Before we get to the articles, I have a quick reminder.  The Candidate Experience Awards have started accepting applications for this year’s awards and is a great way to benchmark your candidate experience against some of the industry’s best recruiting organizations.   To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the “How to Apply?” page on the website.

Now on to the articles.  Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

National Security Agency Releases Spy Guide to Sourcing the Internet by Jeremy Roberts (@ImJeremyR)

Helpful de-classified guide to retrieve information from the web.  Definite read for sourcing professionals.

Laszlo Block on how Google’s hiring process works by The Economist (@TheEconomist)

Short video with some helpful thoughts on hiring from SVP of People Operations at Google Laszlo Block.

Social Recruiting is Dead by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

John’s take on the current state of social recruiting in the technology marketplace and where it needs to go in order to take that next step.

Is there a Fear of Failure for HR Technology? by Todd Maycunich (@tmaycunich)

Good post on how to approach emerging technologies from an organization perspective.

eHarmony moves into the recruiting business by Media Bistro (@MediaBistro)

Bizarre story of the week comes from eHarmony’s news that they will look to put their algorithm for matching couples to matching candidates to employers.  Companies have tried assessment matching before so we’ll see if they can figure it out.

Hope you enjoy the list and see you on Twitter @smashfly.

I’m not down there but our CEO Mike Hennessy & CSO Scott Fowle are, if you want to get your SmashFly fix.

So let’s get started:

Identifying and Solving a problem

Innovation is almost always born out of the necessity to solve a key problem that the industry faces on a consistent basis.  The problem can be for a variety of reasons and crops up due to a number of different factors.  But in every case it solves a business need to can provide clear bottom line growth.

The life-span of an innovation can vary as well and in today’s environment this life-span is shrinking.  The innovations that have the most legs are ones that are less functional (unless it’s truly can’t be copied) and more strategic in nature.  It’s not about the technology per se but about how the technology ties into how you think about and execute your strategy.  It’s these innovations that provide the most value and ones that are the hardest to part with once you get them ingrained in your organization.

The recruiting industry has had their fare share of innovations in the last decade.  Here we will take a look at some of the key innovations and how they came to be:

Like this but Better

The first innovation type is one you are familiar with.  It takes an older but current concept and applies it to a new medium.  We saw this all the time with the internet revolution.  And the most important one for recruiting was job boards.

Job Boards are seen as pretty passe at this point (although the right mix still holds tremendous value to recruiters) but back in the day, they were what kicked off the sourcing revolution we see today.  And it just happened off the idea of taking newspaper classifieds and moving them to the online space.  It was an easy sell.  It was cheaper to do, anyone online could find your job ad and apply and you gained valuable metrics that you could tie back to the job board in terms of applicants.

Companies that jumped on this job board wave early saw more applicants than they had ever saw before and we able to in turn fill jobs more quickly with better people.

Addressing a need quickly

All innovations address a problem that people need solved, however, in some cases their is a need so huge that companies jump in to fill it as soon as possible.  Many companies will probably say they are this but I’m not too sure at times.

With the rise of Job boards and the increased mass of candidates applying for their jobs, organizations didn’t know how to handle the volume and ensure candidates moved smoothly through the hiring process.  Enter the Applicant Tracking System.  With a focus on creating processes where their were none before the ATS helped organizations manage their jobs and more importantly their applicants through a standardized process.

The ATS has evolved toward HRMS systems since that time but the real reason every large organization has an ATS is because they need a system to manage their job application flow and just as important, remain compliant in their hiring process.

Adapting Technologies from other disciplines

I’ve heard people say that HR / Recruiting is at least 10 years behind their Marketing and Sales brethren in terms of technology and strategy.  And while I consider this unfair, there is a little truth in there.  While there might be a gap, it is a gap that is closing by the day.

You can see it today in the point solutions that are cropping up that are based off of marketing and sales technologies.  From Recruitment CRM to source, manage and engage with potential candidates to SEO platforms designed to help candidates find your jobs to social recruiting tools to leverage social media in candidate attraction (especially with referrals), there are a number of technologies looking to adapt what works for other disciplines and make it available for recruiters to leverage and improve their strategies.

