When I think about engaging your Talent Community, I like to think of it in two main categories: the Push and the Pull.

For the push, this is all the content you create and push out to your Talent Network of recruiting contacts.  From email & SMS blasts to video & blogging content to pod-casts to job opportunities, your a conducting one way communication with these specific groups of contacts.  While this is not ideal, these methods are still extremely valuable in terms of getting your employment message across and keeping you top of mind with potential candidates.

Other key benefits to push strategy include:

• Being able to communicate with a larger group of candidates.
• Candidates can choose when they engage with this content.
• All your content is indexed and the more it’s viewed, the more likely it will be found by others.
• The resources and time required is readily apparent.

For the Pull, this is creating places for candidates to engage with your recruiters and employees.  It is through these activities that you get a true two-way communication with candidates and enable them to have a voice in the recruitment marketing process.

While this requires more effort in terms of keeping candidates and the community engaged and making your company available to candidates, it can provide some great potential benefits including:

• Better communication with candidates that should increase employer brand and provide ideas for ways to improve process.
• More data and information about candidates who are potential fits for your company.
• The ability to engage with both active and passive job seekers.

The Pull method enables your organization to engage and most importantly communicate with potential candidates.

3 Ways to begin communication with candidates

With the influx of social technology, there are a number of ways to begin communicating with candidates and providing platforms for candidates to reach out to your company.

Here are three that may work for your organization:

IM Help Chat:  One of the most frustrating parts of being a job seeker is having something go wrong with your application or the recruiting process.  Having a IM Chat on your Career Site or in the application process, can be a great way to ensure a better apply process for candidates and also provide a great outlet for candidates to reach out to you with questions.

Another great benefit is the great qualitative data you’ll receive from candidates on your recruiting process.  This can help you improve it for future candidates.

Twitter Chats: There are already a number of great Twitter Chats out there (#TChat, #HFChat, #JobHuntChat, #CareerChat to name a few) but you can easily start one as an easy way to engage with candidates via Twitter.  For those that don’t know, a Twitter chat is a simple Hashtag (#) that everyone part of the chat uses to contribute to the conversation.  The main chat usually happens at the same time each week but the conversation continues through the week with users using the hashtag.

In order for a Twitter Chat to be successful, you should probably already have some presence on Twitter.  If you are new to Twitter, I suggest tuning into one of the Twitter chats above to not only see how it works but also connect with other like minded Twitter users.

Subject Matter Communities: This is the holy grail of Talent Communities.  A place where top talent in the industry interact and engage not only with your employees but other candidates as well.   These communities aren’t job or recruiting specific but focus on issues concerning the industry and topics that matter for these potential candidates.

In the best case, you are able to create a place that top talent lives when it comes to industry networking & knowledge.  Your company then achieves positive branding impact for being the administrator for these interactions.  You also would have access to engage with all these potential candidates.

By setting up ways for candidates to initiate communication with your company, you are providing access for more engagement and deeper relationships with potential candidates.  Just like other recruiting initiatives, however, you need to make sure to track & analyze key recruitment metrics to determine the success of each initiative.

The push and pull methods are both integral to getting out your employment message and engaging with candidates and should be used in concert to form an overall branding strategy.

We are very excited to announce the launch of a new job board benchmarking solution in our Recruitment Marketing Metrics (RMM) module: WildFire Scorecards.

With WildFire Scorecards, users are provided with the aggregate data for every recruiting source in the WildFire Platform.  With this new capability, users are able to see important source effectiveness data directly in the Recruitment Ad Distribution (RAD) user interface enabling them to easily compare and contrast recruiting destinations and make better sourcing decisions.

Each WildFire Scorecard reports the benchmark-ed performance of a job board’s performance across a portion of SmashFly customers, providing aggregate results for average views, apply clicks and applicants per job campaign with the associated corresponding click through rates.

WildFire Scorecards are free for all SmashFly customers leveraging the Recruitment Ad Distribution (RAD) module.  Recruitment Source providers interested in obtaining direct access to their organization’s WildFire Scorecard can send inquiries to sales@smashfly.com.

