It’s kind of amazing what teachers do, spending hours inside and outside the classroom to prepare students to take the next step and be productive citizens. It’s one of the hardest jobs that exists, if you ask me. They deserve those summers off.
In addition to the investment they make in time, they invest emotionally too. There’s a general expectation that they have to know and be everything for every student – to adapt their lesson to make sure that each child in the class is getting enough information to pass the rigor of standardized tests waiting at the end of the next year. And that’s just the beginning.
You’re also responsible for talking to parents and understanding without commiserating. There’s nothing worse than telling a parent that their child isn’t the brightest in the class. It’s one thing to deliver the news you haven’t gotten the job, or to simply avoid that conversation altogether. It’s another to share something hard about a child.
The hard conversations in teaching parallel many of the harder conversations in recruiting, too. It’s especially hard to teach in our industry because we come from so many different backgrounds and companies – each a filter for how we use information and coach our teams to do better and be better. It doesn’t help that we now live in a world of digital accountability where we have to teach our employees that what happens in the context of an interview or sourcing isn’t left there. It actually starts another conversation online.
The Power of Education
It’s 2016, and I’m not saying anything shocking when I remind you that what happens during your company’s recruiting process no longer stays within your company. It gets shared by candidates through social media and employer-review sites like Glassdoor and Indeedand new-to-the U.S. ones like kununu. And bad reviews, spread virally, can strangle your company’s reputation the way kudzu vines overtake trees in a Southern forest. A bad candidate experience can mean bad business for your company, period.
What we don’t talk about as often is the importance of teaching our teams about those hard moments. The ones where you’ve gone on Glassdoor or Indeed and found reviews of your company’s recruitment experience that were so bad, so stinging, that you just wanted to curl up in a fetal position and stay there for the rest of the day. You hear job candidates complain about unprepared interviewers, being sent to the wrong location, being asked the same questions over and over again by different people – the list goes on. Did they post withering reviews of long and complicated application forms, clunky careers sites and communication that was either lacking or totally nonexistent? Did they describe what sounds like some sort of Orwellian hell that’s totally at odds with the dedicated people and the reputable organization you know and work with?
Amid the skills shortages in many sectors, from manufacturing to IT, talented and experienced people have their pick of jobs to choose from and they aren’t hanging out on the likes of LinkedIn. Finding such folks and enticing them to join your company is harder than ever these days and it means that as leaders, our teaching skills are a must, not a nice-to-have to coach the right behavior and drive the outcomes we need to be successful.
Conferences and Coaching
As part of the Human Resource Executive® family of Conferences, it means my passion, along with the rest of the team, is teaching. That’s why we acquired the Recruiting Trends Conference last year. Our primary goal was to take a distinguished brand that’s been educating recruiters for 40 years and make it better, stronger and more relevant. To create a conference that effectively educates and addresses questions such as, what defines a great employer brand, what’s my role in creating it and how do I know when the goal’s been reached? Am I, as a recruiter, making the most effective use of my time each day? What are the latest tools and techniques for finding and connecting with passive candidates? How do I teach my team? The questions that drive our performance, inspire our passion and motivate us to keep working as hard as ever.
As part of that, two recruiting education powerhouses were brought into the fold to help create the program so it would better address the problems of talent teams: The Talent Board, the nonprofit organization known for the annual Candidate Experience Awards (CandEs), and The Sourcing Institute, co-founded by sourcing pioneer Shally Steckerl, which has helped dozens of the world’s best-known companies rebuild their recruiting function and master the art of sourcing.
Recruiting Trends’ new Candidate Experience session track features past CandE winners and Talent Board members, including well-known companies such as AT&T, Capital One, Humana and CA Technologies. These are recruitment leaders who actually “get it,” who understand the importance of employer brand and who’ve taken the challenge head on by remaking their recruiting experience into one that’s worth bragging about. Translating actions into teachable moments. The people behind the CandE Awards — recruiting veterans such as Elaine Orler, Gerry Crispin and Kevin Grossman — will also be teaching their tricks of the trade.
Meanwhile, Shally and his team are spear-heading Sourcing Labs, in which you’ll bring your laptop and get hands-on instruction in how to unlock the secrets of the web to find and connect with talented people who aren’t actively searching for a new job. Those elusive passive candidates require a different level of skill and savvy to bring them into the fold. It’s a learning opportunity for sourcers that are new to the game and the experienced folks because, like I said before, the times have changed. He and other TSI experts will show you ways to search for talent beyond the Google/Bing galaxy, learn how to be a world-class cyber sleuth, how to implement the recruiting function in a growth-phase startup company, and much more.
Our intent when creating this agenda was to make sure that Recruiting Trends 2016 covers the bases, from building stronger partnerships with your hiring managers to figuring out how to make your company more appealing to female job candidates with actionable lessons from practitioners and thought leaders. And in keeping with the theme of addressing what’s happening now in recruiting, general sessions feature fresh perspectives from well-known talent experts.
The renowned Dr. John Sullivan, author of 10 books and more than 900 articles on talent management, will deliver the opening keynote titled “Forget the Hype: Data-Based Recruiting Reveals What Actually Works.” Our closing keynote will be delivered by the outspoken and always engaging Margaret Graziano, CEO of KeenAlignment and author of The Wealth of Talent, who in her presentation “Taking a Conscious Approach to Hiring” will challenge attendees to rethink every aspect of how they attract, hire and retain people.
In an era in which companies are defined by the talent within them, recruiting is one of the most important jobs to have and holds the key to so many important lessons on the workforce. Recruiting Trends attendees will be better equipped to turn the wave and teach their counterparts so that they can go to the Glassdoors and Indeeds and be inspired, not devastated, by what they read.
Editor’s Note: Full disclosure – this post is sponsored. If you want to attend the #RecruitingTrends conference, you should visit http://www.recruitingtrendsconf.com/
About The Author:Andy McIlvaine is senior editor at Human Resource Executive® magazine and conference chair of its Recruiting Trends and Talent Acquisition Technology Conferences. He has more than 20 years of experience covering HR and recruiting. He is a graduate of Penn State University.
A recently launched app, tilr, hopes to make finding new employees as easy as swiping right on Tinder. It is the brainchild of Carisa Miklusak and Summer Crenshaw, both formerly of Careerbuilder, and their partner Luke Vigeant. The operational headquarters is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Tilr was launched during the first weekend of September. Its goal is to shorten the recruitment process that aggravates both HR managers and would-be workers alike by treating recruiting efforts as an on-demand effort.
“tilr replaces the resume, the job posting, the hiring process, the offer letter, the time clock, the exit interview and then repeats – it enables the full employment cycle on one platform at no cost to the worker or company until work is completed,” said Vigeant, tilr’s CTO.
Traditionally, a company in search of a new employee would either contact a recruitment agency, incurring the cost of outsourcing their hiring efforts, or post a job on one of the various platforms online. This would be the beginning of a lengthy process involving reading countless resumes, multiple interviews, and then finally a new worker is hired. With tilr an employer can fill in what it needs and the app will do the work of finding the right person.
On the other end, jobseekers sign up and fill in what their skills are. tilr handles the process of vetting their credentials and then conducts any necessary background checks. Employers post their needs and are matched with workers who have the skills they’re looking for, not unlike a dating website. tilr focuses on skills rather than such things as degrees or previously holding similar job titles.
tilr’s Summer Crenshaw, COO and acting CMO
“It’s crazy that people are relegated to their job title,” Crenshaw told the Cincinnati Business Courier. “You won’t get a new job unless you had one with the same title in the past. So, instead we work from skills sets.”
Prior to release, the startups’ trio tested the app in beta for two months. They have played match maker to over two hundred employer/employee relationships to date. In addition, the service is attracting more than its originally planned audience.
“We assumed blue collar workers would come onto the platform looking for jobs or that postings would be for line or factory work,” Crenshaw said in the same interview. The goal was for employers to be able to find an instant replacement for entry-level positions and be a tool for the seasonal employment market.
Instead, tilr is already attracting a variety of talent sets. “People coming on board have very sophisticated talents – brilliant coders who do amazing creative work or graphic designers,” Crenshaw added.
Following their market release in Cincinnati, tilr is executing a city by city rollout plan with geographic expansion planned for 26 markets starting in Ohio followed by Florida and Texas.
About the Author
Brandy Hagan graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor’s in Social Science. She has over 3 years experience writing about the employment industry and creating SEO-rich content for marketing purposes.
Previous articles have appeared on the award-winning recruitment blog Cheezhead.com. She has also provided extensive coverage of the SHRM national conference in the past. She resides in North Augusta, South Carolina and devotes most of her spare time to writing fiction.
“Big data” is more than a pair of buzzwords. For employers with, say, a resume database full of candidates, “big data” ends up being a headache at best, and an unused asset at worst. It’s fair to say too many companies put their head in the sand at the fear of tackling the process of making sense of this potentially valuable data.
The challenge represents a huge opportunity for vendors looking to help organizations understand and utilize the data that they already have and the tools they already use. TalentIQ is one such vendor.
Launched in 2015, TalentIQ promised to “replace the decades-old software recruiters use, allowing them to work more efficiently,” according to co-founder Sean Thorne. A college drop-out from the University of Oregon, Thorne began his entrepreneurial journey with the founding of Hallspot, a defunct Groupon-for-college app, but the idea for TalentIQ was born out of that experience.
“We had an incredibly difficult time finding good Android developers,” said Thorne. “There were so many inefficiencies in recruiting, I thought there had to be a better way. TalentIQ’s mission is to solve those problems.”
TalentIQ doesn’t exist as a standalone service like a job board or applicant tracking software might. Instead, it plugs into existing services via a robust API, believing the future of hiring is all about analysis around the data an enterprise already has. Customers plug in TalentIQ’s technology into their existing applicant tracking solution or talent management technology and let it do it’s job in the background.
There are three offerings TalentIQ offers to enhance a company’s already-existing data. The breakdown is as follows:
Enrichment. TalentIQ takes your current data and enriches it with data from 2,300 public sources to provide accurate contact information, as well as other resume data you might not already have.ted information available throughout the web. It also cleanses out-of-date information, reducing clutter.