Familiar but new way of thinking

The last innovation is one that comes about through a new way of thinking.  It’s familiar in terms of what it brings but it provides a “Duh” moment when communicated.  This is because while you’ve never thought of it in the way described, it makes such perfect sense you don’t know how you have not thought about it before.

You’ve seen this in HR for ERP solutions and Talent Management Suites.  They brought together disparate point solutions and made them into an integrated solution to manage all of your HR technology needs.  Today, you are seeing it with Recruitment Marketing Platforms.  RMP’s are pushing the point recruitment solutions together to provide a way for organizations to manage ALL of their recruitment tools and campaigns from a centralized solution.  You should be familiar with all of these.  Think Job Distribution, Recruitment CRM, SEO Career Sites, Talent Networks /Communities, Mobile, Social, all integrated.

The value comes from not only being able to have your recruiting team manage everything centrally through one vendor but in providing you full visibility and recruitment metrics into the sources and activities that actually provide value (and which don’t) to your organization in terms of qualified candidates and hires.  Add in the unique integrated use cases (that only come with having all these tools together) that enable you to capture, attract and engage with more qualified candidates and you have an idea and innovation that’s worth pursuing.

Where to next?

Innovation in recruiting is nothing new and companies will continue to find new and unique ways to provide value and enrich the lives of recruiters.  The key is to really look at new technologies and trends that are being talked about in the marketplace and figure out if they are innovations that will last to provide value for your recruitment marketing organization over the long haul.  The indications are out there, it’s just about identifying them!

Before we get to the articles, I have two reminders.

First, I would like to welcome our new Chief Sales Officer Scott Fowle to the SmashFly team.  You can read his post on “Why I joined SmashFly” here.

Second, the Candidate Experience Awards have started accepting applications for this year’s awards and is a great way to benchmark your candidate experience by some of the industry’s best recruiting organizations.   To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the “How to Apply?” page on the website.

Now on to the articles.  Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

If Social Recruiting is still confusing you, then Read this by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

Great summary on social recruiting.  Well worth a read!

Do a Better Job of Managing Your Brand Touchpoints by Michael Vandervort (@MikeVandervort)

Really interesting piece from Mike on all the activities that impact your overall brand from an HR perspective.

Hire People, not just skills by Chris Havrilla (@havrilla)

Like this post from Chris on the importance of hiring the right people and personalities (that have the right skills) that fit with your organization.

5 Ways HR Can Boost Recruiting by Improving Employee/Boss Relations by Trish McFarlane (@TrishMcFarlane)

Nice look at ways to improve your recruiting by improving employee and boss relationships.

Source of Hire Matters by Maren Hogan (@marenhogan)

A good post on the source of hire metric debate.  I’d also add tracking source of quality (i.e. the sources that provide qualified candidates) to the metrics you capture.  We can help do this at SmashFly too.

Hope you enjoy the list.

Editor’s Note:  This post is by our new Chief Sales Officer, Scott Fowle (see our press release here).  We are very excited to have him on our team at SmashFly and this blog shares his reason for joining SmashFly and his vision for the recruitment marketing technology marketplace.

If there’s one thing I’ve realized in my career, it’s that sometimes in life you get amazing clarity around a vision and direction that’s just so obvious that can’t help yourself from jumping into the opportunity.

If you know me, I have a personal love for growing new categories, brands and technologies that solve some of the most plaguing business challenges in Human Resources and Talent Acquisition (just check my LinkedIn profile.) I’ve been lucky enough to do it at a few stops in my career whether it’s business execution software at SuccessFactors, talent acquisition systems at Taleo, job boards at CareerBuilder or most recently Digital Interviewing at HireVue.

At each of these organizations and brands, they were successful at identifying key business problems in the HR space and were exceptional at creating a value proposition that drove performance that impacted the bottom line.  These same opportunities certainly exist for SmashFly today.

