How to Design a Mobile Enabled Website

26. July 2010 by admin.

Is your website mobile? Can your customers find you when they need you the most?

 

It is estimated that mobile advertising growth will continue at a rate of 10% each year throughout the next decade. With statistics like this, no business can afford not to jump on board and stay on top of this highly effective marketing method in this stage of the game.

 

Look around your business and note the people using a smart phone. Are some of your clientele mobile warriors? You might be surprised but odds are if you are one yourself, you are already aware of the growing numbers of people of every demographic that are using their mobile devices for much more than making phone calls.

 

Here are few import points to consider when designing a mobile enabled website for your organization.

 

1. Less is better. Plan your information architecture based upon what users typically want first when they go to your web site. Make a list and prioritize each page or function.

 

2. Minimal use of graphics. The on-the-go mobile user is not going to be wowed by images, pictures and graphics. They are browsing because they are looking for specific information. You want them in and out of your site. You’ll wow them with simplicity.

 

3. Button and font size. Eliminate wasting your visitor’s time by make links and buttons a size that is finger-friendly. Tiny text and button will just bring the visitor closer to exiting your web site.

 

4. If you want to sell products or services via your mobile website, think about using PayPal or Google Checkout. This eliminates the visitor from having to type in all contact and credit card information.

 

5. Promote your site through geo-targeted sites like Google Maps, Bing Maps and Yelp.

 

Your website should be able to read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device. If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

 

WPtouch is a hybrid Wordpress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile Wordpress theme. WPtouch loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhoneTM, iPod touchTM, AndroidTM, or BlackBerry StormTM touch mobile device.

http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch/

 

Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.

http://mobify.me

 

Wordpress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-edition/

 

Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

 

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed and have an opinion about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.

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Purples Squirrels Discovered at RecruitDC

25. May 2010 by admin.

A purple squirrel is more than just an oddly colored rodent. In the recruiting vernacular, a “purple squirrel” is a metaphor for that very rare, highly sought after, almost extinct species of candidate, because finding this candidate is about as easy as finding a purple squirrel.

How to Find Polygraph Candidates on Google

The strategy I use is filtering all the things I don’t want to see like job postings, etc. Keep your basic skill set search simple. If you get too many results, you can always add more filters to target a specific location or type of polygraph (”full-scope” OR “fullscope” OR “life style” OR lifestyle).

clearance AND polygraph AND resume -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume” -”resume database” -”sample resume” -applicant -examiner -chartrecorder

clearance AND polygraph AND “about me” OR bio OR vitae OR cv OR homepage OR profile OR resume OR resumebook -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume” -”resume database” -”sample resume” -applicant -examiner -chartrecorder

Place this hyperlink in your browser. It’s a search for any resume that has the word “polygraph”.  Add more filters or come up with your own key words.

http://www.egrabber.com/resumefinder/widget/keycG9seWdyYXBotypegoogleurlsearch_popup.html

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Top 10 Technique - Honing In On That Elusive Resume

30. April 2010 by admin.

How many different words can be used to find a resume or candidate profile, only a resume or profile, and not a job announcement? Crafting a search string that returns only useful information about your intended target is not that hard.

Let’s start with the different ways a resume or candidate profile can be found on the Internet. You want to find the following words in either the title of the web page or the within the URL or web address. Hence, the two commands to use will be “intitle:” and “inurl:”. These are generally universal commands among most of the major search and metasearch engines.

Here are some synonyms or alternative names for how resumes or candidate profiles can be found.

About Me
Bio(s)
Curriculum Vitae
CV(s)
Homepage
Profile(s)
Resume(s)
Resumebook
Vitae

You can further refine your search of that elusive resume or candidate profile by adding qualifiers that are generally found within the body of these pages.

Certification
Education
Experience
Objective
Overview
Qualifications
References
Summary of Qualifications
Work Experience
Work History

And finally, you will need to weed out all those JOBS with some choice words or phrases.

apply
benefits
email resume
email to
eoe
hiring
job
jobs
looking for
opening
recruiter
recruiting
requirements
send
submit
to resume

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Top 10 Tool - More Metasearch Engines

21. April 2010 by admin.

PolyMeta is an advanced Web 2.0 meta-search (federated search) and clustering engine. It enables organizations and individuals to simultaneously search diverse information resources on the Web with a common interface. The search results are merged, ranked and presented in relevance order.
www.polymeta.com

Choose Select Sources and check all the search engines below.