Normalization. Takes your current data and creates standards around it. This makes searching and management easier by making sure data fields are all consistent, even though they may be getting pulled from a wide variety of databases and distribution points. “We determine that ‘iOS’, ‘Apple’ and ‘iPhone’ are related through our technology,” said Thorne.
De-duplication. The days of doing a search and seeing the same person multiple times are over. TalentIQ goes through a client’s duplicate records and replaces them with the most recent data, so calling more than one phone number trying to track down a single candidate is solved through their solution.
The company has raised $3 million in seed money after an initial bootstrap period. Funding has been led by Susa Ventures, Haystack Fund, Acceleprise Ventures and various angel investors.
Thorne co-founded TalentIQ alongside Henry Nevue, who leads their product engineering team comprised of engineers from IBM Watson Labs, Wells Fargo Forensic, and NASA. Pricing is based on the quantity of data an enterprise has.
What’s the road ahead hold? “The future is all about context,” said Thorne. “”Enterprises have spent the last 10 to 20 years collecting data. Now, it’s time to start making sense around this data and leverage it intelligently.””
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Everybody presents themselves in this very polished, professional package, you know, but I still think poop jokes are hilarious, watch an obscene amount of cartoons for an adult male, and waste most of my spare time playing video games. And during the weekdays, I write for a living – and the beat I happen to cover is as esoteric as any enterprise software niche, as some sort of cruel cosmic joke.
I thought you should know all this, because the reaction to my first “Top HR Technologies of 2016” list was a little, let’s just say, severe for what was an admittedly arbitrary, completely subjective list of products I happen to like or conveniently popped into my head at the time. I wrote the first part of that post (and second, for that matter) in South Park pajama pants and a Kelly Kepowski T-Shirt (working from home kicks ass, you guys).
But no sooner had I pressed “publish” then my phone blew up like it was a Nexus 7. Notifications started buzzing, DMs and Facebook messages started flying, and likely, a flurry of InMails was sent, although hell if I know because who reads those things in the first place?
The answer: publicists and product marketers, who came out of the woodwork advocating why their product should be on Part 2 of a list I’d already compiled, but contemplated scrapping. Vendors were finally being nice to me. PR people were actually offering me decent placements and putting thought into their pitches. It was like getting out of the Upside Down, really.
I figured people would forget, or that maybe I could keep treading water on hitting publish in perpetuity. Two weeks later, though, I still get asked a couple dozen times a day by people who aren’t my boss when the second part is coming out, and I realize that this is one monster I can’t outrun, this demo Demogorgon of desperate product pitches. The only choice, turns out, is to finish it off.
But before I do, you should know I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I like what I like, and I’m going to try to explain (as succinctly as possible) why I like it.
RecruitingDaily Recommends: The Top HR Technology and Recruiting Tools of 2016.
Most of these products either are existing clients or I have equity in, and I’m not even going to try to point those out this time, because I’m not an analyst, journalist or any of that shit. I’m just me, and because of that, conflict of interest is inevitable. I want to work with products I really like, and this list is supposed to represent my picks of the top tech on the market. That I happen to work with many of them in some capacity is irrelevant to their inclusion.
I believe they solve a real problem instead of create it, are in some way different or unique than the manifold players jockeying for market share in HR Technology, and, most importantly, make end users’ lives – whether you’re a sourcer, recruiter, HR leader or just a plain old candidate (we all are at some point) – a little easier.
And if any of you have any problems with this list, well, it’s my list, and you can go make your own if you want. Sigh. Here goes nothing (preemptively puts phone on DND)…
10. Immersion by MIT.
No matter who I show this free tool to, they instantly get data visualization and network analysis and how they apply to both talent management and acquisition. The product is stupidly simple. You authenticate in with an email account (Gmail, Outlook Exchange and Yahoo! are prebuilt, but it can handle most services with a little configuration), and you get a “people centric” view of your inbox that serves up a beautiful, colorful and powerful data visualization of your personal and professional network, as told by your email (and that’s pretty damn accurate as data sets go).
It’s free, it’s kind of fun to use, and most importantly, makes social network analysis and “big data” instantly understandable, accessible and actionable – for no cost whatsoever. This product might ultimately find its way into B2B offerings as an enterprise grade tool, but for now, it’s a skunkworks project that will show your life (and work) in a completely new way – and if you’re struggling to “get” what’s new and what’s next in HR Technology, organizational design, workforce or succession planning (not to mention sourcing, employee communications, engagement, etc.) then use this tool today to see why people are so damned excited about the future of enterprise software tomorrow.
It’s not necessarily even an HR Technology, I know, but it’s one of my favorites, and every recruiter or HR practitioner I’ve shown this to falls in love with the product and, more importantly, the possibilities it represents.
9. The Muse.
I like this product because it checks the box for building an employer brand (cool custom culture and career landing pages, rich media and social integration) without any of the bullshit or variable costs. Sure, it’s a template, and yes, their solutions are out of the box – but candidates don’t know that. Nor do they care, mostly – they’re going to click right through to apply for openings in your clunky ATS, anyway.
But since you’ve got to have some sort of splash, branded EB portal as a cost of doing business in the business of talent, The Muse is EB in a box, so you can check off that box and move on to the stuff that really matters, like replacing that crappy ATS or actually building an employer of choice instead of choosing to build a “brand” to hide what’s really under the hood.
With better organic traffic than any other career focused content destination out there, qualified candidates are already coming to The Muse for career and job search advice – that they discover your company and ultimately, your jobs, is the entire point of “employer branding.”
A growing client list of blue chip brands like AT&T, Conde Nast, Bloomberg or Dropbox (and dozens more household names) prove that no matter how strong your employer brand is, no employer needs to build it all themselves. Back in May, when the Muse won the iTalent Competition I hosted (rightfully so), I gave them a full article worth of accolades – well deserved, too. Check that out here if you really want more justification for its inclusion on this year’s list.
Somehow, though, even after that rave review (rare for me), their product has only gotten better since then. And I’m out of nice things to say other than if you don’t know, now you know. But how can you not know?
8. Ratedly.
My partner William Tincup released a pretty comprehensive list with over 100 HR Technologies to watch in Q4 2016, but one omission from this canonical list comes (disclaimer) from right here in the Recruiting Daily family. And not mentioning Ratedly, conflict of interest or not, would be doing a disservice to any list of top products not for its provenance, but for the product itself.
We’ve all accepted that for job listings, aggregators are the new normal, with Indeed representing the category leader – and poster child – for the power of aggregation and curation of job content. Similarly, the rise of employee review sites like Glassdoor have completely changed the way recruitment marketing and employer branding work in terms of talent attraction and acquisition.
But less well known is the fact that just as Glassdoor also aggregates job listings, Indeed offers a growing database of employee reviews which return with job search results – and this company review capability has in fact existed since Indeed first launched, only now seems to be getting more attention given the collision course with the company that’s likely their biggest competitors for category leadership in job and career search.
These Goliaths represent most of the market share for employee reviews, but there are a dozen other sites, from Twitter to Kununu to Vault, offering anonymous employee feedback in real time, all the time. But no one in recruiting really has time to monitor, much less manage, this exploding category of crowdsourced company reviews. That’s why Ratedly fits a huge market niche – it’s the first product to actually aggregate all of those reviews in one single, simple solution.
Think of it almost like a productized version of press clippings – it automatically alerts companies to any new review on any of these sites, and amalgamates them into an app that allows companies to ensure that they’re able to respond to reviews in real time, all the time (and triage when necessary). For a flat $149 a month, that’s a pretty sweet deal to anyone dealing with actively managing and engaging employee reviews without having to do anything.
Aggregation and automation are effective – and by amalgamating these capabilities with employee reviews, Ratedly is first to market with a product that not only perfectly captures the HR Technology zeitgeist, but offers an actual solution to what’s becoming a big challenge in many talent organizations – at a price any organization can afford. Ratedly has to rate high on any list – even if Joel Cheesman is the brains behind the operation. We won’t hold that against a pretty killer app that every HR and recruiting pro needs to know in 2016 – and beyond.
7. OnRecruit.
Many employers are starting to think about utilizing some form of PPC advertising for recruiting, with a variety of new products and established players entering the HR Technology space to meet the market demand for better recruitment advertising results.
While companies largely track source of hire when informing recruitment advertising spend, conversion statistics remain elusive, forcing employers to look at volume stats when measuring efficacy and allocating spend or defining strategy. This means a ton of your overall budget gets wasted on traffic being driven to jobs that would get enough traffic without paying for more crappy applicants who won’t get hired while missing out on the candidates who could actually end up getting hired.
OnRecruit enables employers know where their candidates are coming from and which source of hire hires are actually being sourced from without paying for traffic that doesn’t convert or is being spent on the wrong campaigns and roles.
Unlike aggregators and any other PPA tool I’ve seen on the market, all of which index job listings and initiate campaigns at the moment an employer posts a job publicly, OnRecruit only initiates recruiting related ad spend on positions where you actually need qualified candidates instead of more applicants.
Based off an algorithm that’s the secret sauce for inbound recruiting, OnRecruit monitors your job postings in real time, and will then automatically allocate and optimize campaign spend based on job title and how long the role has been open, putting the power of predictive analytics to work to ensure that campaigns kick in only historical data suggests they’re needed, and then deactivates those campaigns automatically once those thresholds have been met.
This automation decreases the amount of time and money employers spend throughout the recruiting process since it essentially achieves the same outcome as any other source (a successful hire) while significantly driving down the costs of PPC advertising and time to fill. These improved conversion rates mean recruiters can make more hires more quickly for less money and less work than really any other tool in the market.
If it doesn’t end up achieving the desired outcome of making a hire, the really cool thing is that you also don’t have to pay anything, either, since it’s tracking conversions, not just clicks. So you don’t have anything to lose except more money and time spent on stuff that doesn’t really work. OnRecruit is one opportunity cost no employer can afford to pass up.
6. TextRecruit.
While it’s not as sexy as SaaS or social media, the fact of the matter is that the single most important piece of technology any HR professional can have in 2016 is a pretty old fashioned one: the telephone.