Let me paint you a picture of the opportunity I see at SmashFly and the tremendous value that I see with this growing technology category of Recruitment Marketing Platforms; a category that I believe will have a tremendous impact on how organizations attract and engage with quality talent.

The Problem

Every new industry category starts with a key problem that is begging to be solved.  And there are a number of key indicators such as brokenness, silos, fragmentation that continually rear their ugly heads in the marketplace.  The end result always leads organizations to continually spend huge amounts of resources (money, people, time, etc.) to achieve moderate levels of success in the business outcomes they are trying to achieve.  This is where the true game changing innovators show their true value and act as a catalyst for progress in an industry.

In the Talent Acquisition and Recruitment Marketing space, we’ve seen a number of layered innovations over the past 15 years, each one solving real problems but creating new ones in their wake.  The rise of job boards helped organizations attract more candidates than ever before letting them expand the reach of their job advertisements.  Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) came in to tackle the new challenge of how to process and transact all these new applicants, helping organizations manage the volume of candidates along the hiring process while ensuring the process maintained compliance.  Many of these systems extended downstream into Talent Management Systems focusing on managing hired or owned talent in the same manner but beyond the Talent Acquisition stage.

While all this innovation has been going on, the front end of Talent Acquisition or “pre-applicant” has been neglected by many SaaS providers leaving smaller more nimble providers to try to solve many of individual problems that recruiters face every day.

Unfortunately, with all of today’s technology, it’s chaos out there.  With so many new tools, solutions and emerging trends, it’s hard for even thought leaders to even make sense of what they need to do to deliver on the internal demand for Value.  This has led organizations to piecemeal and bolt-on solutions to their ATS in an attempt to solve one of the many recruiting problems they need solved whether that’s Job Posting, CRM, SEO, Mobile, Career Site, Employer Branding, Candidate Experience, Social and many others.  While these solutions may solve an individual problem well, this bolt-on approach creates fragmentation in the recruitment strategy not only in the execution of these initiatives but most importantly, in the data that you need to have visibility in order to determine what’s working.

This has created a tremendous opportunity for companies focused on the full comprehensive recruitment strategy, one that centrally addresses all the pain points suffered by recruiting organizations while providing full visibility so they can improve and optimize their strategy.

This is where the market’s headed and this is where SmashFly exists!

The Opportunity: The Recruitment Marketing Platform (RMP)

Here’s the exciting part and why I’m thrilled about the opportunity here at SmashFly.

As mentioned above, there are foundational business problems and business impacts that are still not addressed by the point recruiting solutions that exist today.  Here’s (only) a few to keep this short:

• Not attracting enough quality candidates or attracting too many total candidates that are not a fit?
• Inability to offer candidates an option to engage outside of applying
• Lack of communication and engagement with candidates during the attraction and apply process or within so called Talent Networks or Communities
• Inability to offer consistent branding and experience to candidates across the entire strategy
• THE BIG ONE: No visibility and insight into what’s attracting quality candidates (i.e. where should I be spending my money.) Or what we should now be calling Actionable Knowledge, which is required for critical business optimization!

Most if not all of these problems lead to wasted opportunities, time and most importantly spend.  So the question is how can we solve them?

The short answer is we need to change our way of thinking. We need to stop thinking in MICRO terms about our recruiting (Mobile, Social, Job Posting, CRM, SEO, etc.) and really focus on the MACRO strategy where the sum is bigger and more potent than its parts.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t leverage all the micro tactics that help us find and attract talent but that we integrate them together to drive our recruitment strategy forward.  Most importantly, it’s means we don’t measure the success of these initiatives in a silo but measure them centrally side by side to gain the actionable knowledge we use to improve and optimize our business strategy across the enterprise.

However, the only way to gain the actionable knowledge you need to optimize your strategy is to have a solution that is as comprehensive as your strategy.  It’s only through a Recruitment Marketing Platform that you are able to centrally execute and measure all the initiatives which can drive and improve your business outcomes.

