Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 8/28/10 to 9/3/10
Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week’s topics include websites to help you get hired, 10 commandments of networking, attention grabbing cover letters, awesome info-graphics, why we go to conferences and consolidation in the HR space.
Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:
7 Sites that will help you get hired by Liz Wolgemuth (@LizWolgemuth)
Congrats to @CareerDiva and @FistfulofTalent for being included on this great list!
10 Commandments of Networking by Dee Allan (@DeeAllan)
Great blog article on ways to effectively network. Love commandment #3!
The 12 word cover letter that grab’s a recruiter’s attention by Susan Ireland (@SusanIreland)
Sage advice on how to make your cover letter stand out to a recruiter.
10 of the Web’s Most Insightful Infographics by Sarah Kessler (@SarahFKessler) (@Mashable)
I love info-graphics and these are some great ones!
Why do you go to conferences? by Maren Hogan (@marenhogan)
Great piece on why we attend conferences. This is particularly fitting as we are currently preparing for HR Tech. (If you are attending HR Tech and on Twitter, let us know as we are putting together a 2010 HR Tech Attendee Twitter List!)
Kenexa acquires Salary.com by John Hollon (@JohnHollon) (@ERE_net)
RecruitingBlogs and Recruiter.com by Miles Jennings (@milesj)
The Jeffersons by Jason Davis (@Slouch)(@recruitingblogs)
Big news in the industry as there is further consolidation in the HR space!
Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.
Ready for your Career Site Makeover?
Build a House of Recruiting Excellence!
I was flipping through the channels last night and I came across Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Every week they take a run-down home, tear it down and put a brand new home in it’s place for a low income family. It is a pretty awesome idea.
And it got me thinking. How many times do most companies take a look at their career sites to decide if a makeover is needed? I’ve looked at a ton of Career Sites and while some are great, others appear pretty rundown with inaccurate or outdated information.
Is it time for your Career Site to have a Makeover? It just might be and here are some basic tips for making sure your Career Site always looks brand new:
SEO: There are a decent amount of ways to help get SEO traffic to your Career Site and here’s a quick rundown that can help your recruitment marketing efforts:
Candidate Capture: When a candidate comes to your careers page, it is a great time to capture their contact information as they are obviously interested in your company. Have an easy to use contact form on the front page of your careers site that connects to a Recruitment CRM or Database as you can use these contacts in future job email campaigns. Also, collect recruitment metrics on how many people visit your site and apply for job positions.
Employer Branding: Candidates that come to your Career Site want to learn more about your company and what it is like to work there. Make sure to have content that highlights the perks of working for your company and get employees to share their experiences with potential candidates, whether through video or blogging. The most qualified candidates want to know the working environment before they apply.
A Career Site can be a great way to educate candidates and add them to your Talent Network. But don’t just stop after initially creating your Career Site, continue adding content and highlight why it’s great to work for your company!
Top Ten ways you know your recruitment marketing stinks!
In honor of Dave Letterman’s bit on The Late Show, I’ve put together a top 10 list of my own. Here are the 10 ways that can help you realize your recruitment marketing stinks!
10. You distribute your job ad distribution manually.
(NOTE: Don’t waste your recruiters precious time and invest in technology to help you with this.)
9. You “post and pray” to fill every job.
(NOTE: I don’t believe Praying is a core recruiting function)
8. The previous employer for all your candidates is the Circus. Which is good if you are the Circus!
(NOTE: Make sure to target your job ad messaging toward your target candidates and to distribute your job ads where they search for jobs.)
7. You have no idea where your candidates are coming from.
(NOTE: Track real-time recruitment metrics to determine what recruiting channels (job boards, social networks, referrals) are performing the best in getting qualified candidates to your job application.)
6. You use one Recruiting Channel. There can only be one!
(NOTE: This is not Highlander, several recruiting channels can provide you with opportunities to get in front of incrementally more qualified candidates with marginal additional cost. The key is to track the performance of every channel and update your recruiting mix with your best channels.)
5. Your job application is like a game of Where’s Waldo (without the sense of accomplishment!)
(NOTE: Make sure to create a job application that provides candidates with an easy straight forward process so you don’t lose them!)