Studies repeatedly show that for talent acquisition and retention, the companies spending the most money on HR Technology – those multinational enterprise employers who are the mainstay of client sliders and case studies, and the primary market maker in this space – are in fact the most likely to pick up the phone before doing anything else.
They’re also the most likely to name the telephone among their most effective tools of the trade. In an age of high tech, those companies that can afford the luxury of being high touch are finding that doing so pays much more significant dividends than simply relying on software and systems.
Because of the proliferation of emerging HR Technology products and evolving players selling into this market, however, getting through the noise and getting optimal results has become increasingly difficult.
The single exception seems to be SMS, which maintains over a 90% open rate, with the overwhelming majority of these messages read within 5 minutes of being sent – and HR needs to embrace this medium because, frankly, no one reads emails from HR, although that’s not necessarily new (or news to anyone in this profession).
Texting, of course, is the real “mobile’ solution we should be focusing on at the moment. While many enterprise and emerging players still struggle with tools and technologies that largely aren’t even accessible for mobile, much less optimized for it,
TextRecruit has largely ignored “mobile recruiting,” which is these days just kind of recruiting, and have instead jumped out to a huge lead in what’s sure to be a race for SMS market.
While the rest of the industry is largely still playing catchup on building career sites that are accessible – not even optimized – for mobile, TextRecruit has done the exact opposite in taking a mainly mobile medium – SMS – and bringing its power to enterprise systems and HR Technology.
TextRecruit can be used with pretty much every point solution or HCM/ATS on the market through existing integrations or an open API, and can be configured to make texting a part of your existing workflow or as a standalone platform (or both, because the cloud is awesome like that).
From automated campaigns to personalized messages, TextRecruit enhances and augments (rather than replaces) any employers’ current workflow, meaning that the tool can deliver text capabilities aligned to the entire candidate lifecycle.
Or the employee lifecycle, for that matter – TextHR allows HR to engage with current employees via personalized or automated text messages, offering generalists and business partners an equally powerful and robust internal communication and collaboration tool as their recruiting counterparts for employee engagement and retention.
With a 40% response rate with an average response time of under :30 minutes, TextRecruit delivers far better engagement and much quicker response times than any CRM or “talent network” solution out there and likely ever will be as a standalone product or point solution.
TextRecruit offers a Chrome extension in addition to a mobile app for both iOS and Android to send and track messages form any device anywhere in the world in real time, all the time, – including that clunky ATS or CRM most of you are probably stuck using.
TextRecruit, unlike those systems, is a relative steal, with tiered pricing starting at just $49 a user a month for 200 contacts, which at 40% response rate is 80 responses from qualified candidates. This works out to around .61 for every response recruiters receive, which is one use case I think every talent or sourcing pro can agree is a way higher ROI than any current tool you’re using, period – particularly if that tool also happens to be an “HR Technology.”
TextRecruit offers a free 15 day trial, so take it for a text drive today and you’ll get the message (which is probably more than your candidates or employees can say).
5. Lever Nurture.
In the crowded ATS space, it’s no secret that I’m a big believer in Lever, which is why their core product made our 2015 list, and likely would again, given the tremendous leaps this company has taken over the last year to aggressively ship product updates, expand outside of its core constituency of US based tech companies, and build a solution that’s now able to compete upmarket for enterprise clients instead of staying mainly in the mid-market.
But just as the Lever team has effectively rebuilt and reimagined the ATS as we know it, their newest offering, Lever Nurture, is quietly doing the same for candidate relationship management (CRM), another cutthroat, competitive and crowded category. There’s no doubt that Clinch.io is lapping the competition for stand alone platforms, but for any company looking for an integrated ATS/CRM stack to replace instead of augment or extend their existing solutions, Lever wins in a landslide.
Lever addresses several market needs; as a system of engagement, it effectively automates candidate segmentation and passive candidate nurturing from a process perspective while allowing every recruiting team a ton of flexibility to add the personalization needed to break through the noise, reach and resonate with passive candidates – and ultimately, convert them into interested applicants. Lever Nurture is marketing automation for dummies (and recruiters) that deftly blends high tech and high touch to humanize candidate development and nurturing at scale.
Unlike some seat based CRM solutions – including Avature and Smashfly – which, while effective, can be prohibitively expensive to non-enterprise employers, Lever Nurture has a customer base of mostly high growth companies and has a pricing model that reflects the company’s desire to democratize access to what can only be called a best-in-class solution.
Many organizations today are buying really expensive, really complex consumer grade solutions like Eloqua or Hubspot for recruitment marketing automation, which is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, frankly. If you think Taleo is archaic and inflexible, just take Marketo out for a test drive.
Unless you’re going to pay a marketing automation pro to sit in your TA department and manage these systems, this really isn’t a viable solution. Lever Nurture sure is, though, and is an intuitive, straightforward and incredibly easy way to set up multi-touch drip campaigns, boost response rates, lower recruitment marketing spend and improve direct sourcing results.
Lever has always been a company whose ethos is squarely rooted in design, and this CRM is so user friendly that it’s easy to overlook how powerful a solution this CRM actually is. But It’s just as good as any consumer offering out there – and like their core ATS, will only become better over the months and years to come. And if you’re considering bundling an ATS & CRM with one provider, you’d be crazy to leave Lever off your list, frankly.
Unless, you know, Oracle Sales Cloud or Microsoft Dynamics look sexy to you. They sure as hell don’t to anyone who knows marketing – your candidates included.
4. Facebook Workplace.
This is a last minute entry to this list, obviously, but I cut Slack off the list as soon as Facebook officially launched this category killer this week. This is apropos, since that’s the same thing I think most employers and Slack aficionados (myself included) are going to do in droves. This defection makes sense, since all Slack ever really was (to me) was Facebook for work and project teams, making that sales proposition more or less instantly obsolete.
I’ve been using closed Facebook groups as the primary project and company collaboration platform since Yammer became corporate kin with Sharepoint (and sorry, LinkedIn, you’re never going to make a play in this space, given Microsoft’s spotty track record here). The reason is because most people spend most of their screen time there, anyways, so for end users, adoption and training have more or less already happened – the biggest barriers to any employee collaboration or communications system delivering as promised.
It just went live this week, but Facebook Workplace looks and feels just like its consumer version (sucks to be Slack), only built off of a social graph that’s built around professional, not personal, connections and contacts.
Just like Facebook’s core offering, it supports inline editing, tight permissioning and data governance/administration, supports almost every media or file type conceivable for easy sharing and collaboration, and yes, offers live video for broadcasting internally or with work groups. That it’s a viable replacement for Citrix’s dominant (and crappy) solutions, a Go To Meeting people want to go to, is enough to rank on this list.
That it offers federated search (similar to the old Open Graph) for work teams and a chat feature that kicks the shit out of Skype, Microsoft Messenger or AIM (still a mainstay at many companies, believe it or not) is just adding to a killer arsenal of capabilities that make this the only enterprise collaboration tool even worth mentioning.
It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s new Craigslist killing marketplace offering moves into this suite for contingent labor, staffing or the low skill, high volume and market specific job postings Craigslist makes most of its money from, but for now, this is one HR Technology employees will want to use. And they’re the ultimate end user.
Occulus will kill job trials and skills testing/assessments within 5 years; Instagram and Facebook Live will displace traditional B2B CMS systems within 2 years; and Facebook Workplace has, upon launch, already made its competitive subset more or less obsolete. And even the best competitors can’t pick up that much Slack.
3. HumanPredictions.io
HumanPredictions.io does what a lot of products purport to do – provide enough rich personal and profile data to facilitate engagement while also algorithmically stack ranking results against open roles, public data and proprietary databases to surface the kinds of talking points sourcers and recruiters need to deliver personalized messaging top talent will actually respond to.
Where HumanPredictions differentiates itself, however, is that it actually has a sophisticated enough data set and algorithm to pull in millions of aggregate data points to effectively predict how likely candidates are to consider new opportunities or make a move – their success rate in reading these signals (think: FICO score for passive candidates) has already proven superior to the better funded and more established competition selling this capability (most of which are quantitative vaporware).
Because it can accurately predict flight risks and poachable passives, this tool is already a must have for recruiters – but the real killer component of this is that rather than just return stacked ranked results or alerts based on predefined parameters, HumanPredictions actually has a services layer that will provide talking points, insights and suggested subject lines or targeted content for the highest priority candidates the system uncovers.
This is done by a real human with real recruiting experience, which is almost like having a search firm sitting within the product helping do the heavy lifting for candidate conversion – and since there’s no one size fits all approach to engaging candidates, this human intervention becomes a huge differentiator against the litany of competitors who exclusively seek to automate the candidate research process.
This is included with the (reasonably priced) subscriptions, and their tiered pricing makes this a sourcing and data-driven recruiting solution any organization can utilize – and realize real ROI, really quickly.
The product speaks for itself, but the fact that the founder grew up with two parents in the recruiting business and worked a desk prior to teaming up with two of the top engineers at GroupOn to develop this product shows in almost every facet of the suite. It’s designed with recruiters in mind, and the early returns and burgeoning client base already using this product speak to the fact that recruiters are taking notice.
So too is Ideo, where they’re the first HR Technology play to land a coveted spot in their fabled Startup in Residence accelerator program, which bodes well for the long term potential of a product that’s ready for prime time right now.
2. Hiretual.
This product has been out for approximately 6 weeks, and it’s already one of the most impressive big data plays out there. The really cool thing, though, is that the way it utilizes this data is, in fact, not just predictive, but prescriptive.
Hiretual has a bunch of features like dynamic profiles and federated search, stack ranking and machine learning, that are pretty standard in any sourcing product out there. And yeah – it’s primarily a Chrome extension pulling in a ton of public data points. The difference is, this doesn’t just provide info to help you source better, or engage better, but actually slate better.
That’s because it stack ranks candidates based on how they rank relative to similar candidates on the market (e.g. their hypothetical competition for a job), using stuff like market demand, company financials and compensation benchmarks to tell you as soon as you look at a candidate not only if they’ll be minimally qualified, but how likely they are to actually make it through to an offer (or at least an in person) compared to the other candidates you’re likely to find in your pipeline or direct sourcing efforts.