It’s with this strategic vision and this comprehensive solution, you are able to accomplish things within your recruitment process you were never able to do before.  From building your Talent Network tenfold through the job apply flow process to providing consistency and structure to your communications, engagement and experience you provide to candidates to capturing holistic (and accurate!) metrics that provide full visibility and actionable knowledge (yes, it’s that important) into all the areas that drive performance and ones that need improvement.

Most importantly, a Recruitment Marketing Platform will help you tell a better recruitment story to all your internal and external stakeholders.  To internal Hiring Managers (who sometimes lack confidence in Talent Acquisition), to candidates (who need to understand why they should want to work for your company above all others) and to senior management (so you secure the budget you need and credit you deserve).

It’s due to all of these reasons that I fully expect Recruitment Marketing Platforms to be the pre-applicant partner to the post-applicant ATS at every successful recruiting organization.

A Vision for the Future

In 2001 if any of us were to the use the term ATS’s, would any have understood that acronym?  Most folks today not only acknowledge the acronym but have invested into these platforms over 10 years ago as a necessity.

Today, there is a growing category and solution that is now being defined as Recruitment Marketing or RMP’s.   It’s focused not just on solving individual recruiting problems but aimed on helping organizations execute and measure a comprehensive recruitment marketing strategy that drives candidate quality.  And it is forming an analytical front-end view to an organization’s total opportunity for better business execution.

Creating a new world and growing a category is never easy, it takes a will to think differently and see a vision for a better future that really is familiar in the market but never offered in (1) holistic approach like SmashFly.  It takes time to build towards this vision as SmashFly has been organically building their platform for the past 6 years, growing their solution as trends and needs developed in the recruitment marketplace.

The first customers are now live on the full platform and the results are truly amazing.   But real change doesn’t happen in a silo (nothing good ever does).  We need more forward thinking visionaries to join us in this vision to not only reap the first mover benefits but also turn this category into the best practice it will surely become.

I truly believe that the path to success (both in terms of ROI and candidate quality) for recruiting organizations is to think more comprehensively about their strategy and partner with centralized solutions like SmashFly to execute and measure it.  It’s with this mindset that you can move your brand and your entire talent acquisition team towards the same group goals with planned business outcomes that deliver visibility, validation and a regained control of your future.

That’s why I’m excited to join SmashFly.  Now who’s ready to join me?!!!

Scott Fowle comes to SmashFly as an innovator in the HR and recruitment technology space.  He has a keen eye for emerging innovations and technologies and would love to share his vision with you. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/scott-fowle/0/809/118

If you are interested in learning more about SmashFly, visit our website at www.smashfly.com.  You can also learn more about Recruitment Marketing Platforms by downloading our White Paper, “Why you need a Comprehensive Recruitment Marketing Platform”.

A reminder that the Candidate Experience Awards have started accepting applications for this year’s awards.  To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the “How to Apply?” page on the website.

Now on to the articles.  Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

A Jobseeker’s Guide to Personal Branding: A Recruiter’s Perspective by Ryan Leary (@RyanLeary)

This is a great comprehensive post by Ryan on personal branding.

10 Steps to Building Rapport with Job Candidates by Nancy Parks (@ERE_net)

Good tips from Nancy on how to engage and build relationships with candidates.

Employer Branding Viking Style: Who We Are and the Stories we tell by David Anderson (@FistfulOfTalent)

Some great thoughts on figuring out and messaging the value you provide to candidates.

4 Time Saving Social Media Tips for #HR & #Recruiting by Jessica Miller-Merrell (@Blogging4Jobs)

Actionable ideas for saving time and improving your presence on social media.

The Story of the Corporate Applicant Tracking System by Peter Gold (@petergold99)

Interesting look at the history of the ATS and the need for innovation.

While the ATS does need to get more social and mobile friendly, there is also a need for recruiting / sourcing solutions that integrate with the ATS to help improve communication, branding and metrics / reporting in your recruitment strategy (we have a solution you may want to check out.)

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.

