Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about candidate experience, why passion matters, employer branding and social recruiting.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

What if it mattered how we treated candidates by Marvin Smith (@talentcommunity)

Great post by Marvin on candidate experience and what would happen if we treated customers like we do candidates.

Star Candidate Experience in 17 Steps by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

Another great take on candidate experience.  Best (or worst) of all this was a post from 7 years ago.  Need to take a step forward on this.

Why Passion Matters (and How to Cultivate It in Your Life) by Sarah Winfrey (@sarahwinfrey)

Love this post by Sarah on passion and why it’s important to be successful.

Trucking Company Scrapped the Stock Photos by Todd Raphael (@ToddRaphael)

A great employer branding example from Swift Transportation.

How social recruiting can help you recruit the ‘unicorn’ talent by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

A great look into the value that social media can have 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 follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

We have exciting news from SmashFly as we have announced the latest & greatest additions to our Recruitment Marketing Platform.

We announced the new Platform last week via press release (which you can view here) but wanted to share a few important points about the new Recruitment Marketing Platform and the release:

• We’ve introduced our Career Marketing Sites (CMS) offering to help companies in offering Career Listings for their jobs that are Mobile and SEO friendly.  This tool-set is extremely flexible and not only builds great landing pages with the right URL construction, keyword rich page titles and meta-tags to be easily found on search engines like Google or Bing.  It also lets administrators create dynamic content “on the fly”.  Much like a marketing CMS, we offer the ability to create custom landing pages & micro-sites that include your own dynamic content as well as widgets to include targeted job opportunities.  Clients can now create custom pages for events such as college campus recruiting to better target candidates and capture them as contacts in the CRM or as applicants in their ATS.

• We are very excited about our new Intellipost offering, which can completely change the approach to how jobs are distributed to job boards.  Now companies can automatically & intelligently post jobs to recruiting destinations of their choice without relying on manual work to get the job done.  It enables recruiters to skip the headache of job board posting and focus on more proactive recruitment marketing activities, while still ensuring the company is consistently covered with where jobs need to be posted.

• With this new release, we have also re-packaged our solution into 4 core Platform modules: Recruitment Ad Distribution (RAD), Contact Relationship Management (CRM), Career Marketing Sites (CMS) and Recruitment Marketing Metrics (RMM).  Companies can choose the modules of the platform that make sense in their deployment and grow with the solution over time as needed.

• With the addition of our Career Marketing Sites (CMS) module, our Platform is the only organically built recruiting solution to combine and leverage the interoperability between global job distribution, recruitment CRM, and SEO Career Site to provide comprehensive sourcing metrics for all your recruiting activities.  This can provide unparallelled insight into your recruitment sourcing strategy and help you hire & retain the best talent.

• 2012 is just getting started!  We have a lot of exciting news yet to share in the coming months.  Stay tuned!

No matter if you have talked to us in the past or are new to what we offer, now is a great time to reach back out and get a new look at our solution.

To request a demo of our Recruitment Marketing Platform, please fill out our demo contact form.

It’s no secret in recruiting, referrals are a major source of quality hires.  And key to referrals are your employees.  While many organizations understand they need to get their employees better involved in their recruitment marketing process, the question is how to do it.

When getting started, you need to understand a few things.  First, understand what your main goal is.  Not only should this initiative help drive referral candidates but it should also be a major part of your employer branding strategy.  Second, understand that you will not have full control over the process.  There needs to be a certain amount of trust with your employees that you need to have.  So if your organization doesn’t allow social media during work hours, you may want to focus on other initiatives.

So where to begin.  Here are a few places I would start:

Create and Educate on Corporate Policy:  First things first when getting your employees involved you need to have a set policy that employees can follow. The policy needs to set expectations for what employees should and should not share on social & other channels in terms of jobs as well as company communications.  Here is a good article on how to write a social media policy.

Most importantly, you need to educate employees on your policy.  To be truly successful this is more than just a page you distribute with your messaging but a continual education process with all the internal employee communications you distribute.

Publish new content that is compelling & shareable:  After you determine what content you want shared, it’s time to produce more of it.  The first content you can provide employees is your jobs.  Make sure to keep employees apprised of the new job opportunities that are available, how they can submit referrals and most importantly what the benefits are for submitting quality referrals.   Make it a part of your job distribution process.

