Recruitment Marketing Innovation, Technology and Ideas

Aberdeen released a study entitled “Video-Enabled Talent Acquisition: Improving Cost, Quality, and Satisfcation”. It’s a very interesting read about how companies are integrating video directly into their talent acquisition strategies. The report mostly focuses on how companies are leveraging video-conferencing tools to help them reach more passive candidates, cut costs, and increase overall retention.

The report also talks about how companies are increasing their use of web 2.0 tools, specifically in recruiting. As you can see from the chart below, it’s almost doubled from 2008 to 2009…and I believe that trend will only increase into 2010 and beyond.

The report also discusses how new web 2.0 tools are directly related to leveraging employment branding. The report says "The use of online career portals that include features like the ability to show video from current or past employees, or messages from recruiters, hiring managers and senior executives were the top enabler to employer branding."

We think these “career portals” or micro-sites can have a very large impact on how effectively companies can build up talent pipelines, attract the passive candidates and get future applicants more engaged with your company. These micro-sites, enabled by recruitment marketing technology, can make it extremely easy for companies to empower their recruiters, hiring managers, and employees to quickly and easily publish video enabled content that will keep the content fresh and engaging.

We highly recommend that you start researching how best to leverage video and these types of micro-sites in your own recruitment marketing strategies.

Consumers of video on the internet continue to explode. According to this Adotas article, November of 2009 was the biggest month ever for online video viewing, with more than 170 million unique U.S. Internet users tuning in, each watching an average of 182 videos during the month. That’s a lot of video viewing.

In the recruitment marketing world, video is quickly becoming one of the key differentiators for companies to better market their open positions to both active and passive candidates. A big part of using video, is leveraging video SEO techniques. Once you have a compelling video, it’s becoming increasingly easy to then distribute your video through multiple channels to significantly improve your SEO rankings. There are many tips and tricks for how best to leverage Video….and there are many services which will help you with distributing them, getting them on YouTube, and getting links back to your career micro-site.

The bottle neck for companies right now is, what kind of videos should we create, how, and how much will it cost? I think the “what” and “how” are quickly changing today. The most effective videos need not be the full-blown, professionally made, 60 second video spots that can cost a company over 10,000 a piece. Sure, having a career site “corporate” video is a good starting point…but that’s all it is…a starting point. Companies need to start integrating video’s, screencasts, and presentation videos as part of their normal process for each job they are looking to fill. It’s never been easier for companies to leverage technology to help them create exciting & engaging video content that can be job category specific, or even job specific. In fact, we believe the format of the “job ad” itself will quickly evolve from a standard HTML job description, into a multi-media job presentation that engages the active/passive candidates, better educates them on the company and work environment, and better markets the job and the opportunity converting more passive people into active leads. One thing is clear, video should be part of your recruitment marketing strategy going forward.

I found this article, A Think Piece: Why Is Recruiting So Low on the Corporate Power Scale?, by Dr Sullivan, to be very interesting in describing the most common reasons why HR & recruitment departments don’t hold that much power in senior management. He discusses a number of ways in which corporate groups are able to gain power and influence in a company, and how most companies fail to do those things.

Here are the top 10 ways in which he believes HR/recruiting groups can increase their influence and gain a powerful seat at the corporate table. From our perspective, we believe the recruitment metrics & Technology focused bullet points below are critical to enabling a recruiting team to start establishing the real business value they are providing companies.

1. Focus on revenue impacts: Process results are reported in dollars, demonstrating their impact on revenue.
2. Show impact on strategic goals: Process goals and results are unambiguously linked directly to strategic business goals.
3. Competitive advantage: Results are directly compared to the results of competitor firms, in order to ensure that your firm retains a competitive advantage.
4. Prioritize: They prioritize their efforts and focus on creating strategic impacts.
5. Proactive: They seek out opportunities rather than waiting and reacting.
6. Metrics: The functions are managed and decisions are made based on numbers and strategic metrics.
7. Manager’s reward: Their results are an important component of executive bonus formulas.
8. Innovation: Their rate of innovation is among the highest in the corporation.
9. Technology focused: They use the latest technology.
10. Reporting: Their actions and their results are reported as an integral part of the standard business and financial reports are read by executives.

The items on this list are mostly common sense….and yet I agree that most companies do not implement most of them. Why? From my own experience, I would argue that the technology & tools to help recruiters and talent acquisition specialists has trailed other disciplines in a company. For example, the marketing & sales groups in a company are often leveraging technology which directly improves their ability to deliver the data to show business value and bottom line impact, whereas most recruitment solutions are not geared towards the same type of ROI and business value metrics. That clearly is changing…and we are seeing new recruitment technology solutions that are squarely focuses in the business intelligence space. I believe the advances in technology over the coming years will help the traditional corporate recruitment groups better compete for corporate resources because of the high level of data and metrics they will be able to share with the CFO/CEO’s of their company.

The WallStreet Journal put out an interesting article entitled “Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind” . Where will the jobs come from in this next decade? Technology, Healthcare and Education. The article discusses how having a degree alone, however, won’t be enough. Students and people re-training will need to couple their degrees with skills in emerging trends, as companies are increasingly looking for candidates who are flexible and able to match their skills to specific marketing or operational functions.

