Recruiting is a Triathlon, not a Sprint
I competed in my first triathlon this past weekend and overall I was really happy with the results. I walked off the course, knowing that I put everything I had into the race and beat a few of my friends in the process (which was the goal).
As I look back at the event, there are a few things that I came away with that I think fit really well with recruiting. Here are my takeaways:
Actual results trump Perceptions every time: When I finally was able to see my times for the Triathlon, I was surprised. After crossing the finish line, I thought my bike stage was by far the part where I made up time on everyone else with the run being the slowest of the three stages. But in looking over my recorded times, the run was actually my best event. I was able to finish 15th in my age group because I ran the 12th fastest run.
The key here is that my perceptions of where I excelled turned out to be very different from the actual results. It is important in recruiting that you don’t allow your perceptions of what works best to cloud your judgment when evaluating your best recruiting channels. Collect the right recruitment metrics and make sure your perceptions actually tie into the actual results.
Wear many hats but always have your favorite: For the triathlon, I had to train and get comfortable in three main areas (swimming, biking, running). I needed to know that I could do the distances for each as well how far I could push myself. But all through the process of training, I knew my favorite event would be the bike. While not my best event, the bike allowed me to set the tone for the run and where I was in the pack (and it also allowed me to put some serious distance in between myself and my friends in the Tri).
As a recruiter, you need to be flexible in the positions and people that you specialize in filling for your organization. Wear many hats in helping fill positions across the organization and always look for opportunities to match up candidates with other positions your company is hiring (not just your own.) But the key is to also know and understand your sweet spot as well whether it’s Java Programmers, External Sales or Customer Service. Those are the areas you really shine and can add the most value to your organization.
Preparation is the key to everything: As I was training for the triathlon, I made sure to master the distances for the Triathlon and then some, ultimately being able to do 1.5 times the distances required. Without this training wouldn’t have known I could push as hard as I did and I would have had a much worse time. I also knew in the back of my mind that I had done all this before, so I could build on all my previous efforts instead of recreating them.
For Recruitment Marketing, preparation is key as well! There are many ways to prepare for recruiting and here are just a few:
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- Decide what recruiting channels are the best to use for a given position by looking at your recruitment metrics.
- Identifying candidate contacts in your Recruitment CRM or Opt-In database that meet the skill sets for the position. Reach out to them. (If you don’t have a CRM or Opt-In option on your careers page, I highly advise you get one.)
- What does the interview process look like and who’s interviewing the candidates? Make sure to know this so you can set an expectation for qualified candidates.
Recruiting is a long and hard road. However, continued and sustained success in this area can lead to great benefits and growth prospects for your company. Make sure to think of recruiting efforts as a triathlon (or marathon or journey) where preparation, metrics and flexibility can lead to continued success. Thank me later!
A Great Employer Brand is fueled by great customer service
At SmashFly, we are committed to providing great customer service to our clients. We love our clients and above all else, we aim to make them as happy as possible. Happy clients not only provide the best feedback on our product but they actively tell others about it, are more willing to learn about new product offerings and are much more likely to keep coming back year after year!
Offering great customer service isn’t just important in selling a tangible product but it also is extremely important in recruiting as you try to build your employer brand.
Here are three principles we live by in offering great customer service and a few ways you can provide this in your recruitment marketing process:
Timely Transparent Response: Whenever we receive a request from a client, we look at the request and provide an immediate response. On top of that, we provide an expectation on when we expect to resolve the issue at hand to provide transparency.
For Recruiting: You can do this a few ways. First, make sure to get back to any inquiries or questions you receive about a position within at least 3 days from candidates. Second, make sure to be transparent in providing candidates with an expectation of how long the recruiting process will take and what the steps involved will be. These two steps can go a long way to heightening the experience of your candidates.
Be a Good Listener: We are constantly listening to our clients on new features we could add to our Recruitment Marketing Platform or new ways that we could think of doing things. While we don’t (and can’t) implement everything, some of our best innovations have come from client feedback.
For Recruiting: First, I would try and solicit feedback from candidates as they go through your recruiting process on everything from how did you like the application to how would you rate the interviews. Second, set up a robust recruitment metrics system in your recruiting process, so that you can “listen” to candidates actions. Are candidates dropping off of your online application? Is your job ad messaging compelling? What job sites do the best candidates hang out at?
Make Information Easily Accessible: At SmashFly, we always make time for clients when they want us to do a walkthrough of a particular component or product offering. The main reason is we want our clients to be the most informed as possible so they can use the component successfully. In addition to live walkthroughs, we are starting to create video walkthroughs of our product offerings so clients can review them at their convenience. This helps to cut down frustration in not knowing how to use our product and ensures that clients get the most out of our components by using them correctly.