Google
Yahoo
Ask
Exalead
AllTheWeb
GigaBlast
Cuil
Bing

Also, try out the AllPlus Meta Search and Discovery Engine which is based on PolyMeta.
www.allplus.com

With Zuula, it is quick and convenient to get results from all the top search engines. Search engines often return very different results for the same terms. Currently, it offers Web, Image, Video, News, Blog, and Job searches and provides the results from your favorite search engine unaltered, so you can check those first and then get results from other search engines simply by clicking on their tabs.
www.zuula.com

Choose Preferences to pick all the search engines. Set your results to 60 per page

Google
Yahoo
Bing
Gigablast
Exalead
Alexa
Entireweb
Mahalo
Mojeek

Try this sample search string: +”top secret/sci” +clearance resume OR “my resume” OR vitae -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume”

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Strategies - Unique Web Sites to Leverage Your Recruitment

6. January 2010 by admin.

Criminal Searches provides the scary-but-useful data on how many criminals live in your neighborhood, what crimes they were convicted of, and, in some cases, their names and personal info. It’s all culled from public records, and is presented as a Google Maps mashup. You can restrict your search to sex offenders, search on a specific name to get a criminal history, or do a general search for criminals by city or zip code.

We have stared into the social-networking abyss and it is the information overload named FriendFeed. The service aggregates all your social content and activity from Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, Last.fm, blogs, and so on. It aggregates your friends’ activity, too, giving you a meta-feed of your online social life. Depending on how active your friends are, it can be a pleasant stream of sociality, or like trying to drink from a firehose.

Without a doubt, Howcast has the best-looking how-to videos on the Web. All kinds of topics like “The Questions That a Good Recruiter Asks a Hiring Manager”, “How To Automate the Resume Sourcing Process” or “How To Recruit With YouTube”. Sign up to get a How-To Video of the Day via e-mail, as well as to be able to edit their how-to wikis, talk to experts in the community area, or upload your own videos. The user-generated stuff is okay, but the Howcast-produced vids are particularly great.

PicApp can make a world of difference on your blog or Web site. It’s a free stock-photo service that lets you quickly and easily grab photos of whatever subject you need for use on your blog. PicApp has quite a large image catalog, and photos range from run-of-the-mill stock photos to celebrity pics.

Visual representations of data are nothing new, but Tag Galaxy takes it to new heights in searching Flickr photos. Enter a single keyword (I used “frog”) and you’ll see a 3D representation of a solar system with the keyword as the sun, orbited by related word “planets” (e.g., “amphibian,” “green,” and “toad”). Click a planet to combine keywords, or just click the sun (your main keyword) to get a unique photo-sphere covered with up to 236 images pulled from Flickr. Spin it in any direction with the mouse, clicking shots for close-ups. It takes a while to surf them all this way, but makes for a fascinating time waster.

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Welcome to 2010

4. January 2010 by admin.

Let’s usher in 2010 with more giving than asking. A recent search of “advanced sourcing tips” revealed that there are a ton of “self-professed” experts, who for a bit of bling will divulge all their secrets to you. Whatever happened to sharing what you’ve learned freely with others. I have found over the years that this method of exchange returns much higher returns that can’t be measured in just dollars and cents. If you have been reading this blog, you have found numerous examples of search string algorithms to better identify both passive and active candidates. Below are just a few more. I challenge you to devise some new and more radical strings and identify more sources and venues to find those ever elusive A-list candidates.