In the recruiting field, I believe recruiters and those that help market jobs will need to help companies better convey these new requirements clearly and in an engaging fashion. It will be increasingly important for companies to publish the specific skills that are most important to them, whether that be social networking expertise, web design/user design for techies, or new communication skills.

In fact, I believe companies can do a much better job in helping candidates understand which technologies and skillsets will be most important to them in the coming decade. I’m talking about going beyond the specific job descriptions they publish today. Instead, companies can & should be more pro-active about creating specialized career sites (Microsites) that discuss, at a higher level, the types of positions they WILL be looking to fill over the next 1, 3 and 5 years. By providing specific information about what technologies and skillsets will be important to them in the future, they can provide a type of roadmap for those candidates looking to retool their skills. If they know which technologies will be important to companies, and how they are looking to leverage those skills, they can begin to focus their re-training in those specific areas.

Companies could even make it more interactive, enabling a forum type of system, where future candidates can ask questions and receive responses about the technologies, potential future opportunities, etc. This type of forum will help companies build relationships, start attracting the right type of future applicants AND will potentially help incentivize those future applicants to get better skilled in the specific areas of interest they will be looking to hire!

As a side benefit, companies that take on this type of initiative will directly benefit, because it will force them to think through which specific skills really will be important to them in the next 1, 3, or 5 years. They should really know this today at a basic level. If they don’t, they should find out quick. Ultimately, I believe companies can have a much bigger impact on helping the workforce retool and retrain in the areas that will directly benefit their businesses in the future. Students and people out of work are hungry to get this knowledge…and I believe will use that data to directly impact how they go about retraining themselves for the future…helping themselves become more marketable thereby creating a larger candidate pool for companies to draw from when the new jobs become available.

Ok, truth be told, I stole that line from an ERE article published by Jim Durbin dated December 30th, 2008. I encourage you to read the article in full…but what struck me was how relevant his advise still is today, 1 year later. As Jim talks about in his article, it’s a whole new world for recruiters, and they need to quickly shift into this new marketing role if they really want to engage with those candidates most qualified for the jobs. As Jim says, it’s about getting in front of the right candidate at the right time.

From the article:

“Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing. The new goal is getting in front of the right people at the right time, and that’s a marketing function. To be successful, it requires that every touchpoint (another marketing term) within your company be aware of how you hire and the best way to apply. Providing accurate information to channel candidates into the correct funnel is the most efficient use of your recruiting time, freeing your employees up to interview and match, rather than sort and sift.”

You can see this shift occurring with every month that passes. Every company we speak to is talking about how to leverage social media, blogging, video and other channels to better reach candidates. The companies that are able to embrace and leverage new technology to better market their jobs will be the winners in this new recruitment marketing battle. Don’t be one of those companies that misses the next technology wave, quickly losing the best talent because of outdated recruitment practices.

I came across this interesting discussion on the ERE forums, where someone had posted a blog about how employers will be free of job boards in 2 years. He tries to explain the rationale for how & why this will occur. Here’s a response to why that won’t happen : Employers Job Board Free? By Eric Shannon. He does a great job showing why this whole SEO craze is a bit flawed and that companies can’t and shouldn’t be relying on SEO for all their recruitment needs.

There are some great additional responses to Eric’s that I believe correctly show that job boards , both large and niche will continue to provide real value over the coming years. As one commenter points out, the question shouldn’t be “to use job boards or not”, it’s “to use those resources that deliver results”.

Regardless of what you decide to do, just make sure you measure the results of whatever your recruitment marketing strategy is. The data will provide you the objective knowledge to decide what works and what doesn’t, and what is the best ROI.

This blog post is not meant to disparage or downplay the value of the new breed of SEO recruitment companies that have sprung up over the last couple years. I’m referring to companies like Jobs2Web, OptiJob, DirectEmployers , and others. These companies are providing a very valuable service to their customers. The gist of the service is that they scrape the jobs off of the company’s existing ATS career site (which is poorly setup for SEO), and then republish the jobs into a NEW career site they host on behalf of the companies. Then using the core principles of SEO, they perform both “on page” and “off page” SEO techniques…such as creating optimized landing pages and other things that allow the jobs to be properly indexed in the major search engines. This in turn provides the company more traffic from Google, and the other major search engines. For some companies, it’s an extremely effective tool.

Having spent 10 years at BrassRing where we built both the ATS functionality and the Career Site functionality, I’m a bit surprised that the ATS vendors haven’t been on top of this very hot trend. Let’s face it…the job data comes from THEIR system! They are creating a career site for their clients so jobs can be found and candidates can apply. It’s completely in their power to create more optimized sites. The fact that a separate company is coming in, scraping the jobs off your career site, and then re-building the career site AGAIN so that candidates can properly find your jobs is far from an optimal solution. The question is, why aren’t ATS vendors updating their career site technology to be SEO friendly? I mean, this is low hanging fruit. SEO is clearly a hot topic for a lot of companies, and right now, their only solution is to pay another vendor to optimize the jobs that already exist on their existing career site. Heck, ATS vendors could probably charge more for an SEO Friendly career site….at least in the short term until everyone is doing it.

