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All Shook Up: How To Really Disrupt Recruiting.

ElvisEvery single day, it seems, there’s some “thought leader” out there shouting about how “we” need to disrupt recruiting (despite the fact that almost none of them, you know, actually recruit for a living).

“The old ways won’t work,” they say, even if they don’t know exactly what those old ways actually entail; makes sense, since embracing the status quo is shitty for selling consulting services.

That’s why, according to these “influencers,” recruiting has become a spammy, sadistic and superfluous “unprofessional” profession, as it were.

Of course, this is almost always positioned in the context of whatever new cool recruiting tool, training or technology that “thought leader” happens to be peddling that particular day.

Unlike these “recruiting experts,” however, I’m actually a recruiter. I’ve been one for a while, now. And from where I sit, as a real recruiter closing real reqs, I have a slightly different opinion from this pervasive punditry. The thing is, I don’t know that we actually need to “disrupt” anything, exactly; at least not the same kind of disruption that’s devolved from a professional call to arms to a product call to action.

What I do know, though, is that we’d all be a hell of a lot better off if we, as individuals and as an industry, could collectively get our shit together and make one single, simple and completely disruptive change to business as usual in recruiting: start treating people like human beings.

Treat Me Nice.

2015-11-03_10-46-46One of the occupational hazards of this occupation is that recruiters, by necessity, often upset people. It’s an unfortunate side effect of being in this business; it’s recruiters who most often serve as the bearer of bad news, the messenger tasked with telling job seekers they’re no longer under consideration for a job, or our clients didn’t like their resume, or that here just isn’t a fit for them at this time.

Even the ones who successfully get through the process often have their hopes dashed by an offer that isn’t even close to the range either of you had hoped for, and for some reason, justifying it with HR buzzwords like “internal compression” or “leveling” doesn’t make breaking the news to a candidate any easier; in fact, it often undermines the trust that’s the entire foundation of a recruiting relationship.

So it goes.

And while I firmly reject that recruiters are in the rejection business (see what I did there?), I do recognize that MANY of our candidate interactions aren’t exactly happy ones.

The problem is, many recruiters fail to understand that as badly as being the bearer of this bad news kind of sucks – so much so, in fact, so many of us avoid sharing it entirely, exacerbating that whole “candidate experience” issue – but as bad as it is for us,  it’s often infinitely worse for the candidate.

If you want to change recruiting, start with changing your mindset, first. How about a little empathy?

I can’t pretend to know exactly what implications and emotions any candidate thinks or feels as the result of my rejecting them. But here’s what I can do – I CAN and SHOULD acknowledge they are feeling something – and respect those feelings, whatever they may be. From anger to despair, the reactions may run the gamut, but it’s our job as recruiters to at least understand where the candidate is coming from.

In some extreme cases, a candidate may have put an inordinate amount of effort into your hiring process, or become so interested and excited about an opportunity that being told it’s not going to happen feels not only like a punch in the gut, but a personal rejection.

Often times, the candidate reactions are inordinately irrational – when we’re told we’re not getting an offer, particularly one we want, it can feel like our careers are OVER, particularly because we’ve come to see our careers in the context of that dream job or dream company, only to have the realities of recruiting defer those dreams.

While we can empirically recognize that this isn’t really the case, in the moment, for the candidate losing out on a dream job can feel like a nightmare – and we need to wake up to the fact as recruiters, it’s our job to be respectful of that.

Blue Hawaii.

blue hawaiiThe importance of empathy and compassion in recruiting really hit home for me in a huge way a few weeks ago. As many of you probably have heard by now, I got married last month; my husband and I ran off to Hawaii, leaving our families behind to catch it via live stream instead (gotta love technology, right?)

The morning of our wedding, I woke up with the brilliant idea to send flowers to our mothers. You know, a little token of our love and appreciation, particularly since (by design) neither would be attending the nuptials in person, and I thought it would be a nice gesture to give them something from us they could enjoy during the ceremony. I know, pretty sweet sentiment, particularly coming from me.

So, I jumped online, found some simple, straightforward arrangements (I deferred to the experts and went with the “florist’s choice” option), then shelled out what ended up being an exorbitant amount to ensure they’d be delivered that same day. Which shouldn’t really have been a concern, since we still had a good 12 hours before the ceremony – I was feeling both smart and sweet, really, at having conceived of this little goodwill gesture.

Point, Amy.

Later that day, as I’m getting ready for my ceremony and dealing with the stresses of being a bride that you have to deal with even when you’re more or less eloping – I get an email that my flowers were not, in fact, going to be delivered that day. Which, of course, left me with only one choice: I freaked the hell out.

I called the site I ordered the arrangement at immediately, trying to get the issue resolved; the rep on the phone basically told me “though shit. They’ll be there tomorrow.” Which, shouldn’t be too big of a deal, right? I mean, what difference does one day possibly make? Unless, that is, you’re getting married in a couple hours and are up against a gun (and wish you had one, at that very moment).

I tried to keep my cool. I explained WHY this was so important, and asked if there was ANYTHING that could be done. It wasn’t until I insisted on at least a refund of that same day delivery charge (which came out to be a boatload) that she not only issued a refund, but actually apologized and promised to upgrade the flowers to compensate for the confusion. Which was appreciated, since it was the best she could do, all things considered. So it goes.

The next day, my mother-in-law received her flowers; while they were a day late, she absolutely loved them, and sent me a picture. They were awful. I’m talking heinous, here – which is hard to do with fresh cut flowers. I was actually embarrassed that my mother-in-law had received such a craptastic arrangement, even more so because she used to be a florist. I knew she was judging me, even as she insisted they were lovely and smelled amazing. Now, I love my mother in law. But I friggin’ hate ProFlowers.com.

After hanging up with my mother in law, I called my mother to see if she’d gotten any packages delivered from me. Nope, she tells me. Nothing had arrived; what should she be expecting? I kind of backtracked (I’m still trying to surprise her at this point), and told her I’d get it sorted out.

It wasn’t until the next day, after too many follow up phone calls and way too much frustration, my mom finally received HER flowers (only a couple days late, but really, who’s counting?) Now, I must say that unlike my mother-in-law’s arrangement, this arrangement was at least truly lovely. But honestly, it was the SMALLEST flower arrangement I’ve ever seen; it was like the bonsai tree of floral bouquets. This was an “upgrade?”

It’s Now Or Never.

808a07c6b5f4fedfcc64a5c61143004fI know what you’re thinking; what the hell, exactly, does any of this have to do with recruiting? Well, the point is this. As pissed off as I am with ProFlowers, I realize that that for all my anger, they’re nothing more than an intermediary between me and the actual local florists responsible for royally screwing my order up. It’s not the website that delivered shit flowers late – it was the FLORISTS.

But the reason for my continued animosity (antipathy, even) at ProFlowers, even recognizing that they’re not fully to blame for the botched opportunity, is because they didn’t care. 

Look, I get it. They might not have been able to fix the problem, or do a damned thing about it, but would a little empathy and compassion really have killed them?

By my final phone call to these chumps, I was so upset I had to pass the phone to my husband as I broke down in hysterics, sobbing about how my wedding. was. ruined. And believe me, I’m not exactly the Bridezilla type. Until, that is, you push me over the edge. And I was upset, hurt and ANGRY because, simply, NO ONE CARED.

Every customer service rep I spoke with acted like I was being somehow unreasonable, or worse, like I was BOTHERING them with my questions, queries and cries for help. The attitude, so succinctly summed up by one of the reps I spoke to, was “well, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

Let me tell you what I want you to do, lady. I want you to show a little human sympathy, realize I’m going through some shit, and have some compassion.

Don’t Be Cruel.

9j3p1jYou know, just a little, “I’m so sorry,” or “I understand your frustration,” or, even better, “let me tell you what I CAN do.” It wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but it would have changed everything for me.

It’s those little words, that little bit of interpersonal empathy, that can go SO FAR when it comes to dealing with a bad situation. While you can’t change the ends, it’s the means that really mean something.

But I didn’t get any of that. I was treated just like a faceless number, just another customer having just another crisis, the same type they deal with a hundred times a day.

I was treated like one of the thousands of applicants recruiters get resumes for every day who, no matter what the circumstances, just don’t really matter all that much.

Or the dozens of candidates I talk to every week to say, “thanks, but no thanks,” and forget that those words carry a lot of weight with them. I let candidates know that they’re no longer under consideration as a matter of process, but forget sometimes, in following that process, that every one of these candidates is a real person who’s going to have a real reaction to this news.

Good, bad, or indifferent, all they’re looking for to turn things around, and make a customer for life, is to show a little empathy, a little humanity, and give the impression that someone out there actually cares. Because even if you can’t help change a hiring manager’s mind, or really do much to help resolve candidate crises, sometimes the biggest help, the most profound impact a recruiter can ever make is simply by showing our stakeholders that we’re here for them, we understand how they feel, and that we’re willing to listen.

Talk about disruptive.

amy alaAbout the Author: Amy Miller is a staffing consultant & talent sourcer for Microsoft, where she supports the hardware division as a member of Microsoft’s in-house talent acquisition team.

Amy has over a decade of recruiting experience, starting her career in agency recruiting running a desk for companies like Spherion, Act One and the Lucas Group before making the move in-house, where she has held strategic talent roles for the State of Washington’s WorkSource employment program and Zones, an IT product and services hub.

Amy is also a featured blogger on RecruitingBlogs.com and is a member of RecruitingBlogs’ Editorial Advisory Board.  Follow Amy on Twitter @AlaRecruiter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Weirdly : Candidate Engagement Tools To Build a Team of Superstars

Candidate engagement is the new buzzword for 2016, but what does it really mean? Sourcing for talent in your organization may be challenging, but it’s often not the true obstacle your recruiting team must overcome. Engaging your leads, converting them to qualified, interested and available candidates is the challenge. How your team communicates with potential talent, how you move them through the recruitment funnel and how you convey your message is an area that gets related to sourcing as the issue.

In reality, the issue is candidate engagement.

What is Weirdly?

Weirdly is a customized recruitment software that allows you to create a fun, interactive quiz to include in your recruitment campaign. The idea is pretty simple; include your quiz on your job posting via a link, your social world, Status updates or wherever your candidates may find you. The potential candidate clicks the link and is taken to an interactive quiz page that is customized to meet the quirkiness of your company.

 

Weirdly serves two segments in the branding process; the hiring company and the candidate.

For the hiring company, the idea is simple. Use your quiz to engage with talent that may otherwise be left for dead as the bypass your boring job description.

For the candidate, the recruitment process become fun. Your quiz is interactive, makes them think and allows them to have a glimpse of what it may be like in your seat.

We’ve seen many tools like this before and there are many quiz / gamification companies on the market, but these guys have a nice system on their hands.

What we like about the tool:

  1. The ability to customize and tailor your quiz to your specific need, from design to questions to the visual application of the quiz
  2. The ability to socialize the quiz with custom url’s across your networks and the ability to report back per lead source
  3. The final output of the quiz feels custom and like it has a purpose
  4. The reporting looks strong. Great data and nicely presented in an easy to read display

 

weirdly_stats_dashboard3

What we are not too sure about

Is Weirdly an ATS or a 3rd party application? There seems to be a slight identity issue here. Do you need a 3rd party quiz application to house your resumes and share feedback? we’re not sold on this option just yet.

The name. It’s cute but does it hit home with buyers? Maybe.

 

 

 

 

Jackye Clayton Editor RecruitingTools.comAbout 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 @RecruitingTools or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Block Annoying Ads-Chrome Extensions Pt. 2 of 3

All recruiters love their Chrome Extensions but they can come at a price. Online advertising can be a divisive thing. On the one hand, ads support the free content model of the internet, with advertising subsidizing many of our favorite websites. On the contrary, poorly designed or intrusive ads can be disruptive to say the least, and cookies and similar advertising trackers raise privacy concerns. With ad blockers and anti-tracking software, users can block annoying ads, save bandwidth and opt out of meddling marketing systems. Check out Dean’s favorite ad blocking extensions and apps to take control of your browsing experience.

 

In part 2 Dean DaCosta will discuss:

  • Adblock Tools
  • Chrome Extension Permissions
  • Find Malicious Extensions

 

dean_dacostaAbout 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.

 

 

The Deadly Sins of Social Recruiting.

