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Negative employer branding: Whether organizations acknowledge it or not, social media is a force that will impact them for better or for worse. 2010 will be a year in which employees, past and present, really start to influence how organizations are perceived by being more vocal about their experiences. As more and more online communities expose their content to search engines, transparency will abound. Is your glass house shatterproof?

It’s clear that Employer Branding will continue to grow in importance with the increased proliferation and use of social media tools.  The question is how can you successfully improve your employer branding and build advocates in your target applicants?  Here are a few ideas:

1. Utilize Your Employees as Advocates

One of the greatest resources you have for employer branding are your current and former employees.  The question is how can you encourage them to spread positive buzz to potential rockstar employees?  One way is by creating a great referral program.  Not only will this incentivize current employees to act as brand ambassadors to their professional networks but it will also likely increase the quality of the applicants that you receive (as your best employees will more than likely bring in like-minded and skilled applicants.)  In addition, you may want to open this up to your alumni as well.  One thing is to hear great reviews from an current employee but another is to hear great reviews from a participant with little invested in the company in question.

2.   Re-visit your Careers Page

Your careers page can be a great way to provide high potential applicants with a better feel for your company culture as well as preemptively answer questions they might have.  Be cognizant of the messaging that you provide applicants about your company and include information on topics that are important to them such as work/life balance, work environment, company vision, employee testimonials, etc. (Take time to think about these topics.)  The overall goal is to give them a healthy expectation of what working at your company would be like, so they can become excited about the opportunities you provide.

3. Make Social Media a Hub for Company News

As potential applicants research your company, they are more than likely to come upon your social footprint online which is great.  This allows you the opportunity to control the flow of the conversation to resources such as your company blog, Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools and point to resources and conversations that champion your company brand and provide a positive view of your company.  Lastly, make use of different types of media from blog articles to video in order to engage top applicants in different ways.

Overall, Employer Branding can have a important impact on the success of your recruiting efforts and there are a variety of things you can do to encourage positive buzz for your company that will enable you to attract and grow your applicant pool.

In addition, I’ll be the main voice for the SmashFly blog using it to publish the best concepts and conversations I come across in the recruitment marketing space.  I’ll be blogging a few times a week on important recruiting topics and will provide:

• Links to the most relevant recruiting articles
• Meaningful insights into recruitment marketing conversations
• New Technologies that will help recruiters recruit more effectively
• Important findings from our personal experiences with clients
• New Product enhancements / announcements to our WildFire platform
• New ideas / concepts about recruitment marketing

I look forward to meeting and sharing ideas with all the energetic recruiters and HR professionals out there and would love to hear from you.  If you have any great ideas for our blog, thoughts on our recruitment marketing software or would just like to send me a note, feel free to contact me at chris@smashfly.com.

One of the important trends that occurred in 2009 was the rise of the new “job” specific search engines. The most popular of these engines was Indeed and SimplyHired . There are many others as well, such as Juju, Oodle …but these two engines are far ahead of the others in terms of raw traffic. I recall a webinar I attended in December of last year that said Indeed was now the largest job board globally, with over 10 million searches a month. That’s a LOT of traffic..and you have to believe it’s having a direct impact on the traditional job boards bottom line. After all, these engines index your jobs for FREE….just like Google Indexes your webpages for free.

We have a good number of clients that are using both of these search engines….and I thought it would be interesting to see how they compared in terms of traffic. We looked at a sample of 3000 jobs posted to these two boards over the course of 2009 …from companies that span many different verticals. I would say our customers tend to be more on the technical side…but I still think the numbers would hold up regardless of industry.

We simply calculated the average number of clicks each job received from each board across those 3000 jobs. The results?

Job Engine	Average Clicks Per Jobs in 2009
	140
	40

That’s a BIG difference! Why the huge disparity? I believe it’s because Indeed does a much better job at SEO, and ensuring their jobs are appearing at the top of Google searches when you search for anything related to jobs. Try it out…search for “java jobs in California” …Indeed comes up number 1 and 2 in the rankings. In fact…when you include “Jobs” in the search…there’s a very good chance Indeed will show up somewhere near the top. It’s interesting to see the shift to these free job search engines….and it’s a trend I’d bet continues into 2010 and beyond.

What’s also interesting to consider about these numbers, however..is how many actually turn into applicants in your ATS. For this, we’ll be publishing a separate article…as we have data on a number of clients that are using our full metrics suite. But I can tell you…the numbers aren’t impressive. I’ll publish some separate numbers to show conversion rates to applicants in the next blog posting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.