Second, provide them with great compelling content on your company and make it easy to share for your employees.  And most importantly, make sure your employees know where they can find and read this content.  (You can determine if it’s compelling by tracking what content is shared the most with social media & recruitment metrics.  And produce more of it.)  Best of all, the more employees share, the greater the opportunity they want to get involved with making content.  They are the best resource for creating compelling recruiting stories.

Take a look at Pepsi’s new social policy as a great real world example of providing great content for your employees to share.  As you can see, they do a great job of educating employees on what content is good to share & what’s not.

Encourage them to join social media:  It doesn’t matter how well you do the first two steps, if this third issue isn’t addressed.  Many of your employees already use social media channels but it’s important to communicate that you want them involved in social media.  Encourage them to experiment with different social tools and most importantly, enable them to utilize these channels as part of their every day job activities.  (If you don’t allow social media at work, it may be time to scrap an employee social recruiting policy.)

Getting employees on board to help & share your recruiting content can have some significant benefits.  Not only will it more likely lead to more (& better) referral candidates but it will help provide candidates a deeper look into your organization and what makes your opportunities special.

Let your employees help you shape & spread your Employer Brand.  And most importantly trust them to do so.

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about burning down your HR department, Job Titles for SEO, the best companies to work for, how to build social media talent community and avoiding the Black Hole.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

Burning down your HR department by Tim Sackett (@TimSackett)

Really like the idea from Tim on how to re-invent your HR strategy.

Job Titles that make you go…huh?  A lesson in Recruitment Marketing SEO by Michele Dortch (@MicheleDortch) (@TalentMinded)

Nice post on how those creative job titles can affect how your job appears in search results.  Very important for recruitment SEO.

Who’s the Best Company to Work For?  Here’s 100 of Them by John Zappe (@ERE_net)

The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For is out.  See who made the list.

Best Practices for a Social Media Talent Community by Jessica Miller-Merrell (@Blogging4Jobs)

Jessica shares some great tips for your social recruiting strategy.

Avoiding the Black Hole – Advice from a Corporate Recruiter by Chris Havrilla (@Havrilla)

Great advice from Chris on how candidates can avoid the “Black Hole” in the recruiting process.

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 follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

For many organizations, the ATS represents the central technology that they use to recruit top talent.  It provides a great way for them to capture applicants and manage the hiring process from apply to hire.  Through these functions, the ATS is an integral technology for your recruiting process.

However, when you think about the recruiting process, the ATS by itself leaves a little bit to be desired.  While it does a great job with managing the hiring process, it often lacks in its ability to attract & make sure that the right candidates are becoming applicants in your hiring process.

In order to supplement your ATS and ensure there’s a better flow of qualified candidates into your hiring process, there are a few technologies that can help super-charge your ATS:

Job Distribution with Metrics:  Many ATS vendors offer some sort of distribution capabilities to common boards but few offer the wide range of recruiting destinations that a job distribution provider will.  The value of distributing all your jobs through one system is not just the massive time savings it provides to your recruiters but more so the comprehensive metrics you capture for every recruiting destination you use (global job boards, social networks, sponsored ads, etc.)  A job distribution solution will also ensure the accuracy of the data that enters your ATS.

Best of all, try to work with companies that enable you to leverage recruitment marketing metrics (views, apply clicks, applicants) with valuable ATS data that you capture (qualified candidates, hires) so you can get a full view of your recruitment funnel.

Recruitment CRM:  While you will house your applicants in your ATS, you’ll want a place to centralize all your recruiting contacts, that’s where the CRM comes into play.  The Recruitment CRM provides two necessary functions that ATS systems often lack.  First, the ability to send customized messaging to targeted groups of candidates (this functionality varies among ATS)  Second, the ability to capture candidates in a number of different ways.  From doing it directly during recruitment ads to sourcing them in directly from Excel or Email to opting in via the recruiting portals you own, a CRM can help capture & centralize those contacts.  These contacts should be separated from the applicants you collect in your ATS.

Once you build up the contacts in your CRM, it becomes a new sourcing tool for you to be able to drive more qualified applicants into your ATS for every new job campaign.