There’s been quite a bit of hype about social media. Perhaps you’ve even become an evangelist (or at least a believer) by yourself. Social media is self perpetuating; networks are echo chambers that magnify their own importance. This is why no matter how successful you feel social media has been for your recruitment efforts, it’s important to take a step back and ask yourself a few critical questions.

Are you really generating regular client inquiries and business development opportunities on social media? Are any of the many platforms you’re posting on actually attracting a steady stream of passive candidates? There’s a good chance, if you look at the time and money you’ve spent on social and your actual results, the answer to these questions is a qualified no.

This is the case for a majority of employers and agencies, and if you’re even on social, you’re already likely ahead of the competition, even if you’re not fully leveraging these networks to drive real business results. The nice thing about social is that this medium has a short memory span, so it’s alright if you haven’t achieved the kinds of outcomes you were hoping for when you bought into the buzz.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. In social media, there are no real “experts” or “gurus,” as even the most experienced or successful social savants are really just figuring all this out as they go along; dumb luck, if anything, plays as big a role in all of this as best practices. This means you’ve got a pretty big safety net to constantly tweak and refine your social media strategy to stop spinning your wheels and start delivering real recruiting ROI.

The opportunity cost for inaction is that while they might not be there yet, if you can’t figure social media out, your competitors will eventually. That’s why there’s no better time than now to start building a head start, even if it means not always getting everything perfect the first time.

The Deadly Sins of Social Recruiting.

Here are the four biggest mistakes you’re probably making when it comes to social recruiting if you’re not getting the results you’d like, and some tips and tricks for making social media work for attracting, developing and hiring top talent across industries, functions, levels and segments. While there may be no “right way” in social media, here are some of the most common ways recruiters go wrong.

1. Pride.

'jbToo many people think of social as a bullhorn or broadcast vehicle. This leads to many companies blindly posting content and buying followers or fans, sitting back, and somehow expecting results. This is no better, nor more effective, than the old “post and pray” model of recruiting. We all know how that works out. If you don’t have a strategy for social, you need to remember that the point of any marketing activity, social media included, is to drive sales.

That is why it’s imperative organizations consistently ensure that any sort of social media presence is targeted to an audience with the purchasing power – direct or indirect – to help you achieve those goals.

Relevance is key; if you don’t target a specific audience, you’re unlikely to reach the specific kinds of candidates you’re looking for in the first place. Being everything to everyone never gets anyone anywhere.

One of the best parts about social media is that it can allow businesses who really commit to creating meaningful connections, community and conversation is that social media allows a way to showcase subject matter expertise and reinforce market leadership through cutting edge content and curation.

By sharing great content that’s highly targeted and relevant, social media offers recruiters an ideal way to stay top of mind with existing clients, customers and candidates. This constant presence means that if an opportunity opens up at an employer, or an A-List candidate wants to feel out new opportunities, you’re more likely to get that call than the other guy who’s just sitting there shooting off InMails.

In order to properly focus your social recruiting efforts, you’ve not only got to define your audience, but also what you want them to do. You need to have a clear cut goal in order to develop the call to action that you hope to drive through social media; this can be building future relationships, driving referrals, or getting a butt in a seat in a week. What do you want to get out of social recruiting?

  • Lead Generation: If this is the primary goal, then consider creating an asset like a survey, proprietary research or a private market report. For candidates, getting them to sign up to a newsletter or job alert notification, a webinar or recruiting event is a great way to add value and attract the passive talent we’re all looking for on social media.
  • Relationship Building: This is a great way to make sure that current clients or candidates, past prospects or potential new partners can not only always have an easy way to connect with you while getting the chance to engage with – and learn more – about you as a person and as a professional. This proximity generally leads to deeper relationships, more trust and, if done the right way, more business. Remember, social media is a long term game, and relationships take time. Always build to last. Results are better that way.
  • Career Development: Having an active presence on social gives you access to a huge audience of similarly minded professionals, and recruiters in particular seem heavily prevalent across many social platforms. With so many voices clamoring for attention, using social to showcase your unique perspectives, personal observations and professional expertise can be a great way to drive business. What’s more, over time it can also lead to many other outcomes, like being asked to speak at key industry events or trade publications. This is the exposure that money just can’t buy, and the credibility most recruiters just can’t earn.
  • Candidate Experience: People want to work with people, and social media lets recruiters actually be humans. By putting a face with the name of an employer brand, giving candidates the information they need and providing a point of contact that extends well past the point of apply, even if there’s no point in them applying. By engaging with candidates, providing them information they need to succeed in their job search and careers (at your company or otherwise) and ditching that whole gatekeeper mentality, you’ll be a beam of light into that “black hole.” An ATS is a system of record; social media is a system of engagement – and the better that engagement, the better the candidate experience. If for no other reason, this is why you should be on social media.
  • Candidates being encouraged to register their resume with you or being enticed to a web page where they can view your open vacancies?

To clarify, everyone in your recruiting organization needs to know exactly who you’re targeting, where and how they can be reached and what action you hope they take to produce the outcome you want from social recruiting. This way everyone’s aligned, understands expectations and are monitored, measured and managed on social media success in a standardized, systematic way instead of just hoping whatever they’re doing is working.

If that’s the strategy, chances are, it’s not.

2. Sloth.

slothIt’s important to think of your social media profiles as landing pages – in fact, that’s really what they are, and this is reflected by how search engines use social profiles within their web results – often ranking these networks at or near the top for most employer brand or employment specific keywords. Understand that candidates will come to these pages through search engines as well as from within these social sites.

This is why, like a landing page, they must be designed with conversion in mind. They must be compelling enough in terms of design and copy to capture initial interest and drive candidates or clients to answer your designated call to action.

Like any other web property, there are a slew of analytics that must be monitored and managed, tweaked and refined so that the results are consistently producing real results and real recruiting ROI at your organization.

Here’s an example. If a recruiter can drive 100 qualified candidates to look up at least one of their published profiles, then what percentage of them will actually take action to form that initial connection?

Will they follow you (and effectively opt-in to ongoing updates)? Will they add you on LinkedIn (and grant you access to their professional network?) Will they click through to the links on the company pages associated with your profile and actually fill out an application? The best ways to make sure is simple: be yourself, not the brand.

From your bio to your postings, don’t constantly share a bunch of information about your company and careers; let your personality out and focus on why they should get to know you as a person, not you as a recruiter; we’re all much more tolerable human beings when we’re being humans and not salesmen. Talk about work from your perspective, and add some insight and information to the jobs you do post. If your accounts are more or less automated feeds from job boards and career sites, then your conversion rates are going to be even worse than a Nigerian Prince in need of a bridge loan.

When looking to go from doing this well to killing it on social, consider surveys show it’s about 45x more likely candidates will follow, friend, fan (or whatever) a recruiter’s personal profile over a company careers or employer branded account. That’s a pretty convincing business case to lose the automated feeds, brand policing and centralized corporate career profiles in favor of giving recruiters enough trust to be themselves on social media. The difference between converting 1% of candidates and 45% of candidates is nothing to sneeze at – and if you’re on social, you’d be pretty stupid to ignore these statistics. You do you. Literally.

Conversion optimization doesn’t stop with a well crafted and personal profile, thoug. Recruiting organizations are continually dealing with a ton of variation in messaging and candidate (or client) communications, from different messaging depending on where a lead is in a funnel to whether or not they’re actively in process or proactively pipelined; whether you’re looking for candidates or looking for referrals; if you’re targeting new clients or nurturing existing ones.

There’s an infinite amount of variables, and it’s up to you to continually test the most effective message and method for making sure your call to action is answered. This is called A/B testing, and it drives up results for social recruiting by showing real stats in real time, and what’s really working (and what’s not). This will help you control your spend and optimize your approach for your targeted audience. If your candidate messaging is limited to “send us your resume,” you’re likely only going to attract the kinds of people already applying for your jobs; passive candidates or clients convert when you address them, their needs, and how you can help as specifically as possible.

This isn’t easy, but by consistently testing and optimizing your messaging and methodology to ensure that you’re consistently converting social recruiting leads into qualified candidates, you’ll be able to quickly generate the type of data you need to get the candidates you want for any particular industry, specialty, function or location. And you’ll finally have the numbers to prove it.

3, Lust.

andi.0You can be one of those companies that has the reputation for having the absolute best social media presence in your industry or sector. You can be one of the most innovative and progressive companies in terms of social recruiting, with amazing profiles, killer copy and networks of some of the top candidates and clients in your field.

You can even have one of those conversion rates from social profiles – let’s say, 50%, which is ridiculously high, but not unheard of – but here’s the thing: you’re still only getting 50%. And in a market where every candidate counts, half is pretty much nothing. When recruiters see social recruiting results, they often stop doing the exact same stuff that made them successful – engaging less, bragging more, forgetting (as social media fame often makes us) that candidates need us more than we need them – that’s when everything normally falls apart.

Social requires constant commitment. And good is never good enough, no matter how good it is.

Every social site you’re on should be seen separately; don’t integrate with some app, as many employers do. Every site will reach a different segment of your audience and candidate pool, different UI/UX (LinkedIn, for example, allows you to select the associated thumbnail pic with a company status but Facebook does not) and functionality (LinkedIn doesn’t support hashtags, Twitter does), so integrating these through a single point of contact will hurt your chances of growing your network and engaging your fans.

Make sure that even when using the same post or link, you know which type of candidate or client is most likely to be viewing your profile or updates, and tailor your messaging according to what’s appropriate (and works best) on each respective site. Most sites will tell you how many people – and who – are looking at your profile, following your updates or sharing your content, so use this as a departure point for building a site specific profile and presence instead of one generic “personal brand.”

Social recruiting isn’t one size fits all, and making sure your profile gets seen – and making sure candidates engage with you on social and answer your call to action – means that every site, from your favorite platform to the necessary evils your company requires of recruiters, need to become a part of your daily routine, and that you’re constantly growing your audience. If you’re not seeing growth, try something new, but within a few months, you should really start seeing an increase in the flow of new leads to your profile.

In social media, a new fan or follower isn’t necessarily going to apply, but the more people who view your profile or connect with your social presence, the more warm leads (and candidate information) you’ll have to proactively build a presence and pipeline today for the opportunities that might interest or fit them tomorrow.

Consistency and diligence are key – you’ll get the worst results the minute you stop giving social your best effort.

4. Greed.

ae8d6__chunk-blog-fullFor recruiters, social engagement is critical; it not only improves the candidate experience, but can provide recruiters with the kind of megaphone and huge audience hanging out on these platforms they’d otherwise be unable to reach.

Done the right way, this can lead to cultivating legions of fans who regularly share and comment on your updates, drive new fans and followers to your profiles and help grow your presence by helping you reach ever larger shares of your total target market.

Even if you’re doing all this, though – even if you’re a social media rock star who has case studies and white papers written about them – let’s not forget that reach and revenue aren’t necessarily correlated.

If all you’re doing is building buzz without building business, you’re not really extracting any real value from social recruiting – at least, not any monetary value, which is the reason we’re doing any of this in the first place. Sure, if you’ve got a good following and engaged fans, if you’ve got a strong brand presence and profiles on social, you have an asset. But you’re undervaluing this asset by failing to achieve its full recruiting potential.

Earlier, we talked about aligning social media with your existing sales funnel or hiring cycle, and making sure that your results align with the outcomes or objectives you want your social recruiting programs to produce. This creates a baseline to show whether or not social is moving the needle, or if you’re just spinning your wheels. If you don’t know where you are, you can’t know where you’re headed.

Once you’ve established an audience, once they trust you, only then can you hope to get value – you’ve got to give a whole lot, first. It’s tempting to want to blast out a bunch of promotional messages, the kind of direct, short term calls to action (CTAs) that might drive some of your audience immediately, but lose just as many potential prospects in the process by coming across as just another recruiter or salesy social account. Far more potent is actually engaging individually with your prospects, and personalizing your call to action. If you say their name, chances are, they’re going to lisen.

Consider these two recruiting teams:

Recruiting Team #1 sends out a Tweet, a LinkedIn Update, a sponsored Faceboook post, and a template e-mail asking everybody to schedule an appointment to discuss their career options. No specific job, location, recruiter or any other pertinent information other than a link to a “Contact Us” page with an e-mail address and 800 number.