Take a look below at a few WildFire Scorecard screenshots from our Recruitment Ad Distribution (RAD) module.  Please note that the numbers included are as of 2/20/2012 and are a portion of our overall recruitment ad data:

For more information on our new WildFire Scorecards, please reach out to us via our online contact form.

The official press release is here.

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 #Linsanity, employer branding, sourcing on social media, challenge in careers and employee shelf life.

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

What Does Good Look Like?  Lessons from #Linsanity by Hung Lee (@Wise_Man_Say)

Hung shares some great recruiting takeaways and lessons to be learned from Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in Gotham.

How to Effectively Source Talent from Social Media & Networks by Glen Cathey (@GlenCathey)

Great and detailed post on the process Glen uses to source talent on the major social media channels with helpful screenshots.

Employment Branding Elephant by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

I like how John breaks down Employment Brand into 3 main facets.  It’s well thought out and worth a look.

Are Your Candidates & New Hires This Excited by Jessica Lee (@Jessica_Lee)

Jessica goes straight to a core of recruiting – making sure we connect the right candidates with the right amount of challenge in their jobs.

Employment Shelf Life by Charlie Judy (@HRFishbowl)

Love this post on the shelf life in terms of engagement from employees.  It won’t last forever and it’s up to organization leaders to understand and identify when it’s waning.

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.

When looking at recruitment technology, the first thing you need to answer why you need it.  You need to determine the “what” in terms of the actions and functionality you need it to provide in order to successfully implement your recruitment marketing strategy.

I encourage you to sit down with your recruitment team and brainstorm.

• What do you do today that could be better?
• What initiatives are you not doing today that you would like to?
• What functionality is needed in order to be successful in these endeavors?
• What can your current technology can provide in terms of this functionality?

Flesh out what you currently have with your recruiting strategy and start mapping out where you want to take it.  This will help you determine that functionality and technology you need to drive this evolution.

To get you started here’s a stream of consciousness list of recruiting functionality you may ask about when evaluating the recruitment technology you need:

• Automatically attaching web and social data to all CRM contacts including Twitter, Facebook, Blog, etc.
• Build your Talent Network automatically through recruitment ads, Career Site, social profiles and other recruiting content.  And centrally house these contacts
• Mobile Friendly Job Pages, Talent Network forms and Career Sites
• Quick and easy ways to create automatic Talent Pipelines for use in email & SMS campaigns
• Smart recommendations from your Talent Network on candidates that fit new job openings
• Create simple landing pages and custom content on the fly to target specific candidate types and local employer branding
• Make sure that your recruiting & job content is SEO friendly.  Just as important, have ways to increase the number of inbound links to this content
• Automatically post jobs to job boards, niche sites, social networks or anywhere else you distribute your jobs
• Job Distribution to any global or domestic recruiting channel & job board
• Tracking and measuring qualified candidates and hires back to the recruiting source
• Track all the candidate interactions that led to a hire / apply
• Collective benchmarking data from different companies and industries for best recruiting sources and candidate drop off rates
• Predictive metrics that enable you to easily understand what recruiting sources you should use and provides useful recommendations
• Measure and track all the touch-points with a candidate including email, SMS, phone calls, etc.
• Easy video embedding into apply process for employer branding.
• Full administration metrics on recruiter and sourcer activities to determine effectiveness
• A better quicker apply process that enables candidates to also link their social profiles
• Identify Alternative Recruiting Channels that can be used to increase ROI
• Recruitment marketing metrics to determine bottlenecks in your attraction / apply process
• Resume Sourcing to a number of different resume databases

Some of the recruitment initiatives above can be achieved with today’s technology, however, there are some that still require innovation to be fully realized.

Once you understand what you need and want out of your recruiting process, it will make it easier to determine the technology to get so you make the best decision for your company.

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 sourcing, recruiting the individual, Sodexo case study, creating your employment stories and Oracle acquiring Taleo.

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

Sourcing through Adversity by AmyBeth Hale (@ResearchGoddess)

Love this post by AmyBeth on Ada La Chaux’s great presentation at #SourceCon.  You can check out the presentation here.

Recruiting the Individual: 3 Steps to Success by Trish McFarlane (@TrishMcFarlane)

This post hits the core truth of recruiting.  You need to personalize your efforts to truly get candidates to want to work for your company.

