International Job Boards and Job Postings Ep-18

Hello and welcome back to the Skills Provision podcast. On today's episode, you'll find myself, Francesca. And also joining today is Pete. Hi. I can't quite believe it. We are now on episode 18. On today's episode, we are going to be discussing Job Boards, International job postings, the exciting new unveiling of our new job posting service. So just I want to take this opportunity for any new listeners, if you haven't done so already, please like share, subscribe with whatever platform you're on, be that YouTube, be that Spotify, be that Apple Podcasts, please do also share this with anyone else that may be in the recruitment or employment settlement sectors that you think this would be of interest to for returning listeners. Welcome back. We appreciate you tuning in once again. I also just want to take this opportunity to remind employers if you'd like to schedule a confidential conversation with one of our recruitment team, whether that be about full recruitment services or our exciting new offering that we're discussing today, please don't hesitate to get in contact using the details on the website. Job Seekers, we also remind you to check out our international job board for all of the latest vacancies and please don't forget to register and also create a new profile. Our profile system has been upgraded, adding a lot of additional benefits and exciting additions, meaning your skill set being seen in the marketplace. So brilliant. Let's get started. So, job boards, I, when researching for this podcast, I thought naturally we probably would end up with kind of two different views between myself and Pete. So for those new listeners out there, I work in the recruitment side, the actual more placing of people and Pete is very much the technical whiz and the online guru, shall we say. So Job boards, I'd like to think anyone out there listening doesn't know what a job board is, but for anyone that isn't familiar, we're talking about the likes of say, indeed, Reed, Total Jobs, Nakuri, any of those places where employers, agencies, whoever they may be, can go and advertise their open positions. Now, job boards are one of the most utilized tools by any of those people. So employers or agencies, when targeting the market, looking for new candidates for open roles. In fact, I believe, according to some information and data that I found that it is about 65% of all job seekers or applicants for posts come from job boards. Now does that sort of information surprise you, Pete, or would you say, obviously, as you're not in the recruitment side, does that sound about a right number? Yeah, it sounds about right, yeah. Yeah. Now we'll come on to more about our specific job board, but job boards in general. And Pete, I'm going to come from the stance of how I find my experience as a recruiter utilizing job boards. I hope that's okay. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, perfect. So one of the biggest benefits of obviously job boards, so I'm going to go with some positives and I'll come to the challenges that I face is getting your job out there, obviously utilizing some of the websites or some of the job boards visibility that they may have. Some names are synonymous with job postings and recruitment and sometimes they are the go to place for certain job seekers. Depending on their location, depending on the industry, there might be some niche ones, but obviously there are some main job boards. They are also a good way of connecting with potential. From the reverse kind of point of view for potential employers that you're wanting to offer our services, we can see that they are perhaps struggling for talent for their positions. But to be honest, job boards in the last few years have deteriorated, I think would be a fair statement to say. In fact, I believe, according to a blog, von Q that with regards to the visibility of job boards, they have actually been, and we're talking about major job boards, that they've actually seen a 75% decrease in their visibility owing to various different changes online. And I won't, I won't pretend to know the full details of that. That's very much more a peaked specialist area. But in terms of the negatives when it comes to a job board, the main ones that come out to me are sometimes they can be hard to use, the limited coverage or visibility. So just to clarify skills provision, we're an international recruitment agency so quite often some of our roles are offered to job seekers regardless of their location. So unfortunately not all job boards are suitable. They are not necessarily visible for candidates in the areas that we are targeting. Sometimes they're not even actually seen. So when you see you post on these aggregators and then you go through to the actual job adverts, the way that they're structured, the way that you see them, they're awful, they don't carry through well, which then makes for a poor user experience at the other end, which in turn is going to mean less applications. The usability of searching for actual jobs themselves, that can be a real challenge. I know when we did some testing of a competitor searching for different terms in different industries, there was a real, I don't quite know what the right word is, mismatch in terms of the terms being put in and the results that were being achieved. And then the last one which especially when you're a recruiter obviously you've got to be thinking about where you're investing your resources is the cost a lot of the job boards very expensive for very little return of investment in terms of the candidates that you're seeking which is the primary reason for advertising. So that's kind of my stance on job boards. Now Pete, over to you in terms of what areas you want to focus on when it comes to job boards. Very complicated subject the whole thing. If we use Google as the example in terms of visibility. So the visibility platform structure Google have a problem with job adverts full stop. That being when they release their hcu helpful content update clearly states that they're looking for well written content unique enough of it relevant and quite legal. And when they get this they give precedence, visibility and such like with job adverts as you know Francesca, because you play the same game, it's the biggest regurgitation game on the planet in terms of online which means that the quality of an advert generally is horrific and that's putting it politely and but the usefulness of the, of the material is high as in it has the mismatch being poor quality. A repeat of a repeat of a repeat of a syndication of a. These aggregators. You get aggregators repeating into aggregators repeating into aggregators. So