I know, I know…ATS vendors have a LOT of different projects, limited resources and probably no SEO expertise in-house. But honestly, this is one of those hot features that wouldn’t require a lot of additional effort. Hire yourself and SEO expert. And then re-format and optimize your current career site for the search engines. This isn’t rocket science.

IMHO, this isn’t a matter of if, it’s when. ATS vendors WILL start building their career sites in this fashion because the market is clearly demanding it. And looking at the trends..it’s only going to increase in importance. Taleo, Kenexa, PeopleClick, SilkRoad, Virtual Edge…who will be the first? Time will only tell.

What do you think? Doesn’t it make sense that you have *one* career site for your candidates to interact with?

On Monday 11/16….there was a social recruiting summit in NYC that was focused on how recruiters can leverage social networking tools to better recruit candidates. As everyone knows, social media is all the rage these days..and there is a never ending stream of articles and blog posts about how companies should be leveraging these tools to reach out to their users and candidates. Here’s another one.

I didn’t actually attend the event, I watched live stream, and was using TweetDeck to follow the live tweets using the #socialrecruiting hash tag. Also, I was only able to listen in to the first presentation from Fred Wilson in full…I had work to do the rest of the day…

But some quick comments on Fred’s presentation, because I thought it was very interesting, and very useful info. First, something that’s not talked about enough, but which Fred hit on multiple times…is that companies need to leverage a blog to talk about their job opportunities. Everyone is so fixated on FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn, that you almost never hear companies talk about leveraging a blog to reach candidates. As Fred rightly points out, one way of thinking of Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn is as  notification systems. You use those social networks to let people know about a new opportunity, but they aren’t the right tool to publish a lot of content. What is? A blog. A powerful combination is to create a blog, where you both publish your jobs, but also talk about your company and the opportunities…and then create links from your social networks back to your blog.

So, start blogging about your companies opportunities…people will find you, and start subscribing to your RSS Feed. Next, start leveraging your social networks to “notify” people about those opportunities, pointing them back to your blog. A nice benefit of this approach is that your blog can become a FREE SEO site for you. Make sure you register your blog address under your companies domain name, so you get all the good SEO juice. So, you can use wordpress (like we do) to create a free blog, and then point blog.<yourcompanydomain>.com to wordpress. That way, you’re still leveraging your brand, and all your jobs and blog postings will be picked up by the search engines and blog search engines…and you’ll starting getting candidate traffic from both Google AND from Blog search engines because you’ll be building SEO Authority for the types of jobs you’re hiring for.

Some other interesting facts I didn’t know.

· Indeed is the most searched job board on the Internet….more than 10 million searches per month. They should be part of your recruitment marketing plans…whether it’s just getting your jobs listed for free….but I’d also recommend using their sponsored jobs …at least for those difficult to fill positions.

· Check out Tracker.com …a very useful site to find people and start directly recruiting directly.

· LinkedIn is the world’s online structured resume database. I think this is a VERY Powerful tool. I want to comment on this one more.

LinkedIn … how you can use it

One of the things we do very well is measure a job ads performance in terms of “views” (how many viewed my job), “apply clicks” (how many clicked the link to apply) and “applicants” (how many people who clicked on the link, actually completed our online submission process and became an applicant in my ATS).

We have hard data that shows, on average…most companies don’t get better than 15%-20% conversion rate from people clicking “apply” to getting into your database. Think about that for a moment. You spent $250 on a job ad, and let’s say 300 people view it, but 100 are *somewhat* interested…and click apply. When they land at your ATS System and see they need to create an account , they quickly lose interest and only 15-20 of those 100 people will end up in your ATS db. That’s not good. If it was me…and I spent that $250 for the Ad, I’d want as many of those 100 people as I could get into my system.

So, first, make it EASIER for those 80-85 people who surfed away to at least connect with you in some fashion. They were interested enough to click the link, but hey, they’re busy and for every question and form you put up in front of them, you drop people. Some of these people may not be qualified, but many ARE, and just don’t have the time to fill our your 15 forms. But here’s where LinkedIn comes in. Make it very easy for that person to , at minimum to stay connected with your company (business card info) and ask them for their LinkedIn profile URL (which most people will do) then you now have a link to their active resume! You now have the ability to research each lead, research their background, see who their connected to and decide if they just might be the perfect fit for this job, or another job. You’ve gone from losing 80% of your recruitment funnel leads, and by using LinkedIn, makes it possible to stay connected and build relationships with people.

If you’ve got that active LinkedIn profile URL in your recruitment marketing system, as the person changes jobs, updates their linkedin profile, etc…your recruitment marketing system is constantly being updated….until it finds a new job that you’ve just published, and it automatically makes a match and notifies the recruiter.

Powerful stuff..and something we believe all companies should be actively doing.

A bit off topic, but who will save the comic strips? Apple?

You’ll find the original here