Recruiting Team #2 listens to the people they’ve interacted with, on their own communities or on others, when they talk about their careers, their jobs or even their goals. They listen to clients who might share open positions and engage with those clients around sharing information, not selling services; about starting a dialogue, not an RFP. They individually contact every qualified candidate or client and then proactively arranges for that one on one conversation at the appropriate time, based either on external social signals or direct contact from earlier social recruiting interactions.

You don’t need to be a “guru” or “thought leader” to know that the second approach kicks the crap out of the first by a factor of 50. This is why so many recruiting businesses are seeing such poor results from social media; they succumb to the temptation of promotion, of the asking for favors instead of sharing of tips or tricks; to the ease of automation and high tech over the hard graft of one-on-one interactions and personalized communications.

But if you have any doubts as to the ultimate payoff for taking the road less travelled, all you have to do is implement some sort of big data, analytics or even a simple tracking solution for proof that hard work in social recruiting pays off – and if you’re not willing to put in that hard work, you’d do well to stay off of social.

Grace.

It’s taken us hundreds of social media accounts for recruiting businesses around the world, tens of thousands of hours and innumerable fans or followers to get even the basic insights I’ve shared here. The thing is, we learn something new every day, and the one thing I am always surprised by is how many employers or recruiters think social media just isn’t working for them, even though they’ve been investing in all the wrong places and focusing on all the wrong things when it comes to social recruiting.

There’s a good chance that if you’re striking out on social recruiting, one of the culprits is listed above. The good news is these shortcomings are easy to address; sure, it might take some resources, but if you’re already investing in social, and one of these is happening at your organization, you should reinvest in solving these core capability gaps, first. If these continue to be problems, not even the fanciest career site, most expensive agency or dedicated headcount or departmental time dedicated to social will possibly pay off enough to justify your ongoing spend on social recruiting. Fix this stuff, first.

You might not get it at first – in fact, no one does – so all I can say is don’t get frustrated, and realize that as long as you know why you’re recruiting with social media, who you’re targeting, how well you’re aligning that strategy with the business and measuring results, you’ll be OK.

If not, you’re probably going to be fighting an uphill battle when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of candidates today – and even more so tomorrow.

If you need any help along the way, all you have to do is ask. That’s how you learn, you know. And if you have a success story or want to teach us what’s working for you in social recruiting, please leave a comment in the box below.

All I can say is, good luck.

2015-10-30_04-43-00Tony Restell is the founder of Social Hire, a consulting firm dedicated to partnering with candidates, recruiters and employers to better leverage social media in the hiring and job search process. If you’d like to learn more about his step-by-step process for getting results with social recruiting and business development, click here. 

A published author and frequent commentator and contributor on issues related to social media, marketing and recruitment analytics, Tony has over 15 years in the online recruiting industry as an entrepreneur, business leader and consultant, and is a graduate of Cambridge University.

Follow Tony on Twitter @TonyRestell or connect with him on LinkedIn.

From Good to Great: How To Become A Badass Recruiter

watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here-memeIf there’s one characteristic, a single quality that distinguishes between a great recruiter and simply a good one, it’s attention to details. The best recruiters out there are complete control freaks. We’re not talking about Type A personalities, here – we’re talking Type A++. These are the recruiters who sweat the small stuff and do more than find e-mails, names, and profiles or simply push resumes.

Great recruiters understand that the only way to exert influence and drive successful outcomes lies entirely in their ability to exert and maintain as much control as possible throughout every stage of the hiring process1.

The recruiters who successfully control the process are never blindsided by an interview no-show, nor are they shocked when a candidate declines an offer or decides to drop out of the process.

Superfreak: Taking Recruiting From Good to Great

They say the devil is in the details, but so too is the key to becoming a truly exceptional recruiter and talent acquisition practitioner. If you’re looking to step up your game, here are some often overlooked, but absolutely imperative, details that separate the best in the business from the rest of the recruiting pack.

tough-questions1. Know the answers to the toughest candidate questions.

Good recruiters can find out the answers to the manifold questions that inevitably arise during the talent attraction and offer process, but great recruiters anticipate these potential hiring hurdles and continually remain proactive in alerting and overcoming any red flags well before they’re raised.

They accomplish this by asking a single, simple question: “What could prevent this candidate from accepting a position if offered?”

Whether this comes down to relocation, salary, work-life balance or any other dozens of potential hurdles recruiters often encounter when extending an offer, every recruiter needs to ask this question – and know the answers – for every candidate under consideration for every open requisition they work on. One of the simplest fixes for finding red flags is to be as realistic and upfront about the opportunity as possible.

Never oversell the position or undersell the requirements; acknowledge and directly address any candidate concern honestly, and you’ll build not only trust, but also alleviate any potential roadblock for achieving your ultimate goal of placing the right candidate in the right position – and doing it the right way.

2. Walk On By.

keep-calm-and-walk-on-129A walk-on is one of the most important, yet most frequently ignored best practices in any recruiter’s talent toolbox. For those of you unfamiliar with this critical concept, a walk on is simply when a recruiter physically accompanies a candidate to an interview instead of simply sending them on their way after an introductory interview.

By walking the candidate on, you not only get additional face time but also the chance to answer any last minute questions or address any outstanding concerns the candidate may have while making sure they’re prepared and ready to rock their interviews.

This little bit of time can go a long way in turning you from just another recruiter into a familiar face, and also effectively diffuses some of the anxiety and nerves that so often adversely impact candidates during the interview process.

While preparing for a walk on, proactively think of the little things you can do to help a candidate succeed, from printing a few non-wrinkled copies of their resume to providing them with an interviewing itinerary with the names, job titles and backgrounds of the decision makers they’ll be meeting with, along with a copy of the actual job description so they can easily reference this throughout the day.

Every walk on should end with a handoff – make sure that they not only know where they’re going and what to expect but also make sure to stay around (even if the hiring manager is running late) and make sure to introduce the two in person before taking off. Your primary job as a recruiter is connecting candidates with hiring managers, and this subtly reinforces to both parties that you’re in control – and the ultimate arbiter of successful recruiting outcomes.

3. Keep A Candidate Emergency Kit.

always-be-prepared1_thumb3One time, I was walking on a candidate for an interview – I was living in South Florida at the time, and as always, it felt a bit like a sauna outside – you couldn’t walk out the door without becoming covered in sweat.

On the way to meet me, the air conditioning in his car decided to bite the bullet, and, this being South Florida, he did what any sane person would do and tried to fix it himself so that he wouldn’t come into the interview dripping wet (which never leaves a great impression).

Unfortunately, he cut himself and, using a handkerchief as a bandage, abandoned his DIY attempts at fixing the car to make sure he wasn’t late for his scheduled interview (which leaves a far worse impression, to be fair).

So my candidate – who would probably have gotten the job, by the way – shows up for an interview with a gaping gash on his hand and looking like he just stepped out of a sauna. Needless to say, after he didn’t get an offer, I resolved to make sure never to lose another great candidate over these sorts of silly situations that are easily remedied.

That’s why every recruiter should always have a “candidate emergency kit” tucked away in their office, car or workstation (I recommend using a tackle box) that has the following items:

  • Disposable toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash
  • Disposable comb/brush
  • Hairspray/gel
  • OTC headache and pain medicine (think Tylenol, Advil, Aleve)
  • Travel sticks of deodorant for both men & women
  • A Stain Stick and/or Wet Ones
  • Assorted Band-Aids or other adhesive bandages
  • Breath mints and/or gum
  • A portable sewing kit with a needle, thread and a variety of spare buttons
  • An extra tie for men and a spare scarf for women
  • Extra pens, a black sharpie, a notebook and file folders.

I know this probably sounds like overkill, but I’ve perfected this candidate crisis management kit over the years, and every single one of these items has a story behind it. Buy me a cocktail, and I might even tell you one or two.

But I will tell you this: you don’t want to be in a situation where a candidate might need these basic supplies and fail to have them on hand. You never know what easy, quick fix might be required to make sure a great candidate doesn’t get knocked out of the process for a stupid, silly or superficial reason that could have been easily pre-empted and prevented.

3. Practice Makes Perfect.

MjAxMy02OTgyMTA2NTBjZjlkZWVmMy first recruiting job ever, I worked at one of those huge international recruiting firms, and role playing played a major role in this firm’s recruiter training and development process. I, like most other recruiters out there, hated this exercise; I was afraid not of presenting in public, but rather, of doing something wrong in front of my professional peers or being judged by them.

Eventually, after a lot of role playing, I felt more confident in these exercises, and had the whole thing pretty much down pat, but that didn’t stop me from continually finding new ways to close the candidate or successfully convince a hiring manager that they were worth considering.

Practice didn’t make perfect, of course, but over time, it sure made my colleagues and me a whole lot better when it came to recruiting.

There are always new approaches to experiment with, new things to try, and improving your professional skill set requires relentless pursuit of these possibilities – and relentless practice. No great recruiter is ever satisfied with doing what works – they’re committed to doing what it takes to make that work even better.

4. Honesty Is Always the Best Policy.

2015-04-20_11-29-23Every time you interact with a candidate or hiring a manager, your communication needs to be direct, clear and most importantly, completely honest. Let candidates know as many details as possible about the expectations for the role, the dynamics of the team or business unit they’re interviewing for and the company culture as possible – and make sure that you realistically represent the drawbacks as well as the selling points while selling any opportunity.

If there’s high turnover, or terrible work-life balance, or extremely high expectations associated with a role, let them know – any successful candidate will inevitably find all this out eventually, anyway.

Also, make sure that they know the minor details, personality quirks and other insight into the hiring manager as possible. For instance, if you know that a hiring manager loves a certain football team, loves dogs or is particularly passionate about something unrelated to work, let the candidate know, particularly if you uncover any shared interests that could build affinity, drive better outcomes and more accurately uncover a candidate’s culture and team fit, too.

Furthermore, make sure to keep in touch with candidates as much as possible – I tried to talk to the ones I had in process every day, just to keep them warm – and make sure to address any concerns and questions your candidate might have as they work their way through the interview and offer process. This will help the candidate feel more relaxed, build a trusted relationship with the recruiter, and allows you to know a little bit more about your candidate – and alert you to the red flags you might have overlooked or hadn’t yet considered.

5. The Handshake

giphy (2)Nothing kills a candidate’s chances like having a lame ass handshake. So, for the love of all things beautiful, make sure you shake a candidate’s hand and, if it’s lacking, make sure to coach them so that they don’t unintentionally create a bad first impression through a limp shake or sweaty palms or similar icky, painful handshakes when they meet the hiring manager.

If you’re not sure what makes for a good handshake, make sure to check out this great article written by Arlin Cuncic titled “Top Ten Worst Handshakes”. It totally breaks down what to do – and what not to do – when shaking hands (and it’s pretty funny, too). It also underscores what great recruiters know: you can’t seal any recruiting deal without a proper handshake.

Don’t overlook this essential consideration, or you’ll likely cost yourself, candidates. Always lead with a handshake when welcoming them, and if you find theirs lacking, make sure to work this into the preparation process – a walk on is a great time to do some last minute work on helping them get a grip, as it were.

At the end of the day, recruiting is all about finding as many facts as possible to help candidates and clients alike make the most informed decision hiring decision possible. If you don’t pay attention to the details or sweat the seemingly small stuff, you’re making a big mistake.

Trust me on this one.

 

Jackye Clayton Editor RecruitingTools.comAbout 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 @RecruitingTools or connect with her on LinkedIn.

HR Tech 2014 Startup Pavilion : Where are they now? – MosaicTrack

AAEAAQAAAAAAAAZpAAAAJDRiMTVjOGVhLTQ3ZGItNDU3Mi1iOTI0LTczMGJiZGJhMmE2MwWe were able to catch up with Ed Windgate CEO of MosaicTrack to see what has happened since being part of the HR Tech 2014 Startup Pavilion! MosaicTrack is a smart recruiting solution that leverages the cognitive power of artificial intelligence to read through resumes and social profiles to find the best talent based on culture fit and skill set. No surveys or questionnaires to complete.
Predictive analytics and artificial intelligent algorithms are employed to pre-qualify applicants to increase the quality of the people you interview, and reduce the hours spent by the hiring team reviewing resumes. MosaicTrack built algorithmic tools with IBM’s Watson technology allowing to match talent on culture fit and skill through the power of machine learning and natural language processing. (Vendor Description)

How and when did the idea to develop your product/service begin?

