— March 17, 2011 —
By Tobin Harris (with thanks to Lee Sommerville for the “lessons learned” idea)
We’re currently in the process of hiring iPhone developers. Given the modern age of social networks and t’internet, we’re keen not to use agencies for this task.
As many may have discovered, it’s not easy. So… we’re blogging a bit about the process. This is the first instalment, which touches on what happened when we spuffed £200 on a cwjobs.co.uk advert.
WARNING: it’s not pretty. Sorry for the RANT!
So, one of our starting points was cwjobs.co.uk, a highly popular job board for people looking for jobs in the UK.
We spent over £200.00 on posting a nice job advert up, which looked a bit like this…
Ok, so what happened next? Did we get 100’s of responses from eager iPhone developers? Did we connect with awesome people who would love being on our team?
No. Not even close.
What happened was this…
Ad Cloning Galore
I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place.
The cheekiest one by far was by Opus, who copied the add and put it up on the same site with an increased salary to attract more attention.
Spot the difference between this and the above…
Great, they’re diluting our ad-impact. Thanks.
To make matters worse, they then got in touch trying to sell us a candidate! So, they:
- Copy our ad under their own name
- Make it more attractive by giving a false higher salary
- Bombard us with phone calls
- Then try and sell a single candidate to us for £7,000.
No wonder they wouldn’t drop under 15% on rates, they need us to pay heavily for all this fun they’re having.
Nice.
Agency Bombardment!
A 2nd side effet of posting up at cwjobs.co.uk is a volley of phone calls. For the last week, every day we’ve had about 3-8 phone calls from agencies. I think every agency in the game has phoned us to try and sell us candidates.
Basically, they must see on this site, and target us like animals.
On The Plus Side
cwjobs.co.uk isn’t all bad. We’ve had 2 genuine enquiries from good people. Unfortunately they don’t have the skills we’re looking for, but we might be able to train them up. So, not a complete fail.
Key Take-Aways
£200 isn’t much to pay csjobs.co.uk for a job posting, but be ready for recruitment agencies to clone your add and drown it out from an SEO perspective. I don’t think we’ll be doing this again unless we learn more about how to do it successfully.
Consider putting copyright notices on the bottom or your ads, it might stop agencies cloning them, but I doubt it.
Have a response ready for when you get bombarded with agency phone calls.
Sorry all this is a bit negative, we’ll try and post up more positive feedback once we have more success!