This is a big data tool that helps you know who to engage with, not simply improve engagement – so you can focus on candidates you might actually place, not just ones who look like a fit on paper. A boot strapped company with only 4 employees, Hiretual is in its infancy, but if this is what the first iteration looks like, we can’t wait to see what’s coming next. PS: hopefully a better product name, IMHO.
1. TrustSphere.
Once you see Immersion and get why data visualization, network analysis and relative influence are so critical to really getting a people centric view of the people in your organization, then you’re ready for a product I think might be, if anything, so advanced that the only challenge with TrustSphere is that the market might not be entirely ready for it – at least not in HR.
That said, the company is only now entering HR after beginning life as a tool primarily for sales, biz dev and account management/customer service – all verticals where they’ve built a long track record of success, measurable business and bottom line outcomes and an impressive set of features and functions unmatched by any other analytics offering on the market. That they’re just now entering HR is due to demand, not an identified market need, but all I can say is, it’s about damn time we had a product or platform this powerful in our back office backwater.
Their primary product offering is a “proprietary Relationship Analytics Platform” called TrustVault, which takes internal and external, structured and unstructured data (from customer service call logs to business intelligence to financials to CRM results) and creates a “Social Graph” for an organization, providing a data-centric view of any company across all stakeholders, functions and business units.
The resulting visualization tool, called “TrustView,” provides a look at the informal and formal kinds of relationships and connections within an organization that just can’t be defined by a title, org chart or any traditional HCM tool, and like Immersion, makes understanding relationships and relative internal influence into more or less a map that’s dynamic, configurable and easy to interpret.
It’s basically like a statistically valid version of Klout that can uncover who matters most in your organization, which is great for figuring out who to hit up for referrals, which employees to target for retention efforts and where informal knowledge and influence really reside. Integrations with IBM, Salesforce and Sugar CRM further extend the capability of a product I can only say is not just one of the best HR technologies I’ve ever seen, but one of the most impressive technologies out there today, period.
They aren’t a customer, advisory client, prospect or target, so I have no ulterior motive with this one other than trust me on TrustSphere – it’s everything you needed but don’t know it yet. The only way to predict the future is to invent it, and TrustSphere seems to have done just that.
Miss our first 5 picks? Click here for Part 1 of our annual list of top HR Technology products and recruiting tools.
Editor’s Note: RecruitingDaily was not compensated for this post, and the opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and are completely arbitrary, somewhat biased and reflect
We’ve come a long way since the mainstream introduction of paying for clicks to get candidate traffic. I can remember a presentation by Indeed‘s Paul Forster back in 2006, educating employers on the advertising practice that had already become commonplace for digital marketers leveraging search marketing strategies: Don’t pay a flat fee, instead, only pay for the traffic you want.
I can also remember asking roomfuls of conference goers, “How does Google make its buckets of dollars? Those text ads on the side of its search results, that’s how.” Of course, at the time, paying a flat fee for postings ruled the day, and some never thought we’d get to a pay-for-performance model.
Fortunately for the advertisers (and users), popular sentiment was wrong. Sites like Indeed and Simply Hired blazed the trail early on, and now stalwarts like Monster now offer performance pricing. Turn the spout off and on as needed, pay only for what you want. Just makes sense.
That success, however, has also given birth to added layers of complexity. Which sites are the cheapest? Which time of day is best? What keywords perform the best? What’s my return on investment?
Solutions like Recruitics have prospered by being an agent for recruitment marketers, taking out the manual labor from much of the equation. The downside is such solutions are reactive in nature, instead of trying to predict what the cost of filling certain openings might be.
Jobs2Careers is taking a step in that direction by unveiling predictive job analytics at last week’s HR Technology Conference. “We’re essentially treating job ads like real ads and allowing clients to buy more efficiently than ever before,” said Thad Price, Jobs2Careers’ vice president of product and engineering. “We’ve learned a lot from the digital ad world, and we want to see those successes for our clients in the recruitment industry.”
Screenshot of Jobs2Careers Predictive Analytics Dashboard
How’s it work? Using data across Jobs2Careers’ network, encompassing 1.4 billion searches each month, users can filter their searches to determine how much they can expect to pay for applicants to their job postings. Results can be delivered as “Good,” “Better” or “Best,” as well as whether you want to see cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA). In the example above, Jobs2Careers recommends spending $598 in order to generate 13 applicants for a registered nurse position in Chicago. This translates to $46-per-applicant.
The tool serves as a way to keep the other pay-for-performance players in check. Are you paying too much to Indeed? This will help answer that question. It also puts you in a better position to negotiate price for consumers. To date, this tool is not open to the public, but Price says it will be accessible in a matter of months. Currently, you have to contact the company directly to access the information.
“So many people see Jobs2Careers as a destination site, but we also have this great set of tools to maximize efficiency of ad spend across several channels,” says Shelly Mudd, Jobs2Careers’ chief revenue officer. “For the first time, recruiters and hiring managers can understand the true value of an applicant. From there, they can make informed budget decisions and set realistic goals.”
What’s next? Price tells me they’ll take on the applicant tracking systems. That is, they’ll be scoring applicant tracking solutions based on the usability of each. How long do job seekers stay on your ATS? What is the bounce rate vs. other players? Jobs2Careers is hoping to answer those questions.
Transparency in the applicant tracking space, especially in regards to usability, is something a lot of people, including me, will welcome. Who has the best mobile application process? I certainly want to know.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can hire me too.
As recruiters, we have to know how to ask the right questions that will lead us to the motivation of a candidate – not just checking boxes and using interview score cards.
Losing weight is the inevitable go-to-goal of so many people, myself included. Our society is pretty much obsessed with the concept. We witness it every January when we all fall into the “new year, new you” chaos and join the gym with everyone else in the area. It comes up again before big life events like weddings, family reunions, etc. It seems like people are always looking for a way to be more fit.
Want proof? Walk down the magazine aisle at the grocery store and you’ll see an array of headlines with articles touting new diet plans and people’s “100 pound weight loss strategy”. Even men’s fitness magazines are starting to talk about losing weight. It makes sense, almost 35% of the US population is obese.
There are also 135 million results for diets on Google. It’s one of the most searched phrases in Europe and the United States. People will try everything from Atkins to the Subway diet to juice cleanses just to lose a couple of pounds and have their “perfect body.” These diets test our willpower, our stamina and even our friendships once we go into full on hangry mode.
Yes, hanger is a real thing (hunger anger), but I digress.
The thing is, diet alone doesn’t deliver on that “perfect” vision. It doesn’t make or break the outcome when losing weight is the goal. When all of the strategies boil down, it really comes to the motivation of the person losing the weight. It’s about what drives them every day for months that really delivers the outcomes people are looking for. It’s the mothers who are out of breath trying to catch up to their toddler on the playground and don’t want to miss moments with their kids. It’s the man who recently had a heart attack and wants to see his children graduate from college. They’re motivated and they succeed.
Motivation is what drives us. It’s what pushes us when we don’t want to get out of bed, when we’re not ready for change and we just don’t want to keep going. Motivation is the most important factor in persuasion and the technique that’s most often forgotten when we as recruiters start talking to candidates. Why? Well, I have no idea.
Now What Y’all Wanna Do?
During my agency days, I had a client desperately seeking a systems administrator with scripting experience on a Sun Solaris Unix based system in a medical environment. So basically, a needle in a needle stack for a city like Phoenix. It was going to be a challenging to say the very least, yet I’m always up for a good challenge.
I placed the position online with the requisite job boards I had at my disposal, knowing full well the post and pray method was not going to be the approach that was going to get me that placement. You have to cover your bases in recruiting so I figured, what the hell. Deep down, I knew I needed a different methodology for this role, something more out of the box.
Note, this was way before discovering the great Glen Cathey’s website or conversations at a beach bar with Stacy Zapar about LinkedIn. Rather, this was a straight outta Compton search doing cold calling into companies. I started with a list of a few companies that used this type of technology and started to call them when it happened.
A current contractor that was working for me called with a referral. You see, I told all of my contractors that if they ever hear a coworker (that didn’t work for me, of course) upset with their situation to give me a call. I always paid good referral money and they knew it, so I did get good recommendations that usually panned out. Back to the motivation thing – that was theirs. More money, more referrals.
This Is For My Homey
Ted, was the stereotypical computer geek. The guy was like Melvin from the movie Office Space. Although he was a tad thinner, he had the mustache and everything. A big lug of a man that was like an action figure for nerds, complete with pocket protector and calculator watch. If you haven’t seen the movie, Melvin was motivated by his red stapler. It became a staple joke for those of us who loved the irony of the movie, working in our own cube farms.
So back to the candidate. I took the time to ask Ted the usual recruiting questions – what was his situation, was he ok with the commute, etc. I finally ended with the salary negotiation. “So where are you at and where do you need to be in your financial situation?” I asked. He told me that frankly, it was not money that motivated him as much as a larger monitor and an office with natural light.
I paused. “I’m confused” I said because, well, I was. Why would it not be about money. It is always about money, right? Yes, I was still the naive recruiter who believed it was all about money back then. Nope, not this time. See, Ted was legally blind and had to wear coke bottle glasses to see. If he had a larger monitor, he could see the code more easily, helping him do his job better. The company he was with didn’t see the value in getting him one so he wanted out. We talked more about the monitor and environment he’d need to make a change and we went our separate ways.
Light bulb moment. Two weeks before I had done a site meeting and office tour with my client and I saw where the future employee would be sitting. It was a spacious room with a window and a gigantic monitor. The monitor was, in fact, the biggest screen made and there were even two of them so there would be a reduction of open windows and systems to have to switch back and forth from. I knew I had this hire.
It’s All About the Benjamins: Motivation, Say What?
The meeting was set within twenty-four hours of sending the first email. Ted would be meeting with the hiring manager and two other coders that would be on his team. I warned them about his, well peculiar is the nicest way of saying it, demeanor. The manager responded saying he was a programmer so he was used to it.
However, I received a call from the manager in the middle of the interview.
