Lander Associates, the specialist training and performance development consultancy has emerged as a clear winner of recruiter Chapman Black’s innovative scheme to select a new training partner.

Chapman Black, a specialist operational and executive recruiter set the challenge last year stating that they wanted to “shake up the conventional training paradigm by asking training companies to go head to head and see which could have the greatest impact on performance”.

The project set out to link remuneration to results over a six month period. Trainers would receive a fixed nominal and non-negotiable day rate, but for those who were willing to take the risk and battle it out to win, a significant bonus based on the increase in gross profit generated would be earned. Out of over 15 applications, only three were successful in reaching the competition stage. However, given the uncertain economic climate only two organisations were willing embrace the challenge: Lander Associates and one other.

The companies were tasked with training two different teams and at the end of the period, Lander Associates had increased KPIs by 43% and revenue by 41% the other , with their team had increased KPIs by 10% and revenue by 16%.

“I knew it was worth the risk” said Fiona Lander, Managing Director of Lander Associates. “I believed in our team and in our methods and am delighted that we have had the opportunity to prove that our training directly impacts on results – I’m now looking forward to working with Chapman Black on a long term basis.”

We were delighted with Lander’s approach”, said Shanthi Wilkinson, Head of Operations. “There was real buy in from the team and their passion really shone through. The whole point of this project was to determine the real value of external training – and to be able to measure the return on our investment. We have always considered ourselves to be a performance recruiter – focused on the end result – and therefore wanted our training partner to mirror those values. Lander Associates did a terrific job!”

Following on from the recent positive news from the house building sector, specialist construction recruiter, One way Resourcing is reporting an upturn in demand for skilled construction workers.

“We’ve seen some very positive news in the press recently” says Director Paul Payne. “Taylor Wimpey, for example has recently announced a 28% rise in orders. This suggests that the increase in house prices last year is beginning to have an effect on construction and encouraging new building which has to be good news not just for construction but for the economy as a whole,” added Payne.

The company is reporting an increase in demand for Site Managers, Finishing Managers and Project Managers as well as various trades and labour staff.

But is not just the residential sector where the company is seeing an upturn.  “We are also seeing a general increase in demand for building services and maintenance staff across both the commercial and residential sectors,” adds Payne.

By Nadia Owen, 4MAT Business Communications

Established in 1981 and successfully recruiting IT staff into major corporate organisations   across the UK and Europe ever since, the JM group (www.thejmgroup.com) have a well-founded reputation for quality, consistency and reliability.

During this time the number of recruitment agencies in the UK alone has tripled . Alongside technological developments which have quite literally changed the face, geography and nature of recruitment. We are now in a socio-economical climate where modernisation is prized and flashy designs are a sign of the times, but JM have refused to follow the crowd and instead have created an original new website that embraces classicism and abstract imagery.

Partnered with recruitment web development and marketing specialists 4MAT since 1999, this front-end revamp of their original dotVacancy2 platform is visually distinct, representative of their business plan and historical development. “We’ve been around for a long time and have already survived a couple of recessions,” says Alan Bawden, Director of the JM group. “This put us in a unique position from which we could draw on our experience and improve our business over the past year. Now that economists are predicting improvements for 2010, we took the opportunity to change the look and feel of our site – to reflect the consultative nature of our recruitment business and move away from the “stack ‘em high and sell them cheap” philosophy of some of our competitors.” 

The end result is a classically effective website with modern visuals that contrast with their jaded competitors’ sites. Their flash-focused rivals may scoff at the simplicity but surveys are finding that as a result of the current recession, people are indicating an overriding preference for tradition and abstract interpretations of minimalism, and in JM’s case, this has already been proved by the overwhelming number of leads the new site has generated (both client role requests and candidate registrations).

“We are an executive search, selection and contracts recruiter, and I believe that we have fully seized the opportunity to align our business plan with the website,” continues Alan. “We have always had a clear focus for the website, for which ROI is a key criteria. We didn’t want a brochure site, we want to interactively update pages as and when required to ensure our content remains up to date and relevant to our target audience.”

