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 mobile recruiting, recruiting on Pinterest and others, Career Sites, disagreeing with Buddha and conference commandments.

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

Mobile Recruiting: Defining Your Goals by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

John provides us a great series on Mobile Recruiting.  Be sure to check out earlier posts one, two, three and four here.

College Job Seekers Say That Company Career Sites Are Most Important by John Zappe (@TLNT_com)

Interesting stats on college job seeker preferences and what they look for when applying to companies.  The title gives it away but Career Sites are important.

Recruiting on Pinterest, Instagram and Dribble to Build Your Innovation Brand by Dr. John Sullivan (@DrJohnSullivan)

Some great tips for using these upstart social tools to drive your recruiting and brand.

I Disagree with Buddha by Ray-Anne Thorn (@Ray_Anne)

Really like this article by Ray Anne and her disagreement with Buddha

The 10 Conference Commandments by Trish McFarlane (@TrishMcFarlane) (@HRRingleader)

A great primer for the upcoming conference season.  An oldie but a goodie!

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.

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of traveling down to New Orleans for this year’s Jazz Fest.  It was my first time down on the Bayou and it exceeded even my loftiest expectations.  The people were friendly and food was excellent but most importantly the music was downright incredible.  The best of which was a concert I saw at the famous Tipitinas by a band named Galactic (which was probably the best concert I’ve ever been to.)  I’ve become a big fan of this band over the past last few months and I’d like to share their story as well as some insights we can learn from them on discovering the true value you provide.

The Galactic Story

Formed in 1994 by a pair of childhood friends, Jeff Raines and Robert Mecurio from Washington, DC, the Jazz Funk Band fell in love with the New Orleans music scene after attending college in Louisiana.  After hooking up with drummer Stanton Moore, saxophonist Ben Ellman and organist Rich Vogel, they became main-stays in the New Orleans music scene.  However, in 2004, they reached a crossroads. Both the band and their singer decided to part ways.

So the question was “do they try and find another singer?”

To this problem, they thought about their true value as a band.  What do they provide that is extraordinary and unique to what’s out there?  What do they want to be known for?  After deliberation over a few weeks, they determined their value.  They were the “rhythm section” for other front-men.  While they were a jam funk band first and foremost, they proactively went to other bands, singers and performers with this message and recruited them to play with the band.

This has led them to playing with The Meters, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, The Neville Brothers and Corey Glover.  Best of all, it’s forced them broaden their music from jazz, rap, R&B and funk and experiment with their sound.  Their latest album reached as high as 3 on the Jazz Billboard Charts with their latest album Carnivale Electicos and continue to play great live shows with a wide range of guest stars.

What we can learn from Galactic for recruiting

So how does this tie back to recruiting?  The Galactic story is all about determining the value of what you provide in the marketplace and there are some lessons to be learned from this New Orleans jazz funk band.

Here are 2 major takeaways to help you create and improve your recruitment messaging:

Understanding your True Value: First and foremost, before you create recruitment messaging you need to sit down and determine first the value that your company provides in the marketplace (ask marketing on this one) and second, the value that differentiates you from other employers.  You may not be the “rhythm section” for other performers but there is definitely something special about your organization that you should be consistently communicating to candidates in your recruitment messaging.

Continually evolve: As Galactic plays with different performers with different music styles and tastes, they continually look to evolve and differentiate their sound.  Your recruitment messaging should be no different.  In order to find the right core benefits and differentiators that truly resonate with candidates you need to try and measure different messaging.  Use recruitment metrics to determine what messaging works in driving the right candidates to apply to your organization and how it’s affects overall applicant flow.  Once you figure out the metrics, good messaging should be replicated and honed with bad messaging being shelved.

When you are writing your recruitment marketing messaging it’s important to ensure that you understand what the true value you provide to employees is.  Without this, it makes it that much harder to communicate why you are different from all the other opportunities out there.  Finding your true value is not an exact science and will continue to evolve as your company does.  Make sure to continuously measure and test the content you produce and determine what messaging is the most compelling to candidates (and this may change for different candidate populations.)  It is this content that you should try to replicate in your job ads and on your Career Site to drive better results from all your recruitment campaigns.