4. You direct job seekers to your newspaper ads not your Website.
(NOTE: It’s a pre-requisite to have opportunities on your website. Candidates that come directly from your website are probably the most interested in the position.)
3. You think YouTube is a government conspiracy.
(NOTE: Promote your employer brand by utilizing new media channels from video to blogs to micro-sites.)
2. You recruit every job position from a clean slate.
(NOTE: One of the worst things you can do is not build your Talent Network as you distribute your job ads. Collect qualified candidate contact information during the application process and utilize it in future job campaigns through a Recruitment CRM.)
1. You work with multiple vendors for your recruitment marketing strategy: job posting, recruitment metrics, CRM, email campaigns, social media recruiting, and recruiting commercials/blogs/micro sites.
(NOTE: Why spend the time, energy and money for multiple vendors when there is an integrated recruitment marketing platform that is centrally delivered. Save your precious recruiting budget and create synergies across your recruiting technology)
Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 8/21/10 – 8/27/10
Enjoy your Friday!
Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week’s topics include taking the leap, hiring the military, strengthening your talent pipeline, falling out of love with blogging, how to recruit game-changing talent and incorporating stories into your social media marketing.
Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:
They Don’t Make Nets for Sidelines by Mark Stelzer (@stelzner)
Great piece on how sometimes you just need to take the leap without really knowing what lies below. Love the zen saying at the end!
Military Hiring: Doing Well By Doing Good by Gerry Crispin (@GerryCrispin)
Convincing piece on why hiring military veterans isn’t just a good thing to do but can really help your company.
Strengthen Your Talent Pipeline Now by Roland Smith (@Forbes)
Roland shares some great ways to identify and interact with top talent at your company to get them to stay put.
Falling Out of Love (with Blogging) by Jessica Miller-Merrell (@blogging4jobs)
Some great blogging tips from Jessica. I totally understand her point on blogging as I’ve hit that point a few times myself.
How to Recruit Game-Changing Talent: Part 2 by Mike Ramer (@MikeRamer)
Nice real world example of how Mike’s firm engages and works with qualified candidates to find the right matches for companies and talent. Check out Part 1 as well.
5 Ways to Integrate Stories into your Social Media Marketing by Heidi Cohen (@heidicohen)
Some good tips on how to integrate some personality into your social media marketing and some great ways to track progress.
Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.
Transparency is key to setting candidate expectations!
Job Seekers are not looking for Mysteries like the Scooby Gang!
I’m a huge movie buff and I have to say that I love movies that keep me guessing. Movies with plot twists and surprise endings keep me engaged and glued to the screen till the very end. I like these surprises because in the end I’m there for entertainment and I want there to be a mystery of how it is going to end.
As a job seeker, mystery and suspense are not things I want to be part of the hiring equation. I want to know exactly what to expect in the apply process from how many interviews I will need to go through to how long the overall apply process will take. The less mystery and the more transparency the better!
As a recruiting company, you need to acknowledge this. The less surprises and the more upfront you are about the apply process, the better the quality of the candidates you can bring in and the more highly candidates will view your employer brand. Transparency should be practiced in all aspects of your recruitment marketing including:
Job Ad Distribution & Messaging - Make sure that you give candidates a good understand of what the job will involve and what benefits they will receive from it. Make sure to include location of the job as well as what departments you will work for / with. You don’t want candidates to have the interview and bow out once they here what the job really is. It’s a waste of time for both of you.
Also, make sure you use the right job boards for the target audience you are trying to recruit. A great way to do this is to collect real-time recruitment metrics that provide data on a per job basis. So you can segment by type of position (i.e. IT, Sales, Marketing, etc.) to figure out the most effective boards for certain business disciplines.
Notifications - One of the worst feelings for job seekers is submitting a resume and not hearing back. Candidates have no idea of whether you read it, it got lost in the ATS or you are still considering them. A simple automated message with some time expectation for getting back to them is a great way to keep candidates in the loop.
Interview Schedules - When you bring a candidate in for an interview, make sure to let them know who they will be meeting with as well as where they are in the interview process (i.e. is this the 2nd of 4 interviews). Give them an expectation of what the process will look like and you’ll probably cut down on the annoying follow up emails you receive from candidates.
