Newsletter 4: November 2006

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This month, we’ve introduced a brand new ‘job board’ facility on people4business, which will make matching Buyers and Sellers even easier. We’ll be listing details of current assignments that don’t yet have Sellers, to encourage our Sellers to ‘apply’ for them.

We’ve had a really successful month on people4business, with more than 3,000 Sellers now registered, and lots of fantastic Buyer feedback from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) exhibition and conference. You can read more about the CIPD exhibition on our news page.

If you belong to a professional body or trade association which you think could benefit from people4business, do let us know:

affiliates@people4business.com | 0870 389 3244

In this issue:

Buyers and Sellers 4 business

Seller registrations have continued steadily throughout the month. We’re thrilled to have reached – and passed – the milestone of 3,000 registered Sellers, with more than 3,400 individual skills.

Buyers registered on people4business now range from multinationals, to local and national government departments, as well as small private businesses. We received a fantastic response from the Buyers we met at the CIPD conference and exhibition in Harrogate, 24–26 October. The four-strong people4business team that attended the exhibition were kept busy throughout the three days talking to representatives from large corporations, national and local government, universities and the police. Responses we noted included: “Self-service recruitment – that’s fantastic” and “This means that I don’t have to rely on agencies interpreting my needs – I can go and find them myself!”

Buyer Zone

  New ‘job board’: With our new job board, details of assignments you’ve described, but not yet found Sellers for, may be posted on our home page to encourage applications from appropriate Sellers. They write a brief message, which we then send to you, along with a link to their skills and CV information. As usual, it will be up to you to contact those Sellers you are interested in: the Sellers themselves will not have access to your contact details.

 Finding Sellers: A quick reminder of the four-stage process:

  Describe assignment – briefly describe the work which you need the Seller to do.

  Search for Sellers – search through our categories to find those Sellers with the skills you are seeking. Your final shortlist can have a maximum of 5 Sellers per assignment.

  Contact Sellers – Your shortlisted Sellers have been sent the assignment description, but they don’t have your contact details, so you must contact them yourself.

  Award contract – Remember to get in touch with your shortlisted Sellers, as soon as you can – before another Buyer awards them a contract!

 Customer service: Our customer service team is happy to help you to find Sellers with highly specialised skills.

Please contact us:

buyer@people4business.com | 0870 389 3244 (UK-based customer service team)

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Seller Zone

 New ‘job board’: Now we’ve introduced the ‘job board’ on the people4business home page, you are able to ‘apply’ for assignments yourself. On the home page, we’re listing current assignments for which Buyers have not yet found Sellers. You can express your interest in these assignments by writing a brief message to the Buyer. We then email the Buyer with your message; and include a link to your full CV and skills information. You should, of course, ensure that your skills and CV are up to date; and visit people4business.com on a regular basis to check out the new assignments posted daily on the home page.

 Stay up to date: If you’re not available for work at the moment, just let us know when you’ll be free, so that Buyers looking for someone at that time will be able to shortlist you. And if you haven’t entered your CV details yet, we are happy to do it for you. The feedback we’ve received from Buyers is that you are very unlikely to get on the final shortlist for an assignment if you haven’t completed your CV section. If you e-mail your CV to us, we are happy to input the information for you:
seller@people4business.com

 Ratings: A reminder that you can get a people4business rating from previous employers. Simply go to your people4business homepage and select ‘My Ratings’. We’ll contact all employers who give retrospective ratings, to make sure that our ratings are consistent. Remember: Buyers can sort Sellers by their ratings, so it’s well worth five minutes’ work to update your profile!

 Finder’s fees: Don’t forget to encourage your friends and colleagues to register with people4business, using your unique identification number. When they gain a Contract through people4business, we’ll give you 20% of our fee as a ‘thankyou’. So as well as benefiting people4business by telling more people about the site, you have the opportunity to develop a new income stream. For more information, take a look at the Finder’s fee page.

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Fight discrimination with people4business

This month we’ve seen an upsurge in interest from businesses wanting to ensure they stick with both the letter and the spirit of anti-discrimination legislation; including the new anti-age discrimination legislation, which came into force last month. For businesses needing to ensure that their policies are entirely non-discriminatory, people4business offers the ideal solution. As all Sellers are selected solely on the basis of their skills and experience, using people4business guarantees that your recruitment of contractor professionals is not discriminatory.

Meet the team…

Our CFO, Richard Aylwin, has more than 10 years’ experience at Finance Director level, including working with another successful start-up from launch to £40m turnover. Richard has been concentrating on ensuring that our back-office processes can handle the ever-increasing number of transactions being placed through people4business.

Technical director Martin Nice manages a team with over 40 years’ technical development experience between them. Most recently he has been concentrating on the release of our new ‘job board’ functionality; now he is moving on to focus on improving our subscription offering to Sellers and developing a new finder’s fee scheme for introducing Buyers to people4business.

This month, we’re attending the Career Fair 06 at the Barbican on 17–18 November. We’d love to meet you there.

 

Last updated 14.11.08