it's almost like you, you don't even have control over your own content in terms of how many times it is repeat posted. We are, we've done many exercise where I've shown job adverts and they're appearing all around the world on sites that we have no idea about. And as Francesca says that once you go down the pipeline game of aggregation the quality can become that bad that the adverts displaying the wrong salary, the wrong details, everything, the wrong title and even the actual wrong advert in the end we've seen ones, haven't we where you click on one link and it takes you to a completely different job. There you go. So the. It's a mess and but there's no easy way for this to be. I think what the original idea with Google was that Google decided that indeed would have become too strong. They were scraping, they were doing whatever they do and most people in the industry understand that as with others and they were gaining too much traction, too much online visibility probably just due if nothing else to the quantity of ads that were out there. So Google moved in with their helpful guide helpful content Updates, which basically means if you don't produce good content, we'll nail you. So but job boards were already in the game of regurgitation and there's. And it's a tap that you can't turn off. And even if you did, then what? So it's almost like it's the imperfect model played by the imperfect participants on Google that want quality, which probably means that there's only one way to go. Paid ads. So if you pay for your traffic, you can alleviate a lot of the problems. And we see some of the big players, 100 million a year plus those kind of levels. Astonishing. A lot of the PLC companies, they have big deep pockets and they can afford to play these games and they have to play these games to satisfy their shareholders and investors. It's almost like how can, how could we. So it was understanding that the game was toxic and crooked and Google trying their best for their own means as well with their own pay per click game that they're playing to come out on top. So the, the idea being we'll introduce Google jobs will reduce the traffic to other job boards will come out on winners where they did and are, but the loser being the candidates. Less visibility of jobs across the board. Google are giving less and will continue to give less visibility to those producing adverts. Job boards are seeing their traffic decimated and don't really understand why. And that is that the great content, the duplication of the duplication of the duplication. And where does an advert start? It starts with a job description. Where does the job description come from? Employers generally get it from an online source, then copy and paste and then send it to the recruitment agency who then produce from that, add to it and then they start syndicating and start using all different types of tools and aggregators. And I'm not even sure what they're called a lot of these sites, but they're just redistribution sites of adverts. Those that. It's almost like if you're at the top end, the early recipient of a job advert, then you may do okay. If you, if, if you own the job board where the content is quality or of decent quality, then you will survive and prosper. Because in these games there's always the winners and the losers and who's winning and why are they winning, who is losing and why they're losing and, and who's going to prosper in the future. So the predictive elements of where the market's going, where search is going, where the visibility angles going and how to get out in front of the curb. So the regurgitation game is it's never going to leave but it, it is going to dwindle. And a little bit like oil and gas companies in Saudi Arabia or the Middle east, they've got to find other ways of generating revenue because the, the old game of everyone's banging fuel into their motor car, burning fuel in their houses to heat and all the. This game is slowly coming to an end. So there'll be a transitional period and on the job board front the issue is how can it transition and into what if the game is flawed in the first instance. And that's why amusingly where I, my, where my journey started in, in the whole of this of job boards in terms of what options are there, what are people paying for? Person that's paying for the, for the ad has no guarantees and are not even sure how, how are their ads going to, how are their, how is their ad going to be absorbed by the candidates? The targets now on the popular job boards they don't necessarily need to rely on Google, which is good for them. So people will go to Indeed and do a search in. Indeed. They'll go to Total Jobs and do a search in Total Jobs. But other than the synonymous ones with recruitment, place it on the global market, say 10, 10 main players in the UK, 10 in Germany, 10. What about the 100,000 players below these? Well that's where there's a problem because people are not going to their websites to search. It's a little bit like how content is absorbed and all these interesting subplots that we have online. For example, subject that me and Francesca discussed yesterday, people don't go to YouTube looking for a job, but they may see a job advertised in Google on a video. So then they view the video on the YouTube platform. So it's all this spider's web type thing of first source and then reaching the market being visible. Job boards is a very complicated subject where possibly the billions and billions of pounds has already been made and now it's going, now it's an arbitration of pay per click results against revenue or a new product. And whilst our new service released today is certainly not new in terms of concept, in terms of how it's been put together and structured is absolutely unique in the market. And one of the reasons why we believe that we will set the gold standard for job advertising way down the road, it's not going to happen overnight, it's not going to happen over a year, two years, maybe five to 10 years because it's all about results. What are people paying for? I don't believe in a lot of job adverts. It's the amount that people pay that's the problem on the job board. And the prices do vary dramatically as you will know Francesca, from free government websites right through to 4, 5, 6, 700 pound a pop generally for that, for the high valued tax salary jobs. Now it's the results. If you could post somewhere regardless of the cost and be guaranteed visibility, not results visibility. The results will follow the visibility if there are enough too many factors with job boards to and candidates see all the main players being the job advert publisher, be it an agent or an employer and a candidate, an advert