Further investment in a comprehensive digital marketing campaign including search engine optimisation (amongst other things, the JM group are top rankers for the search query “IT recruitment London”) and AdWords sponsorship, combined with a consistent PR campaign will look to consistently drive both clients and candidates to the site.

www.thejmgroup.com

www.4MAT.com

Almost half of multilingual job seekers don’t think beyond translation when it comes to careers using languages. That’s according to a recent poll by executive and business support recruiter Crone Corkill.

Crone Corkill asked visitors to its stand at the Language Show Career Fair what role first came to mind when thinking about jobs with languages and 45% of respondents replied with the answer ‘translator’ or ‘interpreter’. Other responses included teaching, tourism and customer service.

“The Language Show was a great chance for us to meet talented linguists and show them the career opportunities available where they could use their languages” says Helen Hook, Senior Manager at Crone Corkill. “We met people that spoke a wide range of languages, from French to Latvian to Yoruba! But it’s surprising how many people still automatically think of translation when it comes to jobs with languages.”

“Whether it’s a secretary, receptionist or team assistant, companies are always looking for candidates who not only have the right skills and experience for those types of roles, but who can communicate with people from around the globe. French and German remain the most in demand languages – especially within banking and finance and in the energy and media sectors too. However Eastern European and Nordic languages, Japanese and Mandarin are also becoming increasingly sought after as these markets expand.”

For all the latest office support and language jobs, visit www.cronecorkill.co.uk.

Snow may have ground much of the UK to a halt recently but FMCG recruiter Goldteam has ensured that it is business as usual for its clients, who have been facing their busiest time of year.

With agency staff providing crucial support to busy factories in the run-up to the Christmas period, the adverse weather conditions had the potential to bring production to a halt due to lack of staff. To avert this problem, Goldteam not only lined up extra staff as a precaution, but transported workers to and from their clients’ sites throughout the night to ensure the necessary resources were in place.

“We appreciate that this festive season is of the utmost importance to our clients and that a little bit of snow could have been very damaging for their business” explains Karen Furminger, Goldteam’s General Manager. “By forward planning and making sure we had measures in place to avoid any problems, we were able to fill in gaps left by other agencies and ensure our clients had the people they could not afford to lose.”

Launch of recruitersite.co.uk will negate the need for job board contracts

A brand new online recruitment advertising offering allowing recruiters to multipost to leading job boards on a ‘pay as you go’ basis has been launched to address what the founders call “a double standard where many of the online tools and resources have simply been out of reach of the independent sme recruiter”.

Recruitersite.co.uk, which will be exclusive to recruitment industry professionals, will negate the need for contracts with individual job boards and allow recruitment consultancies to post a job onto six different job boards for as little as £69.00

The site is the brainchild of recruitment industry professionals Scott Taylor and Mark Jones, who, with over three decades of experience behind them felt that it was time to ensure that smaller recruiters had the chance to compete with their larger rivals on a level playing field.

With recruitersite, agencies can multipost to one of three packages and simply pay on line with a credit card or PayPal account. “Unlike multipost tools such as Broadbean, our site does not require recruiters to have job board contracts in place”, says Taylor and so for the smaller independent recruiter it really is a no brainer”.

“The packages are designed to cover every type of industry”, adds Taylor. “Our basic package, which is ideal for generalist vacancies posts to Reed, Fish4jobs; Workhound; CVLibrary and 1Job as well as being added to recruitersite.co.uk’s own job board.  Then there is the standard package which includes all the basic sites but the vacancy will also be smart matched into the UK’s largest niche network, Hotonline. Additionally it will be geographically matched into the jobseverywhere network where it will not only appear in the relevant geographical job board but also in the local print media.  And then finally, the professional package with all of the elements of the standard package but also an additional premium niche site.”

“The SME recruitment market is huge” says Taylor. “Our research, undertaken over the last 14 months, has told us that many smaller agencies would like to use on line job boards but found the costs and resources needed too prohibitive as they had no volume buying power. Recruitersite.co.uk is set to change all that.”

Contact Details:  www.recruitersite.co.uk
Scott Taylor/Mark Jones
info@recruitersite.co.uk