Super Bowl XLIV has just finished airing in the United States. One of the highlights each year is the release of new commercials. Over the past few years we have seen CareerBuilder battle against Monster for the best commercial. Who will take out the title this year?
In the Monster Super Bowl Ad, Monster.com helps a busy fiddling beaver realize his dreams. "Get a Monster Advantage".
CareerBuilder's ad was labeled "too hot for TV" Love Casual Fridays? You might not if you worked here.
CareerBuilder gets my vote. What do you think? CareerBuilder or Monster.
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Search Suggest and/or Auto-Compete is a function usually applied to the keyword field of a job search form. The use of these functions enhances the users search experience through a "suggest as you type" or auto-complete functionality built into the job search form.
For example, as you start to enter letters/numbers into the search field, the function automatically conducts a search and returns any search results matched to that query. You can then either select the relevant keywords or continue typing. You can read more about this topic in a dissertation (PDF) by Ingmar Webar titled Efficient Index Structures for and Applications of the CompleteSearch Engine.
Using a search suggest or auto-complete function can...
reduces the chance of misspelled queries by guiding users to desired queries
reduces the typing effort required by users
speeds up the search-experience by reducing the need to type long queries
improves the quality and precision of queries
lets the website influence search choices instead of being passive observer
Metrics you can use to determine if this function could be a success for your job search form...
fewer keyword misspellings
fewer "did you mean" requests and lower usage of "did you mean" suggestions
fewer "0 results returned" searches
lower number of searches/session metrics
can lead to lower "time on site" metrics
users can find what they are after faster
The MyCareer job search example (above right) starts the search based on 2 letters/numbers. Recruit.net search function is based on 1 letter/number and shows the number of jobs matching the search criteria. Unfortunately the search function on both these examples only matches the start of a keyword string. ie it will not return suggested results if you type "ccount" of "accounting".
CareerZone search is based on 1 letter/number and returns search results that are in the job title. These results are grouped and sorted by the job title.
One of the best examples of search suggest is from Jobs.co.nz as it matches results within in the job title, and also within the job advertisement.
This search suggest example from Yahoo7 has the option to turn the function on or off.
You can also apply this functionality to the location field. Below are examples from MyCareer and Hippo.
Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.
Feel free to join in on the conversation. All comments are moderated before publishing. Comments posted by subscribers don't necessarily reflect the views of Recruitment Directory.
Helena Smith (12:53pm Monday 08 February 2010)
This is was a very interesting article.
kanika (5:01pm Monday 08 February 2010)
Hi,
I cannot view the article. Please email if posisble.
Australian Job Board Statistics measuring the total unique browsers during January 2010. Data source - Nielsen NetRatings. SEEK 3.872m, CareerOne 1.747m, MyCareer 1.448m
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The growth on Seek isn't really a suprise - probably more due to attrition is the printed press pages moving to online rather than an actual reflection of more available positions?
I will be using these stats in an interview on the ABC tomorrow. The biggest problem with major job boards is the lack of moderation, hence the influx of less than legitimate and 'junkie' type ads.
We are all used to creating a fancy favicon for our websites. But have you got around to creating a custom iPhone or iTouch icon yet?
To configure this icon, iPhone and iPod touch allow a user to save a WebClip bookmark to your site on their Home Screen. To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG image named "apple-touch-icon.png" at the root directory of your web server.
To override the site bookmark icon on a specific web page, insert a <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="[ICON-URL]" />within the element of the page.
The bookmark icon dimensions should be 57px by 57px. If the icon is a different size it will be scaled and cropped to fit.
Safari will automatically composite the icon with the standard "glassy" overlay so it looks like a built-in iPhone or iTouch application.
If you are having trouble creating the icon, you could always use an automatic generator.
So why do you need create a custom icon? As Apple pointed out it's attractive - so users want to keep it on their Home screens; and distinctive - so users can easily find it among all other icons.
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Most recruitment websites have some sort of online form capabilities - contact form, online timesheet, job order, newsletter signup form, email to friend form, online application form, etc. But could these emails be going directly to the users junk/spam folder or just never reaching the inbox in the first place?
Send emails through a valid email server with authentication
It is a good idea to choose website software that sends your emails through your email server (this will require authentication rather than the web server's SMTP server). Servers that are specifically set to send emails generally have Reverse DNS & SPF records, support greylisting, etc.
There should be no excuse why you are not able to implement this on your recruitment website, as every scripting language offers different methods to send emails with authentication.