Our idea began when we were placing and hiring people with our website development consulting firm. We got fatigued by reading, and reading, resumes. And realized we are in the tech development business, and should do something about it.

How did being part of the HR Tech Startup Pavilion provide meaningful business opportunities that otherwise might not be possible?

It was a great experience, that we might not have been able to afford by having a regular booth. We talked to literally hundreds of people and made great business connections.

What was an unexpected outcome from being part of the HR Tech Startup Pavilion?

We went to HR Tech hoping to sell our solution directly to customers. That was accomplished. We found that the largest interest was from larger established companies wanting to partner with us. That was unexpected.

What updates have you made to your product/service is the 2014 HR Tech Conference?

We added many more cognitive features, interfaced with partners, and are launching our integration with ADP. Check them out, and ask about MosaicTrack in their Marketplace. We are just finishing up our integration with their products (it will be officially released in a few weeks).

Looking ahead, what does the future hold for HR Technology?

The future of HR technology? More AI. Think about the ‘old’ days, when recruiters spent their day, opening envelopes of resumes. How much time did that take? And, how many paper cuts? Then, we had OCR software that converted resume to Word Docs. How much time did that take? Now, people apply online, life is much more efficient.
But, now, we are left with ‘black hole recruiting’. We have so much more information that has not been reviewed by a recruiter (i.e. resumes in an ATS). We need AI to help. In the same way if HR departments did not use OCR, or now an ATS with the ability apply online, well, that would be old tech. In the future everyone, will be using ‘smart’ apps. Right now, MosaicTrack is on the forefront.
A few numbers. We are able to choose who the hiring teams will want to interview 80% of the time. Compared to a typical recruiter that has a 10 – 20% success rate. This means a recruiter using current technology will need to send 5 sets of resumes to a hiring team to get one interview request. Whereas if the recruiter used MosaicTrack, they would only need to send over one set of resumes to get an interview request. At most, two. This is the point. We think recruiters will use AI as tool, the same way they currently use database technology today, alongside their work. Not replacing their jobs.
Jackye Clayton Editor RecruitingTools.comAbout 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 @RecruitingTools or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The Bad and The Not So Beautiful: Film School for Recruiters.

Bad-and-the-Beautiful-The-bw-still-1581-691Not too long ago, there were a ton of technical, economic and access barriers anyone wanting to make a movie had to overcome to make even a short form student film; I remember, and Lord, this makes me sound old – editing actual celluloid film cels on a flatbed with a straight edge razor, which makes me still get a little pissed off every time I see some kid fire up iMovie.

That was the shit you had to do to make a movie, even the most mundane ones, like my pseudo-artsy film school projects that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on (literally). It was also what you had to do to make any sort of corporate video or internal training tool, too. And it was a ginormous pain in the ass.

Trust me; I actually spent a summer off producing tax training films for H&R Block. It was about as exciting as it sounds. The thing was, it was actually pretty cool making what used to be called “industrial films.”

Tasked with making one half hour introductory video and two fifteen minute supplements – and trying somehow to weave some sort of narrative into a crappy contractor training film – seems, in retrospect, like a pretty simple, straightforward and relatively inexpensive sort of project.

It was anything but, down to the union grips (which means they don’t move shit, but you’re not allowed to), securing permits for shooting locations, waivers for whomever happened to be at that location at the time, and this crazy ass former TV talk show director, Rodger, who I think took acid sometime in the 70s and never came back, which would explain both the ridiculous Frank Zappa soul patch thing he had going on and his odd insistence on running these second rate corporate shoots like he was David O. Selznick on shrooms. Dude, it’s a tax office in a dead mall, no one cares about mis-en-scene or method acting.

This was what you had to deal with back before all this became digital. The Rodgers of the world (now finding a new calling as “social media gurus,” it seems), and the PAs, and the crazy casting ladies and the back and forth on clearances and E&O insurance with hired gun lawyers with nothing to do but sit there and make sure that you only used the part of the Dave Koz song you paid for.

Cold Open.

77e71490351d9af14ef108a243251711This was what it took to make a film – in my case, twelve weeks, 38 full time production crew members and 6 guys working post, plus whatever warehouse crew in Hangzhou was responsible for pressing the thousands of VHS tapes then distributed out to each and every H&R Block tax office on the planet – which, oddly, is a lot.

That was business as usual, and it was a full on business – we take for granted today how easy it is to take out our phones, shoot some footage and instantly upload it in no time for nothing, but back in those pre-YouTube days, amateur video was mostly limited to grainy handheld shots of people eating shit while Bob Saget did a falsetto voiceover.

The turn of the century was a weird time; back then, being able to produce, package and distribute really any sort of video product required a tremendous amount of time and cash, which is why for my summer project my asinine training films (the highlight of which is when Marcy, a single mom, learned about the earned income tax credit and saved her house from foreclosure) were budgeted – get this – at $120,000.

That’s right. One hundred and twenty thousand dollars for one hour of proprietary employee onboarding collateral – and I came in under budget because even the Teamsters working transport on the shoot couldn’t do that much coke in overages. They sure tried, though.

Say what you will about organized labor, but they sure like doing as little as possible while being as messed up on some substance as possible, and I respect that immensely.

At least unlike Rodger, they were under no pretension that we were creating art in any way. Our goal on set: take a really boring subject matter and try to turn it into content that’s at least engaging and tolerable. It’s a lesson I learned well, I like to think. That, and when you’re making any sort of company or industrial film, you can’t take anything, most of all yourselves, too seriously.

We laughed and laughed when we screened it for the CMO and COO, who sincerely reacted as if I were the next Orson Welles and that the reveal about reverse mortgages at the end of the second module was the greatest statement of morality this side of Sophie’s Choice. They were honestly happy with what was delivered, which in my mind, was 100k worth of wasted marketing spend, but the client was happy (another lesson I’ve learned well).

In retrospect, I think their reaction, as well as the other commercial productions I worked on in some capacity, is that film was some sort of magical medium that, since few people knew how to do it, was more or less alchemy to the people willing to spend money just to see their branding on some shitty interstitial.

You Oughta Be In the Pictures.

1954_judy-garland_a-star-is-born_s_21I wish I could still get away with doing that shit for a living, but times have changed, and in the “social” revolution, the most revolutionary democratization in terms of content has nothing to do with shared networks, online communities or a self-publishing and do it yourself distribution platform for publishing your own writing in front of a worldwide audience (literally).

All of these are pretty significant advances, sociologically and technologically speaking, but the evolution of film and video content has been more profound than any other evolution of an existing medium, in my mind, since Gutenberg figured out how to print more Bibles.

Consider that in 2005, which was the year YouTube first launched, the average cost for a corporate training film was around 3 grand per finished minute of film. Today, a two minute, professionally produced company video runs anywhere between $200-$700 according to a study from production house Hinge, and the average production time has gone down from 6.7 hours of shooting for every finished minute of film to only 22 minutes for digital projects.

That same year, when Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reboot was the top box office draw in the world (weird, right?), the MPAA estimates that 229.1 million people around the world saw a theatrical film.

Compare this to the fact that the top performing YouTube video of the year, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again,” has already generated almost 1.1 billion views since its release in April.

That’s equivalent to 1/6 of the world’s population watching Wiz about six months, staggering numbers when you consider that less people have seen every movie in the Star Wars franchise since it was launched in 1977 (estimated by Gallup to be around half a billion peeps, impressive but paltry by comparison to a fairly disposable tribute song for Paul Walker, of all people.

Last point of comparison: the total production budget of 2005 box office champ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was 150 million dollars; Wiz’s production clocked in at an estimated $85,000.

Steven Bochco, the man we have to thank for both Miami Vice AND LA Law (what up, Susan Day?), said a quote that still sticks out in my mind:

“Film provides the only way to marry the power of an idea to the power of images.”

Not only is that true, but that’s basically the core business case behind incorporating video into employer brand initiatives. There is no more powerful medium than film; it’s immersive, creates shared experiences and has a similar impact on our perceived well being and hard wired emotions as doing controlled substances like cocaine or meth, at least according to the patterns of dopamine and serotonin release scientists have seen as the result of both. So, basically, film is addictive, as anyone who has ever Netflixed and Chilled or wasted an entire day at the office watching random shit on YouTube will tell you.

So, if we want to connect with candidates on an emotional level, or we want to win their hearts as well as their minds, then it’s obvious that film has a better track record than any other medium in creating memorable, immersive and indelible impressions; far more so than blogging (sucks, I know), or podcasts, or even, believe it or not, those omnipresent, obnoxious infographics that have replaced reading for so many of us.

Simply: if you are spending money or effort on recruitment marketing, forget “mobile” or “social” first.

Shooting Schedule.

8448861475_09b73ff2a5_bStart by making kick butt videos, which are not only going to improve your SEO, show up in the world’s second most widely used search engine (that’d be YouTube) and be embeddable in everything from JDs to career sites, but are also probably the easiest, most direct way to define your company culture, brand and humanizing an employer through spotlighting real employees doing their real jobs, which takes care of the principal costs of most commercial film projects today .

When you’re shooting on digital cameras, editing on iMovie, uploading everything to YouTube and have free talent and shooting locations, video will become not only your most effective brand builder in terms of sheer audience reach, but likely the cheapest, quickest and top performing candidate engagement driver of any of the manifold options currently in our talent toolbox.

As more employers start investing in sourcing analytics and big data solutions to track, optimize and control spend, the impact and efficacy of video should only become more and more obvious, particularly when coupled with consumer media consumption trends.

In aggregate, video already has a hell of a business case – and the numbers to prove that it’s worth the effort for employers (unlike, say, social media or “talent networks”). Consider the fact that according to research from HR consultants TalentSquare found that job postings received an average of 12% more views simply by adding video to an existing JD; even more surprising is that those postings with video yielded 34% more qualified applicants than those without video.

Think about that: adding a one minute video that’s more or less free and idiot proof could increase your candidate yield by more than one third. If any point solution had that kind of impact on results, I promise employers would be lining up around the block to buy said miracle product. The thing I don’t get is why so many recruiters just don’t buy video when it’s so clearly not just what’s going to matter next in talent acquisition, but what already matters right now.

Studies show job descriptions have drastically different application and conversion rates depending on a number of variables like word choice, job title, listed qualifications, where they were posted and when, and a bunch of other company and req specific inputs; when you’re using text only, quality matters, and the lack thereof is one of the biggest inhibitors of direct sourcing and candidate conversion success. This means job postings have to be really good, and really compelling, to stand out. Not so with video; they don’t even have to be good (or watchable) to produce these outcomes, since these results are consistent across positions, verticals, industries and career levels.

In other words, video dramatically and consistently increases both impressions and conversions irrespective of the actual quality of that video. Hell, it could be Howard the Duck and it would still outperform a text only Citizen Kane as far as recruiting analytics are concerned. And that’s pretty much all we should be concerned about in recruiting and talent acquisition today. Numbers talk, shit walks.

And if you’re not investing in video, you’re walking into some pretty deep shit in terms of long term organizational impact; according to a recent Aberdeen survey, fully 65% of “best in class” talent acquisition organizations are actively investing in video tools and solutions for recruiting and hiring.

Feature Presentation: 4 Ways To Make Better Hires Through Better Video.

ef722042-7966-4ec8-8cf2-3ddce75c4bd1I don’t love analyst research, but that’s a pretty strong correlation between recruiting success and video spend, no matter how you slice and dice the data. And it’s not just job descriptions that can benefit from video; in fact, video can be effectively leveraged (with similarly effective results) throughout every phase of the hiring process, from sourcing to selection to onboarding and beyond.

If you’re not already thinking about video, or haven’t started to deeply integrate video content as a core component of your recruiting process and core competency of your recruiting organization, don’t sweat it. Here are 4 things every recruiter should think about when it comes to talent acquisition and video content.

1. Coming Attractions.

Much like trailers for future films, an important first step in creating video content is to provide just enough of a taste of what to expect from a company and job, kind of like a company culture highlight reel, while leaving candidates wanting to see more. We see a trailer and make a decision on whether or not to invest the two hours it takes to see the whole feature largely based on this pastiche of clips without context. We may not know why, but there’s a reason test audiences rankings for trailers are historically the most accurate predictor of a film’s relative box office potential: it’s because if you can hook someone in quickly, emotionally and viscerally, you can sell any product. Jobs are no exception.

