findjobsin

Staying in the office Vs Productivity

2008-05-01T07:14:00.003+01:00

Happy Worker's day!

I find today at El País an article that states an embarrasing truth. In these days where we face The challenge of Balancing Personal and Professional Lives, we find some data that puts spaniards coworkers and companies in an awkward and contradictory situation: while a spanish employee puts in the office more hours than the average european worker, we are rank far behind on productivity.

The article describes the situation: an employee has finished his/her work and is ready to leave home at a reasonable hour. He looks around and sees all his fellow workers with their noses still stuck in their screens. So he/she feels bad about leaving earlier, so decides to stay longer in the office even if there is no work to be done.

Unfortunately, staying long in the office is still a means of beeing perceived as a value to the company, whereas the trend in the rest of Europe and US is a results oriented policy rather than the presential policy we have here. To that statement we need to add the difficult job market in Spain, with traditionally high rates of unemployment (not the case currently) that make employess fear a job change as a unpleasant experience.

My wishlist: results/effort oriented policies (starting at primary school), variable retribution linked to productivity and flexible office hours or telework where possible. The only means to achieve a balance between family and work.

Add our search widget to your site or blog

2008-01-03T11:48:00.000Z

Do you want to offer jobs to your readers? You can now add our search widget to your blogsite or website by simply adding any of these pieces of code.

You can add the search widget and allow your users to interact. The search button will display the results in a new browser window.

You can also fix the parameter of your search and offer directly the results. By clicking on any of them, you will be directly redirected to the url where the application is submitted.

Enjoy

Season's Greetings

2007-12-24T10:49:00.000Z

We would like to wish you Merry Christmas and all the best for the new year.

If you're thinking on finding a new job, don't forget to visit us at www.findjobsin.com.

The FJI team.

Misuse of email

2007-12-11T09:04:00.001Z

Henley Management College carried out a research, sponsored by Plantronics, into the way managers spend their time. We found that 61% of managers are spending more than 2 hours a day dealing with emails but despite this 23% of mangers are spending 2 hours or more a day travelling for business. 31% said that at least half their emails were irrelevant to their jobs.

A similar survey with similar results has recently taken place in Spain by Sondea.com, where more than 200 executives from a wide range of productive markets participated. Their answers indicate that they spend an average of 2,24 hours per day dealing with emails, 1,49 hours in meetings and 1,33 hours on telephone calls. Again, around half of the emails are considered irrelevant and not all of them manage to transmit a clear message. According to these surveys, 43% of european executives manage to communicate a message efficiently in just 10% of the mails they send.

Some ideas:

Quick math: 2,24 hours a day dealing with emails. Say sent/received are 50%. 50% of the received emails are irrelevant, and 90% of the sent emails are ambigüous. This means 1,7 hours lost just in the email. We can also consider some of the calls, say 10% are due to miscummunication in emails, so we can add an extra 13 minutes to the figure. 1,9 hours, at an average rate of around£50 per hour means a cost of £145 per executive per day due to inefficient use of email.
5 Hours per day are spent on communicating: meetings, email, telephone calls. Most of these communication relates to more than one person, so by finding a way to broadcast a message to everyone involved companies will reduce inefficiency costs. If this broadcasting allows also interchange between parts, feedback and real time answering that allows clarification on tasks and assignments, this inefficiency is reduces to a higher extent. The tool that will allow executives and any other employee to enhance communications is IM.
Most of the emails sent fail to transmit what they intended to due to ambigüity and misinterpretation. I already mentioned a book, the Cluetrain Manifesto, in one of my recent posts. The authors at some point partly explain this fact by the common aim to transmit a corporative message in any communication to both employees and customers, somehow disguising the core of the message with company taglines and long paragraphs and dictionary underused wording. Make your message short, easy and personal.

Jobsearch on Thursdays

2007-12-03T10:06:00.000Z

This is probably not written in any agenda of any employee, but it is a clear trend according to our data. The number of visits in findjobsin.com, and confirmed by other jobboards statistics I have had access to, shows peaks on Thursdays amongst all the other weekdays.
Although there is bias we need to consider that affects overall Internet usage, this data could probably be explained by the fact that Thursday is usually the day of the week where work load and tension reach its highest point. Friday doesn't really count on this math; preceeding the weekend traditionally brings a more relaxed atmosphere to the working place (I am talking about office schedules), being even a day off or a half day for some people in countries like The Netherlands and France, where they enjoy reduced hours weeks, or Spain.

