Irish Universities Launch Shared Service Jobs Portal

Posted on: 20 October 2014

Ireland’s seven universities have launched a new shared services portal advertising all vacancies in Ireland’s university sector – www.universityvacancies.com

This shared service initiative has been developed collaboratively by the seven universities working under the umbrella of the Irish Universities Association (IUA). Formally launching universityvacancies.com at the annual IUA HR conference, the Association’s Chief Executive, Ned Costello said:  “Our new gateway provides a cost-effective and user-friendly solution to publicising job opportunities in our universities. Universityvacancies.com is now up and running with over 1,400 vacancies advertised on it in the short time since the site went live”.

Mr Costello commented: “in today’s market for talent, our universities want to hire and nurture the best people.  Universityvacancies.com brings us global reach and gives prospective candidates access to all vacancies in academic, research, management, and administration jobs in the Irish university sector”.

A digital marketing campaign launched during the summer months targeting search engine traffic has successfully resulted in over 1 million page impressions per month and a dramatic increase in site visitors. This initiative is being complemented this Autumn by an extension of the campaign to social media along with display advertising which will further drive traffic to the website.  

An interesting insight into the behaviour of visitors to the University Vacancies website is the number of times a user has returned to the website over time. Quite a number of visitors returned to the website between 9-200 times; most likely to check on new vacancies. This is encouraging as visitors see the university vacancies website as the authoritative website for third-level jobs.

The site offers job seekers sophisticated search criteria to hone in on jobs of interest and incudes the addition of the option to subscribe to receive email alerts of potential jobs that match the user’s preferences.  The site is smartphone and tablet friendly and has full social media integration with vacancies automatically posted to social media channels:

Twitter www.twitter.com/@UVacancies

Facebook www.facebook.com/UniversityVacancies

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/groups/University-Vacancies-5095522

Concluding the launch, Ned Costello thanked the university team which developed the site. He said: “universityvacancies.com demonstrates the proactive approach of the universities to the Government’s shared services agenda. We are actively looking at how the portal can be developed further and how shared services generally can deliver quality improvement and cost efficiencies across the sector.”