How Sodexo Does Recruitment and Employer Branding on Social Media by Marion Muller (@MarionMuller_fr) (@SodexoCareers)

Terrific Case Study on Sodexo and what they’ve done with their social recruiting and employer branding strategy.  Some great takeaways.

Employer Stories: The 5 You Must Tell to Humanize Your Brand by Michelle Dortch (@MicheleDortch) (@TalentMinded)

Some helpful tips on how to create recruitment content and stories that are meaningful.

4 Things to Consider About Oracle’s Acquisition of Taleo by Madeline Laurano (@Madtarquin)

The big news this week was Taleo being acquired by Oracle, while we’ll have some opinions on this over the next few weeks, here is Madeline’s great take on what to consider with the acquisition.

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.

Instead the most important aspect is how you can display / make available this data in a way where you can easily make meaningful insights into your recruitment & sourcing initiatives.

Making sure you are fulfilling your data needs

In order to make sure this is happening, you need to identify two main things:

What data?:  Basically you need to identify and decide on what data is crucial to your organization in terms of making better strategic recruiting decisions.  The key is understanding what data you need at your fingertips always and what data can be leveraged when you want to dig deeper.  This will help you determine what your data needs are and what you need to capture in your job distribution campaigns.

Can you current process / technology support this?:  Once you determine the data you need, it’s important to take a look at your technology and if this data can be provided & presented in a way to easily make sense of it.  Because without the ability to present the right data in an efficient way, you are lost knowing what you need but being unable to provide it.

By answering these two questions you are well on your way to understanding your recruiting funnel better which can help you form a better overall recruitment strategy.

The Power of Collective Data

First and foremost, the first focus for any recruiting organization in terms of data is to make sure that they are fulfilling their needs in house.  They need to make sure they are getting the right data and are making it available in the right format.

One last important aspect of internal data is that you should make sure that all of your recruiting / sourcing data is in one place.  This will make it so you can make easier comparisons on what sources are working and what sources you should cut bait with while giving you a holistic view of all the activities you are doing to bring in qualified candidates.

Once you have your internal data processes in order, it’s time to look at what I call collective data.  Collective data is something many technology providers (including us) are working hard to provide.

Most technology providers in the recruiting space have access to a tremendous amount of data from a number of different organizations and industries.  From candidate drop-off rates to recruiting source data, there is a bevy of data out there that can be extremely valuable to companies looking for recruitment trends.

What would happen if this data was made available to every user in the aggregate (obviously, anonymously) so that you could see recruiting source data and recruitment metrics for other industries and recruiting organizations.  And best of all, it would be great to sort this data based on different filters including job categories, experience levels, industries, etc.

With this data, you would be able to answer questions like:

• Are my candidate drop-off rates higher or lower than the industry?
• What recruiting source is best for Senior Marketing professionals?
• What job board / recruiting source should I use that I currently don’t?
• How does my social recruiting or Recruitment SEO strategy compare to other organizations in terms of results?

The sharing of collective data has huge potential to help recruiting organizations to greatly enhance the recruiting strategies they are using, benchmark their efforts against other organizations and most importantly improve the ROI they receive from these strategies.

This data is still a little ways off but is coming up quick in the rear view mirror.  However, when it comes organizations need to be ready to share their data in order to be able to leverage and draw insights from the collective.

Candidate Experience is one of the biggest hot button issues in recruiting.  Most recruiters can agree it’s important, but there’s a lot of discussion on what you can to improve your overall candidate experience.

But while it’s important to think about what YOU can do to improve your candidate experience, the question that I think is just as important to answer is:

What can we reasonably expect candidates to do in order to apply for a job?

The real core to the issue is what is a reasonable amount of time and effort a candidate should have to expend in order to become an applicant.  There is no universal answer for all organizations but really something that must be decided by every organization on their own.

The first thing you need to do is to understand your recruitment marketing process from a candidate stand-point.  Here are three areas to take a look at:

Double Sign-In Required:  Some ATS solutions make it so a candidate needs to create an account in order to apply.  Even more troublesome is that some of them make you sign in just after creating a profile.  This double sign-in can be a huge hurdle for most candidates and just isn’t needed.  See if there are ways to remove all the double work in your ATS application.

