Even when you are targeting candidates in multiple countries, it is generally possible to go through the big international portals like stepstone.com or monster.com and have them post your advertisements in the region you are interested in. What they will often do is to cooperate with the local job portals and just transfer the posting over to them. Although this might be convenient, especially when you want to put out the same advertisement in multiple countries, this way of doing it comes with two disadvantages:

1. Often you will have less influence on how the subcontracted websites will actually display your advertisement and how they will process the results that come back to you. This can easily result in a higher need for manual applicant filtering on your side.
2. It has a certain price tag, as you will need to pay two providers - one directly and one indirectly.

I wanted to explore the direct cooperation with the Hungarian job portals and therefore decided to put out the advertisement myself. As I thought this might be useful for other people as well who are faced with a similar tasks, I thought I should describe some of my observations.

I will provide an assessment of the pros and cons of the three different job portals that I have used, namely profession.hu, cvonline.hu, and jobline.hu.

Comparison

profession.hu

profession.hu portal

profession.hu posting

profession.hu comes with the cleanest interface. Of the three portals it has the least commercials and a special plus is the presentation of the advertisement itself which is by far the most prominent one of the three portals, as profession.hu presents the advertisement on a dedicated page, without any sidebars, commercials or similar. They provide an English user interface for posting advertisements but they are apparently still in the process of developing this functionality, as I was not able to change the posting again after saving the first draft of it. The customer service was very helpful though and modified the posting according to my specifications in a short time.

cvonline.hu

cvonline.hu portal

cvonline.hu posting

cvonline.hu also has a clean interface and allows to switch the display language between Hungarian and English. It comes with one major minus though, which are the Google Ads, both on the start page as well as on the page of the job advertisement. I consider this to be a fairly unreasonable approach, as their customers are paying for the job postings to be published on the website, so I do not see a need to clutter the view with additional advertisements.

jobline.hu

jobline.hu portal

jobline.hu posting

The interface of of jobline.hu is comparable to the one of cvonline.hu but with less commercials, although they have sporadic Google Ads on the jop posting site itself. Here applies the same criticism as to cvonline.hu.

Conclusion

In an effort to do a fair comparison of the three job portals I put all my above mentioned observations plus some more in a matrix. For every feature each job portal can get between 0-3 points. Obviously that assumes that all features have the same importance but please put your own weighting scheme on top of this if you like.

Although profession.hu only beats jobline.hu by two point, it is clearly my favorite.
Especially when you would neglect the difference in price (which is just about 60 EUR) between this two sites and put an even stronger emphasize on response and advertisement layout, profession would have been an even more dominant winner.

One more general piece of advice: If you are not speaking Hungarian it is better to contact the sales representatives of all three sites directly. Although some of them are offering an English interface, it is not always working properly or offers less features than the Hungarian counterpart. The sales representatives are generally very helpful and (at least in my case) did their best to layout the advertisement according to my requirements.

All the best for your future recruitments. I hope this little comparison of Hungarian job portals helps.

Link List
TecChannel - Online-Jobsuche nimmt weiter zu
stepstone.com
monster.com
profession.hu
cvonline.hu
jobline.hu

Before relaunching FANtasy Rotation next week, we are trying to come up with some more modern ways of engaging with our audience. One thing we are trying out is to set up Facebook page. See how the result looks like in the screenshot or on our FANtasy Rotation Facebook page.

In this page also integrated two free Facebook applications developed by the company Involver. They allow for easy mashup with two of our already existing services:

• FANtasy Rotation RSS feed
• FANtasy Rotation Twitter page

GetSatisfaction, a service we a trying out to imrpove community communication, has recently released news that they will integrate their service more closely with Facebook as well. So we will see how we can benefit from that.

Below you see a Facebook Fan widget of our page for integration in blogs, static websites, etc.

So check out the FANtasy Rotation Facebook page.

We are now on Twitter and directly the first tweet is a bold one:
FANtasy-Rotation V2-Launch: 22.09.2009

That means work for us and potentially fun for you! Stay tuned!

I was just wondering if there was a way to display my blog posts in a box on my facebook profile.

There is one WordPress application called simply WordPress by Developer Joseph Scott. I am only posting this application here in order for you NOT to use it! Besides its review (1.9 out of 5), it is lacking one major feature which is connecting your facebook with your wordpress blog that is hosted outside of wordpress.com.

On the discussion board there is one very busy thread Access to other WordPress installs not hosted at WordPress.com. It has a lot of comments quite recently and everybody is asking just this one feature. Even WordPress developer Matt Mullenberg replied saying that they will be trying to get this feature working in their own facebook app.

Well, maybe that is not necessary at all:
The only feature I really want is to be able to display my blog posts on facebook anyways, so the before mentioned application would be overkill anyways because it also enables you to write posts to wordpress.com directly form within facebook. Not really necessary for me!