Flexible Career Sites: This is one that comes up a lot but many of the ATS versions of Career Sites provide little in terms of flexibility of being able to create new content easily.  As a recruiting organization you will want to create landing pages with dynamic content for the different candidate groups that you are marketing towards.

While this is not available with many Career Site technologies through the ATS, recruitment marketing technology vendors provide functionality that enables you to create SEO friendly jobs sites that can be home for this dynamic content & landing pages.  These pages can be used to supplement or replace the ATS career sites you currently use.

All three of these technologies can help you better market your job opportunities to candidates and drive more & better applicants into your ATS.  They do this by dealing with the recruitment marketing part of the hiring process, focusing on the activities before a candidate becomes an applicant in an ATS.  And in coordination with the ATS, they can help super-charge your recruiting results leading to a better overall ROI.

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about social recruiting misconceptions, habits of a successful recruiter, Klout & recruiting, finding your writing voice, top 25 online influencers in recruiting and SEO in 2011.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

Are you guilty of one of these 10 social recruiting misconceptions? by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

Love this post by Andy.  Great read when thinking about your social recruiting strategy.  I really like points 4, 6 & 8.

5 Habits of Highly Successful Recruiters by Jessica Lunk (@Sendouts)

Nice post by Jessica on RecruitingBlogs.  Agree with all points especially #1.

Is it Time to use Klout/Kred Scores as Part of the Hiring Process? by Dr. John Sullivan (@DrJohnSullivan)

Interesting debate happening on how useful these scores are to recruiting.  I’m of the belief that they definitely hold value as another data point to analyze a candidate on.

Finding your Writing Voice: One Tip From a Non-Expert by Lance Haun (@thelance)

Great article to read as you begin creating content for your recruiting blog and Career Site.

The Top 25 Online Influencers in Recruiting V.5 by HR Examiner (@HRExaminer)

This list is ripe with great recruiting thought leaders.  I’m honored to be included with this great group of people.

2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers by Danny Sullivan (@DannySullivan)

Interesting look at what happened in SEO last year.  Great as you are finalizing your Recruitment SEO strategy for 2012.

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 follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

On this blog, I talk a lot about measuring the performance of your recruitment ads and tying back important recruiting metrics to the recruiting source that produced the results.  These metrics are important as it enables you to understand the high & low performers in your media buying strategy so you can “fire” your low performers and increase usage of your high ones.

But while measuring back to the source is something integral to your recruitment reporting, this data can often be skewed if you don’t put in the proper time to understand how to target your recruitment ad to the right population on your given recruiting channels.

When I say “target” I don’t mean just the messaging in your recruitment ad (although that always helps) but I also am talking about making sure your job ad is appearing under the proper categories and classifications that are provided to you by the recruiting source provider.  This can make a huge difference on whether candidates see your ad to begin with when they are searching through jobs on these sources.

Here are a few areas to focus on when classifying and targeting your recruitment ads:

Always fill out classifications: For most job boards and other recruiting channels, there are a number of classifications or categories they offer in order to put your recruitment ad in the right location on their sites.  Most importantly these categories are usually keyword searchable which make your job available to candidates that are searching for jobs like yours.

The next time you post a job make sure to focus on choosing the correct fields for the important categories such as Industry, Job Category, Occupation, Job Type, Salary Range, Years of Experience and anything else that adds to your recruitment ad.  If you use a global job distribution provider, make sure that they enable you to specify the most important categories for every recruitment ad you distribute from their system.

Follow with Real-Time Metrics: If you are not capturing real-time recruitment data on your recruitment ads, you should begin doing so.  By looking at your job postings the day of or a few days afterward, it can give you a good idea of if the recruiting source was a good one for this specific job or if the classification you chose for the job was correct.

Follow along with your metrics and most importantly, make quick real-time decisions to try and improve the performance of the ads.  Whether that’s re-posting under a different job category or changing the location where you posted the job.

Use Historical Data: As you are capturing real-time data you will be building a collection of extremely important and useful information for future recruitment ads. This data will help you understand what sources (such as job boards, social networks, recruiting SEO sites, SEM, etc.) work best for a specific job.