This blog post was inspired by conversations with William Tincup.  Check him out on Twitter at @williamtincup and his internet radio show at DriveThruHR.

Here’s a question: when’s the last time you really sat down with your team and discussed the true value proposition that you provide candidates and how to most effectively message this to candidates.  If the answer is never, it might be a great time to do just that.

Here’s a recruitment marketing idea.  Block off two consecutive weekly afternoons (i.e. this Thursday and next Thursday) and bring in your core recruiting team for a brainstorming session.  Ask them to share their honest opinions on what you currently do (make it clear that you are trying to improve the strategy and frankness is imperative.)  Be the moderator to move along the conversation and ensure everyone is heard on each issue.

Ask questions like:

• In your opinion, what is the most unique benefit we provide to candidates as an employer?
• What is the biggest determinant for a candidate to have a positive candidate experience?
• How do you grade our messaging to candidates today?
• How do you grade our candidate experience?
• If there’s one place you point candidates towards for more information where would that be?
• Who are the companies we compete most with for candidates?
• Why do we win employees? Lose them?

What we are really trying to get at with these questions is a few things.  First, you are trying to evaluate where you are at now with your messaging and branding strategy.  While trying to determine what really resonates with candidates from your ground level recruiters.  Second, you are trying to figure how what the competitive marketplace looks like and how you are messaging vs. the other employer choices that candidates have.  Basically, what you can do better.

These are just some beginner questions and may not be the best for your organization.  But the key to the exercise is to build off these initial questions and dig down deeper into these questions so you can extract the unique value that working at your company provides.  This will help you determine and set up a plan to message this to your target candidates across all areas of your organization.

The key here is to leave the first brainstorming session with an exercise to think about the key value propositions brought up in the meeting and to think about potential ways to message it.  The second meeting will lead to everyone sharing their ideas (there will be many different ones) to help build consensus around a combined message going forward.

The point of this exercise is to leverage the knowledge of everyone on your team so that you can identify what truly matters to candidates.  It also is a great way to get everyone on your team on the same page with how you communicate and attract candidates to the organization.

This is the very beginning of thinking about your employer brand and the value you provide as an employer.  Once you decide on a strategy, it’s time to begin leveraging this brand throughout your recruiting organization and measuring it through recruitment metrics.  I will touch upon this in a post next week, so stay tuned!

A reminder that the Candidate Experience Awards have started accepting applications for this year’s awards.  To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the “How to Apply?” page on the website.

Now on to the articles.  Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

mWeb – Because starting with an app is for suckers by Keith McIllvaine (@Kufarms)

A good comprehensive post on what you need to think about when building out your mobile Career Site strategy.

Social Recruiting Doesn’t Have To Be Complicated by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

Some great reminders on your social and mobile recruiting strategy.

Differential advantage via technology?  It’s hard to find that on a shelf by Steve Boese (@SteveBoese)

Great post reminding that technology needs to be tied to strategy in order to be successful.

The Power of Content with Keith Robinson #Rectec13 by Bill Boorman (@BillBoorman) and Keith Robinson (@SiteAdvisor)

Insights on an evolving recruiting industry and the importance of content.

Big Data and Marty McFly by China Gorman (@ChinaGorman)

Interesting look at the changing skills market and opportunities that exist for recruiting organizations.

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.

Here’s the concept.  A good doctor won’t tell you all the degrees he or she has on their wall, what they studied in medical school or the latest medical research they published but they will focus on the individual patient and tailor their messaging accordingly.  They will identify the problem (or more appropriately, the pain point) for the patient and will work to communicate the solution to their ailments, stressing why this solution is in the patient’s best interest.  The key here is focusing on solving a particular problem for their customer (the patient), explaining what the problem is without getting into innate detail all while demonstrating the best solution for the patient.  They aren’t just offering a pre-packaged solution off the rack but are really trying to customize one to the needs of their patrons.

This makes a whole lot of sense when you think about your messaging from a marketing perspective.  You need to identify the core pain point of the audience you are trying to attract, communicate why this problem needs to be solved and offer the best solution for helping to solve this problem.