It also shows the emotion component in a jobsearch and the importance of opportunism for online recruitment. There is a certain percentage of jobseekers who do not plan their jobsearching and react to a specific uncomfortable situation at work (spare time, excessive work load, bad working environment, no salary raise, etc). These casual jobseekers probably do not perform a thorough jobsearch in many sites, they most likely check one or two and do not even bother to add their complete profile because it takes too long. They are not determined to find a job. The online recruitment site that comes to these jobseekers mind at the appropriate time will get their visits. If it makes their jobsearch easy and fast to match their expectations at that specific time (see my previous post on Time&Money spent on (job) searching), while showing hints of other appealing features to make the jobseeker intrigued, they will most likely turn the occasional visit into a registered user in the short future.

Stay tuned

I work at Myself Inc. : Knowledge and Network

2007-11-30T22:52:00.000Z

One of my business partners and longtime mentor has sent a couple of books, challenging me to come up with some ideas on the Internet and its consequences by stirring my mind. He, of course, has already succeeded after only a few pages of the first book, the Cluetrain Manifesto, written back in 2000. Although the book is already obsolete in some parts, it works around a set of ideas that where also presented in another book published at around the same time called Funky Business.

I just want to develop a few of these elements shared by this two publications. The concepts of knowledge and network and the way corporations need to deal with them. These two concepts, are characteristics of the individual worker and not of the company they work for. Markets and b2b/b2c relationships are based on human interaction. As we can read in the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto.
"The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media."

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy."

"In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way."

"These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge."

"As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally"
In a similar way, Funky Business states that:

"Today people can and want to be independent (...) We should consider ourselves as brands (...) People want to be employable, they update their knowledge to result appealing to their bosses"

"Individual competition= what one knows X who one knows"

Individual knowledge and network as the basis for business, pillars also of the new Internet and the end of traditional corporations as we know them. A company would be similar to what we currently know as a project, and in this picture, an employee would be what a company is nowadays. As a result of that, and with the fast spreading of knowledge and network using the Internet as a optimal channel, business processes within a corporation would be as efficient as a perfect competition market. Bottom up efficiency that will be also apply to customer relations, products and services.

How far in the future is this model? How does it affect the job market? Stay tuned.

War of numbers in job searching

2007-11-20T11:37:00.000Z

I have reviewed a considerable amount of job boards, and job search tools in the past months while getting ready to launch our recent findjobsin.com and checking how it fits in the current European market. I have realized that most of them if not all still include the number of jobs available in their home pages, probably following an old trend from the first Internet boom back in the 90's: The war of numbers as the only means of competition. How effective is that in terms of revenue? how appealing is that to jobseekers?

We can analyze data from NORAS report, despite 4 of the top job boards did not participate. If we leave out all the sector specific jobboards to avoid the existing bias, we come out with 12 representative job boards. Here's the correlation between unique visitors and number of available jobs. My statistical analysis concludes that there is no correlation.
So here you are a number of random thoughts and facts from my research:

Winning the war of numbers doesn't make a job board more appealing to users, and the only figure that is appealing to advertisers is the number of users. So having more jobs doesn't bring in more money (from advertising).
The new ways of competition is based on specialization and differentiation. Make your site different and you will find your niche of users. Innovation is the key.
Sector and regional job boards have a better ratio Unique visitors / Available job. They are more efficient.
Users do not look for volume any more, they look for relevancy and matching expectations results when accessing the Internet.

Blackle: Energy saving Google

2007-11-18T07:48:00.001Z

In times of global warming consequences being reminded on a daily basis, when high expenses and increasing barrel price are also impacting family budgets, here's a proposal that might not have a real impact on our pocket money, but that reminds us of those little expenses we don't count on but sum up to an amount at the end of the year. Many small steps make a long walk.

Blackle is a black interfaced Google's main search screen where the number of watts saved by the absence of color is indicated.

Is my site web 2.0?

2007-11-15T23:29:00.000Z

Everybody speaks about web 2.0,

but ...

What does having a web 2.0 application really mean?

I'm talking about interaction between users.

Users do not expect a simple computer process when they enter in a web2.0 site. They expect a real customer service, a person behind the desk. Yes, this is the Customer to Customer approach, this is the Web 2.0.

Users don't want to click in your site, they don't want to read your site (if they really want, they will print the article). They want to do useful things ASAP!

If you can't have people interacting , you don't have a web 2.0 site, not yet.