One of the most obvious and most effective ways to incorporate video in recruiting is to produce your own “coming attractions” sizzle reel to preview and provide candidates with a realistic sneak peek at job positions in specific and the employer in general. One good example is one of the earlier, and most successful, video based recruiting campaigns run by health insurance provider Humana.

Let’s face it. The production values suck. The music is cheezy. The scripting is awkward. And yet, somehow, it still does a pretty good job of showing candidates what real employees are really working on and hearing about these opportunities not from a job description, but in these workers’ own words. It briefly touches on aspirational stuff like company mission (which is pretty compelling when it’s literally saving lives), provides some snapshots of the corporate culture and outlines the benefits and perks of working at Humana in a package that’s all under two minutes. The video, as all recruiting videos should, ends with a specific call to action that also includes specific instructions for job seekers on how to apply and what to expect.

I’m not saying that the production design, sound, cinematography or even post production are any more than serviceable, but serviceable works – and this is a good example of a generic video that’s inexpensive and unpolished, but still accomplishes its objective of providing a job search preview and company information to candidates.

You don’t have to make the next Oscar winner to make video work. Just make video, and start with the small stuff. Humana nearly doubled its applicants by using this video throughout their recruiting and career collateral. If you can think of another way to see twice as many applicants simply by using technology every employee already has to create content that costs a couple hundred bucks and a day or two of shooting, tops, please let me know.

2. Get Ready For Your Close Up.

357125712d4d5e932123c3ef6ccc7262Obviously, video can humanize your recruiting process by showcasing employees in action, but the real opportunity for using employees as video talent comes from the fact that video allows you to capture and create a repository of institutional knowledge that can come in handy during any sort of change management, restructuring or turnover scenario.

Getting people to talk on camera about where they work, how they work and what their job is really about is great knowledge for candidates, but it’s also a great way to make sure your own team and internal stakeholders have that sort of insight into existing employee roles, responsibilities and how these align with the bigger business picture.

Similarly, putting employees in videos and effectively deputizing them as the “face of the franchise” is a great way to feature and recognize top performers, and ensure they’re being appreciated and recognized, which, in turn, not only helps recruit new top talent, but with retaining them, too.

Of course, one employer who is notorious for turnover is Google, whose average 1.1 year tenure is among the worst of any public company; despite their reputation for grueling hours, and nearly mythic work-life imbalance (including the recent stories of employees opting to sleep in the parking lot for expediency), Google remains the top “dream employer” and career destination for candidates across levels and markets, and does so perennially, despite a reputation as being, well, kind of a crappy place to work.

One explanation for this, of course, is consumer brand (hell, they even made a major Hollywood film starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson that was more or less an employer branding video), but the other is that since Google is known for developing talent in house, with a sort of Silicon Valley minor league system that’s focused largely on getting fresh blood in the door and developing them, preferring potential over direct experience.

This makes them very dependant on college hiring to sustain this bottom heavy talent organization, and this specific video featuring five college students showing what the first week as a Google Intern really looks like is a great example of speaking to a specific demographic with a very targeted message and doing so not by jamming down a bunch of corporate propaganda or HR talking points, but instead, by telling a story and creating instant affinity by focusing on new hires and onboarding, which are the most immediate concerns of most every candidate considering careers at your company.

Google is a company that is known to focus on the distant future, but by positioning their recruiting videos on the short term, it’s much more accessible, relatable and way less scary to potential candidates (and informational for successful new hires, too) than the only thing worse than the fear of not getting a job you really want – the fear that comes with not knowing what happens next when that job does happen. This is one phenomena I’m pretty sure most potential Google interns are pretty familiar with.

 

3. Since You’re Already On There…

nosferatu_2According to LinkedIn, the average employee has 10 times more social media followers than their employer.

You’d think that would, you know, be pretty good proof that sinking money into company pages and paid display ads and premium profile branding are kind of a waste of time, considering everyone would rather just connect with your employees instead of following your company and opting into automated job postings, company press releases and bad B2B blog content about how badass your company is.

But since they have to monetize that stuff, instead, LinkedIn figured out how to monetize a solution rather than help solve the actual product problem.

This has led the geniuses in Mountain View to continue their amazing track record of innovation with yet another amazing tool, this one known as LinkedIn Elevate.

Per the geniuses in their product marketing group:

“With LinkedIn Elevate, your employees get a steady stream of quality content to share across LinkedIn and Twitter – and help influence all of the customers, prospects, potential hires, and industry influencers in their networks … LinkedIn Elevate is a paid product that helps enterprise companies empower their employees to become social professionals.”

Pretty simple, right? I mean, your employees are already on LinkedIn. You use LinkedIn; in fact you spend most of your time and money on it. It’s obviously doing such a kick ass job at generating you candidates with its suite of systems and solutions that obviously the only thing it really needs is employees automating the same shit job feeds as recruiters to their own connections (but hey, Twitter. That’s kind of cool, if you still think # is a “pound sign” like most SPHRs). Direct search, InMails, Publisher, Company Pages and Groups somehow aren’t enough to get LinkedIn members to apply for your brand; company content sent through employees via an automated feed controlled by HR, however, is the silver bullet. Even though the latter is free and the former…don’t ask.

What does this have to do with video, you ask? Simple: it’s the only LinkedIn product that offers a native video sharing solution that’s widely available to date, which means that since you don’t seem to be dissuaded to just kill your account, suddenly you have a compelling case use for video instead. Because LinkedIn is pushing it now, it must be the future of recruiting.

If you’re too dumb to understand the blatantly obvious business case for video recruiting, then you probably love you some LinkedIn, so if their condoning video is what it takes, well then, I’ll trade a necessary evil for the greater good any day.

PS: Facebook has a much more robust, intuitive and flexible video solution that can be deployed the same way, but for free and with an easier integration and more data integrity. But hey. LinkedIn. Video. Winning.

4. Ace Your Screen Test.

unknown-production-movie-Paramount-Wardrobe-test-board-2In their recent report, Aberdeen reported that the most common case uses for video in recruiting – and the most success most early adopters are seeing – actually comes out of using video as part of the screening and selection process rather than at the front end of the funnel. Aberdeen reports the primary benefits employers report from video screening include reduced costs, the ability to align HR strategy with business objectives and to provide a counterfoil for automation by providing some level of front end personalization, even if that is in the form of a standard screen with the same old questions as everybody else.

Additionally, an OfficeTeam survey showed 63% of employers currently use video technology for interviewing, whether through a dedicated point solution like Take The Interview or HireVue or a free tool like Skype or Facetime.

Of these, 53% rely on video interviewing “very often” or “daily.” So the good news is, the majority of employers are already using video, meaning that finally, this trend has moved from recruiting margins to mainstream. Of course, there’s still a long way to go.

As Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Experiments once proved, letting workers (and by extension, candidates) provide feedback and feel like they have a voice is a bigger driver of satisfaction and engagement than any other variable at the workplace.

So even if you don’t hire a candidate, giving them the chance to talk about themselves and why they’re a fit – something most companies don’t yet offer – actually fulfills that psychological need of recognition and almost unilaterally leads to candidates rating their experience with an employer more highly than those that simply use text based applications and resumes, even if, like those traditional tools, they widely never hear back at all. What matters for most people’s candidate experience isn’t that they heard from an employer, it’s the belief that an employer, for once, heard them.

Here’s hoping that if you’re in recruiting or hiring, the audience is actually listening when it comes to recruiting and video.

 

Build Talent Communities with new Enterprise Offering “Facebook at Work”

facebook-work-ftFacebook at Work, is an enterprise version of the social network that Facebook developed to build social networks for their employees. This is not surprising. There are some companies including Slack, Socialcast, Salesforce’s Chatter, Zyncro and the like who are trying to tackle internal corporate communication issues. While the products listed have found various amounts of successes, a significant number of them have had issues obtaining full corporate buy in and as a result, have not been as successful as companies may have possibly hoped.

From the RecruitngTools.com viewpoint, Facebook at Work also has the possibility for enterprises to build robust Talent Communities. Facebook’s very nature promotes engagement. When viewed as a talent community, your network will consist of current employees who can interact with each other, make referrals, stay up to date on open internal positions and just share information about company initiatives and successes. It also gives recruiters the opportunity boost talent mobility through engaging existing employees,  build rapport and develop a robust talent community.
The popularity of Facebook will be Facebook at Work’s major advantage and will provide its users an authentic “consumer” social experience different to the boring intranet sites most corporations try to pawn off as an effective way to communicate; AKA the ideal talent community environment.

fb@wkSo how Does Facebook at Work (well…) Work?

Julien Codorniou explained, “When an employer adopts Facebook at Work, they can construct it with a set of new accounts. Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time.”

On mobile, you would have two mobile apps occurring at the same time, he adds. “Even if the employee chooses to link there is no crossover. The content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook.” The product will be accessible via desktop and as an Apple or Android app. The primary capabilities make use of user profiles, groups, messaging, individual and group chat, the news feed, search, and events. One other benefit is that individual users on a Work network can follow/friend each other to see general updates publicized by them in their work life. Here is why FB@Work is the Ultimate Talent Community:

It’s Free…For Now…

Facebook is always attempting to find new ways to monetize. While nothing concrete has been announced regarding how they plan on monetize it, at some point, they will. Trust me. “We’re still in beta, but we do plan to monetize, based around a freemium business model,” Codorniou said in an interview. “We are also building sales and marketing teams for Facebook at Work across the globe right now.”

Employee Engagement

The best talent communities encourage not just reading what other people are saying but responding to things, too. The way they interact, and what they post, gives hiring managers and recruiters insight into what your company culture is. Sometimes even your current employees have no idea what is going on internally where they work. Facebook at Work can help share behind-the-scenes information about your organization, spotlight employees and teams as well as consistently conveying your company culture and corporate mission. Recruiting.com suggested that you share:

  • New open positions
  • New product releases or other company updates
  • Cool things your employees did or events your company participated in
  • Job fairs or other job-related events you are hosting/attending
  • Industry events that your company will be hosting/attending

Referrals

Now that your employees know what the heck is going on internally, they are going to be more apt to disclose referrals. Facebook talent communities make easier for them to suggest their colleagues to you. It also creates a place where you can actively ask for referrals and get real-time responses.

Scalable

Facebook at Work allows you to create Groups within your Work account. For example, you can build groups for members of a particular project going on. Users can message one another directly, make voice and video calls, and as share screens with each other. I like the idea of creating various discussion groups for key initiatives that can target specific departments.

Right now there are some limitations. As detailed by SocialMedia Today For example:

  • Individual updates lack granular controls: everything an employee posts is automatically shared company-wide unless the employee specifies “Only Me” and tags specific individuals
  • Employees can’t directly manage their news feeds: algorithms driven by things like people with whom an employee interacts the most and posts “endorsed” by other colleagues will determine what gets presented
  • All events are company-wide: employees cannot create events for departments or work or other groups of which they’re a part

“More importantly, Facebook at Work is missing key collaboration features, including the ability to share and co-edit documents, project and task management tools, and discussion threads that are independent of messaging and chat. Currently, there is no ability to use third-party apps to substitute for the missing features, and it’s unclear whether and how organizations can customize the product (e.g., to reflect their own branding).”

That being said, there are still some very distinct advantages to using the Facebook at Work module. I would love to hear what you think about it. Please leave comments below on what you think the benefits or disadvantages will be for Facebook at Work.

Jackye Clayton Editor RecruitingTools.comAbout 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 @RecruitingTools or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Why Your Job Postings Suck (And What You Can Do About It).

2099489154_33aa5065b0This might surprise you a little, coming from me and all, but man, I really need to take some time to vent about something that’s really starting to piss me off even more than it always has (hint: it’s always pissed me off).

Now, before I start into my rant, it might be a good idea to provide a bit of context, just so you know that I’m not totally crazy (just a little).

See, recently, my role has focused more on sourcing than recruiting, which has been a recurring theme throughout my career, with the line between these two continuously shifting from req to req, client to client.

The one constant about the great sourcing/recruiting divide in practice (not some “thought leader” theoretical BS) is that the line is always blurred, and if you can’t both recruit or source, you’re pretty much screwed (not to mention a pretty shitty recruiter).