For Recruiting: The biggest thing you can do is provide as much information as possible on working at your company and the position that you are hiring for. You can do this in a variety of ways but a few important ones are creating a dedicated career site, using web video directly in your apply process and utilizing social networks to interact with potential candidates (with links to your profiles from your career site).
Customer Service is a great way to differentiate your company and ultimately your employer brand. In the end, you are selling your company to the most qualified candidates and the better you are at communicating and presenting the opportunity to enable candidates to make an educated employment decision, the more top talent you will be able to attract to your company!
Innovation comes by trying new things and measuring them!
I love the saying “Throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks!” That’s experimentation at it’s finest in trying to solve important problems. But the real key in this statement that I think gets missed most of the time and is the most important is the “see what sticks” part. Sure deciding what to throw (i.e. the viable choices) is important but ultimately measuring (or seeing what sticks) is the key to really driving innovation from these types of experiments.
Deciding what to measure and how to measure it is key to making educated and better recruiting decisions and we stress this on a daily basis. We are consistently asked by clients and prospects questions about their recruitment marketing strategy. What new job boards should we be using? How long should our online application be? What should we include in our job advertisement?
The answer we always give is “it depends”. While we have a good deal of important collective data that can help answer these questions, all this data is ill-equipped to answer these questions for a single company / scenario. We’ve seen time and time that collective data is imperfect for these types of questions and that in-house personalized data is the best way to ultimately decide the best way to go with most recruiting questions.
So try out new job boards in your job ad distribution, test out new job ad messaging, shorten your online application, start using social networks for recruiting and experiment with a whole slew of new recruiting initiatives at your company to foster innovation within your recruiting organization. But don’t do it blind, set up a process to collect key recruitment metrics for each of these new initiatives to prove if these experiments are true innovations or rotten ideas!
Recruitment Metrics: In Real-Time or don’t bother!
We talk a lot on this blog about the importance & power of metrics and data. But one aspect of metrics & data that is not talked about but is extremely important is how quickly you report and make available the data which you make decisions on every day.
Ask yourself. When making an important decision at your company or more simply in your life, how recent do you want to data that you are receiving? Most people will say they want the most recent data available! The fact is that data a few years ago or even a few months ago can be imperfect in helping you make decisions for today’s business climate and competitive companies need to find ways to collect & present all the data collected in real time!
For recruiting, it’s even more important to have all the most recent recruitment metrics / data at your fingertips. Here are 3 ways that real-time data can help you make better recruiting decisions:
Identifying New Recruiting Channels: Recruitment Metrics in real time can help you quickly identify new channels you should distribute your job ads to directly in your recruitment marketing process. Just like Google Analytics can help you quickly identify keywords or referral sources you should target for your website, recruitment metrics can identify free recruiting channels you should be using in your job ad distribution as well as identify channels that are not performing as well. Best of all, metrics in real time allow you to act on these recruiting channels, enabling you to leverage these new channels in tomorrow’s job campaign.
Our Online Application Stinks: Real-Time Metrics are great also at telling you what’s broken. Let’s say that your online application is too long and more than 50% of applicants have been failing to complete the application. Real-Time Metrics could be telling you today that this needs to be fixed so you can take immediate action. Which is much better than learning a month later and realizing you’ve lost 1/2 your applicants for something that could have been fixed in a day’s time.
New Initiative: is it working? – Real-time Metrics can give you a quick look into if a new initiative is working or not, without having to wait a month or longer to determine success. Are you using a new job board, starting to leverage social recruiting or trying out a new job ad format? Metrics in Real time can help you gauge the performance of these new initiatives and enable you to make & test small changes with them along the way.
When you begin to think about collecting metrics in your recruitment marketing funnel, don’t settle for anything less than real-time. Historical data will always be important for some decisions but real-time data enables you to make more informed decisions on the best data available. Get your data in real time, you won’t be disappointed!
Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 7.17.10 to 7.23.10
Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about recruitment marketing. This week’s topics include questions that will help you hire better people, 3 ways to improve employee innovation, 2010 engagement trends and why we can’t lose creativity!
Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:
10 Questions to Help You Hire Better People by Kevin Wheeler (@Kwheeler)
Nice piece on identifying the character traits you are looking for in potential employees and how you can display these in your organization.
3 Principles for Creating Innovation by Chris Ferdinandi (@chrisferdinandi)
Short but spot on piece about encouraging innovation within your organization.
2010 Employee Engagement Trends by Monster (@Monster_WORKS)
Are you engaging with your employees? Monster provides 6 ways to start engaging with your employees today. I really like number 2!