WEB2.0: Content Vs Community

2007-11-15T08:06:00.000Z

Tim O'Reilly defined Web 2.0 as "the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform". In the Web conference 2005, that took place in October, the web2.0 principles were described:

The web is a platform
The information resides in the processor
Web effects are driven by a participation architecture
Innovation comes from attributes distributed by independent developers
The end of the software consolidation, permanent Beta services, permanent change.

Some examples that will help us understand what this transition from WEB1.0 to WEB2.0 is about are listed below:

Britannica Online-Wikipedia (the visits to the Wikipedia, according to hitwise, outnumber 3400 times that of Encarta)
Personal websites-blogs
Directories (taxonomy)-tagging ("folksonomy")
Doubleclick-Google AdSense
Domain name speculation- SEO.

There are a set of technologies that supports this transition (CSS/content distribution, AJAX, etc), an analysis we will develop in a future post, but Web2.0 is not about technology. Web2.0 is the representation of evolution of traditional applications into web applications focused on the end user. Web2.0 is an attitude, in sync with the trend change I introduced in a previous post (Time&Money spent on searching)

Web 2.0 has been successful in significantly broadening the content available to users, but reviewing the latest data from hitwise reveals that we're still in the very early stages (and in some circles, the web3.0 terms is starting to be present).

Although there is a clear upgoing trend in the use of web2.0 applications, as shown in the graphic above, only a very small percentage of Internet activity is related to users creating and publishing content: less than 1% of visits to most sites that thrive on user-created materials are attributable as to participative users, the remaining 99% are passive visits. Examples of ratios participant/passive type of users for 3 well known applications.

We can conclude that web2.0 applications, although in obvious growth in number of visitors, has a long way to go when it comes to consolidation in terms of usage. We are offering a range of possibilities that are not being totally exploited by a large percentage of the visitor. I had previously stated that one of the reasons might be simply the fact that it is just not what the user is looking for, based on data related to the use of the Internet of each individual (the Internet Index Activity report by OPA and Nielsen/Netratings stated that 50,9% of the time was spent on content and only 30,4% in communications, including email and participation tools) but I can also think that a large number of users are not proficient in the use of the participation tools at their disposal. Are we building too complex applications? Are we making it difficult by means of adding additional steps (registration, confirmations, account creation, etc) that are not necessary?

Web X.0 should be based on the principle of simplicity.

Findjobsin.com integrated with Payscale

2007-11-12T19:28:00.000Z

Findjobsin.com has released a new feature to allow jobseekers check competitiveness of the offered salaries by comparing it to other jobs based on job title, location, etc. Payscale is the tool we have integrated in the result page, and provides a range of salaries for each specific job title to serve as a reference to our jobseekers. When salary is not specified, our users now know what to expect.

Clicking on the next steps, shall the jobseeker require more accurate results, redirects our users to a new window where experience and skills (requested) are also added to the salary calculation algorithm provided by payscale.

Stay tuned for our next improvements.

Endeve, online invoices management made simple

2007-11-10T10:27:00.000Z

Not long ago Luis, my business partner in findjobsin.com, shared with me this application, Endeve. We were accessing from The Netherlands and found it quite useful for contractors like myself, with little time to spend (amongst other things) in paperwork.

I had to wait, though, until they removed the IP country filter that would allow me to keep up with it from my home country. I have now gained access, and would like to share some thoughts on it with you.

It is a very simple application in his free plan, which excludes bulk payment management and expenses as the most significant features. Simple meaning easy to use and not lacking of functionality. It covers all the needs of a freelance with multiple clients, includes the possibility to set up discounts, taxes and penalties. It allows export to excel and it is integrated with a mail server.
It lacks flexibility when it comes to customization of the invoice template, but once again this is about spending as less time as possible with non-invoiceable tasks.
Special mention needs to be made to the quick an effective response of their customer service.
It still has some room for improvement, here are some suggestions: existing invoices/clients import tool, invoices expiry date reminders setting (and customization), the Balance option should also be exportable and even have a estimation balance option for planning purposes.

A pretty nice tool overall.

Touchgraph, anyone for a business application?

2007-11-09T20:07:00.001Z

A couple of days ago I went through this cool web tool called Touchgraph.

A java application used to visually explore the connection between the elements of a database. It shows 3 different implementations in very large sites such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Here's the results for keywords "job search" in Touchgraph Google.

Although a very cool display of the information, I found it somehow disappointing. After sharing the finding of this tool with some friends and business partners it took us sometime to come up with a potential business application other than the obvious visual appeal, although for a large set of connected elements, the visual effect is diminished.