One of the comments, written by the developer itself, was referring to the WordBook Application by Robert Tsai. You just need to Download WordBook, install it on your blog, to through two authorization/connection steps between your blog and facebook and then things should be set up.

This is actually my first post to test what the output of WordBook on my facebook page will be, so stay tuned :)

Update 1:

I read in the description of the plugin that you cannot customize the displayed content of the Wordbook box. That is ony partially true as you can change the wordbook_fbmltext() function in wordbook.php directly. Of course you should know what you are doing, otherwise you might mess up the plugin. :)

A FaceBook wall box is limited to 250px height by the way, so your content might appear cut off as you see in the screenshot above. Still better than nothing!

Link List
WordPress
Developer Joseph Scott
Access to other WordPress installs not hosted at WordPress.com
Matt Mullenberg
WordBook Application by Robert Tsai
Download WordBook

Check out the latest version:
WordPress Plugin Directory: EbaySalesLister

We had it ready behind the curtains for quite a while but now we pushed it out: The reworked news section of fantasy-rotation.de is now online. “We” is quite wrong in this case I did not do anything, so all the glory goes to the Big H :)

We also state the bold promise that our fantasy tip game will be back online for the next season. We have a bunch of features implemented already, including all time stats, charts, result tips, and and and. All in all it is more a matter of getting everything in release shape. I am confident, we can do it!!! So stay tuned and check out the new news section and also the roster preview for the next season.
Link List
http://fantasy-rotation.de
fantasy-rotation.de

Segment of a mini-documentary about MEST aired on GTV from Kimling Lam on Vimeo.

Link List
MEST
GTV
Segment of a mini-documentary about MEST aired on GTV
Kimling Lam
Vimeo

I am constantly looking for new interesting things to do in Budapest and after visiting the New Tech Meetup some 10 days ago I am happy that I found this information about Ignite Budapest #1. For the ones of you who don’t know what Ignite is - actually like myself before readings this - the official Ignite Website by OReilly describes it like this:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

gist of the matter
Event: Ignite Budapest #1
Date: May 28, 2009, 7:30pm
Place: Budapest at Treehugger Dan’s Bookstore and Cafe
Entry: 200Ft.
Contact: ignitebudapest@gmail.com

More up to date information and last minute changes can be found on the Ignite Budapest Website or in the Ignite Budapest Twitter Feed, maintained by Steven Nelson, apparently the main organizer of this event.

As stated above the location for this event will be Hungary/Treehugger Dan’s Bookstore & Cafe. Also great as I have not been there before.

So I hope that helps a bit to spread the word. I am looking forward to that event, especially because I will understand more than at the New Tech MeetUp because presentations will be in English :)

Link List
Ignite Budapest #1
Ignite Website by OReilly
ignitebudapest@gmail.com
Ignite Budapest Website
Ignite Budapest Twitter Feed
Hungary/Treehugger Dan’s Bookstore & Cafe

On my way to Dürer kert the sign on the left was at least a little bit helpful in finding the place :) Dürer kert was an excellent location by the way, very spacious, good sound and presentation screen. I was expecting a way smaller crowd but eventually the place filled up and the MeetUp websites indicates that about 200 people where there which is impressive for a tech meeting in my mind.

The presentations where quite diverse in terms of topics, two of them that were of particular interest to me:
Trencséni Márton : Keyspace : Keyspace is a consistently replicated, fault-tolerant key-value store. The website also contains a draft of a whitepaper about this topic that is worthwhile reading.
Szalai Ferenc : Genie Platform

Tip of the hat for the organizers of this event because preparation, execution and media coverage were really well done. For example you can find videos of all presentations on the Budapest New Technology Meetup Blog. I will come again for sure!

Link List
Budapest New Technology Meetup Group
May Meetup
Dürer kert
Keyspace
Budapest New Technology Meetup Blog

Some advantages that using Feedburner entails over published the RSS feed yourself are:

• Less traffic costs for your own RSS feed
• Automatic visitor counter and analysis
• Multiple other services (Embeddable HTML code, Email Subscription, Headline Animator, …)

Wait a minute? Headline Animator? What is that?
I actually never really checked out any of the Feedburner features besides visitor counter. So I played around a bit with the Headline Animator feature and produced the two little widget like things that you see below. The first one is more ore less the default template while in the second one I am using a custom background. This offers another nice way of embedding your RSS feed in a smaller form in other websites or even your email signature (although I would consider the later at least annoying, almost Spam).

As you see there are some minor problems with displaying the date correctly in the 2nd version - at least right now, maybe not when you look at it as it is dynamic content - but I am not so bothered about that as I don’t want to use it for any production environment.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Link List
FANtasy Rotation
Feedburner
↑ Grab this Headline Animator
↑ Grab this Headline Animator