could sit at the top of Google for example generate zero results because there are zero people available in that market or the offer or the offer may not be attractive, for example. Yeah, there's a lot of contributing factors, lots of contributing factors and this is why what, what we have to, what, what we focused on is something that no one else has in the market. I can absolutely guarantee them. And that is the visibility. We focused on the visibility totally and with a unique approach which we'll discuss later in this podcast. So as for job boards, I wouldn't even like to imagine where the, where it's all going. I understand Google, my specialist subjects understand Google better than understand my wife. It is like they, they want to marginalize their own position and they, and they play twisted games to do so. They're like, they don't like dominance within the market. LinkedIn indeed. Those kind of companies eventually start feeling the pressure mainly because they're probably too successful or they're getting too successful or they're too visible and with that carries power. And it is one big powerful game played by people with people, dark glasses, black suits, men in black. It's the, it's the, it's the money game. It's the global money game. And focusing on Google which is kind of where we were going after this is that as you say to me in numerous subjects and this is just another one, Google rules all. When it comes to online Google set the rules. You play by them or you don't play by them or if you don't play by them, you pay to play by them at this moment in time. Yes. Whilst, whilst they generate the lion's share, I mean I'm not sure put in percentage terms, what is it like 90% of our traffic comes from Google? Something like 85. It's above 85, probably 85 to 95% of the traffic is generated by Google and of course we're going to play by those rules and if and when that ever changes then we would change. So for me it's not like a. It's the visibility of everything that dictates whose game you're playing by. It could be eventually that Microsoft you know with their introduction of bots chat Chat GPT those kind of AI subjects. Yeah eventually take out Google on better platform. It's like I said so he it's almost like the customer that's quite fickle. I'll just go where like it's the ease and also habit habitual or habits online demographics we we all use Amazon because it's the easiest and eventually is it eventually it isn't the cheapest but we still all use it because it's because it's just synonymous and we do it all have it out of habits so but eventually another something else will come along this cheaper, better, more customer related. I mean if you look at like the way these it's almost like everything got. Everything seems to follow a cyclical pattern and we see parts of that in our research where as you said we went to a job board and it was pretty lame. What were the results we were seeing to say politely we're looking for a farmer I think at position and we and then there was HR results and all engineers and it was like wow this is a mess. Which is obviously a positive for us because we compete with these people but it's. You need to need to deliver quality across the board and that's where and that's the struggle I guess with all of this the m. Visibility and quality the winners and the losers and it's a. It's a very very complicated game that you. You need some needs. If you invest heavily you need to win it or you're gonna lose. And where you and where people. It's like it's all about habits isn't it where people. You know you've been in the job market where were you looking? Yeah no I was gonna say that's the thing is it naturally you have your go to synonymous job boards depending on what country you're in but most times you're gonna go to Google first of all you're. You're gonna be searching in there and then and then from there yeah you might then go to the other job boards but or you're going to apply on companies websites directly but Google I would say even more so now than even five years ago two Years ago. Whatever is generally most people's first port of call. The issue a lot of the time is the fact that people post information without understanding how to make that page visible to the market. So the first port of call a lot of the time with jobs is companies post on their own website but they're not sure how to structure the pages in such a way that they would be visible to their target candidates. So the result is more often than not zero visibility, zero applications. You need the workers just like them. What. So it could be job board recruitment agency. And the recruitment agency basically have the same problem as what the employer had with at times utilizing just as bad a platform as what the employer was in the first instance and they receive zero candidates. So it's a. It's a very complicated game where when it's played online, technical experts need to be working alongside operational people so that work that's produced and pushed out there has a chance of or is structured well enough that it will be visible. And this is not just about utilizing aggregators, job boards or anything like that. Because if the structure is wrong the visibility is not going to be there. And because everything's a repeat of a repeat of a repeat. It's almost like you shot yourself in the foot before the hundred meter race starts. It's going to be a struggle. So it's. And then people think that if you just keep repeating going to social, repeat the same job a thousand times, going to LinkedIn, repeat the job a thousand times, you will get some visibility. Ish. But even these everyone's protective of their own system and protect him from spammers and such like. So it's almost like to be a. To be an online recruiter, to be successful in online recruitment you need to use the. And doesn't have the luxury of massive marketing budgets. You need to play the visibility game to such a level that you give yourself a fair crack of the whip by generating the decent results for a job advert. Yeah, it's like tying your shoelaces before you're going to start a race. You want to give yourself the best opportunity when you start rather than retrospectively trying to do make changes on different things. You want to get off on the best foot that you possibly can. And I think that is what I would say when we're with regards to the product that's being launched is that you referred to people not look necessary or when we look at stuff we look at the full cycle is that I think people look at just the one side and don't account for the other side. Yeah and the problem with let's say the technical side of working one it changes all the time too. It's