“Job Description” Doesn’t Have To Be An Oxymoron.

Without job postings, sourcers wouldn’t know the minimum or preferred qualifications they should be searching for in the first place. Without job postings, we’d have no easy way to gauge a candidate’s interest in a position, ask for a referral or really engage anyone on social, CRM or anywhere except, maybe, an awkward 1:1 call or e-mail string.

Without a JD, of course, there’s a chance that no matter how you’re communicating with potential candidates, if you’re recruiting just in time you’re likely wasting both your times. When fit happens, it’s because there’s a match between a candidate, company and career opportunity – the same standard stuff that’s the common currency of pretty much all recruitment marketing and advertising.

So, that’s a long way to say that as a sourcer, I’m always forced to defer to the “recruiter” I’m working with (assuming there is one) on any given requisition to provide me with what is arguably the single most critical competitive advantage anyone trying to source or identify qualified candidates can have can have. While I have little input on most job descriptions (and rarely, for that matter, do recruiters – it’s mostly either some warmed over HR document or some cut and paste template the hiring manager slapped together), I’m the one who has to deal with the pain that comes with a painful job description.

A sourcer has to find qualified candidates no matter what, but tell you this: it’s a whole hell of a lot harder when you’re trying to fish with the wrong bait.

We’re all looking for “top talent,” and if your opportunity sounds generic or has absolutely nothing to do with the actual job – like “Systems Analyst” or “Technical Support,” then you’re asking for generic or unqualified candidates.

It really pisses me off how much money recruiters and employers throw away every year on stuff like posting jobs online or developing an employer brand presence, only to completely neglect the fact that no matter how awesome your career site is, no matter how big your budget for recruitment marketing might be, it doesn’t really matter.

If the job ads that are the ultimate destination for all these “recruiting trends” that seem to be distracting so many recruiters from recruiting – the hub to which every social, search and sourcing spoke stems from, the one piece of content candidates actually care about and the ultimate arbiter of whether passive prospects turn into proactive applicants – are complete and total shit. And let me tell you, you don’t need to be a job seeker to realize that most job descriptions fail at the one job – the ONE JOB – they have.

Which is, you guessed it, to describe a job.

Lost In Translation: The True Cost of Crappy Job Postings.

Fig1_Suntory-timeSo recently, I’ve had to do some positions with thrilling titles like “Data Center Support Engineer” and “Windows Technical Support,” and don’t get me started on the word “storage,” which, turns out, is a pretty damn good keyword if you’re recruiting for U-Haul, but not so much if you’re looking for, you know, the digital footprints that anyone you might actually want to hire has out there – the kind of stuff I’m paid to find, and I’m damn good at finding.

But for some recruiters, they don’t know enough to know how broad, vacuous and poorly targeted these titles are, since there’s no indication in the actual posting of what the hell the job actually entails or what qualifications the candidate actually needs, beyond the years of experience and college degree.

I’m telling you, if your experienced sourcers can’t read a job posting and immediately know what it is they’re looking for, there’s a good chance that the candidates you’re out there looking for are going to feel the same way.

Now, I don’t love looking through the resumes of active applicants (and really, who the hell does), but recently I’ve been tasked with doing this more and more, as the influx of resumes coming in for some of my searches seems to have spiked. And no wonder, the ones that get the most applicants –  few are candidates, mind you, because they are in no way qualified for the role – are the ones with the vaguest job descriptions or the ones with the broadest stated set of basic or preferred qualifications.

When recruiters complain how they don’t have time to go through all the resumes they receive, they really should just shut up and actually take the time to write decent JDs instead of throwing out crap that they don’t even read yet expect to be compelling enough to get qualified candidates to apply while getting the crappy ones to self-select out.

A job posting has to speak to a candidate, and, ideally, present more than simply a wish list of shit the hiring manager wants (irrespective of reality) or some inane career copy with a “mission statement” or “values” that’s really just a laundry list of stuff that the company knows it sucks at and hopes to fix one of these days.

And if you’re just using a bunch of corporate jargon or business buzzwords strung together along with some bullet points and a boilerplate, you’re not only going to turn off active applicants, but you’re basically setting up your sourcing strategy for failure.

Sourcers can’t find candidates, and candidates can’t find jobs, by building search strings around shit like “big picture thinker” or “experienced technical professionals” or “strong communicator,” “inspiring internal leader” or any of the other fluffy stuff that tends to predominate in some of the most piss poor position descriptions out there – the ones that say nothing other than “hey, we have no idea WTF we’re looking for.”

Which sucks for the people who, you know, are the ones out there actually doing the looking.

How Crappy Job Descriptions Kill Candidate Experience.

I-believe-in-karmaYeah, I busted out “candidate experience,” because, you know, no blog post would be complete without talking about this perennial HR water cooler favorite.

The consensus is that while we’d like to touch or talk to every candidate, the combination of compliance concerns and sheer scale of submissions makes this pretty much an impossibility; the thing is, I get that recruiters are busy and that being the bearer of bad news sucks is old news, which is why in recruiting, candidates pretty much expect to only know no news.

I’ve written extensively on the subject of candidate experience, hell, everyone who blogs about this business has a ton of content on this subject out there in the ethos, and all I’ve got to say is that recruiters have reaped what they’ve sown. Big time.

And karma, my friends, is a bitch.

Here’s the thing: by putting up a convoluted job posting, a generic HR template or some copy that’s got no actual details of what the job actually does, then of course you’re going to get a ton of people who aren’t qualified applying, because you never actually tell them what you need the person to do, mostly, only what they must have already done.

We ask for experience without offering opportunity, and expect candidates to independently make sense of the senseless, self-select against unstated or unclear criteria, which, of course, means the recruiter receiving the resume has to do it. There’s just too much of that work for any of us to realistically do, even though it’s work we ourselves created, and could just as easily eliminate.

The black hole is a myth invented by recruiters who would rather lean on the convenient crutch of compliance than attempt any real creativity or clarity in career related copy. We’d rather not get sued than not find the talent our organization needs and our hiring managers want, which seems a bit silly if you think about it. And you’re never going to get sued for not using a template or adding the details applicants need to self-select for positions more effectively. Your job isn’t to come up with excuses, it’s to come up with candidates.

If the goal of compliance is minimizing risks, then we’d all would do well to shut up about OFCCP, EEOC and wake up to what “risk” really looks like in recruiting. Because to me, it looks a lot like the same sorts of crappy job ads that cost candidates, cause the “black hole” and lead to many of the frustrations so endemic to today’s recruiting and job search processes.

A “post and pray” approach isn’t about the recruitment marketing medium; it’s a mentality. Turns out that it’s the recruiters who don’t even take the time to discuss the position, edit the JD or even review the req prior to publically posting it are the exact same ones who somehow also don’t have the time to read all those resumes, creating a crappy candidate experience that costs more than your company’s external reputation and street cred.

Recruiters can irrevocably damage their own brand buzz and business credibility by being unable to find the kinds of candidates hiring managers want. As every recruiter knows, what the HM says and what HR puts out there is rarely, if ever, even remotely the same thing.

When this stuff gets lost in translation, we lose candidates, clients and credibility. This is too big a price to pay for what’s really a simple fix: stop writing craptastic job postings that say nothing to everyone and start focusing on what’s in it for the candidate, not the company; stop speaking in buzzwords and start making sense; and please, for the love of God, remember they’re called “job descriptions” for a reason.

Recruiting isn’t broken, but for God’s sake, fix your job posts, people.

Derek ZellerAbout 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. Currently, he is a Senior Sourcing Recruiter at Microsoft via Search Wizards.

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.  Derek currently lives in the DC area.

Data Scraper and the XPath to Sourcing Success

One of my pet peeves around recruiting tool discussions is how shiny new objects get the bulk of the attention. This, of course, is not a problem exclusive to recruiting. Websites like Product Hunt and BetaList help fill our feeds with bright shiny and new tools that can distract us from what we NEED. Spoiler Alert! Not all that glitters is 24-karat. The alternative is let the test of time prevail and potentially miss out on a great new product. My goal is to show a more in-depth review of a tool with at least one real-world example of how the tool can save you time.

xppath

Data Scraper/Data Miner (both names appear on menus and web pages) is similar to a few Chrome Extensions in look and feel. You can right-click on a webpage element, and it will try to “Get Similar” data fields and create an orderly file for export.

xp1

The uncommon features that make this free extension part of my regular arsenal require some understanding of scraping, but are well worth exploring. First off, you can Save Recipes with site-specific XPath or jQuery logic. This means that once you have mapped a website perfectly, you will never have to do the hard work again. Saved recipes sync to your private cloud account, or can be shared as a Public Recipe. You can clone public recipes or customize them for private use. This is great for beginners to learn web scraping since you can see the syntax used on popular sites as a way to advance your skills.

Here is a screenshot of the pop-up when on Twitter. My “Private Recipes” appear above while community submitted ones are below. These can be rated with thumbs up or down; some have an “Example” link to see how the expected source page. You can click any one of these formulas to begin extraction. Links to great help videos and your personal data collections are found at the bottom.

xp2

But wait there’s more! It handles multi-page (pagination) scraping with configurable delays and somewhat intelligently skips empty fields as seen in gray. This works surprising well. Since all the work is performed in your browser this type of scraping is almost undetectable when done at a proper pace.

xp3

Now that we have our data, we can export to CSV and convert to standard Excel for cleanup. The new option is to use the Collections feature to perform even more tricks. Collections act as a mini database with all the data you have collected. In this case, I pulled the 90 names and links for speakers from bluetoothworldevent.com and I can use the search box (far left) to search within the text of this private collection.

xp4

I was lazy though, as I did not grab their company and title so now is my chance to fix it. In Chrome, you can right-click on most items on a website and select “inspect element” to view where that item appears in the source code. Right-click again on the element to “Copy XPath” (think shorthand for page formatting). In the larger screenshot, you can see the copied XPaths in Notepad and how the element changes color as you hover over the source code.

 

xp5

 

The best idea for clean results is to find the common denominator. If you look closely, you can see how each link starts with the same base, with tiny changes at the end. Now we add only those slight changes that define each unique element. This lets us test changes in real-time from the extraction page. Here is new Public Recipe for Bluetooth world with all data fields.

xp6

Lastly, there is a Beta version that can be run concurrently with the original (link at the bottom of the tutorial page). This version shows even more promising features in the pipeline that would usually require either dedicated scripting or use of additional scraping tools.

xp7

Like any technology, you only learn from playing with it. Data Scraper/Data Miner works out-of-the-box with many popular websites, but you will find the most benefit when you dive deep and create a few formulas of your own. I recommend it this for anyone who wants to take their sourcing skills to the next level.

aaron lintAbout the Author: Aaron Lintz is a Talent Sourcing Specialist with @Commvault Systems. Over the last decade, he has held corporate sourcing and agency recruiting roles, helped develop applicant tracking solutions, and managed email & social marketing programs. His passions for experimentation, automation, and willingness to share make him a natural sourcer.
Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronLintz or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Price Is Right: Why Talent Market Success Starts With Sourcing Analytics.

priceisrightThere’s never been a clear cut consensus on where, exactly, sourcing ends and recruiting begins in the hiring process. It’s a distinction that data is increasingly rendering more and more moot, no matter whether or not your organization has a dedicated sourcing team or not.

The lines between these often disparate disciplines has always been blurred, but the increasing prevalence of predictive analytics and foundational focus on data throughout talent today may be making this more or less a moot point.

In order for analytics to be actionable, or metrics to be meaningful, they’ve got to tell a story, and every recruiting story starts with sourcing. In the beginning, sourcing required an extensive personal network, an expansive budget and an arsenal of often arcane or esoteric technology tools and tricks.

Part archaeologist and part alchemist, without having the right data – in the forms of facts, probabilities or market clues – no sourcer could really build a sustainable, scaleable system or strategy, much less monitor, measure and optimize their results.

As the old adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the fact is that in talent today, sourcing the right candidates has become increasingly incumbent on having the right data, as new research conducted by Wanted Analytics suggests. Our research found a significant increase in HR positions that require the integration of critical data into daily workflows, practices and processes as a key for recruiting and retention success. This approach must start with sourcing – which is, after all, where every employee’s employee lifecycle truly begins, too.