Decisions - Just like with interviews give them an expectation of when you will make a final decision. Also, when you do not choose a candidate, don’t just say you’ll contact them if other positions open up but provide them with ways to keep in touch with future job openings (email opt-in, Twitter, Facebook, Career Site).
Being transparent in your apply process can provide huge benefits in terms of keeping top candidates engaged in your hiring process. Candidates love surprises on birthdays and in movies, but when it comes to careers, stick with transparency!
Job Ad Distribution: Things to Think About Today!
And I hope you aren't using the newspaper right now...
One of the first and most important parts of a successful recruitment marketing strategy is deciding where and how you are going to market your job to prospective candidates. You have to decide what recruiting channels to utilize, what tools to use, the factors to use for success as well as the tone and language to use in your job advertisements. This part of the process is vastly underrated as it represents the first contact you have with any prospective candidates. So how do you make sure your job ad distribution is successful? Here are a few things to think about:
Technology: While it’s important to understand and decide the right recruiting channel mix for distribution, it makes no sense to waste valuable time and energy in actually distributing your jobs out to recruiting channels. That’s where technology comes in. There are a lot of great technology solutions out there that can help make it quick and easy for you to distribute your jobs to the recruiting channels that fit your strategy!
Your current strategy: Keep track of what recruiting channels are working (and not working) for you currently in terms of bringing in qualified candidates. You do this by collecting real-time recruitment metrics that show you who your best and worst performers are. Check these metrics weekly and fire the recruiting channels that are a waste of time and money!
Your Future Strategy: Are you keeping up to date with all the places your qualified candidates hang out? Make sure to keep up to date and try out new recruiting channels (referrals, social networks, niche job boards, etc.) that you think will work in your recruiting strategy. Utilize these new channels in new recruiting campaigns and make sure to collect metrics for them so that you can compare them versus your current channels. You may be surprised with what you see.
Don’t just be a machine that churns out job ads to the same half dozen recruiting channels. Think through your job ad distribution strategy and determine the best channels to utilize for your organization. And most importantly, measure the success of these channels in bringing in the top qualified candidates on a daily basis because as more things stay the same, more things change!
Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 8/14/10 – 8/20/10
Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week’s topics include 5 things recruiters need to stop doing, fundamental shifts in our workplaces, on whether a boost in spending could fuel jobs, Facebook Places launch and Twifficiency.
Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:
5 Things Recruiters Should Stop Doing by Linda Brenner (@DesignsOnTalent) (@ERE_net)
Great piece with some helpful tips on improving your recruiting. I particularly agree with “Working Outside Your ATS” section.
Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work by John Hagel III and John Seeley Brown (@JHagel) (@HarvardBiz)
Nice article on important shifts happening in our workplaces. I think the “Dilbert Paradox” is particularly important because you not only have to get the right people on the bus but you need to provide them with the training to succeed.
Companies are boosting their spending: Could jobs be next? by Paul Davidson (@USAToday)
Encouraging article on how trends in company spending increases may signal hiring growth.
Field Guide to Facebook Places by Jolie O’Dell (@JolieOdell) (@Mashhable)
Facebook Places Logo: A 4 in a Square? by Alana Marie (@amedmunds)
The big news this week is the launch of Facebook Places which is said to be a Foursquare (not to mention Godwalla) killer. Here’s a guide to using Places as well as a curious choice by Facebook on their logo (FourSquare shout-out anyone?)
Twifficiency by James Cunningham: Better Than a College Diploma by Steven James Snyder (@TheSnydes) courtesy of Omowale Casselle (@mysensay)
If you hang out on Twitter, you must have seen plenty of Twifficiency posts in your feed. Here’s the story behind a simple idea that turned into a short-lived social media sensation.
Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.
If you had it to do all over again, what would your recruiting look like?
At some point, everyone has asked themselves the question: if I had it to do all over again, would I change anything? They look back, take a look at their actions and how everything turned out. And wonder. There is of course, no real way to change any of the outcomes from these past decisions, but the key is learning from them. While changing the past is impossible, changing the future is far from it.
We get so caught up in our daily lives and so determined to continue down our current path that we rarely get the time to stop and figure out if we are really going down the right path at all. It’s important to set up times to re-evaluate what your goals are and determine the right strategy for getting there for everything you do. And for companies, recruiting is no different. Companies are continuously on the lookout for new top talent to bring their company to the next level, mostly using the same techniques that “worked” time and time before.