complicated, very complicated in some areas in it and without the technical knowledge how would you even know? Like it's almost like if you've got. If you, if you're a recruitment agency in a local village and you a 10 mile radius this kind of stuff then it's not a problem but if you're doing it within a county nationally offers internationally generate visibility. It's not just because I wrote an ad it has to be because you tick so many boxes along the way and we've. Because I. Because at schools provision I was heavily involved in the development of the business. I guess I was involved in the way that jobs were structured and syndicated and we were sort of like we started the journey on a decent footing. Yeah you looked at it from the other side rather than the self serving side which naturally when you're looking for something you don't always actually account for who's going to be on the other end receiving it. You're not generating visibility. It's almost like 10% game or a 90 game depending on which way you're looking at it. If you want 10 people you need to generate interest from 100 candidates that kind of thing. And how if you want, if you want 100 you need a thousand. So is, is like how do you, how do you achieve that online? And you know because you played the, you've, you've syndicated out to some of these majors. You've, you've done, you've played all these games in the past so you know how difficult it is to generate quality results and often quality results can be not purely numbers can just be like we got five quality people from that ad. It's. It's almost like the problem with recruitment is recruitment as a process is not intellectually difficult. It's. It's a simplest, it's a complicated. It's complicated because it's probably long the length of the process. So there are many steps to let's say to international recruitment. Filtering suitability of flights, visas, getting them into the workplace. Then are they able to do the job when they get there? Family or schooling all different types of related subjects. In terms of recruitment I've got the right qualifications of the qualifications match are they in the right language? What's do they speak English? On and on I've got a driver license. On and on and on and on and on the game goes but it's not intellectually tough or complicated, it's just vast. So you have to box, tick all the way along and, and do the job well in terms of job boards, visibility, Google and what we're talking about in this podcast that is unbelievably complicated because of the way everything changes of the participating elements to it, the complications that are just symptomatic of, of human behavior or the game that's being played. So fine example, everyone was playing the regurgitation game over, right? Very difficult to write job adverts in a unique manner when you may be the fifth in line with the same job with the same job description. So what do people. So we'll get the bots to write the content, bang it into chat GPT, it'll spit out a decent ad, tweak it a little, two or three minutes, job done. And that worked fine. Bit of a game changer in terms of quality of content until Google turn on and say you go running off to the bots and we'll, and we'll spank your behinds hard. And then it's like now a very difficult setup. It's almost like you could discuss the ins and outs and the angles of what qualifies what, how is it, how is that, what is what differentiation factors are between adverts, what defies quality of conduct, quality. You just look at it and say, well, I just see agile. It's almost like, like you said, you've got to be, you've either got to be very technically minded and strong with recruitment or you've got to have the same type of people working in on the same projects, on the same taskings. So that because to give yourself a chance of when ads go out there, keyword in for example massive subject, they are highly visible and you measure and then you can start understanding that this is not just about writing ads, this is about satisfying many elements within this, within a structure. You, as you know yourself, we have a sort of like A to Z system of publishing. It's a tick boxing. You've got a tickle to various different criteria, but if you don't get the ad right at the start, so let's say B, A, B, C, B or C, get that part wrong and then when you get to the end, it's nobody, it's not visible, targeted. The wrong keywords went to too, too high, the competition levels are too high for the keywords. I didn't produce enough ads, I just copied and paste. So it's, it is, it's almost like it said, it's a full time job in itself. Understanding and keeping on top of job adverts and what makes what defines visibility and quality and how do you. How can you even produce it when all around you is either cheating directly or indirectly failing? Because the only people that loses here are the ones that pay to have their ads published not the platforms themselves. And we've. What I found with my research is that as businesses have become became more successful their own quality structure everything that probably led to them being successful in the first place was forgotten about. And maybe that's that maybe that's like synonymous with like boxing Ag when he was hungry and he was a young fighter he was he. He was getting out there and putting the hard yards in and all this kind of stuff. Yeah it can be a by product byproduct of success. Yeah Nobody wants to get out of bed and run at 5 o'clock in the morning the winter in when they're wearing silk pajamas. It's that kind of. It's that kind of game. And what and this can be the problem with a lot of the top players within the marketplace is in the end they become victims of their own success because they never kept on because their. Their systems were never robust enough to fulfill the online journey that likes of Google are following. Which is where we. We certainly didn't go down the quantity road. We went down the quality road. And for many years it didn't appear that it was a worthwhile course because it takes time for these things to and. And it may not have played out as I thought it was going to play out which was maybe 10 years ago when I when I sort of realized that or believed strongly that Google were going to follow a quality system within with content it was all links and spam and get it all out there repetition of keywords. If you could repeat something 5 million times in a sentence you were going to gain visibility for that which was true. And and like job ads just keep repeating A structural engineer. We need a structural engineer for the structural engineering company to work on structural engineering projects and so on and on and it was