Going through their clients section my thought was confirmed. Basically it is used as a simple diagram generator rather than as an analytical tool, where nature of the relationships between elements is not visually intuitive. Two examples below.

Time&Money spent on (job) searching

2007-11-09T18:24:00.001Z

Fact: According to the Internet Index Activity published by OPA and Nielsen/Netratings, 50.9% of internet users’ time is spent on content (any sites or applications that provide news, information and entertainment); 30.4% is spent on communications (such as email, IM and forums); 14.1% is on commerce (shopping websites) and 4.6% is on searching (getting to all of the above).

Fact: Netratings.com offers their data from September2007, where in the UK, each of the rough 35 million internet users spend 45 hours on the internet per month (29 from home and the remaining 16 from work).

Fact: The average hourly pay gross, according to statistics.gov.uk is £13,37 for 2007.

Conclusion: Employees spend £344 million per month searching for content.

How much of that expense can be related to inefficient use of the searching tools or irrelevant content filtering?.

We can take the job searching activity as an example, our area of expertise and definitely part of the £344 million we calculated before. Long working hours, lack of discretion and spare time are the reasons why many jobseekers use company resources to find their next job (not only internet access to perform online search, but also faxing resumes, telephone interviews, etc). We don't know how important that activity is with respect to the total amount calculated before, information that is suitable to be inaccurate since most employees will not confirm they do it, but we can calculate the cost per jobsearch.

It takes an average of 15 minutes to fill in the required information to create a profile in a standard jobboard. Most of this jobboards do not allow any user to apply without having set up a profile, even though they are also requested to attach a copy of their CV to the application (double entry of information). According to NORAS report, a jobseeker visits 5,3 job boards on average when looking for a job. Each jobboard, of course requires its own profile to apply to their jobs, so it adds up to 80 minutes just to set up the profiles. We now need to add the time spent in the job search and the content reading to determine if the search results are suitable. This extra time has to deal with the opposite interests between a jobboard (advertising, sponsored jobs, featured companies, etc) trend to keep the candidate in the site for as long as possible plus the inefficient job searches, job categorization etc producing unexpected results and the interest of a candidate wanting good efficient results spending as less time as possible in a site. My own calculation would give as a figure of another 20 minutes per jobboard to find a suitable set of jobs out of which a positive application is processed.

Conclusion: The cost of the average employee searching for a job at work, is of approximately £42/employee/job found

The debate of employees spending inordinate amounts of time surfing the Internet for non-working related purposes is something to be balanced carefully by each company and depends on many factors out of the scope of this post. The analysis will be done in a future post.

The solution I'd promote is the change in the trend of the existing jobboards (and, by extension, other content&search websites) from a company centric business model into a candidate centric structure to cut short the amount of money spent in inefficient web crawling by the very same companies that advertise on these jobboards (websites). This change in trend is something difficult to monetize in the short term, but will pay back in the longer term due to the fact that a content searcher will choose the efficient site amongst the other competitors for their searches, and hence the numbers/volume war will be won. When looking at advertising, sponsoring and other traditional money drivers in a website, they are all based on the number of users.

Findjobsin.com wants to show its candidate centric nature by allowing users to perform efficient and quick searches. Covering most of the main jobboards in the country and offering relevant results on the search we can help a jobseeker cut short the time spent jobhunting. By doing this, we also help employers in two different ways:

we cut short the cost associated with the jobhunting of its employees
we cut short the cost associated with the job posting, by applying the same principle to our jobpost feature, next to be released. Easy, fast, cheap and efficient jobposting.

Stay tuned.

Findjobsin.com, more than just an aggregator.

2007-11-08T07:56:00.000Z

Findjobsin.com is designed to be the next step in the job search evolution, integrating a complete set of tools to comply with its candidate centric nature. Our only goal is help you, jobseeker, find your next job.

Findjobsin.com does not only offer a great number of jobs available within one search, but also a weekly analysis of the job market, which sectors are hot and which are not, which positions are the most demanded and which are the best paid.

Please be aware that we are still on a beta step. We are developing new features that will be made available to you during the course of the coming months, so keep yourself posted to our blog and send us your feedback to info@findjobsin.com to help us match your expectations.

Enjoy the experience.

The findjobsin team

First bytes, findjobsin saw the light at 5:56 a.m.

2007-11-08T04:55:00.000Z

After the somehow strange development, the first beta version of findjobsin.com has been published. Now we aggregate jobs from 5 of the most important job boards in UK. You can see the first screenshot

Luis