SimplyHired, a US based jobs aggregator, launched its Australian operations yesterday. Already 200,000 Australian jobs are listed on their site.

Jobs aggregator sites have been around since 2005, and the Australian market is well served by a mix of overseas players and local startups. Recruit.net, based in HK, is one of the first and most established companies to serve Australia. UK based Careerjet and local players like Jseekers and myspider are also gaining traction.

At the core of an aggregator’s service is collecting jobs from all over the Internet - company career portals, recruiters websites, blogs, job boards etc , and put them in one searchable database. It delivers value to job seekers by providing a one stop platform to search for jobs. Of course, not everyone like their jobs to be indexed (SEEK is an example) and debate continues on issues like copyright infringements and data ownership (more of this in a later post).

It is too early to gauge how well SimplyHired will perform in Australia. The market looks crowded. However, innovations like its jobomatic service, which allows jobs to be easily syndicated on websites and blogs, will make SimplyHired stand out from the rest. Their collaboration with Linkedin will also go down well with the Australian recruiting community who has embraced Linkedin with gusto. Besides, it is a global operation with deep pockets.

We expect job aggregators to stay, the benefits they give job seekers, convenience and unparalleled  information, is different from those offered by conventional job boards.  For employers, it means their jobs can be distributed to even more places and get more exposure.

History, however, is not kind to American companies who enters the Australian market. Monster and Hotjobs failed to make any dent in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and ultimately quit the market. Only time will tell if Simplyhired will be any different.  Watch this space.

Armed with a sharp focus (team leader recruitment) and a brilliant marketing strategy, we thought teamleader.com.au is a breath of fresh air. Recently, we broke bread with James Adonis, co-founder/director of teamleaders.com.au and international expert on employee engagement, and he sheds some light on his background, company and how to find ‘good team leaders’.

James can be reached at james@jamesadonis.com or + 61 402 334 987

DT. James, tell us a bit about your background and how teamleaders.com.au came about? Why do you choose to focus on team leaders?
JA: I’ve dedicated my entire career to obsessively researching and understanding what it takes to create highly engaged employees. As a result, I set up “Team Leaders” because I am convinced that they have the greatest influence in the workplace. What Team Leaders say and do every day determines whether their employees perform well or perform badly, so I really wanted to create a program that was (a) targeted specifically for this group of people, and (b) delivered in a way that is unparalleled in this country.

DT. Besides core recruitment services you offer a ‘development program’ component. Can you shed some light on this?
JA: Team Leader development program is a 12-month experience which incorporates a one-day workshop which is followed by monthly group mentoring sessions, monthly audio programs, books, newsletters, and online forums. It’s been designed in this way because a recent study showed that over 80% of the funds that companies spend on training goes to waste. I believe there are two reasons for this. Firstly, learning outcomes aren’t reinforced over a period of time, and secondly, the delivery doesn’t target every learning style. Our development program meets both of these objectives.

Q. In your opinion, what do you think is the demand and supply situation for team leaders. Which industries do you think have the most demand for ‘team leaders’?JA: Team Leaders are especially in demand in call centres and administration teams. But the term “Team Leader” also applies to branch managers, retail managers, and basically anyone and everyone who managers front-line employees.

Q Are team leaders born or made? Is there a universal set of skills that all team leaders share in common?
JA: A bit of both. If you’re born with a high degree of emotional intelligence, it’s much easier to be a brilliant Team Leader. In saying that, there are core skills that can be easily learned by anyone who truly wants to excel in this role. The universal set of skills for Team Leaders would be:

- An ability to communicate well
- An understanding of the coaching and feedback process
- An awareness of how to respond to tricky situations like poor performance, conflict, change, and negative employees
- A solid comprehension of what motivates people

DT: What makes a good team leader? Can you lay down the five most important traits?
JA: The five core characteristics of the world’s most amazing Team Leaders are:

- A genuine love of people
- A cheerful disposition
- A passion for achieving high levels of performance in themselves and in others
- Self-awareness
- A focus on building relationships not only with their employees, but also with their managers and colleagues

DT. What must employers do to find and hire the best team leaders?
JA: The first step is to look within. Some of the best Team Leaders aren’t even Team Leaders. The biggest mistake companies make is to promote the most technically-proficient people to the role of Team Leader.