Take a look at jobs that are similar to the job you are currently posting and understand what sources and classifications worked well in terms of bringing qualified applicants into your ATS.  If you are unsure about the right source or classification, test out what you think will work and measure the results.  Your historical data can provide a wealth of knowledge of what works and doesn’t work for specific jobs, you just need to take a look at it.

The more information you provide about your recruitment ads to recruiting sources the better displayed and more available it will be for job seekers that are looking for positions like yours.  Do your best up front to have your recruitment ads found and then track the results.  This data will not only help you for this specific recruitment marketing campaign but can provide you with the information to improve all future campaigns as well.

With this week’s #HRTechChat, we took an interesting look at HR Technology, gaps that exist in the marketplace and who drives product innovation.  The most interesting part of the conversation however was a look into technology trends that we are seeing and where we thought the most innovation would be occur.

While there were a lot of great ideas that were thrown out and mentioned, here are the 3 trends that I think will be the most important for recruiting in 2012:

Centralized Recruiting Metrics that are Predictive

One of the biggest trends in HR are metrics & data.  Whether it’s for workforce planning or talent acquisition, there is a need for accurate data to make better strategic decisions.  For this need, I see 2 major trends in today’s marketplace: centralization & predictive analysis.

Centralization: Most organizations today have multiple solutions where data is stored.  Whether it’s recruitment ad data in their job distribution solution, sourcing data in their Recruiting CRM or applicant / hire data in their ATS, there are a number of disparate solutions that contain data you need to make good decisions.  The key is making sure these solutions speak to one another so you can take this data and make it all available in one central location.  Data is only as valuable as how accessible it is to you when you make decisions.  This makes centralization key.

On top of this, recruiting data will be for the entire recruiting funnel from first click to becoming a hire in an ATS.  Data will be tracked by every source used and be displayed together in order to get a full view of the recruitment funnel and understand what recruiting initiatives provide the most ROI.

Predictive Analysis: Once you have your data centralized, it’s time to analyze what’s happening in your recruiting strategy.  While there’s value in providing raw data, an important value add vendors are pursuing is taking this data and providing their own analysis on top of it.  The easier and more intuitive vendors can make their reporting solutions, the more value these solutions in the recruiting decision making process.

In addition, vendors will continue to do better at providing users with the ability to play with the data & create custom reports that are important to their organization.

Social Recruiting – Education & Value Add

The value of social media in recruiting is immense.  Not only does it provide a great way to engage with candidates on a platform where they feel comfortable but it also provides a wealth of new data points to evaluate a candidate.

Education

In speaking with recruiting organizations, I see that there is still a great need for education on the social recruiting basics.  These organizations are looking for help anywhere they can get it and many times are looking toward vendors for this knowledge.  This education will go past how to leverage the vendor’s social recruiting solutions (which I’ll expand on below) but more towards how to build a comprehensive social strategy which will include utilizing their solutions as well as many of the great social media marketing tools that exist in the marketplace.

Most importantly, vendors will need to understand & be able to communicate the inherent benefits & tradeoffs that come with a social strategy.

Adding Value

The problem today, however, is that a lot of the social solutions in talent acquisition technology don’t necessarily add value to the already fantastic social media marketing solutions that exist in the marketplace (and should be used for any social recruiting strategy).  It will be important for technology vendors to focus on adding value to the space and less on just checking the social recruiting check box on the RFP.

For example, solutions such as incorporating social data for contacts in your CRM or Talent Network or tracking social media job clicks alongside job board clicks can provide value and fill a need in a company’s social strategy.  Conversely, being able to post status updates from your recruiting technology in and of itself doesn’t add all that much value.

Talent Network: Building your own sourcing database

Companies are increasingly looking for ways to capture and most importantly engage with qualified candidates.  Talent Networks provide a tremendous way to build & cultivate these relationships and should see an evolution in 2012.