But when is the last time your recruiting organization took a step back and really looked into what their recruiting strategy is and if that was the best use of their limited recruiting budget. If the answer is not in a while (or ever), set up some time discuss what you would want your recruiting strategy to look like if you started from scratch today! Here are some questions to pose as you discuss re-tooling your recruiting strategy:
What are the best recruiting channels for us? - Sure, you may have contracts set up with job boards or channels that you’ve used with moderate success forever, but are these methods really the ones that you should be using? Are there recruiting channels that you think would be worth it to try? Where does our top talent look for jobs?
The key here is figuring out the channels you want to test and setting up a system of recruitment metrics around them. This way you can know what channels work the best for specific jobs you are looking to fill.
How can candidates learn more about our company? - Sit down and look at your recruiting process from a candidates point of view. How can qualified candidates currently learn about your company, job opportunities and most importantly interact with your company?
It’s not only important how candidates find your job ads, but also important how easy it is for them to find information on working for your company.
What recruiting activities are we spending the most time on? – What tasks are wasting your recruiters time? Is it job ad distribution, searching through candidate resumes, setting up interviews, etc.? Whatever the culprit, invest in some technology that can alleviate that time necessity so that your recruiters can focus on finding and contacting top talent for your company.
Take some time and re-evaluate your recruitment marketing strategy because if you haven’t, you’ll be left behind!
Use Internships to Interview Experienced candidates!
I recently came across this survey by CareerBuilder that had some nice statistics on what type of candidates are currently applying for internships. In the survey, over 2500 employers said that 23% of candidates are experienced workers (more than 10 years experience) or mature workers (over 50).
The fact is that due to this tough hiring environment, more mature candidates that are unemployed are turning toward internships to find their next opportunities. And employers are and should be looking at these trends as a great opportunity to bring in talent without a huge upfront commitment. Utilizing internships as a system to fill full-time positions can be a good strategy for a few reasons:
1) Extended Job Interview - A few month internship is a great way to see how a potential candidate handles day to day activities as well as new projects you throw their way. 3 months of seeing them complete projects is so much better than an hour long interview.
2) Make sure it’s a good fit for both sides- An internship is not just an interview of the candidate but the candidate gets to interview your company as well. If you extend an offer to an intern, the intern knows exactly what to expect in working for your company. This helps to decrease the possibility of a new full-time employee coming in and leaving within the first year.
3) Save money on Recruiting - While internship to full-time hiring shouldn’t take the place of all your recruitment marketing campaigns, filling a few of your open positions with great interns can help you decrease your overall recruiting spend.
Experienced & Mature Candidates that are applying for internships at your company could be great future full-time employees at your company. They are coming in with something to prove and understand that a full-time position is only attained through hard work. Right now there is a great opportunity for companies to use internships as a great system in filling some of their full-time positions with candidates that they know can do the work!
Note: For college students that are looking for a great Marketing internship this Fall, come work for SmashFly!
Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 8.7.10 – 8.13.10
Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week’s topics include the most important recruitment metrics, how to ask a stranger for a favor, a great Google search cheat sheet, a survey on job seeker and employer perceptions and a study on 72% of companies having a social media strategy.
Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:
Quality of Hire: The Top Recruiting Metric by Recruiting Trends (@RecruitingTrend) Steve Lowisz (@slowisz)
Nice article that describes why the Quality of Hire metric is so important and how you can measure it.
How to Ask a (Near) Stranger for a Favor by David Silverman (@HarvardBiz)
Some easy simple tips on how to improve your networking messaging when asking a contact (however, strong) for a favor.
Google Search Cheat Sheet by Google (@google)
You may have already seen this but here’s an awesome cheat sheet for all your Google Search needs!
Disconnect Between Job Seekers and Employers Fuels Frustration by TalentDrive (@TalentDrive)
Here’s an interesting survey study on the different perceptions job seekers and employers have when looking for a job and hiring. Some good stats!
72% of all Businesses have a social media strategy by Hubspot (@Hubspot) guest blogger Gordon Plutsky (@KingFishMed)
Some great stats on companies utilizing social media. The biggest questions to me is how effective are the social media strategies of these companies and two when and how many are using the social media tools for recruiting.
Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.
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