I panicked. Knowing your candidate is supposed to be in the middle of a meeting with a manager who is now calling you adds up to heart palpitations. But it was good news. He only had one question for me: how do we get him? I laughed in relief. I explained that salary was not the issue here nor title. If they wanted to close him right then and there, just walk him over to the office that he would be sitting in – the one with the big monitors and window. The manager – confused, and rightly so, said: “Um, ok, sure then, I will call you back when we get back to my office.”
20 minutes of hand wrangling torture later, I got a call from the hiring manager telling me he had done what I had asked. He took Ted to the office. Ted’s immediate response was: “When can I start?.” Ted also called me as he was leaving and told me the same thing. I could hear him smiling through the phone. I let him know they were expecting him on Monday for his first day, and I was starting the paperwork. I was ecstatic, as you might expect.
See, that was a win for so many reasons and most importantly for the lesson learned. As recruiters, we have to know how to ask the right questions that will lead us to the motivation of a candidate – not just checking boxes and using interview score cards. I know the “thought leaders” and RPO’s always preach that it’s the money, but that’s just not true. You need to dig in and find out what it is that they really need.
That is what I suppose most of us try to do but end up bothering people, and even worse – spamming them, just to fill a role. We call and never take the time to listen to them and learn what’s going on in their lives because we’re so obsessed with following the standard format instead of the thought process it takes to find out simply what motivates them.
I have hired people that wanted less travel, shorter commute, better projects – hell even healthcare plans that suited their kids, who never pushed on salary. It just wasn’t their bottom line. What motivates us to do things, like taking a new role, is often interspersed with passion, feeling, and, sometimes, just sometimes, it only takes a monitor and a window; there is only one trick, it’s called asking then listening, doing that can be the greatest thing you do. #truestory.
About the Author:Derek Zeller draws from over 16 years in the recruiting industry. The last 11 years he has been involved with federal government recruiting specializing within the cleared Intel space under OFCCP compliance. He is currently serves as Technical Recruiting Lead at Comscore.
He has experience with both third party agency and in-house recruiting for multiple disciplines and technologies. Using out-of-the-box tactics and strategies to identify and engage talent, he has had significant experience in building referral and social media programs, the implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems, technology evaluation, and the development of sourcing, employment branding, military and college recruiting strategies.
You can read his thoughts on RecruitingDaily.com or Recruitingblogs.com or his own site Derdiver.com. Follow Derek on Twitter @Derdiveror connect with him on LinkedIn.
Next to “artificial intelligence,” “engagement” was all the rage at this year’s HR Technology Conference in Chicago last week. Evolution in technology and mobility has made interacting with employees in new and interesting ways more possible than ever before.
There’s an area in the exhibit hall dubbed “Startup Pavilion.” Instead of a traditional booth, this area encompasses a group of newer companies sharing a common area with only a kiosk and laptop to promote their wares. Some of these organizations are a little less startup than others, having received millions in funding in some cases, but it’s a good place to start when you’re in search of new ideas.
One company that intersects at the road of “engagement” and “startup” is Bonus.ly. Launched in late 2013, Bonus.ly has received $1 million in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta and FirstMark Capital in 2014. It has a presence in both New York City and Boulder, Colorado.
What makes Bonus.ly a little different is that rewards are given by peers, whereas most other engagement solutions focus on management. Think your boss giving you a Starbucks gift card for a job well done.
Here’s How It Works
Each month, employees get a small allowance called microbonuses. Users take this allowance and give it to their coworkers in small increments to recognize high-five worthy accomplishments. Employees save microbonuses they receive to then spend on items in a reward catalog.
The “reward catalog” is custom to each company and typically comes pre-stocked with rewards like gift cards and charities. Employers can also add custom rewards like time off or lunch with the CEO.
When an employee spends microbonuses on a reward, Bonus.ly fulfills it electronically so they can use it immediately. Customers are not charged until microbonuses are spent. For instance, a line-item for $5 would be added to an invoice when an employee redeems points for a $5 Amazon gift card, then at the end of the month, the line items in an invoice are added up and billed to the credit card an employer has on file.
According to Bonus.ly customer ZipRecruiter, 95% of employees have given bonuses, while 94% have received them. “Employees aren’t required to use Bonusly, but everyone does,” said Maria Alparaz, HR assistant. “Executive leadership loves it, and they end up giving out all their ZipPoints every month.”
Bonus.ly also integrates with popular platforms like Slack, Yammer, Google Talk and Workday. The cost to use the service is free for teams of eight or less and goes as high as $5-per-month, per user. Bonus.ly is also available for Android and iOS users on the go.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can hire me too.
Regardless of our education and training, we as recruiters by in large do three things: We find people, we interview and we extend offers. All opportunities for training, development and starting to tell our story in a way that changes perceptions.
Most movies follow a pretty predictable plot line. In the hero’s journey, we watch the evolution of our protagonist. Usually starting from humble means and a position of ridicule, the journey transforms the character into an idealized individual. In my favorite movie, Star Wars, we watch the journey of a lost boy on the planet furthest from the bright center of the universe to the liberator and hero of that same universe.
Our path to recruiting isn’t always so linear. We dive into sales, strategy and marketing or simply fall into the roll with little to no formalized training. Unlike an engineer, persay, who goes through a litany of trainings and certifications to do their role, we’re left to learn on our own.
That leaves a lot of people in our profession with a variable amount of experience. It creates that perception that we’re little more than mercenaries, akin to used car salesmen, to valuable business partners that are a revenue center and not a cost center. That anyone can do it. The evolution of that story – where a recruiter gets to be the hero – is still a journey in progress.
Regardless of our education and training, we as recruiters by in large do three things: We find people, we interview and we extend offers. All opportunities for training, development and starting to tell our story in a way that changes perceptions.
Found Someone, You Have: Sourcing
In sourcing, we go looking for the “right” type of candidate. The first trap we can fall into is starting to look for something, not someone. Similarly, In the Return of the Jedi ,Luke goes to a place called Dagobah. He is told that there he will find who he’s looking for. His own unconscious bias kicks in and in his mind, that person will be a great warrior and Jedi Master. He pictures this strong man however, when Luke encounters the Jedi Master Yoda for the first time he doesn’t think he could possibly be the person he is looking for. The encounter is instructive for recruiters.
Yoda: I am wondering, why are you here?
Luke: I’m looking for someone.
Yoda: Looking? Found someone, you have, I would say, hmmm?
Luke: Right…
Yoda: Help you I can. Yes, mmmm.
Luke: I don’t think so. I’m looking for a great warrior.
Yoda: Ohhh. Great warrior. [laughs and shakes his head] Wars not make one great.
Luke initially misjudges Yoda based on his appearance. In recruiting we travel to our own Dagobah of Databases looking for our great talent warriors. We too can misjudge someone based solely on the appearance of a great resume. So how do we, as recruiters, avoid the mistake that Luke makes? We follow one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given in my career: when in doubt, call. Have a conversation. It isn’t until Luke talks to Yoda that he realizes he was the person he was looking for all along.
Like Yoda meant after all: resumes not make one great.
The Jedi Mind Trick of Recruiting
Once we find the right talent warriors, we help them through the hiring process. Unfortunately in this galaxy not far far away, hiring managers suffer from a disease that we call FOBO (Fear Of Better Options). As recruiters many of us attempt to use jujitsu and try to turn FOBO into FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
Typically the attempt goes something like this: “Well you know a candidate like this won’t last on the market very long, if you like them we should extend an offer.” All too often the reply comes, “I like them but I’d like to see a few more.” At that point you are tempted to give up and join the dark side.
Here is the secret to the recruiter mind trick. When you get feedback from your hiring managers, make sure you take note of the things they said they liked about the candidate. Pay careful attention and listen for superlatives. Then, when they seem hesitant to move forward – frame the superlatives in context of data.
The first thing to do is acknowledge their concern. Most people want validation of their point before they are willing to listen to yours. So start by saying something like, “I understand you are hesitant about moving forward and I am in agreement with you and I believe the candidate has superstar potential. Personally, I felt they were the best person for the job out of the 250 I reached out to and with unemployment in their demographic at 2.5%, I’m sure they will be getting multiple offers and most likely a counter offer. Who would want to lose that kind of talent from their team? If you like them, I will make every effort to get them on the team.” In order to make a decision, it can be helpful to hear our own words presented back to us in context.
In the movies and in real life, the Jedi mind trick doesn’t work on everyone. Jabba the Hut wasn’t persuaded by Luke’s Jedi mind trick either so don’t feel too bad if it doesn’t work every time. As a recruiter it isn’t our job to win every battle, only to be prepared for it and do our best for our client and our candidate.
Join the Dark Side: Extending Offers
The most satisfying part of recruiting is extending an offer that gets signed. However, we know many offers are extended without being signed. The most common mistake I see in recruiting is extending an offer too early. While that can work, it can also imply negative things to the candidate.
First, many times an offer is perceived by as our last and best offer – even when it isn’t. When we extend an offer, we lose power or control of the situation. We also open ourselves to counter offers and being put on hold.
What you should do is talk to the candidate before you formally extend the offer. Tell them that the offer is coming but you want to make sure everyone is on the same page. I usually lead with salary negotiations. I say, “we are getting really close to an offer but I want to make sure I get you the best offer I can.” This has the advantage of being true, for one thing.
At this point in the process, you have invested a lot of time – you want to be the hero of this story and close this role to move on to the next one – right? Here’s my closing tactic. Start with a salary a little less than you know the salary will be. For example I would say, “if got you a salary of 75K would you be able to accept now?” If they say yes then I move on to the next question.
Once I have the absolute yes salary number, I find the number that they are comfortable with. Once I have the salary information locked down I move to the next question: Is there anything that would stop you from saying yes today?
If they say they need to talk to someone or are waiting for another offer, I don’t extend mine then. I set up a check in for the next day. If in the course of the discussion I learn that the salary will be an issue, I don’t extend the offer but rather return to the hiring manager and speak with them.
I give them the yes number and the areas I think we can improve the offer in order to close the candidate. Doing this before I extend an offer saves me from counter offers and the back and forth of negotiations. At this point I’m the hero of this story. I’m better able to negotiate with the hiring manager as they don’t feel like the candidate has countered them. Plus, the candidate loves me.