Take a lesson from Galactic and zero in on the value you provide to the marketplace and make sure to continuously communicate it.

For more insights on recruitment marketing, check in daily to this blog and follow us on Twitter @smashfly.

There are a number of areas you can improve your candidate experience, but when it comes down to it, if there is one thing you can do to improve the overall candidate experience it would be to focus on “closing the loop”.  This concept is one born out of conversations with Ed Newman (co-founder of the Candidate Experience Awards) and is a pretty simple mantra.

For every action taken by a candidate in your recruiting process, an equal reaction should be taken by the employer (i.e. close the loop of this interaction.)

To explain the concept a little further, I’ve included some scenarios below of interactions probably already happening in your recruitment marketing process and what the appropriate reaction should be:

• Action:A candidate just finishes submitting an application
  • Re-action: Each candidate should receive a confirmation that their application was received (with an expectation on how long it should take to hear back).  This can be automated in many ATS systems through email.
• Action:A candidate submits an application
  • Re-action: The candidate should receive a communication (email or phone) about the decision (whether they are given an interview or are rejected for the job.)
• Action:A candidate interviews for the position
  • Re-Action: Any candidate that interviews should receive a call back after their interview to let them know next steps or if they will not get another interview.  This should be done for each interview stage.
• Action:A candidate is hired for the position
  • Re-action: Candidates that have gotten to the last interview steps but not received the position should be called and be screened for their interest in other employment opportunities.  Add them to short-list for future similar positions.
• Action:A candidate that opts into your Talent Network to receive job and company updates
  • Re-action: Candidates that opt-in should receive targeted updates to their interests and skills and should receive them on a timely basis.
• Action:A candidate sends an IM chat request (if on Career Site), sends email to recruiting help email or interacts on a specific social recruiting profile.
  • Re-action: Candidate should receive a timely response from someone on the recruiting team.  If organization does not have the ability to staff these portals they should remove it as an option.

It’s simple.  For every action taken by a candidate, a company should make a corresponding reaction to respond back.  Take a look at your recruiting process and the communications you currently send at each stage in the process and see if candidates are entering a Black Hole.

Close the loop and it should have a positive impact on your overall applicant flow.  But don’t assume, make sure to track the effects of these measures with recruitment metrics.

Not knowing what happened to your record or application can be the most frustrating part of applying for jobs and the more you limit this, the more candidates will have a positive experience in pursuing job opportunities at your company.

If you think you have a great candidate experience, The Candidate Experience Awards are still accepting applications for this years awards.  If you are interested in submitting your recruiting organization, you can do so here.  We are proud to be a sponsor this year!

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 future of work, happy employees, talent community, making things better and disruptive HR technology.

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

The Future of Work: The Manifesto by Charlie Judy (@HRFishbowl)

Great work by Charlie (and other influencers).  Well worth the read.

Happy Employees are not Engaged employees by Sharlyn Lauby (@Sharlyn_Lauby)

Nice piece on the difference between happiness and engagement and what that means for organizations.

4 Essential Pillars of a Talent Community by Crystal Miller (@TheOneCrystal) (@Blogging4Jobs)

Crystal shares some great thoughts on Talent Communities and what you need to consider when building one.

Just Make it Better by Tim Sackett (@TimSackett)

Some great advice for anything you try to do from Tim.

A Rabbit or a Duck? It is Time for Disruptive Innovation in HR Technology by Jason Averbook (@JasonAverbook)

Some great points on perspective and looking at things differently to solve problems.

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, we’ve spoken about a good deal about candidate experience and how your can improve the overall experience.  From going over the different stages of the process that affect it to why candidates drop off the apply process, we’ve covered a number of varying topics around the candidate experience.

But I wanted to go back to our posts and create a laundry list of sorts from all the tangible things you can do today that can help improve your candidate experience.

Here’s the stream of consciousness list (I know I probably will miss a bunch, please add in the comments):

• Improve your job titles for search by adding location and less generic terms (should help be found in search)

• Make your job ads more compelling (here are some tips)

• Update the UI of your career site and application technology.  And if you have it, scrap the iFrame.

