PharmiMike

There seems to be an increasing amount of talk about diversity recruiting, and not just in pharma. By diversity recruiting I mean ensuring that you recruit a diverse range of candidates within your company. In reality this might mean that you broaden your recruitment net to include sites that, for example are used by minority groups based on race, colour, age, disability, religion. It may even amount to positive discrimination, as the BBC have stated:

“Under such a plan, if two job candidates met the required standards, the candidate whose ethnicity is under-represented in the force would be selected.” (BBC, 19th April 2007)

A few useful diversity recruitment resources:

• http://www.recruitersnetwork.com/resources/diversity.htm
• ttp://www.pharmadiversityjobboard.com/
• http://diversityjobs.com/
• http://www.diversity-jobs.com/
• http://diversityworking.com/career/Pharmaceuticals/?cchan=83

Some pharma companies are making progress in diversity recruiting by promoting themselves well

• Astellas on Blackcareers.com

What is immediately noticeable however, is the fact that all these diversity job boards are USA based – what is the UK, or indeed the European pharma industry doing about diversity recruitment?  - and what strategies are in place?

I came across a nice looking site.. http://www.zubka.com/ - you can refer a friend to a job role and get a referral fee. Actually quite a large referral fee. I was wondering if referral campaigns actually works – have you tried? Either externally or as an internal campaign. – Let me know.

Zubka only has 19 jobs listed, so they won’t be setting the world on fire yet, but its a nice idea. Although I have no idea how long they have been around. Candidate referrals was something we’ve thought about for PharmiWeb.com, but never got round to – so I’d be interested to know your thoughts, ideas, criticisms.

I’ve just started to test a job posting on Xing. Their site (which is much like LinkedIn) requries that you are a “premium” member before you can advertise jobs. Unsurprisingly, there is a cost for this, but its only a few Euros. Once you are registered you can post your job adverts and set up the budgets. You are charged 49 cents (Euro) per click,  but you can cap each advert on clicks.  A job is live for 90 days (which might mean a lot of clicks!)

It all seems pretty straight forward, but I’ll do a more comprehensive review once I get some responses to the adverts.

Posting a job on Xing

I read an interesting article by Seth Godin in the Times about the fact that we are in an era of work-change.. no longer will the majority of us be working from an office; more an more of us will be working from home – its cheaper for all involved, less stressful, and better on the environment. And more interestingly, the important jobs will be managing “tribes” or teams of people across the globe,  or building and managing online communities. Nearly everything you used to do in your company will be outsourced to someone much cheaper somewhere else in the world. Of course the key thing that this “new way” uses is CrowdSourcing

So maybe we should be thinking about who, where and how we recruit and what we will be doing in 10 years time, and perhaps think about the skills and training we’ll need to get ourselves and our teams to adapt.

Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble : Businessweek .
http://bit.ly/3TFW7n

I looked at TwitterJobSearch a while back and for some reason it didn’t really register. However, I saw recently that they were anouncing updates, so I took another look.

Firstly what is it?

It’s a job search engine that uses Twitter as its source of jobs. OK, I admit I’m still pretty sceptical about the real value of candidates you get from Twitter, but I thoughht I’d have a look and see how it might help move Twitter one step closer to a useful application.

First Impressions

Its a nice looking 2.0 site. Clean, simple and pretty easy to use. The homepage has one large form field titled, “What do you want to do?” – thats nice. (There is an advanced search too). It also has a large counter showing how many jobs have been added in the last 30 days. (300,000 if I recall).

Does it work for the candidate?

Actually it does seem to. Searching is simple, and filters work reasonably well. However, my first  question was how do they know the location, salary, job type & job title from a simple tweet? More on that in a moment. I searched for Pharma Jobs and was pleased to see a selection of PharmiWeb jobs, from a bunch of my different twitter accounts.

You can search and save jobs when you link to your own twitter account, and you can addyour own profile and links to LinkedIn and other online CVs.

Applying for a job involves clicking a small (cute) icon below the job labelled “I can do that“, then you get a chance to select whether you want a public or private application. Its seems pretty slick.  Job owners are notified by tweet that they have  a new application.

Twitterjobsearch results

Does it work for advertising my pharma jobs?

Well, if you have a twitter account with your jobs, you may already be listed. if not, you can post directly (time consuming) or can provide them with an XML feed, which is where they get their “advanced” detail from I guess. Is it worth doing? Looking at the PharmiWeb stats its hard to determine as any clicks to the original job as they are not campaign flagged in any way.

Beyond Twitter

It looks like they also scrape a bit more detail of the job’s original page which is clever, and also create a list of keywords (presumably keyword matching) Read more…

I think I am getting obsessed with RSS feeds. However it occurs to me that you cant do much digital marketing with them. And feed reading is much easier now it is build into most new browsers. (Safari, Opera and Chrome are all good!)

Why use RSS?

What’s Going On
How can you find out what’s going on in your field? Well, I use an RSS reader (actually I use the build in reader in the Opera Browser) to display feeds from a range of sites. that way I can scan down and see what’s new. It certainly saves opening a dozen or more websites. I read feeds for most of the major pharmaco’s PR(where they have them), and a selection of other sites. (reuters, bbc health, Department of Health etc.)

Tell The world
If you have content of your own, make sure its available in RSS! and make sure as many variations as possible are on RSS. Better still, allow your users to define their own feeds. For example, candidates who save a job search on PharmiWeb.com have the ability to read their job alerts as an RSS feed.

This blog has an RSS feed, and so you can subscribe to it and find out when I update it without checking back every day!

Keeping Control of your own RSS feeds
One thing I’ve had problems with is keeping track of the feeds that I generate. Enter Feedburner. Feedburner is one of Google’s goodies that allows you to log and track your feeds, so you can see how many subscribers you have and also modify elements of the feed without going back to your website developers. I’ll do more on Feedburner later, because there are some cool features, but essentially you can add your feed to feedburner and it creates a new XML/RSS feed which you can modify, log, publicise, etc etc. Well worth doing.