Once I have the negotiation handled, I speak with the candidate. I review the last conversation. If they say they are ready to make a decision, I tell them to stay by their phone because I will be calling back in the next 15 minutes with the offer. This gives them time to think and get excited. When I call them back I start with the word congratulations and extend the offer.
Douglas Adams said, “It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.” After all, a little green alien could turn out to be the Jedi Master and Darth Vader can become a good guy. Take the time to learn your craft and you too can become a recruiting Jedi.
We need to approach the “when” and the “what” of communication as a form of relationship management with care, thought, intent, and efficiency. And whatever you do, don’t simply automate your way to apathy.
Recently, a teenager told me that on her birthday, she spent nearly the entire day replying to social media communications from her vast array of friends and followers – her myriad digital relationships. With a tinge of regret, she shared that many of her “birthday wishes” resembled one another. She speculated that the websites and apps in question prompted the “friend” at the right time, and even offered a birthday message to send with a single click. It’s even possible that the message was completely automatic and generic.
Having a large number of relationships to be engaged with isn’t unique to teenagers – for recruiters, it’s their day job. As a superstar recruiter, you’re responsible for a multitude of relationships. In fact, some firms require recruiters to develop scores of new relationships every week. In just one year, the number of distinct relationships a successful recruiter is involved is in the thousands.
Despite the natural gifts recruiters may have, there’s a known limit to be aware of, Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s research, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “The Tipping Point,” establishes a range for the typical number of stable social relationships a person can maintain. Dunbar projects this cognitive limit is between 100 and 250 relationships, with 150 being safe for the general population. Recruitment’s viability as a business depends on defying a modified version of Dunbar’s number.
There are two well-known approaches to surpass Dunbar’s number and keep more than 150 relationships viable. Both rely on a strategy of making the relationship investment easy for the recruiter – one focuses on “when,” the other on the “what.”
Birthdays, Revisited
Almost eight years ago, I was introduced to Jeremy Epstein, founder of consultancy Never Stop Marketing. What makes Jeremy remarkable is that he runs his relationship network at over 10 times the size of Dunbar’s 150 relationships. He maintains over 1,800 relationships per year – and he’s not even a recruiter or a sales guy. He just calls everyone on their birthday. He explained that his grandfather used to call and send cards to everyone, but Jeremy elected to scale that model – he picks up the phone. Despite Jeremy’s wisdom and impressive memory, he’s not remembering people’s birthdays randomly – he’s got them all catalogued. Every night, his call list is ready to go. He knows whom he’s calling, he knows what to say. Even if he didn’t say a word, the phone call itself says so much. Epstein’s number is 1,800.
Our aforementioned teenager’s friends, like Jeremy, have systems to help with who to reach out to and when – it’s the “what” that’s tripping them up. Before we judge the teenagers, we should take a look at ourselves. Teenagers aren’t the only folks prompted by a system and being influenced by the power of suggestion.
I recently ran a quick survey to learn more about the use of LinkedIn’s “Say Congrats” feature (and I wasn’t the only one who noticed this). The survey was open to my over 1,500 LinkedIn connections and work colleagues. We had just over 100 respondents.
I wanted to know:
Are people actually using the button to “Say Congrats?”
If not, why not?
If so, do they use the default text or make the message their own?
I also asked if people had recently changed jobs, and if they did, as the recipient of congratulations, about their reaction – both to congratulatory messages in general and to the default text when used.
Here’s what I learned:
In my sample, only 19 percent of the respondents never “Say Congrats.” Some of those who never congratulate are skeptical about social media, but most believe pressing “Say Congrats” feels hollow.
The other 75 percent who are willing to “Say Congrats” – 57 percent admit to rarely or never changing the default text. One participant said, “I think of it as a Facebook like.”
In a nutshell, a small group of people cast aside the call to action; a smaller group uses the call to action to invest further in relationships by consistently changing the default text (10 percent), but 75 percent of the respondents are willing to just push “Say Congrats.”
It all comes home when you ask people who recently changed jobs about their experiences with “Say Congrats:”
Over 30 percent of recent job changers received more than 20 congrats
When congratulated, over 69 percent felt positive; 31 percent felt indifferent
When congratulated with the default text, 60 percent felt indifferent
66 percent of folks who recently changed jobs said the congrats were “most” or “nearly all” default text
Automation Apathy
The data suggests we’re often clicking the buttons without feeling. “Say Congrats,” like a birthday, is a missed opportunity for building relationships. When we “go through the motions” of relationships (by accepting the default text), we all know it.
With that in mind, I asked some of the respondents to share what made for meaningful congratulatory message:
Make it personal: Your tone animates your message. Offering an update of your own in addition to wishing a colleague well personalizes the moment.
Ask a question: Opening a conversation about the new position invites a conversation and a reinvigorated connection.
For recruiters, the key to achieving Epstein’s Number is his method – he’s ruthlessly organized and efficient while maintaining the personal connection. Put another way, he has engineered his process to minimize task switching (he makes calls sequentially). If we were to apply his scaling technique to “Say Congrats,” you might:
Spend an hour brainstorming a set of more personal congratulations messages
Store them in an online document for easy access anywhere
Expect to spend some copying-and-pasting to more effectively “Say Congrats” time periodically (weekly or monthly), ideally in a cheery mood. In some ways, you’ll have re-engineered your own default text.
To achieve Epstein’s Number, we need to approach the “when” and the “what” of communication as a form of relationship management with care, thought, intent, and efficiency. And whatever you do, don’t simply automate your way to apathy.
About the Author: Jonathan Novich is Vice President, Platform and Staffing Technologies for Bullhorn, which provides cloud-based CRM solutions for relationship-driven businesses. A staffing technology innovator, he has developed broad and deep product and technical experience consulting to staffing firms over the past 15 years. At Bullhorn, he directs product initiatives as the rapidly-growing CRM company continues to diversify its customer base. He graduated with honors from Princeton University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science and a certificate in Operations Research. He can be found on LinkedIn.
Walking into a room with literally a thousand HR technology vendors can be, to say the least, overwhelming. There’s a hum similar to a venue before a concert with a thousand mini conversations. As I aimlessly navigated the paths between booths with faux flooring, I can’t help but notice the spectacles. The guys dressed as carrots and sharks, the Mardi Gras themed two story booth and even puppies. Yes, live animals made their way to the floor this year.
I’m not terribly surprised. I’ve seen all kinds of spectacles – in years past there were booths that felt more like Cirque du Soleil shows than business centers. What did strike me is how little I could gather about what these companies fundamentally do despite a booth that’s larger than most apartments in Chicago. As someone completely embedded in this space, I feel like that shouldn’t be so hard. I read more than the average practitioner. First, because that’s my job. The second and real distinguishing element is simply that I have the time most practitioners don’t to read, search and talk shop. Yet, in this buzzing chaos, I’m still not sure where to start.
Putting myself in the shoes of a practitioner, I can’t imagine how they self-select which booths to visit or how to identify what technology resolves their core problems. I can appreciate the big box store approach to tech and I’m thankful to be a part of this event because it’s a once a year opportunity to see a really eclectic group of services in one place rather than setting up a hundred demos to half listen to at our desks. Yet, if I had to guess, I’m sure most of them end up going to visit with their current partners and getting a lot of the demos by unintentionally wandering into a booth for espresso that ends in a demo.
Spectacles work, after all.
Small Talk and the Next Big Thing
Of course, these visits to the expo hall are punctuated by parties and networking galore. That buzz doesn’t die down the second the expo hall closes but rather make it’s way to the bars and restaurants as we catch up with the people we always run into online but rarely in real life. After spending a day looking at technologies, it’s pretty natural that our conversations go to the best, worst and brightest. In the first 24 hours of arriving, I believe I was asked at least 30 times what technology I was most excited to see. Who I thought would be the next big thing.
Initially, I have to admit, I was a little stumped. Sure, I have my favorites in certain categories but I see them all the time. I know what they’re doing and while it’s exciting in the context of their future and I’m thrilled for them, I’m not going to tout it as the next big thing. After a few drinks, my conclusion was simply that I’m just not interested in the next big thing. I know that’s not a popular answer and it definitely created some awkward pauses but it’s the truth. My #truestory, as Zeller would say.
Sure, it’s awesome to have these conversations about people management of the future and see these bots and visualization tools that are taking people teams that are already light years ahead and pushing them forward. But in reality, that’s not most of us. Businesses with 500 or less employees make up 99% of employer firms in the US.
What I’m most interested in seeing are the solutions that help the 99%. The solutions that deliver smart data, better fundamentals and process that support the humane treatment of candidates and employees. Solutions that help us become better communicators and solve the black hole of the job search from both the recruiting and candidate site. I mean, we treat dogs on the street better than we do most candidates with simple acknowledgment and that’s a real shame.
Face it. What good is data visualization if we don’t have data? What good are all the bells and whistles on your CMS when we can’t even convince a candidate to apply? I’m more interested in technology like TextRecruit that’s letting hiring conversations happen in a trackable way via text and delivering 100% open rates. Yes, 100%. No matter how witty your subject lines are, you aren’t getting that kind of delivery.
Or ZipRecruiter that’s ending the black hole apply by simply telling candidates when jobs they’re interested in are posted and texting them when the employer is looking at their resume. Seems simple but communication is very simply the #1 thing for candidates – the more the better. On the recruiting side, they’re ending spray and pray limbo, too. They deliver candidates in hours instead of 30 day packages.
Bottom line, I’m excited about the technology that delivers more humane treatment to the humans we attract and employ in the 99%, not the one that delivers a tech stack of acronyms and buzzwords that the 99% doesn’t totally understand. I hope practitioners on the floor today do the same – looking past some of the bells and whistles and trying to find the solutions that help people relate, connect and communicate in the same language.
Katrina Kibben is the Managing Editor of RecruitingDaily
The HR Technology Conference is heating up in Chicago, and vendors are looking to make a splash. Eight of these companies got a leg-up during Tuesday’s session entitled “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company.”