 

site:*.craigslist.org/*/res “software engineer” -”this posting has expired”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (java or j2ee or weblogic) “software engineer”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (admin or administrator or administration or administer or administered or maintenance or maintained) (server or servers) (mail or email or messaging) (mcse or “microsoft certified systems engineer”)

site:twellow.com “software engineer” and geeks

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Top 10 Tool - AutoSearch

31. December 2009 by admin.

A-list candidates are a recruiter’s market. Hence, the science for discovering these folks, their resume, profile, contact info, and anything else should be reclassified as performing market intelligence. To be an effective and productive analyst, it can take an enormous amount of time in a workday to collect all the necessary leads. So discovering tools that can greatly reduce the time to perform this market intelligence is a godsend to any recruiter. One such new tool on the market is AutoSearch. It does a variety of tasks in the public domain that makes sourcing fun and productive. It scours LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Plaxo, Xing, Spoke, and Jobster business networking sites as well as the Twitter, Ning, Facebook, and MySpace social networking sites. This tool also employs other web-based research sites such as Mail Tester, 411.com, Google, Whitepages, and pipl.com to best leverage your time.

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Top 10 Technique - The Power of the Word “Resume”

21. December 2009 by admin.

How many resumes can be found using Google? A bunch! The same is true for most any other search engine. My research revealed that when searching for nothing more than any one of the following versions of the word resume, over 3.6 billion were found. Now, of course, there was no additional filtering to remove jobs or other keywords that would return only true resumes, but the potential results far outstrip anything you could find using all the fee-based resume boards.

Variations on the word Resume

vitæ, resumé, rèsumé, rèsumè, resume, résumé, résumè, CV, vitae, vita

Going one step further, I further refined the search with this algorithm:

(~resumé|~rèsumé|~rèsumè|~résumé|~resume) -intitle:~job -intitle:~jobs -apply -submit -job -jobs -template -”resume writing” -”resume sample”

This produces over 170 million results. However, this is still much too large to work with. Your challenge is to introduce a variety of keywords to further refine your results. All the best.

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Strategies - Effective Recruiting Begins at Home

18. December 2009 by admin.

If you’re not collecting email addresses on your homepage (and anywhere else you can), you are missing out on opportunities to turn first-time job seekers into your best employees. No matter how they found you - maybe you rented an opt-in list, placed a banner ad or two, distributed a flyer or sent a postcard - if you’re not providing a way for passive/active job seekers and visitors to express interest in hearing from you in the future, that opt-in list rental, that banner ad, flyer or postcard was nothing more than a one-shot deal.

Here are some hints and tips on building your own opt-in emailing list.

Begin by asking for email addresses at every point of customer contact:

- On your company website
- In a guest book
- On customer service or support calls
- On invoices, brochures, customer surveys, feedback forms
- At tradeshows or events
- Place your email list sign-up on your homepage above the fold

You may also want to place it on other pages, like “careers” or “contact us” but whatever you do, don’t hide it! Same goes for your guest book. Place it prominently. Ask your employees to make it a part of their routine to ask friends if they would like to receive your newsletter, to receive special promotions, or to be notified of private events.

I want confidentiality

Just get the email address to start. Your visitors’ and jobseekers’ trust must be earned and this only happens over time. To that end, also make your privacy policy clear up front. Make sure they understand how you will be using their email address, that it won’t be sold or traded and that they can decide to “opt-out” of further communications at any time.

Why should I sign up?

If the lure of private events or promotions isn’t enough, email list sign-up success can be achieved with sweepstakes, drawings or the like. Make sure your incentive is closely related to your product or service. That way, you’ll end up with an audience interested in you, not just the latest gadget.

No matter what you’re recruiting and no matter what your size, your goal should be to make the most of every visitor and every job seeker. Make your site traffic and/or foot traffic, work for you by building your own opt-in email list and communicating with your visitors and job seekers.

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Strategies - Online Job Postings

17. December 2009 by admin.

Great online recruitment advertising can be the key to attracting the “A”-list talent your company needs. Here are 9 tips for maximizing your advertising budget.

1. No misspellings in your job posting.
2. Specify a salary range for your job posting.
3. Disclose your company name in the job posting.
4. Put as many keywords in your job description as you can.
5. Promote your company in the job posting.
6. Explain what makes your company unique and attractive to applicants.
7. Describe your benefits, emphasizing any special perks your company may have.
8. Use a more traditional job title so applicants understand what the position is.
9. Make sure the job posting is not too lengthy.

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