Blinded by Science by Steve Boese (@SteveBoese)
We talk a lot about recruitment metrics on this blog but it is always good to remember that is the creative recruiting ideas that make great recruiting organizations. Metrics are a great evaluation and validation tool for these ideas but creativity is essential.
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 send me an email at chris@smashfly.com or follow us on Twitter @smashfly.
Recruitment Metrics: Not for those with commitment issues!
I spend a lot of time on this blog speaking about the importance of setting up the process of collecting and tracking recruitment metrics in your recruiting process. But in the end, that is only the first step of the process!
The second step is harder and probably more important. It is showing a commitment to the metrics you collect and integrating these metrics into your overall decision making process. This is where most recruiting organizations fall off, however, it is extremely important that metrics become a part of the long term plan.
The power of recruitment metrics comes from the iterative nature that they possess. The more data and metrics you collect, the better you can understand your recruiting process and make important recruiting decisions. It makes no sense to collect and track these metrics in your process if you never look at them when you are making decisions.
If you are not yet convinced, here are three reasons why a commitment to metrics is necessary:
Avoid Costly Mistakes - Recruitment Metrics help you identify what’s wrong in your recruiting process. Whether it’s an expensive job board that is driving only a few applicants to career site or the application process you have where a majority of your applicants drop off, recruitment metrics can help you identify and remove these problem areas: saving you money and increasing the amount of qualified applicants in the process.
Identify Important Trends - Metrics can help you identify key new recruiting channels that are up and coming for your industry. By keeping on top of the metrics, you will be able to see what recruiting channels are growing and what are languishing and accurately plan your recruitment mix and job ad distributon for the future.
Quickly Test Ideas - Recruitment metrics are a great way to quickly test if you ideas and decisions are sound. By carefully monitoring the right performance metrics against recruiting activities that you already do, you can quickly identify what recruiting campaigns you should continue and which ones are not worth your valuable time.
So as you are building out of the processes for collecting and tracking your recruitment metrics, please know that this is not the be all end all. Now starts the most important part of the process, using these valuable metrics to strengthen and optimize your recruitment marketing efforts.
Lessons in candidate engagement from the Old Spice Man!
If you didn’t see it, Old Spice ran a great marketing campaign last week. Through social media platforms, they asked fans to send in questions for the Old Spice guy (who appears in their commercials) and within 24 hours created over 100 video responses to the best questions they received. This is the best example I’ve seen to date of a brand engaging with their customers and fans in a personalized way.
So what lessons can we learn from Old Spice in terms of candidate engagement for recruiting. Here are a few:
Timely Response is key - One of the reasons why the Old Spice campaign was so successful was that they created the videos all in one day so fans received their responses within 24 hours. If it took them a week to create all the videos, the impact wouldn’t have been the same.
One of the best ways to improve candidate experience is by providing quick responses. You want to provide candidates with timely information and let them know what to expect with your hiring process. Timely response will make sure that candidates have a more favorable view of your employer brand as well as be more apt to apply to future positions at your company.
Personalized can be for the masses - When you look at the Old Spice video campaign, it is amazing to me how they made the campaign feel so personal to everyone, even though they only personally responded to around 100 people. The main reason for this is because they made all these responses in public forum for everyone to see online.
By leveraging social media tools you can create an open forum for candidates to ask you about your company and the positions you offer (a simple FAQ page that answers past candidate questions would work as well). This transparency shows candidates that you are responsive and care about the people you bring into your company thus increasing your employer brand.
Sustainability - The Old Spice video responses were a huge deal this week. Everyone was talking about them but now the chatter is about other topics. A hard day’s work had a great impact on the Old Spice brand but now the campaign is over.
In recruiting, you don’t really have this luxury and therefore need to set up tools and processes to keep in touch with qualified candidates 365 days a year. This will be a long process that requires consistent effort to be successful. However, with the right effort you can build the right connections in your Talent Network and create a sustainable pipeline for talent in your company for years to come.
Targeting the right people - When you look at the Old Spice responses, you notice that they responded to people that were thought leaders on social networks, stars like Alyssa Milano or questions that they knew they could make a hilarious joke about. In short, they identified the people & questions that they felt would be the most influential to their campaign.
This is also true for recruiting. While you should get back to everyone that submitted an application to your company (if you can), you should go that extra mile to respond to those candidates that are the best qualified for the position and your company. Create ways to identify these top performers from the rest and utilize employment branding resources to engage with these candidates (Twitter, LinkedIn, email, SMS, etc.)
The key to all of this is that you don’t need a full staff of writers and video production staff on call, to make an impact with your candidate engagement. All you need is some effort to provide timely, personalized responses to candidates you identify as top performers in the pre-, during and post-stages of your application process. It isn’t “Post & Pray” but a continuous conversation with your Talent Network that will lead to recruitment marketing success.
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