Data is the currency of talent acquisition, and utilizing an analytical, data driven approach to sourcing is guaranteed to pay off big time for any recruiting organization or employer. If practice makes perfect, then real results will only come from combining the qualitative candidate research most sourcers are already familiar with together with the talent data research (I know, sounds fun, right) that comes from continually analyzing and optimizing real numbers in real time, all the time.

Come On Down: Sourcing Analytics and the Recruiting Revolution.

Bob-Barker-the-price-is-right-118655_440_330Traditionally, sourcing was seen largely as a reactive function focused primarily on just-in-time candidate identification, screening and slating. While proactive pipeline building has long been a critical core competency within the sourcing function, the truth of the matter is that most sourcing happens only when a position actually opens.

This puts the onus on sourcers to fill positions not with the best candidates on the market, but the best candidates who happen to be on the market at any given moment.

Once the clock starts ticking on time-to-fill, most sourcing strategies tend to look more or less the same, irrespective of the skills or profile required by the requisition itself.

This tendency ignores the fact that an employers’ ability to succeed at direct sourcing and attracting top passive talent is driven not just by the expertise or execution of any individual sourcer or recruiter, but also by bigger market forces that, either explicitly or implicitly, impact their hiring efficacy and efficiency.

Successful sourcing is predicated on knowing – even before a position actually opens – external variables such as candidate supply versus labor market demand, who the competition for the same highly skilled talent is and how much they’re paying, and so forth.

Having the right talent metrics can increase institutional knowledge and individual recruiter understanding of the conditions that may be impacting talent availability, which, in turn, inevitably impact more traditional metrics like time to fill or cost per hire. This, in turn, helps sourcers not only understand, but anticipate and ultimately overcome, many of the challenges and roadblocks that often accompany reactionary recruiting and sourcing for hard-to-fill positions.

By knowing this information in advance, sourcers can not only determine the best approach for identifying potential candidates, but also have the data required to optimize outcomes, improve conversion or offer acceptance rates, and have the requisite subject matter expertise required to more effectively partner with internal and external stakeholders throughout the hiring process.

This market, function or industry specific demand planning becomes even more effective when combined with proprietary company data like succession planning or performance management can help employers build sourcing strategies that address long term organizational needs and anticipate future talent challenges, too.

By aligning traditional HR metrics with recruiting analytics, sourcers will be able to align their efforts with the bigger business and talent picture, using the critical insights this data represents as ammunition for obtaining buy-in, driving hiring decisions and building the kind of credibility needed to transcend their roles as tactical specialists and become true strategic business partners – and trusted advisors, too.

Data democratizes business, and recruiters can finally prove that they’re delivering real ROI – and real results – when it comes to driving the business and bottom line forward. Sourcing, similarly, can not only prove that they’re effective in delivering qualified candidates faster and cheaper, but for the first time, quality of hire; no longer do we have to hope that the people we source work out after the fact, but can use meaningful metrics and actionable analytics to predict and prove we’re sourcing the best candidates before they even become candidates.

The bottom line? While we have commoditized the term “big data” to the point of it being the sort of meaningless buzzword that consultants and corporate lackeys like to use, this is one trending topic that’s actually not only a real thing, but also really important when it comes to determining both sourcing strategies and recruiting success.

The sourcing analytics revolution is here. And this is one opportunity cost where the price is right – and we’ve got the data to prove it.

Disclaimer: Recruiting Daily was compensated by Wanted Analytics for this post. But their insights and information are actually pretty priceless, so in this case, the facts and opinions contained herein do, in fact, represent those of the publisher. Because we’re all about better recruiting through better data, too.

unnamed (8)Meredith Amdur is the President and CEO of WANTED Technologies. She previously held senior leadership and strategy roles at DirecTV, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Informa, where her accomplishments included heading the strategic planning for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division (Xbox), serving as the General Manager of Strategy for the Bing search engine, leading DirecTV’s Digital Entertainment Products Group and spearheading new initiatives in big data analytics and advanced geospatial visualization tools for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Amdur holds an MBA from Cornell University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Follow Meredith on Twitter @BelmontLive or connect with her on LinkedIn.

 

MYnority Report – Prime Minister Announces ‘Name Blind’ Recruiting

The Prime Minister will announce that organisations will pledge to recruit on a ‘name blind’ basis to address discrimination.

  • under new agreement, names will not be visible on graduate recruitment applications, reducing potential discrimination
  • leading graduate employers from across the public and private sector commit to new scheme
  • this will include applicants to the Civil Service, Teach First, HSBC, Deloitte, Virgin Money, KPMG, BBC, NHS, learndirect and local government

Organisations from across the public and private sector, together responsible for employing 1.8 million people in the UK, will sign up to the pledge to operate recruitment on ‘name blind’ basis to address discrimination, the Prime Minister will announce at a Downing Street roundtable later today.

The roundtable will include:

  • Managing Director of Deloitte, David Barnes
  • Head of Human Resources at HSBC Tanuj Kapilashrami
  • Chief Executive Officer of the Civil Service, John Manzoni
  • Chief Executive Officer of NHS England, Simon Stevens
  • Partner and Head of Corporate Affairs at KPMG, Marianne Fallon
  • BBC’s Director of Strategy and Digital, James Purnell

British Prime Minister David Cameron giving thhumbs upThe Prime Minister said:

I said in my conference speech that I want us to end discrimination and finish the fight for real equality in our country today. Today we are delivering on that commitment and extending opportunity to all.

If you’ve got the grades, the skills and the determination this government will ensure that you can succeed.

The announcement follows the Prime Minister’s speech to Conservative Party Conference, where he cited research showing that people with white-sounding names are nearly twice as likely to get job call-backs than people with ethnic-sounding names.

The Civil Service is today committing to introducing name-blind recruitment for all roles below Senior Civil Service (SCS) level. Other top graduate recruiters like KPMG, HSBC, Deloitte, Virgin Money, BBC, NHS, learn direct and local government are joining organisations like Teach First by committing to deliver name-blind applications for all graduate and apprenticeship level roles.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) will be promoting the benefits of name-blind recruitment and will be working towards embedding this as standard through its training and development courses. This means the approach is likely to spread more widely throughout the private sector.

Chief Executive Officer of the Civil Service, John Manzoni:

I’m delighted to expand the Civil Service’s use of name-blind applications – not just for all graduate and apprenticeship level roles, but for many other external applications too.

It’s vital that the Civil Service takes a lead on this, and I’m confident that this important step will help us build an organisation that is even more talented, diverse and effective than it is today.

David Sproul, Senior Partner and Chief Executive of Deloitte, said:

At Deloitte, we are working hard to ensure that our talent pool is diverse and reflects the make-up of today’s society. We want to show that everyone can thrive, develop and succeed in our firm based on their talent, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any other dimension that can be used to differentiate people from one another.

The introduction of name-blind recruitment processes and school and university-blind interviews will help prevent unconscious bias and ensure that job offers are made on the basis of potential – not ethnicity, gender or past personal circumstance.

James Darley, Executive Director, Graduate Recruitment, Teach First said:

Today’s pledge is a great day for graduates and employers across the country. I applaud the many leading organisations’ and the government’s efforts to ensure name-blind recruitment – something that Teach First has championed in its recruitment of new teachers for over 5 years.

From: GOV.UK Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, The Rt Hon David Cameron MP, Cabinet Office and Civil Service First published:26 October 2015 Part of:Equality and Employment

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Lookup and the LinkedIn Talent Disconnect

tumblr_mahxbaNXm91qc7mh1Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is one of those companies that’s constantly tweaking their platform; that they put a ton more time and money back into their actual product than most HR Technology vendors, and make much more substantial updates to core features and functionalities than most online and SaaS companies, period.

The average active LinkedIn member (note: the “average” LinkedIn member, in fact, isn’t active on the website) a recent study suggested only around 37% log on at least once a month) spends a scant 17 minutes on the site every month, compared to over the over 20 minutes a day Facebook’s 1.3 billion users spend on site.

The average recruiter, by contrast, more or less lives on LinkedIn, which is why we’re so quick to catch even the most minor tweaks to functionality or the most subtle changes to the site’s UI/UX. Recruiters know LinkedIn better than anyone, which is why no one in this industry would deny the sheer level of work that goes into iterating current functionalities, introducing new features and experimenting with potential enhancements or revenue streams (remember CardMunch or Connected, anyone?).

This is why so many of us are so frustrated at the fact that what was once such an effective, disruptive and innovative recruiting technology has devolved into whatever the hell LinkedIn has become these days – although frankly, I’m not even sure the company itself knows what LinkedIn is supposed to be, anymore. While the amount of work that goes into the product is self-evident, exactly what the hell the point, or value, of this work actually is to its end users and customers, however, is another story entirely.

LinkedIn: New Look, Same Shit.

Linkedin1A perfect example of this mentality of fixing stuff that’s not really broken is LinkedIn’s recently released UI update, which, let’s face it, took some getting used to even for the most diehard of LinkedIn fans – it was, after all, a pretty huge change to the look and feel of a site that so many of its users had grown so accustomed and familiar with.

The old UI was fine, and the new update wasn’t a dramatic improvement – just a sweeping, superficial design change that didn’t actually address any of the seemingly infinite problems (like the laughably bad InMail open rates) that might make a meaningful improvement to its overall platform or product offerings. In a way, changing the most obvious elements of the site, like the profile design and homepage layout, makes perfect sense.

LinkedIn, as a publically traded company, has an obligation to its shareholders to continually evolve and expand its offerings, no matter how asinine or nonsensical they might seem, because optimizing existing features won’t help the company hit its quarterly growth and revenue targets, while even the worst new features still hold the promise of an untapped revenue source. Increasing value to institutional investors is the imperative, infinitely more so than investing in increasing value to actual end users. Successful companies know how to balance the competing needs of the market and marketplace.

LinkedIn, however, is obviously still trying (and failing) to figure this out, which is part of the reason that its roadmap seems to point more towards the needs of investors instead of the needs of recruiters. In this environment, change is seen as an ends, not a means, and this outlook inevitably leads to disastrous outcomes for both investors and customers (like New Coke or diesel VWs).

These changes aren’t limited to organic iterations, but include the aggressive acquisitions LinkedIn has been making over the past few years, a spending spree that has brought in a melange of seemingly random products into the company’s portfolio, with only a handful of stripped down capabilities actually finding their way into the actual LinkedIn platform.

Some, like Pulse or Connected, became watered down and made more or less worthless; most, though, have either been quietly sunsetted (man, I miss Rapportive and CardMunch) after being stripped for parts (and proprietary data).

Jumping the Shark: Why LinkedIn Isn’t Relevant To Recruiting.

1346331081419_797630In their continued attempt to maximize investor value, LinkedIn’s results have been decidedly mixed; a one-time Wall Street darling, the company’s ongoing identity crisis, coupled with a loss in consumer confidence and a spike in legal actions and litigation, have finally started to damage those stakeholders, with market cap and consumer confidence continuing to trend downwards over the course of the past couple of quarters.

This, of course, has led to the more nefarious minds in Mountain View turning to increasingly desperate ways to right the ship, which means that its expansion into such categories as CRM, LMS and media buying have created a product suite that’s more bloated than their current stock market overvaluation, and likely, just as unsustainable and unhealthy over the long term.

All the money in the world can’t save you when you make self-destructive short term choices for the sake of immediate gratification or business expediency. Hell, that whole “only six figure jobs” thing probably seemed like a good idea at the time, too, but like a Monster Super Bowl buy, what’s good for marketing might not be the best idea for long term viability and sustainability. Just letting it BeKnown (boom).

In watching this year’s LinkedIn Talent Connect, I realize that for LinkedIn, the happy days are gone and that watching their slow, inevitable slide into irrelevancy is kind of like the live stream equivalent of watching the Fonz go waterskiing. The shark, my friends, has been jumped.

Only compared to LinkedIn, Henry Winkler basically looks like Steve Jobs in a life jacket. Hell, even though the entire point of the character was to be a throwback and act as a walking anachronism, somehow the Fonz is way more cutting edge and innovative than LinkedIn ever was.

To make yet another random TV Land reference, even though LinkedIn sees itself as Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, to the rest of the world, you’ll always look like Opie (and come across like Barney Fife). I know; these references are as outdated as LinkedIn’s search capabilities, but you get my point. Plus, if you care about LinkedIn, or even use it, you’re probably about as old as the average Jitterbug user, Gen Y “thought leader” or Taleo implementation specialist.

