Wednesday 6 August 2008

Innovation vs Effectiveness - or have we disappeared up our...

OK - back to a familiar topic. And its the differential between

1. us in the "industry"- who get a bit bored by discussing and improving basic functionality on company's careers sites and find job postings on Job boards to be frankly dull. What we really want to talk about is Social Media, Geo-Targetting, Mobile Messaging and whatever the latest fad is.

2. and the "real people" out there - HR/Recruiters. Who are under pressure to improve efficiency, reduce cost per hire, improve employer brand etc



So we saw an unnamed client (large UK PLC) last week - who had taken meetings with a couple of other rec ad agencies, online specialists. And their head had been filled with lots of talk of Facebook, SMS, Twitter (NB 1st time a client has mentioned this in meeting - so interesting) and yet and yet....



In order their priorities should be

1. Their careers site search does not work in any logical way and must lose candidates who are unfortunate enough to go in it at front end - it is a block on recruitment not an aid.

2. they were on Job boards (not Google though) but in certain cases the wrong ones and in all cases with very poor copy and with the wrong and ineffective inventory. This can be fixed incredibly quickly and with immediate excellent results.

3. A mini audit of the web - finds there are a bunch of dead links for this company out there - old logos pointing to old micro sites and other destinations



I asked their permission if i could blog about this anonymously as it so annoyed me that others who do know their stuff had focussed on the sexy not the serious, the fluff not the core, the sizzle not the steak (enough analogies Dom....)

we are very keen to criticise the laggards in the rec ad industry but spending clients budgets on areas that do not deliver the tangible demonstrable ROI results can in fact cause more damage. I sometimes think think that we recommend this sort of innovative stuff to make us the suppliers feel cool not for the benefit of the customer.

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