On the other hand, sometimes just using email servers is not good enough. You may need to send lots of emails but the hosting provider may be applying limits. This is often the case when you use cheap or shared hosting providers.
Reverse DNS (rDNS)
As every domain resolves to an IP address. Optionally, IPs can resolve to domain names which are called reverse DNS. Many spammers use non-existing or dynamic emails without reverse DNS records. Email servers generally check if the sender IP has a reverse DNS record or not.
How do you add reverse DNS records? Reverse resolving uses the pointer DNS record type (PTR record) which you should be asking your hosting provider to create it or check if it exists.
SPF Records
Sender Policy Framework is being used by more & more email providers everyday (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) as a criteria to detect if a message is spam or not. It simply allows the owner of a domain to specify their mail sending policy (like which mail servers they use to send mail from their domain).
SPF records are DNS TXT records which an online setup wizard can help you creating it (you'll need to create new DNS records).
Sender transmits email
Receiver's mail server receives email.
Server checks which domain claims to have sent the message
Server checks DNS record; verifies SPF record of sending domain
Does sending server's IP address match IP addresses in published SPF record?
If the IP addresses match, email is delivered
If addresses do not match, email fails
Using a SMTP server that supports greylisting
A very powerful spam prevention method used by mail servers is called greylisting. When you send an email, the server receiving it can say to your SMTP server "send it to me again in x minutes" which is mostly not supported by the methods spammers use.
So, you need a smart SMTP server who can understand this command that will re-send the e-mails when requested.
No bulk mailing
Both the SMTP server you'll be sending emails and the servers that will receive them generally have rules to define an IP/email as spammer who sends x number of mails in Y seconds. So, if you have a large database to send emails - it will be a good idea to send them in intervals.
Do not send emails in alphabetical order
If you are sending emails to a large database, don't send them in alphabetical order as mail servers can mark them as a dictionary attack.
Check if the server IP is blacklisted
Blacklists are systems that are used by most of the email service providers. It has bot and human email accounts which analyze the common email traffic and can blacklist IPs according to emails sent from them.
The server you're using to send e-mails can be shared by many other users. If spam is sent by anyone on that server can lead to a "blocking" by email blacklists which will damage the communication of every account on it.
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Great article on this complex area Thomas. Correct sending of emails can be an absolutely minefield that is so often done wrongly by inexperienced web host providers.
One aspect which you missed out here, but can be very complex to set up is DKIM/DomainKeys. Support for this tool is slowly growing as well, as is what gives you the "signed by" header you sometimes see in Gmail/Hotmail etc. Used a little more by financial companies at the moment, as it specifically states that an individual email is from who it says it is, and has not been altered at all in transit to you, but if possible, it's good to adhere to this as well - see www.dkim.org
There are so many other aspects to safe spam free sending, including getting your mailing system to support the Feedback loop system that Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo etc operate. This system allows you to get information back on when a user has tagged your email to them as spam - the idea being that if you keep sending email to someone who has tagged you as spam, then you are a little bit more likely to be a spammer. As most spam filtering systems score a sender based on a wide range of criteria, each individual point counts and the more things you can do to make yourself look better in their eyes, the better!
Thanks for such a great post. I didn't realise just how complicated the emailing issue is. I will work through these suggestions to improve my own services.
You have managed to make it easy enough to understand LOL
Forget the bland and boring job ads. 2010 has started with a bang! This week we bring you 3 contenders for job ad of the year. These 3 job ads have gone viral across the globe and continue to give us a laugh.
The first job ad caused a public relations nightmare for Albury truck company Border Express.
A disgruntled former employee of the company was able to modify a job ad for an IT Developer.
He added a number of extra requirements for the job including "DD Cup breasts, slim waist, tight twat" and "applicants must be prepared to undergo a pre-employment strip search to ensure they meet the requirements of the position".
Border Express first tried to blame SEEK for an apparent hack, and then the company later found out it was a former employee who used to work in the HR department.
So who knows your passwords?
The second job ad was posted by marketing agency Razor on behalf of one of their clients Electronic Arts (EA) Australia for the upcoming release of the Xbox game Mass Effect 2.
The job ad titled "Biotic-Powered Super-Solider" attracted over 12,000 views in 2 hours before it was pulled down by SEEK for violation of their terms and conditions (the ad was obviously a fake).