• Trim your job applicationto only gather information required for an effective initial screen.
  • A Simple Test: Take the application yourself.  If it takes more than 5 minutes to complete, then you have some trimming to do.  Remember you can always collect more necessary information from candidates after the initial screen.

• Add the ability for candidates to opt-in to your Talent Network via a simple opt-in form (great for candidates who are not ready to apply today.)

• Interact and engage these Talent Network candidates with targeted messaging and jobs on a weekly or monthly basis (generic messaging is OK but content that is targeted is that much more effective.)

• Measure your candidate experiencewith key recruitment metrics and through varying methods including:
  • Recruitment Funnel Metrics
  • Sources of Hire / Influence
  • Candidate Surveys
  • Contact Surveys

• Eliminate the Double-Hop in your apply process.  A candidate shouldn’t have to create two accounts just to apply for a job.

• Build targeted messaging on your Career Site for different candidate populations.

• Focus on education and selling (and to a lesser degree screening) with all your recruitment messaging.

• Utilize mobile recruiting to capture candidate information easily on the go or at events such as Career Fairs or Networking Conferences.

• Ensure that you have opt-in forms and landing pages that are mobile friendly.  If you have this you can make it as easy as having a candidate scan a QR code to launch your opt-in forms.

• Your Career Website should be mobile friendly.  While creating an app can work, it can be unnecessary if your Career Site can be navigated well on mobile.

• Close the loop on all communications with a candidate.  If they submit an application, at the very least, provide a final status email for their application.  These communications can be automated for rejected candidates but should be more personal as you get farther in the process (i.e. all interviewed clients should receive a phone call, etc.)

• Institute features such as social recruiting profiles or IM chat on your Career Site to provide candidates with instant access to recruiters on your team.  If done, there should be adequate resources to support this.

• Use different types of content including email, SMS, video, blogs, info-graphics to engage and communicate with candidates on why they should want to work for your organization.

This is just the first batch that I’ve come up with but there are a number of other great things that you can do to improve your candidate experience.  The key is to understand the value you want to provide and determine the resources you have to implement many of these projects.  Then measure it with recruitment metrics to determine how it affects the overall bottom line.

During the apply process, the dynamic of control in the hiring process takes a dramatic shift from employers to candidates.  Candidates are the ones that control whether they move on at each step of the apply process from viewing a job to ultimately becoming an applicant.

How successful you are at fostering a good candidate experience can have a significant impact on the results you receive in terms of candidates actually finishing the apply process.  One of the first things to focus on in your apply process is your recruitment marketing messaging.  Making sure that your content is intriguing, well layed out and compelling to candidates is one of the first and most important things to iron out when trying to improve your overall applicant results.

While I’ve gone over what I think a good job ad should include, let’s take a look at what you need to focus on communicating when you write up your job ads and create messaging on your career site.

Here are three things you must do in your messaging to be successful:

Educate: First and foremost, you need to accurately describe your opportunity is and what you are looking for in a candidate.  For some companies, this is also an opportunity to describe your company and what they do.

The biggest thing here is to make sure your job messaging makes sense and answers the questions that candidates have.

Sell: Once a candidate understands what the opportunity is, it’s time to sell them on the position (or generically on working for your company).  You can do this in a number of ways.  Give them reasons why your company is a leader in their field, tell them about the advanced training and skills they will build, introduce them to employees that have done great things or talk about your great benefits and perks.

Find what makes your company and employment opportunities special and make sure to include that in your messaging.

Screen: This may seem a little counter-intuitive but your messaging is also a great way to screen out non-qualified candidates.  By including the key qualifications, you can provide candidates with a baseline for what is needed.  This will hopefully screen out the “right” candidates in the process.

The key is to identify the few needed skills and qualifications that will matter in the position and not get bogged down in a laundry list of requirements.

If you can educate, sell and screen in your apply process, you will ultimately be able to see results in your applicant flow and the quality of the applicants you receive.  The key is to improve your messaging and measure it with recruitment metrics.  With constant iteration, you will be able to make your messaging that much more effective.