Best case scenario, your application should be a one page form with all the information you require (only the crucial questions should be included) as well as a way to capture the resume.  After they submit the application is the time to create an account based on their email address.

What are the Expectations?:  Very easy to do but not done nearly enough is setting expectations for the process.  How long is the full process going to take?  How many pages do I need to fill out?

If you can set expectations for a candidate early on, you will see a lot less animosity from candidates.  That and making your process easier and shorter.

No Other Points of Contact:  What happens when I get to your application and realize the job isn’t for me but I still am interested in your company?  In what ways can I still interact and here about other opportunities?

For this make sure your social recruiting profiles and Talent Community forms are easily available on every page of your Career Site and embedded in your recruitment ad distribution process.  Enable candidates to easily engage and opt-in to your recruitment messaging.

There are a number of ways and areas of your process that can help you improve your candidate experience.  The key is looking at every aspect of your recruitment marketing process and understanding what are the big pain points from a candidate’s perspective.  Also make sure to analyze the key recruitment metrics you capture in your recruitment funnel so that you can 1) understand where your bottlenecks are and 2) know if the changes you make to the process are having a positive affect on qualified applicant flow.

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, employer branding, passive candidates and recruiting videos.

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

Employment Branding – The Message by Teela Jackson (@TeelaJackson)

Love this straightforward post on the questions you should ask when you are crafting your employer brand.

An Employer Brand is a Relationship by John Sumser (@JohnSumser)

Interesting take on where employer branding is going.  The future is definitely upon us in terms of creating custom messaging to different talent audiences.

Candidate Bill of Rights by Tim Sackett (@TimSackett)

One of the better blogs I’ve read on candidate experience.  Well worth the read.

Stop with the Recruiting Fashion Trends by Morgan Hoogvelt (@SuperRecruiter)

Interesting look at the trend in sourcing “passive” candidates and analyzing if it’s gotten totally out of hand.

5 Reasons VC Firms Love Recruiting Technology in 2012 #HRTech by Sarah White (@ImSoSarah) (@HRTechBlog)

Nice look at the recruiting technology industry by Sarah.  I agree with all the points.

The Best Worst Recruiting Video (so far) by Steve Boese (@SteveBoese)

Steve shares a fun recruiting video from Twitter and some great thoughts on employment branding.

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.

But your recruiters can’t do everything and finding ways to automate and reduce the time associated with these tasks is an important goal for any recruiting organization.  The key is to make sure you automate these processes intelligently as all automation is not the same.  You need to make sure the automation you put in place enables you to perform as close as possible as doing it manually would do.

Some activities can’t (or maybe I should say shouldn’t) be automated.  For instance, candidate screening while it may be enhanced with technology should always be done by your recruiters in person.

However, there are a number of functions that can be automated that can help drive your recruiting efforts.  Here are the big 2:

Job Distribution: Job posting is probably one of the most time consuming parts of the recruiting process.  While many organizations don’t post jobs manually anymore and use technology services to post jobs, many of these solutions provide further automation to take job posting off of your recruiters plates.

The key is to find a solution that enables you to post to the correct recruiting destinations for each specific job opportunity you have (whether it’s for a marketing professional or an engineers).  As posting for these different job categories will require different recruiting mixes.  Find a solution that intelligently automates your job distribution and provides recruiting metrics for all these postings.

Build Your Talent Network: Whether directly in your recruiting process or via your Recruitment SEO site, there are a number of ways to capture recruiting contacts in your recruiting process.  The key is to make sure you have opt-in forms available on all recruiting portals where your employer brand comes into contact with potential candidates.

This will help you continuously build your Talent Network without any extra labor.  And with this Talent Network you will be able to engage with potential candidates and increase your overall applicant flow for all future job positions.

To make these candidates more valuable to your database, you may also want to ask a few screening questions to get more information for evaluation & engagement.  Or connect with them after they opt-in to ask for more information on their skills.

Automating certain activities in the recruiting process can help your recruiters get more done and more importantly drive success in your recruiting strategy.  The important part is making sure that you automate the right processes and your automation is done intelligently so you don’t lose the value in these activities.

This automation will enable your recruiters to focus on more important recruiting tasks.

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.