While this is important in marketing and sales, it’s just as important when you think about your Career Site and the messaging you use that drives your employer brand.

So how can we be more like a “good doctor” in our recruitment marketing messaging, here’s a few ideas:

Focus on the career:  For candidates, the main problem that they are looking to solve is 1) they need a job (active candidates) or 2) they want a better job (passive candidates).  In both cases and especially in the second, just having an open job position in their field isn’t all too compelling.  It might be a great job but a single job description can only do so much to communicate that.

What we really need to try and accomplish is to educate candidates on why your organization is a place to start and / or grow their career.  This doesn’t mean going on about your company stats and history but moreso showing and communicating the successes of your employees.  And being forthright with how you help candidates build skills and thrive in their careers.

This is what you are trying to accomplish.  Because if you accomplish this, then finding a job for an interested qualified candidate should be the easy part.

Create tailored messaging:  No matter your organization, you are looking to fill jobs in a variety of disciplines with candidates that have unique and diverse skill-sets.  Most importantly, the candidate populations have different interests and key drivers in how they make career decisions.  So how do you communicate in the best way possible to make sure your messaging is resonating with them?

Organizations that can understand and be able execute this type of mass customization with your recruitment messaging will be more successful at attracting and ultimately selling candidates to join their organization. When I look at this I think of a few different ways:

• Career Site: Start to think about your Career Site not as a static place for your boilerplate and compliance approved messaging but as a group of interactive messaging paths for each candidate population you look to recruit.  Each messaging path should have a optimal flow from the homepage to communicate the right targeted messaging and employee stories to each candidate population.  For instance, an engineer should be able to go from generic employment messaging on the home page and drill down into information specifically designed for engineering talent with employee stories, custom content and benefits that fit this discipline.  Best of all, this would provide a great tool for recruiters to point particular candidates towards to communicate the true value position for working at the company with their specific skill-set.
• Campaigning:  Organizations will need the right tools such as Recruitment CRM to segment the different candidate populations they engage with and campaign to them with unique messaging that really resonates.  In order to be successful, this messaging in email & SMS form needs to be targeted to the specific population with content that fits their interest and jobs that fit their skills.  In this initiative, you are aiming to provide true value to the candidate, not playing the numbers game and spamming their inbox.

Employees front and center: Just like any doctor, basing your messaging on prior experience with this particular problem can be the best way to communicate the solution.  For organizations, this is showcasing their best recruitment tool, their employees.  Whether it’s in written text, videos or other media, it’s important to highlight your employees and what they’ve achieved in your recruitment messaging.  The more you can tailor it to the specific candidate audiences, the more it will resonate with the qualified candidates you are looking to attract.

Your employer brand is all based on the perception that a candidate has of your organization and the career opportunities you offer.  While candidate experience and other factors will affect this brand, your messaging can go a long way to helping candidates understand the true value of working for your organization and can help you better attract the qualified talent you need to drive your business forward.

It’s due to this that I think when you being your social strategy I would focus on the free social media tools that exist in the marketplace already as they can help you manage and execute your social campaigns.  There are a number of tools out there that people use to run their strategy and for this post, I’ll only share a few that I use on a daily basis (this is by no means exhaustive of all the useful tools out there & probably is slanted towards Twitter than any other social media network.)

Bit.ly

What it is: There are a number of different URL shorteners out there but here is the one that I use and is supported by many of the tools listed below.  This will help you track the popularity of the links you share.

How I use it: I’ve created my own bit.ly account and make sure to add it to the account settings for any social media apps I use.  This will ensure all the content I share is tracked centrally so I can see what content has been the most successfully shared.  This allows me to try and duplicate content that is more successful.

Where to find it:  https://bitly.com/

TweetDeck or Hootsuite

What it is:  Both TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter) and Hootsuite help users manage all of their social feeds including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.  The real value they provide is helping you track when other users mention your profiles, enabling you to easily find and share follower content and overall stay connected with your social contacts.

