Jan 9, 2013.
Yes! We have survived 2012 and its extraordinarily soggy swellings, Olympic overexcitement and cataclysmic curiosities. SO…to celebrate the start to a fantastic year, WEXO has made some natty New Year’s resolutions.

Following a survey that we sent out in December to our entire database, in which we sought to understand what it is that you are looking for from your job boards – these are our promises to you. (Winner of the Kindle Fire HD announced below)

‘What do you want to see more of in terms of recruitment companies helping you?’

(Bearing in mind that you were able to tick any and all of the boxes, so the percentages may seem a little confusing at first glance)

1.As above demonstrates, 81.8% of those who responded to the survey wanted recruitment companies to have a more personal touch.

Using our matching algorithms, we not only endeavor to notify every applicant we believe would fit each role posted, but we are also aiming to give every unsuccessful applicant some feedback on why they didn’t make it to interview or beyond that stage within 14 days.

It might be generic feedback on what qualifications and attributes they are missing but we hope that’s a start. Where possible, we also try and take as much time out of our day to speak and meet candidates as well as using our University Ambassadors as a sounding board for what you are all after.

2.The second most important attribute, according to our members, at 63.6% is that, as a recruiter, our responsibility should be to ‘clamp down on unpaid internships and therefore discrimination’.

Our WEXO directors are doing their best – they have previously tried to unite all internship companies into an alliance with such focuses, and have addressed audiences at locations ranging from 10 Downing Street to London Universities. We are also a committed partner and regular attendee of the initiatives and meetings instigated by Martin Bright and his team at The Creative Society. WEXO is always encouraging its clients to pay interns for reasons both legal and moral , yet our stance remains that encouraging and incentivizing our companies to pay is more proactive than naming and shaming those that don’t.

3.The next 2 most popular requirements addressed the need for more jobs. At the end of last year, WEXO was in final round discussions for a paid internship programme with a very large media organization, which represents 250 of the most exciting creative companies in London, but unfortunately this time round, this has not come to anything.

We are however still in discussions with various other types of organizations and are particularly excited about the potential surrounding our ‘How I Made It In’ recruitment events that worked so well for WEXO and Rightster last year. We’re also encouraged to see lots of interest already from companies looking to hire in 2013 and we’re looking forward to increasing what we have on offer for you. It should of course be noted that WEXO continues to believe in its niche within the creative industries and surrounding SMEs, for this reason we have no intention of simply listing graduate schemes and deadlines for all the big-corporates. (Unless that is what you really want !?!)

Interestingly, the least popular option in our survey was the need for careers advice. Initially we found this statistic a little surprising especially given that Tray and Bella (our Recruitment Directors) run a careers mentoring business on the side! On reflection, we feel that candidates often overlook how they are going to get to their destination in the excitement about the destination itself. All too often people fluff applications and interviews when they could have been better prepared – we’re looking forward to doing a Careers Advice session at KCL in a few weeks and this is perhaps something to think about for YOUR NY’s resolutions!

…Aaaannnddd fiiinnnaaaalllly…. the winner is Georgina Ireland – congratulations! (Please message us your address so we can send you your new Kindle Fire HD!)

Ailsa Renton – Marketing Intern at WEXO & University of Leeds graduate.

This morning at around 1am we went live with some major changes to the way WEXO works and in the coming weeks you’ll start to see the look and feel of WEXO change too.

* CANDIDATES will no longer have to pay £10 to identify companies and apply for opportunities.

* COMPANIES will now be able to choose between paying up front to advertise internships & jobs through the WEXO network or engaging our experienced team to help them find the best recruits.

* CAREER GUIDANCE is now just a click away.

When we started WEXO as ‘Work Experience Online’ in 2007, we set up a company that would focus on democratising access to work experience and encouraging Generation Y to ‘do something different with your day’ (see launch video!) We had many excellent contacts in aspirational organisations (largely in the creative industries) but their core problem was receiving and rifling through too many CVs for the opportunities they had to offer. They were interested in us finding them graduates and using our network to fill higher level roles too but their main problem was filtering out the strong candidates from a mass of applications.

In the beginning (when man created site), we looked hard at where the value in our offering was and,uncommonly, made it free to post roles on the site (to get as much ‘content’ as possible). We allowed people to search for free but only allowed those who joined us as members (paying a one off £10 Membership fee) to identity the companies behind the roles on offer and apply for them. We also invested a lot of resources into building our ‘filtration technology’ which matches candidates with opportunities and remains one of the key USPs of WEXO. It allows us to rate candidates and our companies to rank applicants.

At the same time as entering this market, we subconsciously entered the ‘unpaid Internships’ debate (most recent thoughts on that here, here and here!). Beyond question, this has shaped our development as a company and dictated our direction. As staunch supporters of people paying for value (hence interns – or in my other working capacity, musicians!) it was only natural that we would eventually start charging companies for finding them good people. But as we have found it easier to place interns and graduates than to to improve access to work experience in its purest form (SHORT, UNPAID placements for YOUNG people – where they derive the lion’s share of the value), so it has made sense to move away from charging our users to apply for roles on the site. We always offered paying members career guidance however and remain committed to this. We are also delighted to say that we have recently been joined by Bella Connelly and Tray Durrant from Tinker Tailor who are happy to offer refined 30 minute careers and CV advice sessions to anyone on WEXO for a much reduced fee of £50. We will be exploring other ways to add to this offer in due course and it will become a focus of the site but if you are interested please email:info@wexo.co.uk

The most consistent proactive feedback has always been that it is unfair to be charged £10 to apply for a job but in some ways, that was what our key stakeholders (our companies) have required. They only wanted to see considered applications and we found that only those that really wanted the role would pay £10 to apply. We concede that this wasn’t how everyone saw it!

Many have identified the two biggest problems in the recruitment industry today as too many people applying for too many jobs (‘Shotgunning‘) and not enough applicants receiving responses or feedback (‘Freeloading‘). A lot of this is driven by the Internet economy itself which has broken down many barriers for the better but also created expectation whilst failing to manage it. Our response now is to restrict people to applying for a maximum of 3 roles at any one time (and focus ambition) whilst ensuring that all applicants get a response of sorts within 14 days (we have much work to do in this space and are continually open to feedback).

We also want to ensure that we are working with similarly minded companies – ones that want to invest in finding talent and driving UK PLC out of the recession. From now on, we still allow you to sign up for free but offer you a range of options to promote your opportunities to our growing user base of over 10,000 and a partner network that stretches to up to 750,000 (prices from £135 to £750). Through Step, host businesses have access to a wider network of upto 750,000 students and graduates. And for those of you that simply want us to help find you strong candidates, we look forward to hearing from you and will respond to postings within 24 hours to discuss the best course of action (more info here). We are proud of the work that we have done of late and are excited about some of the new things in the pipeline:

* Finding, recruiting and payrolling over 60 graduates to work with UPS at the London 2012 Olympic Games with STEP and their Internship programmes.

* Placing interns and permanent employees in roles at exciting start-ups including Housebites and Fanatix and more traditional companies like Henry Cookson Travel and Claudia Bradby Jewellery.