Technically-competent people should be moved to specialist roles. It’s the people-lovers who need to be Team Leaders. So, my first piece of advice is to always be grooming your people-lovers so that they can step up to the Team Leader role. Aside from that, my “Team Leaders” company is the only one in Australia that specialises in recruiting Team Leaders – and only Team Leaders.

DT. Lately, everyone’s concern is the economic downturn. What do you think will be outlook for team leaders in the near future, say the next 12 months?
JA: Economic downturns tend to affect middle managers more than Team Leaders, so I think they’ll be okay. The biggest impact will be on maintaining morale and engagement in their teams because the financial uncertainty is likely to affect their employees’ attitudes, especially if there are retrenchments occurring within their organisations.

Problogger is one of the most popular blogs in Australia. On any given day the site amassed well over 65,000 readers. With a loyal and active readers base(one post registered 600 plus comments from readers) it is understandable that Problogger runs a lively job board, charging $50 per job posting.  Recently another popular marketing blog gave birth to a new job board - Socialmediajobs.com.au.

The explosion of personal publishing tools essentially allows anyone to become their own media company and develop a community of followers.  Blogs in particular are effective in conducting conversations and build relationship with a focused pool of readers. Hence, blogs offers a lot of potential as a platform to advertise jobs and target candidates.

Already, services like Jobcoin and Jobamatic allows jobs to be syndicated to thousands of blogs. Meanwhile, Job board templates for popular blogging software WordPress are raising their heads. It is increasingly easy to run your own job board on your blog.  We expect to see a lot more innovation in this space in the near future.

Still, job listing on blogs are only a small fraction of those on mainstream job boards. But it is clear that a blog can be an effective channel to reach out to potential job seekers, especially the passive types. Blogs will increasingly be recipients of advertising dollars, and in the process will enlarge the pie spent on online classifieds advertising.

• The thirst for workers continues in the Australian oil & gas industry.
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Every 30 seconds a new social network is created on Ning. Since it launched two years ago, close to 500,000 social networks has been created on Ning (see graph).  Of course, Ning is not the only player in this space, other white-label social network platforms abounds.

Ning’s, and white-label social network providers, stratospheric growth gives one an idea on where online communities are heading. At this rate, there is likely to be a social network for every niche imaginable. At the core of this growth is the ease with which anyone can create a social network, and the basic longing for everyone to be part of a community.

The explosion of online communities offers both opportunities and challenges for recruiters. For one, it will be easier to identify and reach out to a focused pool of talent (Need accountants anyone?), at the same time monitoring conversations across a large number of networks will prove to be a challenge for most recruiters (How many social networks can you participate in?).

It is not difficult to imagine job listings to become a standard feature on social networks. Already, job listings are a regular features on some popular social networks. Very soon, the jobs listings themselves will be the draw card for signing up with a particular social network.

It’s not clear how social networks will affect the status quo in terms of job listings and talent acquisition, but online communities are here not only to stay but to prosper. As Seth puts it in his new book Tribes, ” Go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect.”

250,00 0 registered users, 15,000 daily visits and thousands upon thousands of conversation threads are just some of the big numbers chalked up by  the Whirlpool (not the white goods manufacturer) forum. The forum is probably one of the largest Australian online communities where people (mostly IT professionals) congregate and passionately talk about technology on a regular basis.

Where there is a thriving community, job advertisements usually follows (Mainstream job boards take the reverse route of listing jobs first and try and build a community, some do both at the same time).  As Kevin Kelley points out   “wherever attentions flows, money will follow”

Already, hundred of jobs are advertised on the forum. A job posting is free for employers and forum participants (professional recruiters are not allowed to participate), but it is easy to see that commercialisation is the next logical step for Whirlpool.

As social animals we all participate in one or another community. The Internet just makes it a lot more easier to foster connections, amplifies interaction among like minded individuals and allows for communities to be created quickly.  The proliferation of online communities means the definition of a ‘job board’ will be redefined.