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 recruiting messaging, being baller, candidate experience awards, job referrals and marketing & sourcing.

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

3 Stories you should be able to tell candidates by Steve Boese (@SteveBoese)

Great piece on a few ways you can create messaging for recruiting candidates to your team.

What is Baller? by Paul Hebert (@Incentinal)

Great post on what it means to be baller and how to foster better employees.  With a hat tip to Kris Dunn.

The 2012 Candies Start Today by Ed Newman (@newmaed)

Ed writes his intro blog post on this year’s candidate experience awards.  If you want to participate, registration is now open.

Need any more proof?  Job Referrals are REALLY Important by John Hollon (@JohnHollon)

Nice piece by John on referrals and key stats on their importance.  Also includes a great info-graphic.

Marketing and Sourcing: A Marketing Mix Approach to Sourcing by Lance Haun (@thelance)

Nice feature article with Sal Loukos on how to think through the full sourcing process from a marketing perspective.

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.

Talent Networks or as they are sometimes called Talent Communities (we explain the difference here) are an important trend developing in the recruitment marketing space.  The ability to capture candidates via opt-in and direct sourcing and internally build your own talent pools and pipelines is a game changer for many organizations.  This is because having populations of talent at your fingertips instead of having to start the recruiting process from scratch for every new job opening enables the organization to save precious budget as well get access to talent more quickly.

In speaking with customers and prospects, pretty much all understand the value of creating these talent pools but where many have questions in how to keep engaged with candidates in their Talent Network.  When you create this Talent Network it’s important to keep engaged on a regular basis with candidates not only to keep your organization top of mind as candidates think about their next opportunities but to make sure they take action when the right position comes from your organization.

But what types of communications should you be sending them?  When I start with this discussion I usually begin with talking about using email or SMS to communicate with candidates.  These mediums are ideal as they enable you to mass communicate and track candidate interactions with recruitment metrics. Social recruiting channels can also be included in this but I see the most value if you have dedicated resources that can respond quickly to candidate engagement (which many organizations don’t currently have in place today).

For this post, I’m going to focus on email & SMS, however, many of the communication strategies can be leveraged in social as well.  When using email and SMS, there are a number of communication types that you can use to stay engaged with candidates in your Talent Network.  Here are a few to consider:

Targeted Job Listings:  If a candidate opts in to your Talent Network, more often than not they probably want to hear about your job opportunities.  But they don’t want to hear about ALL your opportunities but moreso what opportunities fit their interest and skill-set.  When you send your job communications make sure to make them valuable to the candidates you send it to.

All your candidate populations should receive targeted job opportunities that fit how they came into the system.  Your marketing talent pipelines should receive only marketing related jobs while your sales candidates should receive sales opportunities.  This is important because if you just do a generic job opportunity email to all candidates, candidates may opt out as they don’t see value in the communications.

Employer Branding Content: On your Career Site, you probably already have a lot of great content that you can re-purpose to engage with candidates.  From videos on your company & employees to articles on cool things your company and workforce are doing, you have a lot of content that can help candidates learn more about your company and what they should want to work there.

Thought Leadership Content:  This is content that can help candidates develop their skills.  Be helpful with blog articles or vidoes you create on the recruiting process (interviewing tips, resume reviews, etc.) as well as provide helpful industry information to your targeted candidate populations (for example, interesting articles on Google’s semantic search impact on SEO would be a great communication to Marketing professionals.)

The key here is to mix into your own content with outside or 3rd party content you find valuable.  If you can make your organization a valued source of information candidates will be more likely to open your emails and hopefully apply for your job opportunities.

In terms of frequency of email campaigns, I typically recommend sending at least one email communication a month to candidates with the optimal being once a week to once every two weeks.   You want to toe the happy medium between continually communication and spamming their inbox.

Keeping engaged with your Talent Network requires some up front work from your recruiting organization from setting up email templates to creating the content needed to share with your candidate audiences.  However, once you have the process set up and understand the communications you want to send, it will become easier to continually engage with candidates in your Talent Network.