getting visibility. It was madness. But that was the game back then and now it's totally changed. But who changed along all these recruitment agencies all they've ever done and we've seen this Francesca we debate it a lot is they've dove into the paper click model. Yeah which means costs go up margins and everything and it just becomes a stupidly that people is that businesses that are now generating a billion pound revenue are running at A massive loss. Massively. Yeah, well factual it is so visibility it's almost like the Google side of got a strong understanding but even then you've got to be. It's almost like you've got to be patient and you haven't got to chase the money too hard because you will come unstuck because you can the problem that with the online game a lot of the time is you can set things up for short term gain. Back in the day the directories those two don't remember a live directory was one and so I can't remember what the other and they were generating unbelievable sums of money just by people posting in ads as such really for companies that contained a hyperlink and then was so strong in scoring that they could charge a fortune for this. And, and that's how, that's how it all worked. And now with jobs it's almost like people almost like not giving up but it's over. I just want my ads to be visible and where do you go? Because the platforms that people are, that are posted into are not producing results and we've done trials on all these systems and the results that we've achieved and the numbers are horrific. Which I guess is absolutely fantastic for skills provision today. But it took 10 years to. To get here. Like with everything it's the journey, it's not the necessarily the destination. Isn't it? And it's. We also have to see how some things play out and like you say with the online world things can change so quickly that sometimes it takes the time for certain things to fall into place. And to answer your question about where people should go to advertise their jobs well, skills provisions, new job posting service which I think leads us on to nice leads us on nicely even to discuss a bit more about the offering about what it is. Would you like me to carry on? Sure. You, you go and then I'll interject. Okay. Over a decade ago I, I had an idea that we needed to go down this job posting system but only when because we use obviously we use our international job board internally but it would only be useful for other companies and agencies when we hit a threshold so we could see the success ourselves because otherwise we're just going to be taking money off people on false pretense and that's no way to build a business of any description. So it's performance built from the ground up and as we discussed earlier at length, it's all about Google, it's all about visibility, it's all about not playing this Confetti type game of just keep repeating the same thing over and over and over and over. And so our jobs ads were meticulously structured contextually and you know that more than anyone else, Francesca. So they are. And we invested in time so we kept it, we kept the system running when in truth it would have probably been better off to cheat to use the bots to copy and paste the same as everyone else and not worry about the future. But we didn't a bit of doggy determination in there and we will win out in the end by following the quality quality system. And yes, seeing others benefit in front of us wasn't, wasn't nice or easy. And then things started to change maybe two to three years ago for various reasons Google Jobs indeed got too powerful. Job boards, the useful content update bots, the killing off of bot content. The whole journey now is one of it's everything is content. And we produced our ads totally unique. A very, very strong rewrite of a job description. So it didn't matter where that job description was originated from and written in a manner that put the employing company and the position very much to the forefront. Then we had our syndication at. So what we call as a light job that we used that was separate to the full advert we then use for syndication purposes. So we built two ads and then our syndicated system was cut up into small pieces of paper and blown into the wound and out it went into the World World Wide web. And then we start to see the benefit and where are we at now? Where we, the job board where minus is only used internally generates approximately 1.4 million views per year and we've, we have ads that are in the 10,000 view tens of thousands of times which is astonishing. We sit at the top of Google for over half of the positions in the inventory which 6, 700 half of these sit at the top of Google for the, for the title and also many, many of these have feature snippets where we sit comments at the top of Google. You can see this on the video on the homepage which it is referenced there, some screenshots taken and cut out cropped out of there into the video to proof. And also we're now generating AI commentary, commenting, commentary, visibility. Sorry. And all this is because we produced a performance built system purely on contextual superiority. We back this up with what you do now with quality AI videos for every ad and a strong syndication system with no spam and the understanding that the first place of indexing as far as Google is concerned holds Ownership rights. This is what knackered a lot of people out across the the globe really is the fact that the likes of Indeed and their bots were that in yeah Glass Door maybe and there's quite a few maybe not Glass Door Indeed certainly where or Total Jobs or where where jobs are syndicated into so people write an advert put on their website and then post it on a job board at the same time and then all of a sudden these places where jobs have been syndicated into getting indexed so quickly sometimes within about 10 seconds they would gen. They then were given ownership. So the jobs actually belong to Indeed or Total Jobs or whoever and made them more popular at the at the expense of the people that wrote them in the first place. So we do so we make sure everything is indexed fully before we even consider syndication whatever and whatever. We're going to syndicate it out there and then into the performance elements of a job. In online terms if job ads are of massive value to a company you don't need you need to be producing more than one but you need to be producing them in a way that you're targeting multiple keywords. So some of our customers may come in and they may have a engineer engineer we need a architect Engineers all the get the keyword in get 4, 5, 6 targeted keywords and then write 6 unique quality adverts. There's going to be similarities