172 organisations that are engaged in recruiting academic, research, science and related staff, for their thoughts and feedback on the recruitment landscape and the results are now in!

Download the full report for free here

The top 5 findings from the research

• Job boards continue to be the most effective recruitment tool for recruiters
• Sector specialism, pricing and audience size are the most important factors when choosing a job board
• The lack of skilled/quality candidates is the biggest challenge facing recruiters
• Cost reduction is the biggest recruitment priority for the next 12 months
• The adoption of Applicant Tracking Systems in the sector is still very low

Commenting on the findings, Carl Freelove, Marketing Manager at jobs.ac.uk, said “The numbers in the survey clearly demonstrate that job boards, particularly, specialist job boards, are still an important part of the recruitment mix. The research also indicated that a lack of skilled or quality candidates was the biggest challenge for recruiters, which is supported by the majority of respondents using specialist job boards, such as jobs.ac.uk, to find more relevant, better quality jobseekers.

To read the full survey, download the report for free by clicking the button below:

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!