In this event, a panel of industry professionals selected relatively unknown solutions they believed to be the next big thing. The companies then presented their product to the panel shark tank-style. The audience, after all companies had a turn to showcase their wares, then voted on their favorites via text messaging. I counted about 100 people in the audience.
Here are the results, along with the percentage of votes received:
LifeWorks (21 percent) – Tools to enhance wellness, provide perks, enable communications and stimulate recognition within companies via one platform.
ClickBoarding (19 percent) – A new take on onboarding, focusing on retention and ease-of-use on the go.
Chemistry Group (16 percent) – Suite of services promising predictive data, better targeting of talent and more intuitive analytics for hiring managers.
InvestiPro (14 percent) – A fully-automated workplace investigation solution designed to simplify the way employers conduct investigations.
Qwalify (8 percent) – Another talent engagement solution, focusing on millennials.
RolePoint (5 percent) – Employee engagement with a focus on mobility, a streamlined application process and ATS / CRM integration.
Clinch (3 percent) – Recruitment marketing platform. “Hubspot for recruiting” is a term growing in popularity, and these guys are hoping to profit from this trend.
It’s important to note this was not a scientific vote by any means, but the voting results combined with the fact that industry vets selected them as their choice of “Next Great Technology” carries some weight. Highlighting them is newsworthy.
LinkedIn announced it is rolling out ProFinder nationwide after a successful 10-month pilot. ProFinder is essentially a marketplace for freelance white collar professionals. ProFinder models itself similarly to companies like Upwork, Fiverr, and Maven offering similar services and platforms matching people or corporations with practitioners and experts. Presently LinkedIn has no announced long-term business model plans for the service. However, LinkedIn has stated it will begin by allowing professionals to submit ten proposals for free after which they will be required to pay $60 per month for a business plus subscription. LinkedIn suggested it could eventually host payments and take a commission for arranging the introduction and secure payment between parties on the platform.
LinkedIn’s entry into the online freelance marketplace space comes amid a seemingly daily flood of news stories and studies declaring the continuing rapid expansion of the so-called “gig economy.” LinkedIn Project Manager Vaibhav Goel announced on LinkedIn’s blog that active freelancers on LinkedIn are up 50% in the past five years. Staffing Industry Analyst completed a study recently estimating the “gig economy” (i.e. people who freelance) at 29% of the workforce. Another study from Upwork and the American Freelancers Union estimated that 54 million Americans worked as freelancers in 2015.
What does this mean for individual recruiters and staffing agencies?
In the words of Lord Helmet (Played by Rick Moranis) in the movie Spaceballs – “Absolutely nothing!” – for now at least. First, ProFinder does not presently list recruiting or any equivalent service as an option on the platform. Secondly, LinkedIn creating a “talent marketplace” or an opportunity for people to find & buy “talent on demand” is nothing more than LinkedIn extending and better monetizing what it has been doing since its founding in 2003. ProFinder is not a recruiting marketplace; it is a hiring marketplace. There is a difference.
As recruiters, we know but often fail to relay to our clients and stakeholders, that recruiting is far more than only finding talent, gathering resumes, and forwarding them along to employers. ProFinder, at this time, does not appear to be a threat in any way to traditional in-house, staffing, or agency recruitment services. The only caveat I offer to this statement, is that ProFinder could occasionally threaten traditional recruiting services in instances in which employers get the opportunity to “try” the freelancers on a project basis before “buying.” By “buying,” I mean hiring those freelancers on a permanent or long-term basis for roles that employers would otherwise have used the services of a recruiter in-house or 3rd party.
Is ProFinder likely to become a significant new player in the gig economy, online talent marketplace space?
LinkedIn is already the 800-pound gorilla in the online recruitment, recruitment technology, and professional networking space. I imagine you, my dear readers, are now asking yourselves, “doesn’t this directly contradict what Evan just wrote in the above section?” The answer is no; please allow me to explain. Just as LinkedIn itself never replaced or will replace traditional recruitment services, ProFinder is simply an additional way to find and connect with talent on LinkedIn like people have already done for years.
I am highly skeptical of the economics of online “talent marketplaces” as a stand-alone company. I am confident that LinkedIn will come to dominate the space because it is likely to become the only real player in the space over the long-term. Inevitably, LinkedIn, backed by the full might of its parent company Microsoft, will acquire any competitors showing promise and knock out business any competitors who do not – then proceed to obtain their data and intellectual property in a fire sale.
What sort of possibilities does this create for LinkedIn?
In short, several. I can imagine several possible and probable eventualities from LinkedIn ProFinder emerging as the dominate player for hiring freelancers.
ProFinder, as an additional tool and service available on LinkedIn, can drive new members to LinkedIn and more active use and returns visits for those who already are on LinkedIn.
Forgetting how ProFinder itself performs financially for LinkedIn, increased LinkedIn membership, and more active usage by more members means increased eyeballs and prospective advertising revenues for LinkedIn.
If ProFinder takes off, it could be in the position to become the go-to platform for rating and reviewing individual professionals like what Glassdoor has become to rating and reviewing companies. This can only further drive more new and more active LinkedIn members, which means more eyeballs and more advertising revenue possibilities.
Individuals, as already has been occurring in the age of social media, mass digital marketing, the gig economy, will increasingly be able to brand themselves as via ProFinder unique individuals and not undifferentiated professional very similar or no different from others with similar bios, resumes, and LinkedIn profiles.
Corporations offering professional services will eventually “buy-in” to ProFinder just as they ultimately embraced Glassdoor, and will use ProFinder as a way to promote their services and their individual employees who will perform those services for their clients. In other words, I envision, if LinkedIn ProFinder achieves its full potential, that ProFinder will not just be a marketplace for individual freelancers, but a marketplace for buyers to connect with and purchase the services of individual employees of their choosing from professional services corporations.
Who are the likely net winners and losers of LinkedIn ProFinder’s rollout & continued expansion?
Winners – Besides LinkedIn itself, any individual or corporation looking to enhance his/its brand, skills, and value proposition to prospective new clients. The traditional employment, economic, and social contract has broken down. Loyalty and trust between employers and employees have been diminishing for decades. Whereas once, by and large corporations could offer job, income, and retirement stability in exchange for the long-term loyalty and dedication of their employees, today’s generation no longer sees job security anywhere. Therefore, Millenials, in particular, are always on the lookout for additional opportunities to earn a second income and brand themselves as individuals rather than corporate representatives to the marketplace. The gig economy fills in the gaps created in the wake of the traditional economy’s decline over the past 30 years. Less and less, people feel the need philosophically or financially to be traditional corporate employees. ProFinder in combination with the marketing and professional networking synergies offered by LinkedIn seems well poised to help accelerate the “gig economy” trend to anyone offering white collar professional services.
Losers – In the Short-term, ProFinder’s direct competitors are Upwork and Fiverr. These companies, with slight differences in the markets they serve and the business model with which they operate, will compete directly with LinkedIn (read: Microsoft) ProFinder. The economics of operating and independent online marketplace are tough enough without the backing of a larger investor or parent company, but competing with new behemoth of a Microsoft-backed LinkedIn will be devastating for Upwork. Upwork is the new company created in 2014 through the merger of the two previous dominant players in the online freelance marketplace space – Odesk and Elance. It seems sensible and inevitable for Upwork too become an acquisition target for either LinkedIn or a large recruitment service provider such as Randstad or Adecco looking to diversify by entering the marketplace for freelancers).
In the long-term, Glassdoor seems to be the most likely loser from the rollout of LinkedIn ProFinder. This prediction may not seem obvious. Allow me to explain. First off, I must admit I struggle to decide whether or not I am bullish or bearish on Glassdoor and its long rumored and probable IPO. That being said, regardless of Glassdoor going IPO, I think it is inevitable for the company to be acquired by Google, which already invested in Glassdoor through Google Capital in 2015. Additionally, the synergies with Google’s search business are too obvious and sensible for Glassdoor to long remain an independent digital recruitment marketing company and the millions of dollars in working capital that it takes to remain dominant in that space.
My point is that long term, Glassdoor’s value proposition appears to be unpenetrable by ProFinder or any other review / rating product. But, ProFinder with the synergies offered by its connection with LinkedIn has the potential to become a go-to destination for reviews and ratings in ways Glassdoor, cannot hope to compete.
About the Author: Evan is a Denver-based independent recruiter and consultant. He joined SourceCon as a contributor in 2015. Evan is passionate about helping recruiters and sourcers improve their craft by adopting tactics of sales professionals and digital marketers. He blogs and tweet on recruiting, career advice, and HRtech. Evan’s mission is to help keep the “human” in human capital. You can follow Evan on Twitter @evanfherman to receive daily tips on recruiting, careers, and HRtech. Or reach out to him on Linkedin.
Let’s be honest. The reason that your recruiting messages are not completely personalized is due to time. It just takes too long to engage candidates already in process, let alone create a talent pipeline, right? Yes, engagement is a challenge for everyone. And while there are several tools on the market that offer customization, but most do not offer the warm and fuzzy personalization candidates are looking for. That is why getTalent, by Brightmatter, blew my mind.
I met the getTalent team at one of our #HRTX events. I sat down to have a conversation about what exactly getTalent does ready to tell them all the things it didn’t do. See, I talk to more HR Tech and Recruiting Technology vendors than the average person. So, to make sure demos don’t get too boring, I play a game I like to call “find the gap” where I try to find the weakness in their products. Not to be mean mind you, just to make sure that I am giving accurate reviews. When I played “find the gap” with getTalent, they won. I couldn’t find any gaps, and in fact, getTalent did more than I would ever expect in a tool.
So, what is getTalent?
getTalent was developed to help recruiters create better candidate pools, then organize those candidates into pipelines, engage with those candidates to keep them interested and analyze what marketing activities are attracting candidates and which are repelling candidates.
I really was impressed by getTalent’s CRM features combined with seamless supercharged marketing automation features. Lead management, candidate outreach, pipeline building and sourcing capabilities are all inside.
Why do I need getTalent?
“In today’s market, recruiting is a 24/7 activity, and you have to strike while the iron is hot,” said Shravan Goli, president of Brightmatter. “You don’t have time to wait until you’re back at your desk to add resumes to your database or contact prospects by email or phone call—you need to engage them now before your competition beats you to it. That’s where getTalent mobile gives you a significant advantage, providing the tools to add and engage candidates on the spot, so recruiters can be proactive from anywhere.”
