Bar Talk at Barmano

Barmano has officially launched job e-mail alerts, so let the jobs come to you! You can now sign up for job alerts for a wide variety of bar and pub related jobs, and get a daily list of new jobs (or no e-mail if there are no jobs, we don’t like useless e-mail either). In addition to that you can refine your alerts by country, state/region/province and/or city. AND IN ADDITION to that, you can also specific the contract type and full time/part time.  We recommend not going too granular, otherwise you may miss out on a great opportunity! Likewise you don’t want to cast your net so broadly as to make extra work for yourself looking through listings.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems with this, would like to other improvements or just have general feedback.  We’d love to hear all that you have to say!

~ Dave

Barmano quietly added a new feature to our member pages, we’re gettin’ social wid it.

So how does it work? It’s quite easy:

1. Search for your friends
2. then “add as a friend” directly from the results
3. or from a member’s page, again look for the “add as a friend” link
4. et voila ! an invite is sent to your friend-to-be

We send an email invite to the person for them to accept or reject to make sure they’re ok with it.  After your friend has approved it, then you can find each other in your friends list on your member page. If the invitation to connect is rejected, it’s equivalent to being ignored. sorry.

Connecting with friends helps you keep track of:

• your friends page
• check out mutual friends
• see what bars and drinks they love
• If they are a mixologist at heart you can check out their creations

It’s quite genius in it’s simplicity.  But there’s a lot more coming.  At our research and development center, hidden under a mountain in the French Alps (with a long underground tunnel to Munich for Oktoberfest. of course.), we’re thinking of all sorts of new ways to get connected with people, and discover new things. Top on our list is bar ratings/reviews, recommendations, and figuring out how to make it stupidly easy to invite other non-barmano member friends.

If you have any ideas for killer features, let us know!!

~ Dave

Perhaps it’s a little dated, and cliche, but oh so important to deliver content our users want! When we first launched, barmano.com was targeting the US market, and then reality set it that it was very much global.  We’ve recently added geographical location data to our systems, so now people get data, that are relevant to their country. Right now we only do this for our “hot lists” that you see in the columns that show most popular bars, jobs, etc. and help you preselect your country on forms so you don’t have to scroll through a massive country list. It’s a small step, with huge potential. So what can I expect? If you are from Australia, you’ll start seeing Australian the popular bars and pubs.  If there is not enough information, it’ll show the global data.

Thought this was some interesting information we dug up while working on this, here’s our top 10 country list for bar and pub seekers (and the related country’s bar guide):

1. United States (Our US bar guide 37% of our traffic)
2. United Kingdom (UK bar guide 30% of our traffic)
3. Canada (Canadian bar guide 15% of our traffic)
4. Australia (Australian bar guide 8% of our traffic)
5. Germany (German bar guide 5% of our traffic)
6. France (France bar guide)
7. Israel (Israel bar guide)
8. Ireland (Ireland bar guide)
9. Spain (Spain bar guide)
10. Faroe Islands (Faroe Islands bar guide, yes we even have one of those too!)

It was interesting to see Germany and France right up there near the top, with Ireland barely making the top ten, and our Kiwi friends barely on the map with New Zealand coming in at 24th (of about 55 countries).  Perhaps they and our Irish friends are too busy having a real pint versus a virtual one.  Wise people.   We were pleasantly surprised to see the Faroe Islands on there, so hello to our Faroese fan club!

stay tuned for more!

~Dave

In the spirit of starting simple with our new jobs center, we focused on introducing a simple job display and editor for creating your job ads. Someone applies to the job, and boom, you get all the details in your inbox. And it’s free. Doesn’t get easier than that.

So what now? It was pointed out that sometimes e-mail fails to reach it’s destination (gasp!). horrors! “I’ve just lost my candidates details for the job I desperately need to fill!” or “the jobs admin panel says I have applications to my job ad, but nothing in my inbox!”

We listened, and started beavering away at a solution. And we’ve arrived at the remedy for the problem just the other day. If you go to Your Account, you can check out the status of your job ad, and if you click on the number indicating the number of applications made to your job ad, you’ll get a list of all the applicants with name, contact info, and cover letter / application message.

screen shots to come, stay tuned.

After much blood, sweat, research and long discussions, oh, and much coding, our jobs center (or centre for our non-American friends) officially launched with a glorious little tab added to the navigation bar. Haven’t seen it? check it out now! So why add a jobs section to the website? In our pursuit to provide an end-to-end, all things bar related, it seemed to make a lot of sense if we added a section for employment opportunities. Everyone needs a job right? Well most of us.

It doesn’t have a thousand bells and whistles like some of the big employment sites but we’ve started with basics with the spirit of keeping it clean and simple as possible! Of course we have more planned, but we want to make sure we focus on what our users want most.  And did we mention the huge advantage that you’re posting jobs on a site that is directly related to your business/industry?

So what does it cost? For now it’s free to list a job, and of course apply to one.

As an Employer you can:

• keep track of all your job listings in your account area
• view / edit / deactivate the job listing
• see how many views the job ad received
• see how many people applied
• have your ads appear on your business page as well as the job center
• Don’t want your name to appear on the job ad?  you can post the job anonymously

We’ve decided to launch with the following categories:

• Catering Staff
• Entertainment
• Event management
• Finance
• Human resources
• IT and Engineering
• Kitchen Staff
• Management
• Pub and Bar Staff
• Reception and Concierge
• Sales and Marketing
• Security
• Sommelier
• Valet
• Waiting Staff

There was a lot of debate on the wide variety of categories (and some where sent to the bin), but we wanted to create a job listing service that would work for all bar, pub, club, lounge and related hospitality businesses, large or small.

Next steps:

• Hitting the road to talk with business about how the Barmano Job Center can help them
• Making it easier to use
• Defining a few new tools and features to help connect people with the jobs they want

Stay tuned for more news. If there are features you want, let us know!

~ Dave

Barmano officially has a blog!  We decided to launch it in order to better keep our beloved users better informed.  Please keep checking back for news on the latest happenings.  And sorry, it’s currently available only in English.