but it is possible. Then get it out there. Then you're going to start seeing your bang for your book. Then you're going to start seeing hundreds if not thousands of candidates. If certainly if you're looking at the worldwide audience then you can filter down that interview. So it's all about understanding this thing of more on a quality system is absolutely better than less. We don't need people posting single adverts onto onto our system. We need people understanding what they're doing and posting multiple ads per position. I wouldn't go more than five. Threes are tough but five's possible. Take your time deliberate and you put and you produce quality. You can get it done. You can get copywriters to help out. So what our system ended up doing was in the end we offered the poster job service as a means of piggybacking what we what we already had in place for ourselves. So once our system foundations we'd built yeah Once our system became very powerful and it is now powerful like we and it's. Some people are surprised internally I'm not obviously when our job adverts outrank the absolute top of the tree majors and it's like, yeah, well, they've been dealing in poison for there. There'll come a time when you won't even see their results and it's, it's only a couple of years away. We're dealing in pure content, quality content, a quality system. So now we're allowing employers the world over, in any language to piggyback onto our system and start using it as we are. But as I said, in an intellectual manner or being better than less, cover more keywords. Think about the audience, think about the terms they're going to be searching for when they're, when they're looking for these ads they want. Want a job. The other part of the skills provision, job bodies. It's very competitively priced. They'll start in, starting out fee is £149 per advert for four weeks, just under six pound a day, which is insanely priced when you consider a lot of our competitors are banging, banging them out with 5, 600 pound a pop and they produce zero results. We've done our trials. We've. You, you put, you put, you put some out there, Francesca and seniors 00 applicants, haven't you? Yep, just a few times. Yeah, we will. At this moment in time we're releasing one product on the poster job with more to follow. So we will add elements like the extraction and twinning to our substantial candidate database. So a pipeline going directly from there to into. Into the ad which will be a massive benefit and the introduction of video and all different kinds of bells and whistles will come in the future. So it won't just be this, as you see on other job boards, you, you might get two extra weeks or you might get this and that the other and. And the price has gone up five times. We really are going to offer groundbreaking sector changing elements to our service offering. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to support all languages. Although the system will be set up in. Is set up in English, you can post ads in any language. So if you're targeting Brazilian workers, workers in South America that utilize English less than say common languages in, in. In. In that continent, then this is going to be a once again groundbreaking. What platform out there offers international language support? You can post your answer in any language. The answer we got many are the any. The whole system is twin to Google Jobs. So it's. We've produced it in a structured data. May I just interject there a second and something for especially this year there's been a massive increase with regards to those posting on Google Jobs. And the fact that it increases I believe up to about 75% it increases the click through rate with regards to the jobs themselves. And obviously like we said the visibility and the engagement is everything. So by being twinned to that it massively increases the click through rate. Yes. And of course because we're using structured data which basically means we the fields that we extract the information or post the information into is all coded in a certain way that it's aligned to Google system. So their bots we push it through. So they're bot we and our backend have a system where we tick a box and then Google's box within 24 hours will crawl it and then if it passes their criteria will be posted into their system. And also we. You get a lot of separate syndication off the back of Google Jobs. So a little bit like pages that appear in wiki get referenced all over the place and it is the same with ads on Google Jobs that they then get picked up by all different types of feeds around the world. Which is quite amusing when you start deep delving into where ads are actually visible and you think we don't know hardly any of these. And it's quite interesting that how far and wide that the syndication sub syndication resindication can actually go the within two years it is predicted that skills provision will be the strongest international job board in the world. Why? Quality of content, quality system well priced, highly visible above all else will produced produce fantastic results as in relevant people applying for the default of if they are available. And there we go. That is the system that will be going live and on that also that the offer is fair and competitive especially when you're looking in the international market. If you are trying to find people you do need to recognize the offer has to compete with the market you're competing with whether that be local, national or international. So that was. That was my side on the poster job I think be nice for you to probably talk a little bit about the operational side of job posting in you know, sort of what. What you see where you're disappointed less not about our system, I've covered that in depth but more of an operational element of your challenges within. Within operations and when it comes to. When it comes to posting jobs when it comes to the whole thing I think because the job, the person of the job is the first. You know it's like the start of the process and obviously it's the most important part of the process. Without a quality job with visibility who's applying. It's almost like how do. How Are you seeing it in operations? I think some of the points I touched on at the beginning, I think one of the biggest challenges when it comes to attracting the talent, shall we say, is getting it seen by the right people. And obviously there are certain other contributing factors, like we mentioned pay if the type of person that they're looking for even exists. You know, you have people who have a Wish list of 100 different items for someone when reality is you're not going to get someone who's going to have all hundred. What