A few things I expect to happen to Talent Networks:

1. Social Data: I expect social data to start being tied to candidates joining these networks.  And candidates can even use their social profiles to join.
2. Targeted Communication: With these candidates, communication is extremely important.  Technology providers will find better & easier ways to target communications to specific populations in their solutions.  This will lead to better engagement.
3. Touch-point tracking:  Talent Network provide a tremendous opportunity to touch candidates multiple times with your employment brand.  Due to this, it will be very important to understand how many and specifically what recruiting actions drive conversion into applicants.  Some of this data will be housed in other solutions.
4. Community development: There has been a big push to create company owned Talent Communities that enable three way communication between candidates, employers and other candidates.  It will be interesting to see how this develops and if it is worth the considerable effort to build.

Bonus: Integration across all solutions

Thought I was done?  Not quite yet.  With all the solutions that recruiting organizations use, it will be important to make sure they all play nice together.  This includes with data, contacts, process flow and many other areas.  I see vendors being very flexible in terms of their API and integration options so that organizations can leverage the right technology for their situations.

In Summary

While centralized recruiting metrics, social recruiting and Talent Networks are the three main Recruiting Technology trends I see, there are a number of other trends including Mobile (which I will touch on in another post) that will play a big part in innovation in 2012.  The key is to understand the key problems & gaps in your recruitment marketing process today and figure out the solution you need to fix them.

What are your thoughts?

Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In the first week of 2012 we’ll be talking about true SaaS, HR technology commandments, an innovative recruitment campaign, social media saturation and stagnant recruitment.

Here are the articles our that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

There’s True SaaS and, then there’s SaaS InFullBloomUS by Naomi Bloom (@InFullBloomUS)

Great post by Naomi on the most important features and architectural behaviors for a true SaaS technology.

10 Technology Commandments for HR When Hiring for 2012 by Jennifer Brogee (@JenniferBrogee)

Nice list of commandments to take to heart as you are making HR Technology decisions in 2012.

Is the Australian IKEA Recruitment Campaign the most creative ever? by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

Really interesting and ingenious recruitment campaign from IKEA.  The video is definitely worth a watch.

Are we becoming over saturated in social media? by Ed Newman (@newmaed)

Good points from Ed Newman on social media capabilities in HR Technology solutions.

Eternally Stagnant Recruitment and Some Ideas to Overcome It by Kevin Wheeler (@KWheeler)

Interesting ideas from Kevin on a few different things you can do to improve recruiting results.

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 follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

With New Year’s just one day away, I thought it would be a good time to look back at our blog posts and share the most popular from 2011.  Like any blog, we’ve had hits & misses with our content but here are the articles that struck the right chord with our readers.

Here are the top 10 blog articles from 2011 in terms of views & re-tweets:

10. Candidates vs. Employers: Who’s screening who?

A recent article that takes a look at the recruiting process and the screening power that transfers along the way.

9. How to accurately measure source of hire with ATS & Job Distribution

Source to Hire data is one of the most difficult recruiting data to collect.  We outline a few ways to start collecting this data in your recruitment marketing process through your ATS & Job Distribution.

8. Talent Communities: If you build it, will they come?

Inspired by a #TChat (which I highly recommend you attend), this article tackles the concept of Talent Communities and what they truly are.

7. Source to Hire & Candidate Touchpoints

It’s important to understand all the touchpoints you have with candidates that apply for your positions.  This post goes into how to track these interactions.

6. What I learned in Vegas: #HRTechConf Wrap Up

Summary post of our experiences at this year’s HR Technology Conference.  Lot’s of great takeaways.

5.  3 Ways to improve your Candidate Experience

3 Helpful suggestions on how you can improve your recruitment marketing process and your overall candidate experience.

4. 5 Recruiting Lessons to be learned from Marketers

A post on a few things that Recruiters can learn from Marketers to help improve their recruiting results.

3. The Who, What & Why of candidates dropping off during the apply process

A look at the candidates who drop off at some point during your recruiting process and a few ways to capture their information instead of just letting them drop off.

2. 3 Recruiting Success Stories

3 recruiting success stories from our clients of simple things they’ve done to their recruiting process that yielded big results in their ROI.

1. How Talent Pools Get More Social

At number 1, we have a post on how to make the Talent Pools you currently have in your ATS or Recruiting CRM and how you can make these pools more social so you can generate more value out of these Talent Pools.

Those are our Top 10 posts of the year.  I hope you enjoy them and continue to come back and enjoy our content in 2012.