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 Big Data, Recruiting Videos, Talent Communities, Work Metaphors and Used Car Salesmen.

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

Big Data: The Question Matters most by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

John shares his thoughts on Big Data and what it can help us learn.  Well worth the read.

The Blog Squad: Creativity, Engagement & Talent(ed) Community at #OKHR by Crystal Miller (@TheOneCrystal)

Interesting piece on Talent Communities and what they really need to be about to be successful.

Can you spot the big error in this recruitment video? by Andy Headworth (@AndyHeadworth)

Thought this was a great example of the importance of a call to action on your recruitment marketing content.

Marriage, Chess & the Zoo: How Metaphors Reveal our Thinking by Jason Lauritsen (@JasonLauritsen)

Jason shares his favorite metaphors for work and what it means to his view of work.  What metaphors do you use?

Recruiting: Things I’ve learned from Used Car Salesmen by Meredith Soleau (@LifesCrazyJoke)

Nice post by Meredith on some key traits recruiters could learn from car salesmen.  Number 4 is a big one.

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.

It’s hard to argue that the candidate experience is not an important area to focus on in your recruitment marketing strategy.  Common logic would dictate that if you improve your candidate experience that should result in an increase in your apply rates and overall recruiting ROI.  But the real question is how do you measure the impact of candidate experience?

Here is my opinion on what you should be tracking and I’d love some other opinions on this.  So please either ping me (chris@smashfly.com) or add your thoughts to the comments.

The first thing that needs to happen is to continue to measure and keep track of your high level recruitment metrics that you already analyze (time to fill, cost per hire, etc.)  But now we need to go deeper into the data and determine how the new initiative for candidate experience affected these metrics.  It’s important to track over time and benchmark how these metrics perform before and after the launch of these initiatives.  This can give you a good basic idea of how successful your actions have been to these baseline metrics.

Second, you need to go a little deeper in capturing metrics that can help you understand your candidate experience from a micro-level so you know what areas and initiatives have an impact on every area of the candidate experience.

Here are a few areas that I think should be a focus:

Recruitment Funnel Metrics:  When you are measuring the candidate experience, it’s important to understand how it affects every stage of your recruitment funnel.  More specifically, how it affects if a candidate moves on to the next stage in the recruitment process.

By capturing data on views, apply clicks, contacts, applicants, qualified candidates and hires, you are able to determine bottlenecks in your recruitment process that need to be fixed in your process to improve candidate experience (from poor job ad messaging to a confusing apply process).  This will also help determine in what areas your candidate experience initiatives has the greatest impact.

Sources of Influence:  How are candidates interacting with your employer brand and recruiting content?  This goes beyond just tracking the “Source of Application” but tracking every engagement you have with a candidate.  From the job they apply for to them opting into your Talent Network to what pages on your Career Site they visit to interactions they’ve had with your social recruiting profiles.  All these interactions have an impact on a candidate’s experience and it’s important to track when these interactions happen and what the result is from these interactions (i.e. applies, qualified, hires, etc.)

Candidate Surveys: The two above can usually be measured automatically across the process, however, it’s also important to get data that can’t be covered by your current technology.  This is where candidate surveys comes in.  By having candidates fill out candidate experience surveys, it will provide a way to check the accuracy of your data as well as capture significant qualitative data to help to better understand the quantitative data you already have.

Contact Surveys:  Surveying the candidates that finish the apply process is great but you may not want to stop there.  What about the candidates that don’t complete the apply process but do decide to join your Talent Network?  Since you are able to engage with them, it’s possible to reach out and ask them why they didn’t complete the apply process (and encourage them to apply).

This information has the potential to be very insightful in understanding the negative aspects of your candidate experience and is something you should consider trying to do with your current recruiting systems.

As you begin capturing the data above, it’s important to look at it in concert with your other metrics.  Each data point tells only part of the story and by viewing all the data, you can start to form a picture of what’s working and what’s not working in your candidate experience.

Do you have other ways that you can measure the candidate experience?  I would love to hear your thoughts.