are your, what are your essentials? What are the negotiables in terms of the skill set that someone may have? I think the other challenge that we find is that where we work with a lot of employers, where one of the reasons they've come to us is they've exhausted their options on a local and national level is they are looking for that international support and getting the advertisements seen on other sources where the international market be that targeted into a specific area or whether the general international market being seen is limited. And then you have to go through the process of going across all of these different places of which then you're shooting yourself in the foot of the regurgitating of the content again and again and again for what value and what return? Because you can post jobs in multiple different places and get no results. What are you finding? I don't know, what, how many years you've been here now or eight, something like that. Yeah, the difference in the applications that you'll see, the number of applications that you're seeing. So number wise, what I will say is it very much depends on the type of job. The location does play a massive factor. There are naturally, I think if you put yourself in the position of the job seeker is there are naturally a lot of places which are known to already provide certain aspects part of their job. One of those major ones when we're dealing with the international side is the relocation and work permits. Where not every country offers that by kind of default, it's of often just targeting their local and national market or if we're in within Europe, those with the freedom of movement within Europe that you don't sometimes will get lots of interest, other times we'll get no interest. What I will say, and I've been seeing a lot of people echo this is with a lot of job boards getting a lot of people that are irrelevant applying for jobs. Now, whether that's just the circumstance of where we find currently in the end of 2024, the job market is, I think it's been. It's a difficult market at the moment for a lot of job seekers. A lot of employers putting jobs out there, having unrealistic expectations of what they're going to find and waiting for that perfect candidate and then realizing a month later that they want to go back for the other person. But unfortunately times have moved on and things have moved on. So what I will say if I think about when I first joined to now, the volume of applications, I would say overall has reduced. But I think you do get your exceptions and sometimes you will know yourself, Pete, when we've gone and launched now, but we're like not sure how well this is going to be received. The level of interest. Some are go exactly how you expect it to. Others can go completely the opposite in the negative sense, but equally completely the opposite in a positive sense. Yeah. So in terms of where I'm seeing it from what compared to where I started, I would say overall less job seekers and I feel like the quality, it really, really fluctuates. You could ask me today and I could say one thing and then another day, I think what is unfortunately happening and is a victim of where we've got to as a, as a society and the technology is available and it's what you were talking about with people using AI and ChatGPT for job posting. It's the same approach when it comes to then applying. There is sometimes a scattergun approach and less necessary dedicated effort to the actual application or applying for jobs and reaching out about jobs that you don't even have. I get a lot of that people saying oh for the job of this. And I'm thinking we don't have any position for that. So I'm not sure who you're reaching out to other than you're just generically trying to find something. Yeah. It's interesting that you think that like you said, that there's less candidates generally, which is actually very positive because initially when you first arrived the. The job board, we. It really was in its infancy and internally we produced very little. Very little. So we were having to utilize other. Other sources. CV libraries. Yeah, indeed. And which were big drivers of traffic. LinkedIn. We're more reliant on other systems, whereas now we're reliant on less systems and we're in charge of our own destiny as such. So that's interesting. Yeah, we, we hold. We hold more cards. I'd say now, whereas before we were very much reliant on the dealer. I feel like we're becoming more in the position of power and dictating a bit more and able to put more intent behind everything we do because we have that visibility. The foundations are now there. It's now building and utilizing those tools as best we possibly can. Absolutely. And having multiple service offerings just adds to that strength that we, that we hold within the marketplace. The I touched on it earlier that didn't expand on it in terms of we're going to be offering multiple layers of service within poster job and one of the ones that I'm particularly excited about is the fact that we'll be able to produce adverts in multiple languages. And that is an absolute game changer in terms of. Let's say you're you. You want to an English company targeting people in France, Holland and China predominantly. We will give the, we will give the opportunity to automatically produce ads in a very technically technical manner so that visibility enhanced visibility is achieved on a massive scale and that will be rolled through as well. So it's like this today. Yes, it's important. We've just released a new product. We can, we can now speak to more people, we can get more interest. But the real game changing part of all this is going to be when all the bells and whistles will be a couple of years down the road where there could be three or four or five different service offerings as part of the poster job element, which in conjunction with a personalized profile system which we haven't discussed, which we had a new system released two weeks ago is going to be fantastic. And continuation of the development of the global network for skills provision. I mean and I know the focus of today's podcast is on the job posting side of things. Do we want to touch on profiles or should we leave that for a separate conversation? We can, we don't want to spoil it. We can leave that for another day. Do you have any other points that you want to add in terms of whether from a technical standpoint, whether from the service standpoint, anything else you'd like to add to kind of summarize the offering, to summarize it in terms of where it sits within the marketplace? I think I've explained in detail the product. The part that I would like to reiterate that I find think that it is crucial to