The third was posted by Jobadder who are looking for a new c# / .NET Developer. "Chris was a cardigan-wearing up and coming .Net Developer working in a large Local Government organisation"
A very clever and well written job ad. Well done Brett.
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CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots and spam by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot. Nobody wants to use CAPTCHAs. They're a necessary evil. So why do we use them on application forms?
The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart”
If your application form needs protection from abuse, CAPTCHA will not solve your problem. Instead of adding CAPTCHA, look at the reasons why bots are processing queries on your website. 3rd party programs like Bad Behavior or Akismet may solve your problems.
No one likes CAPTCHAs. They are not fun. They can not be used by everyone, such as those with impaired vision or without graphics enabled. They slow down the sign-up process and, ultimately, they will lead to fewer real registrations.
The worst problem with CAPTCHAs is that they put the onus on the user. Users do not care if you are receiving thousands of spam messages or bogus accounts: that’s your problem. CAPTCHAs should be the last barrier of defense – not the first.
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Some of our clients' sites get hit by bots occasionally - usually for a sustained burst and then nothing. There are many bots out there simply crawling and looking for forms to submit - especially ones with large text fields that they can populate with spam adverts or links to sites. We find that usually simple validation on values on a few fields, such as valid email and phone numbers is enough to prevent them however as most bots are not very sophisticated. There are various other approaches I've seen such as only enabling the submit button if specific Javascript is run by the browser, but this approach often runs foul of accessibility requirements on our sites so we we avoid this.
Admittedly though, while we have offered Captcha protection for a while now to our clients, none have yet gone for it.. So I'd agree that it's generally unnecessary.
If you have been reading all the technology predictions for 2010, you may have noticed that location based services feature predominately. Online websites such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Twitter all have the ability to publically share and promote your current location.
Geolocation is the practice of determining the physical, real world location of a person, device, and address using digital information processed through the internet or other electronic means of communication.
Foursquare is like Twitter, but for locations. It is more of a game, and some people use it to obtain a high score and get badges (for checking in certain places). Just like every other social network, you build a friends list and when you decide to check-in (or publicly announce your location), it uses your phone's GPS to get your coordinates.
New mashup websites like Demand Spot plot geotagged tweets using the Google Maps API.
Geotagging will open up a plethora of privacy and security implications for the recruitment industry. We can now easily find, follow, track or stalk with the click of a button.
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I think you're spot-on. Location sharing technologies create a new reality that recruiters, as well as marketers of all kinds, will learn to use to reach out to their prospects. That raises all kinds of questions regarding privacy, like where exactly lies the boundary between following and stalking, marketing and spamming. The questions aren't new though - they exist in some form in almost any online-marketing technology (like email marketing vs spam) - and with time the boundaries between use and abuse become pretty clear.
I believe that the responsibility to take advantage of the new opportunities that geolocation offers without abusing them lies with all players in the game: services that publish people's geolocation must make that fact and its implications perfectly clear, consumers need to be aware of that publicity and how it may be used by third parties, and businesses must learn quickly which behaviors are appreciated by their prospective customers and which are considered invasion of privacy or spamming.
The big problem is figuring out where the line should be drawn - if a recruiter sends unsolicited but well targeted messages to job seekers, many will be thankful for the offer of help in their time of need, some will simply ignore the message and an unavoidable minority will not appreciate it.
Our experience in DemandSpot so far was very positive. Out of many thousands of messages sent by our customers to prospects over 30% resulted in a positive response while less than 1% led to a negative one. Moreover, all those negative responses can be traced to a few specific users of our system who apparently aren't good communicators (easily solved with a little education on online etiquette...)
It appears that the secret to successful marketing in this new environment, as opposed to stalking or spamming, is in offering a great service to people who really need it while avoiding too "pushy" behavior (if someone ignores your message leave them alone). This leads to an overwhelmingly positive response and most important - new business.
Over the past few weeks I have been integrating SMS functionality into a number of recruitment agency websites. We are all used to having the ability to email a job to a friend, but these days you are more likely to remember your friends mobile number compared to their email address.
Like any technology, SMS has its limitations. My biggest concerns have always been around the message and the process. You can read my previous articles on using SMS in recruitment and SMS job alerts.
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Using a search suggest or auto-complete function can...
To configure this icon, iPhone and iPod touch allow a user to save a WebClip bookmark to your site on their Home Screen. To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG image named "apple-touch-icon.png" at the root directory of your web server.
The first job ad caused a public relations nightmare for Albury truck company Border Express. 
