Last week I spent some time with Matthew at Innovantage having a play with their Insight product.
This is a web tool that tracks and monitors online recruitment advertising. The idea is that it improves a recruiter's ability to conduct "lead generation, business development and market research" They aggregate jobs posted on over half a million direct employer websites as well as over 30 UK job boards.
It was superbly simple to use and I was impressed by the results. The basic process is thus:
create a search (job title, specific company, location, keywords, etc)
view results
The results show the number of jobs matching that criteria in a list (title, organisation, date posted, job board used). You can click on an individual job to see what else is being advertised by that company, contact details (if the system has them), Yahoo News stories (where available) and you can also see who at that company you "know" via your LinkedIn network. This is a superb little feature which I very much like!
You can also save searches so that results are emailed to you each day.
As well as searching for vacancies for business development purposes you can monitor clients or target companies to see their activities and you can research a company you might be pitching at to see the last 10 jobs they've posted, which job boards they have used, etc.
There is loads more to the system than I can't really put here without it making sound like a full on sales pitch.
It's worth checking out the site for more of the benefits (that really would make this sound like a sales pitch). They do offer a trial (two or three months) – but it's not free. I can see why potential clients would want to trial this and how many would expect the trial to be free. However, you can always ask for an online demo like the one I had.
Having said they don't do a free trial I have been granted access for a couple of weeks (press privileges you know!) and will set up a few searches to report back on here.
If you want more information on the product just give Matthew a shout.
Hi Louise,
When I read a blog post like that, I realise I must be living in a small village! 30 job boards and half a million employers sites? Well, here in Ireland we have the whole workforce of about 2 million people. We still manage to have about 4 to 5 job boards, and about 20 wanabe job boards. 2 multiple job board posting services (and UK’s BroadBean covering a few of our sites). A number of aggregators, that are mostly foreign based, and … that’s it! Oh yes, I almost forgot we also have about 700 registered recruitment agencies.
So, how is that relevant? To launch a product like the Insight, you would need to spider about 100 web sites in total. There are simply no more web sites with jobs in the whole country.
Then again, being Irish you probably have a cousin in pretty much any of the companies, so you can just ask who is hiring as aposed to pay for the Insight like service…
I wish I lived in the real world… BIG world…. Some say Internet made us work globally?
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
Hi Louise, I was interested to read your blog re. Innovantage. We recently signed up to it and find it an extremely useful tool. The support team there are also excellent – nothing is every a problem for them if you have a query re. your searc criteria.
We used this tool and I would be very carefull before signing up. The sales process is slick but the actual results are extreemely poor.
They basically have a lot of public sector jobs and jobs off blue chip companies websites that are usually handles by an external managed service recruiter.
In addition you have to realise that the bulk of the results it shows you are from employers who cant or wont use a recruiter.
AVOID if you like money!