companies who are entering the international market and desperately require the manpower is to employ a tactic to embark on a tactical approach. Like I say, you, if you use our platform or you don't, but it's, it's almost like what are you pulling out there and why. So if you're using our platform and you're going after certain keywords where people don't realize that their adverts are based around keywords in search. You may want to consider 3, 2, 3, 4 ads for that one particular task because the absorption and the market visibility is going to increase by the number of ads that you have. So it's. It's almost like, I bought one, right? I bought one lottery ticket, I bought a million lottery tickets. You're just improving the mathematics. Yeah. By having. Having more in place. And that is vitally important because it's almost a little bit like, it's not a. It's not a fit, if you think about it in terms of a fishing exercise. And I, I don't fish much, but I go into a competition, I get all the gear for Christmas and I enter my first ever fishing competition and I'm sat there alongside a couple of national representatives, fishermen, inland bank fishing, like, type of thing, and around the lake and they're pulling out carp and all these big fish all day and I've got nothing. After about eight hours, disillusioned and like pissed off and. And it's, well, I'm not going to do this again. Right, where is the time board? Senseless, dejected. Can be the, can be the feeling when employers and agencies start right there, post their ads into whatever system and start and receive diddly squat. And a lot of the time it could be where when it's all done and dusted and I finished in last place in this fishing competition, that one of the people that was sat next to me came over, could see that was pissed off and said, it's your bait, you're using the wrong bit. You, you need to do this, this, this, this and this. And whilst you won't, we've been at it years, you start to get bites. And that's very much like the analogy with the job adverts in terms of you go 4, 5, 6 ads, all targeting quality keywords across the spectrum. Transmission linesman, overhead powermen, overhead power line workers and such, these type of power line specialists, electrical power engineers. Also understanding if you're targeting the international market, not everyone's national, not everyone will semantically think in the same way. And you have your. And you have your local terminology that someone might use. The way that people are refer things, it's completely different. Yeah. So by putting more adverts out there, you give yourself a better opportunity. And that's not understood because they don't see that what people. There's a lot of ads for different positions, but not multiple ads for the same position. Why it's hard to write. However, as we know anything's hard's worth doing well. If you do it well and continue to do it well, you reap the benefit in terms of success. And success online is measured via revenue and money. And I think that, and I think that ties into also in terms of how much priority someone is putting on a position. If it's a position that is an essential one more effort put in if it's not and you can afford to take your time. But if it's an urgent hire that your business can't function without, surely the putting more in at the front end, you're going to see more return and investment on the other end. Yeah, and I'll finish with this, that just because we have a poster job assist, it doesn't mean that skills provision do not have to be involved. Francesca and her team will set up packages where we, we can produce your ads for you multiple and post it in there, obviously at a cost, but we can, you know, it is, it is something that we would be willing to discuss for the right terms. So this thing of. It's not. It's like we've got post job and we've got full HR globalized, full HR support service. There is a gray area in the middle where we can, we can operate and can support. So and I think that's the thing is we need, we'll adapt with what the market needs and see and see what our, what inquiring businesses and agencies may need and we can be adaptable. And I think that's the biggest thing is learning from you and the online environment is that you have to be adaptable and move with what, what the demand and things may be. Definitely. And on that note, that's, that's really. That's it. Yeah. I was gonna say I exhausted myself on job board chat. I think from my side, the one thing I will say just pur. Focusing on the job posting aspect. I think what we have done and what the technical team have done to develop the system has been fantastic and I'm looking forward to employers, agencies utilizing the system and in turn getting the results, but also that it is an accessible option for everyone. If it's your first time going into the marketplace for something different, it's a good way of dipping your toe in the water. If you're looking for new people. It's a relatively small cost in the eyes of many people, whether you're a small business, medium business, or large business. If you're a large business, it's not a lot when you compare the cost of some other options, but it's a tool to have in your toolkit and I'd advocate for the fact of why not use it if your company is in need of, I don't know, engineers, it, house care, whatever. It could be anything and everything if your company needs workers skills, skills. Skills provision should be one of your top choices when it comes to advertising in the marketplace. Get your job seen. That's. That's what I would say. Definitely. And on that note, we're going to wrap up here. Just want to finally remind everyone in terms of if you're an employer and you do want to inquire either about the service we've been discussing today, so post a job, please find details on our website and equally if you'd like to talk about full recruitment services with the team at Skills Revision and what we can offer, please submit a confidential inquiry using the employer inquiry details. If you're a job seeker and you're looking for that next opportunity, be that locally, nationally or internationally, don't forget to check out our job board, register and create a award winning profile, meaning that your skill sets are seen in the marketplace, ensuring maximum visibility and chance of success when looking for your next opportunity. And if you haven't already done so, please like share, subscribe, share this with anyone that you think may be interested and you can find us on YouTube, AudioBoom, Apple, Spotify or the main locations. So for myself, Francesca, it's goodbye and until next time. See you later. Take care everyone. See you on the next podcast.