Use getTalent on the Beach with New App
getTalent is launching their new iOS app at HR Tech in Chicago. Making it “… the first mobile candidate pipelining solution that empowers Recruiting teams to add new candidates, manage talent pools, engage prospects, and build proactive talent pipelines on-the-go.” The newly launched getTalent mobile app allows recruiters to:
Instantly add new candidate profiles and resumes to the talent pool.
During an in-person meeting, simply snap a photo of a candidate’s resume and getTalent automatically parses the data, adds the candidate and resume details to your database and tags the profile with keywords associated with his or her skillset. This not only makes profiles easily searchable but also streamlines pipeline building.
Augment rich candidate profiles with open web data using FreshUp™.
Every new profile automatically gets the FreshUp treatment, getTalent’s exclusive process that supplements, updates, and refreshes lead profiles with the most current and accurate data from more than 200 online sources, including social media.
Engage leads anytime, from anywhere.
getTalent’s built-in mobile engagement tools let you send emails or call candidates directly within the app. This real-time lead nurturing capability ensures you never miss an opportunity and leads never grow cold simply because you’re away from your desk.
View, search and analyze engagement activity.
Every candidate interaction is automatically logged to the getTalent system, allowing teams to stay fully synchronized with all candidate activity from their desktop or mobile device.
If you are at HRTech this week, see getTalent mobile in action for yourself, stop at booth #2230. Or, visit www.gettalent.com to learn more.
Editors Note: RecruitingDaily was not compensated for this post, and the opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.
About the Author: An international trainer, Jackye Clayton has traveled worldwide sharing her unique gifts in sourcing, recruiting and coaching. She offers various dynamic presentations on numerous topics related to leadership development, inclusionary culture development, team building and more.Her in-depth experience in working with top Fortune and Inc 500 clients and their employees has allowed her to create customized programs to coach, train and recruit top talent and inspire others to greatness. Follow Jackye on Twitter @JackyeClayton and @RecruitingToolsor connect with her on LinkedIn.
Facebook officially launched Marketplace this week. It’s about what you’d think: Post an item for sale via your Facebook account and potential buyers contact you via Messenger. The buyer and seller workout the details and a deal is consummated.
It’s been available where I live for awhile, so I can talk about the service as a seller. In a totally unscientific test, I posted an old gas grill on both Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.
No responses via Craigslist. Two interested buyers came through on Facebook which is how I unloaded the item. I’d certainly use it again. Posting was easy and I found the result I wanted.
Facebook is getting some heat today, however, as users are posting a wide variety of things like guns and animals. No surprise spam is rearing its ugly head, and job postings are starting to make their way to the service too, even though there is no specific category for employment.
Job posting spam seems to be limited to posting a display ad as an item photo. Postings can include text, but the job opportunities I see are too lazy to include a text description. Interested parties can message the poster directly, which seems like a nightmare for a recruiter. (Of course, the lack of anonymity in the service may fight job spam more effectively than anything else.)
Facebook Marketplace does include Classifieds as a category, but it’s limited to Housing, Services and Miscellaneous. Jobs has yet to be added, and there’s no word on whether it ever will. In fact, there’s no guarantee Facebook will keep the service at all, since a similar option was tested back in 2007 but closed seven years later.
Anything with a billion users is worth keeping an eye on, but Marketplace is no Craigslist killer. If it ever is, we’ll let you know. Now, carry on.
About the Author
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
He has been featured in Fast Company and US News and World Report. He sold his company in 2009 to Jobing.com. He was employed by EmployeeScreenIQ, a background check company. He is the founder of Ratedly, an iOS app that monitors anonymous employee reviews. He is the father of two children and lives in Indianapolis. Yes, he’s on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can hire me too.
I know that I have done a review of Hiretual before, but I am excited about the latest update. Currently, Hiretual acts like a “Recruiting Assistant” and obtains additional information about candidates on LinkedIn and GitHub and there are more sites in the works. What is great, is that it does a lot more than just finding contact information about candidates.
Some key features of Hiretual are:
It has a Chrome extension making it easy to use.
It ranks each candidate for you letting you know the best.
It also has a boolean building capability that allows you to search both Linkedin and other social sites.
It also gives you likely hood they are looking to move and compensation data.
It gives you the ability to save profiles and download the info as a .CSV file as well.
If you would like to download this Chrome Extension for yourself, please click here. Below is my latest video about the latest Hiretual update.
About the Author: Dean Da Costa is a highly experienced and decorated recruiter, sourcer and manager with deep skills and experience in HR, project management, training & process improvement.
Dean is best known for his work in the highly specialized secured clearance and mobile arenas, where he has been a top performing recruiter and sourcer. Dean’s keen insight and creation of innovative tools and processes for enhancing and changing staffing has established Dean as one of the top authorities in sourcing and recruiting. Connect with Dean at LinkedIn or follow @DeanDaCosta on Twitter.
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It’s kind of amazing what teachers do, spending hours inside and outside the classroom to prepare students to take the next step and be productive citizens. It’s one of the hardest jobs that exists, if you ask me. They deserve those summers off.
It’s 2016, and I’m not saying anything shocking when I remind you that what happens during your company’s recruiting process no longer stays within your company. It gets shared by candidates through social media and employer-review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed and new-to-the U.S. ones like kununu. And bad reviews, spread virally, can strangle your company’s reputation the way kudzu vines overtake trees in a Southern forest. A bad candidate experience can mean bad business for your company, period.
As part of the Human Resource Executive® family of Conferences, it means my passion, along with the rest of the team, is teaching. That’s why we acquired the Recruiting Trends Conference last year. Our primary goal was to take a distinguished brand that’s been educating recruiters for 40 years and make it better, stronger and more relevant. To create a conference that effectively educates and addresses questions such as, what defines a great employer brand, what’s my role in creating it and how do I know when the goal’s been reached? Am I, as a recruiter, making the most effective use of my time each day? What are the latest tools and techniques for finding and connecting with passive candidates? How do I teach my team? The questions that drive our performance, inspire our passion and motivate us to keep working as hard as ever. 
About The Author: Andy McIlvaine is senior editor at Human Resource Executive® magazine and conference chair of its Recruiting Trends and Talent Acquisition Technology Conferences. He has more than 20 years of experience covering HR and recruiting. He is a graduate of Penn State University.
Brandy Hagan graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor’s in Social Science. She has over 3 years experience writing about the employment industry and creating SEO-rich content for marketing purposes.
Joel Cheesman has over 20 years experience in the online recruitment space. He worked for both international and local job boards in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. In 2005, Cheesman founded HRSEO, a search engine marketing company for HR, as well as launching an award-winning industry blog called Cheezhead.
Everybody presents themselves in this very polished, professional package, you know, but I still think poop jokes are hilarious, watch an obscene amount of cartoons for an adult male, and waste most of my spare time playing video games. And during the weekdays, I write for a living – and the beat I happen to cover is as esoteric as any enterprise software niche, as some sort of cruel cosmic joke.
Losing weight is the inevitable go-to-goal of so many people, myself included. Our society is pretty much obsessed with the concept. We witness it every January when we all fall into the “new year, new you” chaos and join the gym with everyone else in the area. It comes up again before big life events like weddings, family reunions, etc. It seems like people are always looking for a way to be more fit.
During my agency days, I had a client desperately seeking a systems administrator with scripting experience on a Sun Solaris Unix based system in a medical environment. So basically, a needle in a needle stack for a city like Phoenix. 
Ted, was the stereotypical computer geek. The guy was like Melvin from the movie Office Space. Although he was a tad thinner, he had the mustache and everything. A big lug of a man that was like an action figure for nerds, complete with pocket protector and calculator watch. If you haven’t seen the movie, Melvin was motivated by his red stapler. It became a staple joke for those of us who loved the irony of the movie, working in our own cube farms. 
The meeting was set within twenty-four hours of sending the first email. Ted would be meeting with the hiring manager and two other coders that would be on his team. I warned them about his, well peculiar is the nicest way of saying it, demeanor. The manager responded saying he was a programmer so he was used to it. 
About the Author: Derek Zeller draws from over 16 years in the recruiting industry. The last 11 years he has been involved with federal government recruiting specializing within the cleared Intel space under OFCCP compliance. He is currently serves as Technical Recruiting Lead at Comscore.
Of course, these visits to the expo hall are punctuated by parties and networking galore. That buzz doesn’t die down the second the expo hall closes but rather make it’s way to the bars and restaurants as we catch up with the people we always run into online but rarely in real life. After spending a day looking at technologies, it’s pretty natural that our conversations go to the best, worst and brightest. In the first 24 hours of arriving, I believe I was asked at least 30 times what technology I was most excited to see. Who I thought would be the next big thing.
LinkedIn
About the Author: Evan is a Denver-based independent recruiter and consultant. He joined SourceCon as a contributor in 2015. Evan is passionate about helping recruiters and sourcers improve their craft by adopting tactics of sales professionals and digital marketers. He blogs and tweet on recruiting, career advice, and HRtech. Evan’s mission is to help keep the “human” in human capital. You can follow Evan on Twitter @evanfherman to receive daily tips on recruiting, careers, and HRtech. Or reach out to him on 
Let’s be honest. The reason that your recruiting messages are not completely personalized is due to time. It just takes too long to engage candidates already in process, let alone create a talent pipeline, right? Yes, engagement is a challenge for everyone. And while there are several tools on the market that offer customization, but most do not offer the warm and fuzzy personalization candidates are looking for. That is why 
So, what is getTalent?
Use getTalent on the Beach with New App
About the Author: An international trainer, Jackye Clayton has traveled worldwide sharing her unique gifts in sourcing, recruiting and coaching. She offers various dynamic presentations on numerous topics related to leadership development, inclusionary culture development, team building and more.Her in-depth experience in working with top Fortune and Inc 500 clients and their employees has allowed her to create customized programs to coach, train and recruit top talent and inspire others to greatness. Follow Jackye on Twitter 
I know that I have done a review of 
