I'm proud to say TAG have now been awarded a contract by Job Centre Plus and are now supplying jobsearch support for newly unemployed IT and AV professionals.

You only have to watch the news or look at the vacant shops on most high streets to realise the state of the economy and I like most recruiters have found a majority of regular clients are not hiring or are in fact making redundancies.

However the real condition of the job market really hit home on Tuesday morning following the Easter brake.  I placed an add on the Thursday before Easter for an IT support engineer to work in London with a pretty respectable salary of up to £35,000.  I already had 2 or 3 good candidates in mind but placed the add to see if any superstars would apply. 

Normally for a job like that I would expect between 20 and 30 applicants and of those 30 maybe 5 or 6 would be suitable.  Tuesday Morning I logged into Outlook to find 340 CV's had been received in just 4 days!!!!  It’s now Tuesday night and I have only managed to read through the first 20 of them and speak to 2 or 3....... It’s going to be a long slog!  The worst part is that a of the first 20 I looked out a majority are currently out of work and about half where previously earning a lot more than £35,000.

Roll on 2010.

The TAG information email account probably receives 5 emails a week from companies that 'specialise' in designing recruitment websites and can offer an out of the box solution for upwards of £495.  However having designed a few websites for friends and my football team (the mighty East Kent Mavericks) I figured I could save TAG some money by setting up, updating and hosting a new recruitment website.  How wrong was I.......

Actually that may not be true, I am very happy with the new website, however if I was to put a value on my time and the amount of time it took to get the new site designed, up and running and the content added then it would have cost a lot more than the £495 some design companies offer and had I e-lanced it would have probably been even less!  The finished site runs on Joomla and is hosted on Linux and Apache,  so on going maintenance will be far less and will not have to pay a company for updates, but it did take a lot longer than planned.

The initial spec I set myself was for it to be functional and simple to navigate yet interesting and not "just another recruitment site", I also wanted IT people to be impressed with the technologies and gimmicks while regular users to not be confused and pleased by the aesthetics!  A tough spec for a non professional designer but hopefully I came close to achieving it! 

There still needs to be some integration between our vacancy database as currently new roles have to be added manually but other than that it is pretty much finished. www.tagrecruitment.co.uk any feedback gratefully received!

Any feedback would be gratefully received.