How I use it:  Today, I use TweetDeck on my laptop and Hootsuite on my Android phone.  I’ve set up a number of different streams of followers in my TweetDeck account including mentions (anyone who uses @smashfly), followers, Twitter lists and different hashtags.  It’s also a great resource in following conversations at conferences we attend.  Lastly, it helps me share content and post updates to all of my social profiles including my personal Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and our corporate Twitter and Facebook accounts.

As for Hootsuite, I use it mostly to receive updates on when people mention my Twitter accounts so that I can respond in a timely fashion.  You can do a lot more from the app but that’s the main way I use it.

Where to find it:  TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com/) & Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/)

Buffer

What it is:  This is a good little app to help you schedule relevant content in your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn streams.  While you can schedule content in TweetDeck and Hootsuite, Buffer offers what I think is a better solution to share content as you are surfing the web.  To get the most benefit, you should make sure to set up your feeds and scheduling settings via the website and then download the browser add-on.

How I use it:  I rarely go into the website (other than to check stats) but I use the browser add-on all the time.  This enables me to share any webpage directly from my browser window.  So when I’m reading an interesting article I can quickly share them with all my accounts while tracking them through my bit.ly link account.  Best of all it enables me to set up set times to share any of these updates.

The key here is that I can spend the morning finding relevant content and add them via the browser add-on and Buffer will send out the updates at various times that I set up when I created my account.  This helps keep your stream fresh and ensure that you don’t have too many dead periods in your stream during the day.

Where to find it: http://www.bufferapp.com

Twitterfeed

What it is:  Any blog you read has a RSS feed that you can use to alert you to new articles that have been posted.  This tools enables you to share articles to your social profiles based on new updates to a sites RSS feed.

How I use it: I have a few blogs that I really like and share whenever they have a new article.  This tool enables me to share it and include text to the tweet (I include “by @TWITTERNAME” to my posts) for these tweets.  I use it to ensure that my streams consistently have relevant content in them from sources I trust.  While I wouldn’t use this for every blog you follow, it can be a good resource to sources you trust and to share your own organization’s content in your feed without having to manually add it.

Where to find it: http://twitterfeed.com

Twitter

What it is: The native app for Twitter can also be useful for the right actions.  While I don’t suggest using it to RT or post updates all the time, it can be a good way to see new updates to your audience and find other like-minded Twitter handles to follow.

How I use it:

Where to find it: http://twitter.com

These are just a few of the tools that I use to update my social streams and engage with my followers and connections. I hope this will help you get started in building out your social recruiting strategy.

I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed, so please include them below in the comments.

A few things before we get to the articles.

With the tragic events that happened in Boston both on Monday and today, I wanted to include a link to The One Fund that goes towards those affected by the tragedy. Here is the link to donate.  I also wanted to pass along a link that includes a lot of the good that happened in the midst of this tragedy (well worth a look), which can be seen here.

On a much happier note, the Candidate Experience Awards has launched this week.  This is a great and growing event that is looking to enact positive change in the recruiting industry.  Organizations that participate will receive valuable data and feedback from candidates to help improve their overall recruiting process.

To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the “How to Apply?” page on the website.

Now on to the articles.  Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:

Measuring HR isn’t the goal by Ben Eubanks (@beneubanks)

Love this post by Ben on the importance of not just collecting the data but using it to improve your processes and strategy.

Know what you’re recruiting for by Ryan Phillips (@engineerfinder)

Some nice examples from Ryan on understanding the role before you recruit for it.

How do you tell a bad and persistent candidate to go away? by Tim Sackett (@TimSackett)

Interesting take on how to deal with candidates that may not fit your organization.

5 Things Enterprise Rent-a-Car is trying to Convey to Recruits on Social Media by Todd Raphael (@ToddRaphael)

Good real life example of how the organization is using social media to convey their brand and engage with candidates.

5 Weird Habits of Successful People [INFOGRAPHIC] by Kate Kudish (@OpenForum)

Like this info-graphic with some great reminders on how to being conventional is not always the key to success.

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