If you’re cold and need to go grab a sweater, take a breather, mix yourself a glass of Ovaltine and check your Hotmail. Because you’ve got to be eligible for the Early Bird special at Denny’s to think that LinkedIn’s latest product news is even remotely innovative, ground breaking or even particularly interesting to anyone who doesn’t spend most of their budget on LinkedIn’s license fees.

#TalentConnect: Don’t Believe The Hype.

Jones1650If you watched the inordinate amount of money spent on the veritable Nuremberg Rally that was Talent Connect, at least you know your money’s hard at work paying off the student loans of the world’s most inept lighting designer or the overlay for a massive event held in some of the world’s priciest event space.

The spectacle that was this Jonestown revival meeting should have been an affront to anyone who’s paying through the nose to access LinkedIn’s premium product.

The companies shelling out millions of dollars a year for the privilege of having their InMails ignored and their proprietary or personal data repackaged, repurposed or resold to the highest bidder should be up in arms at the conspicuous display of unconscious capitalism on display at Talent Connect.

Every employer paying above market rates for below market results should be indignant at seeing LinkedIn make it rain with the money ever recruiter had to fight so hard to get to finally convince their organization to let them have the “must have” talent tool of the season. But of course, the point of the Talent Connect is so that LinkedIn’s biggest buyers get distracted enough by this boondoggle to forget that from a recruiting ROI perspective, they’re being bamboozled.

Of course, the people who actually have to live with LinkedIn’s constant devolution and pay the price for the open bars and high-end branded swag are sitting back at the office, watching the stream as their leaders get sold over dogmatic product presentations, steak dinners and the chance to rub shoulders with the likes of THE Lars Schmidt – coincidentally, Talent Connect’s only redeeming quality. Awesome job, my friend. I hope you charged them like five times what other clients have to pay for the exact same schtick if only to prove that there really still is justice in this cruel world we live in.

Because while the hype machine was kicking into overdrive, LinkedIn fed the buzz machine of their own design with a juicy product release before the event started that did a good job setting a precedent, albeit probably not the one the company intended.

This brand new product, LinkedIn Lookup, allows you to…drum roll, please…allows you to look up (get it?) the exact same shit about your coworkers that you could have already found out about them on LinkedIn had you cared to look and – wait for it – send them messages directly on the LinkedIn platform. Which, of course, they’ve always been able to do. But now, instead of communicating with future employees, you can do the exact same shit with current ones, too. Wow, they really went all out on that one, right?

Somewhere Elon Musk is stroking a pet cat while cursing LinkedIn for stealing all the innovation out there in Silicon Valley, and a team of Stanford and MIT grads are pulling all nighters dedicated the best years of their lives to what’s pretty much a recycled version of what’s pretty much the most mediocre product on the planet. The sad thing is, the second part of that sentence is actually true. Wow, that’s depressing.

What’s even more depressing is the lack of value (not to say there’s none, but it’s minimal at best) that LinkedIn delivers, even when delivering its purported latest and greatest, “full of sound and glory and signifying nothing,” to quote my man TS Eliot.

If you’re new to a company and have no way whatsoever to access any search engine out there, or lack the ability to access the same basic data that’s already on your intranet, say, then this product might have some utility. Or, if you’re trying to stalk, hook up with or blackmail your coworkers but prefer to use “professional networks” for personal motives, good news: the wait is finally over.

LinkedIn Product Roadmap: Recruiters, Don’t Lookup.

Social-Media-Jokes-LinkedIn-ProfileFor the rest of you, you probably don’t have a whole lot to get worked up – or even really give a shit – about; seriously, Lookup isn’t worth looking up, much less really breaking down its features and functionalities or creating a case use that, frankly, would be a pretty big stretch at best unless some weird confluence of circumstances occurs when all other technology stops working, but you still really need to know who knows both accounting and Powerpoint for that big client meeting next week.

So, quickly, here’s what Lookup does (or what LinkedIn says it does), only without a lot of bullshit buzzwords and meaningless product marketing fluff:

1. Easily Find Your Coworkers! I can already do this on either the desktop version of LinkedIn or on its mobile app. Alternatively, I can kick it old school and pull up the good old company directory. Next.

2. Learn More About Your Coworkers! You’re a recruiter. You do know you have access to HR information and resumes, right? Also, see above: you can already do this on LinkedIn. In fact, it’s the entire point of a profile, come to think of it.

3. Contact Your Coworkers! Awesome! LinkedIn is giving me a way to message my coworkers directly in this application, using an inbox they own and that I can’t actually transport or extract outside of their platform, much less delete or remove any of my personal messages or previous communications from LinkedIn (I can only archive it). If only someone had thought of a way to build a special internet just for employees at a certain company to exchange information and post messages and discussions. You know you’re in trouble when your innovation is pretty much Sharepoint.

I know, right? If your mind isn’t yet blown, consider that as dumb as that sounds, the stuff LinkedIn is saying about their product is even more stupid than the product itself (which, by the way, is no small feat).  I pulled these real (and really stupid) quotes from the million social media groups and online networks that exist for the sole purpose of providing recruiters a place to bitch and moan about whatever mole hill the mountain happens to be sitting on that day.

For these incredibly eclectic, amazingly active and completely asinine “communities” (the term for a place where you can blast your complaints to a captive crowd who could give two shits), LinkedIn releasing a new app is more or less Christmastime for all the ninjas and gurus out there joining in on the online pithy party that is online recruiter shop talk. Shudder. Yet, like a car crash or Top Recruiter, it’s gruesome, morbid and hypnotic. Like The Donald, these talent trolls are so over the top that they’re actually kind of entertaining (unlike Top Recruiter).

And yet, it’s been crickets in there on this one, mainly because not even the cynical critics (trolls) or the staunchest LinkedIn defenders want to touch what’s more or less a product whose idiocy is almost as self-evident as the actual talking points from LinkedIn that made this product more or less dead on arrival (or MIA, since it’s not really a new product in the first place):

“As an individual user, you cannot opt out of LinkedIn Lookup. However, you can choose to not add your contact information to the app.”

Well, I’ll trust the people who got sued (and lost) for literally violating their own terms of service and lost another class action suit for sending unsolicited spam to my contacts on my privacy settings and permissions. Yeah. Not so much. So, reading between the lines on this one, what I think it says is:

“If you want to keep using our site, tough shit if you don’t like us giving the information on your profile to another application. But you can choose not to enter it manually and just let thescrapers and spiders grab it anyway.”

I don’t want to hyperbolize or sensationalize this, but the fact that I’m not even allowed to opt out of the product, which is some kind of social spyware masquerading as a SaaS solution, is a little 1984 for me; apparently, LinkedIn reigns with an iron fist, and their corporate values seem suspiciously similar to Fascism (Mussolini would have been a killer personal branding guru).

Down At the Crossroads: Making Deals With The Devil.

linkedin11HR is notorious for its compliance hypochondria, an overreaction to legislation few generalists actually understand, much less have the acumen to interpret. This is why sweeping doctrines and employee policies that are both unambiguous and incomprehensible are put into place – nuance is the stuff that lawsuits are made of, it seems, which is why the only thing we have to fear isn’t fear itself; it’s the remote possibility that someday, the dozen or so OFCCP compliance officers out there might somehow single out your company for a documentation audit.

We make our employees sign and acknowledge they understand stuff no one without a JD (that’s juris doctorate, by the way, not a job description, recruiters) could possibly comprehend to cover our asses. We forbid them from doing almost everything, no matter how innocuous, because it’s a potential compliance violation of some sort, but for all of this policing, somehow, we’re cool with letting LinkedIn take the PID from all of those employees to a standalone app just because they happened to set up accounts on a completely different platform well before the app ever came out – but who don’t have any sort of grandfather clause factored in. When you’re trading privacy for convenience, you’re making a deal with the devil.

And LinkedIn, my friends, is the devil to whom you’ve already signed away your soul. Suckers.

“Only 38 percent of professionals said their companies’ intranets are effective at helping them learn about their coworkers. 58 percent said they could do a better job if they could find coworkers with specific skills.”

First off, how “intranet” is still a word people use is kind of funny, right? I mean, even the word is an anachronism, but even weirder is the thing that these historically hated closed company networks are still widely in use at most enterprise employers.

While we can pretend it’s 1999 and do stuff like edit a department wiki or look up internal phone extensions, these systems almost always fail when it comes to presenting any personal information about employees, other than a few with noxious answers to stupid questions that sound like writing prompts for first graders (“where’s your favorite vacation destination?”).

Trying to configure these to add any degree of personalization, such data about an employee’s professional skills or professional expertise, is almost impossible, since these intranets are generally run by your IT department, who put HR’s intranet requests pretty far down the priority list (as a rule); figuring out how to structure, sort and search this data in these systems, similarly, would be way more effort than it would ever be worth.

Talent Disconnect: What LinkedIn Doesn’t Get About Recruiting.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAALXAAAAJDlkOGRiZjc0LTZkOTktNDkzMy04OWQ2LTMzOTZkNmZjMzJiMwLinkedIn offers a way to do that, but every recruiter knows that the way someone markets themselves to their current employers behind closed doors differs drastically from how they position themselves for potential employers on public profiles.

Using LinkedIn data will not make the information on your intranet any more accessible, nor employees any more likely to use internal systems to research their coworkers – most just go to Google, and most of the time, end up on LinkedIn since that’s the only relevant result a huge majority of workers have to their name.

Unlike job aggregators, LinkedIn gets traffic by owning the search term of YOUR ACTUAL NAME (not much you can do about that, either, unless you want to learn SEO and create a bunch of content using your name as a targeted keyword). LinkedIn has proven that identity theft is no longer a crime, but a pretty smart business model. So too is putting the customer first, but exploiting them is way easier.

LinkedIn values the intelligence of its users so much that it actually thinks they’re too dumb to either A) use the employee directory that’s already on their intranet; B) collaborate with coworkers to either get this information directly; or C) looking this exact same information up on LinkedIn, which is what we’ve all been doing since 2004. None of us realized that required a stand alone app until this last month when LinkedIn told us we needed one. And they’d never lie to me.

Here’s the Talent Disconnect that Lookup brings up: LinkedIn either doesn’t know what the people using its product actually need so they can align their roadmap with recruiting reality or (more likely) they don’t really care about end users for anything other than the revenue they represent. And if they already have your data, you’re really pretty useless to them, anyway.

Of course, the entire point of Talent Connect is to fool the people writing the checks into believing that an elaborate stage show somehow replaces service and support for a big ticket SaaS solution. Here’s hoping that LinkedIn looks up long enough to realize that this dog and pony show takes more than releasing apps that are more or less giant, stinking turds.

I give this one twelve months, tops. That’s OK – that’s an eternity for a company who can’t see past their current quarter, much less the bigger picture of the true price that the hubris evidenced in the new “products” (yawn) unveiled recently are already costing them.

ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MATT CHARNEY (mainly the offensive stuff).

unnamed (11)About the Author: Pete Radloff has 15 years of recruiting experience in both agency and corporate environments, and has worked with such companies as Comscore, exaqueo, National Public Radio and Living Social.

With experience and expertise in using technology and social media to enhance the candidate experience and promote strong employer brands, Pete also serves as lead consultant for exaqueo, a workforce consulting firm.

An active member of the Washington area recruiting community, Pete is currently a VP and sits on the Board of Directors of RecruitDC.

Follow Pete on Twitter @PJRadloff or connect with him on LinkedIn, or at his blog, RecruitingIn3D.

How to get the Most From Chrome Extensions: Part 1 of 3

As a recruiter, Chrome extensions can be your best friend. From browsers extensions to speed to security and add-on’s, Chrome is a serious contender to the king of browser extensions; FireFox. With extensions however come conflicts, and with conflicts come slow CPU’s and with slow CPU’s comes a really pissed off recruiter. Learn how to get the most from Chrome Extensions

Malware is prevalent among many extensions in Chrome. It’s been a key focus of Google to eradicate this but to no avail they still remain. Long story short, you need to be cautious. These add-on’s that are filled with suspicious software, however, are not truly malicious, rather they are aggregators of data that generate revenue from your clicks through non-visible adds.

Throughout this series Dean DaCosta will discuss:

  • Browser level security
  • Chrome extensions and add-on’s
  • How to set up and maintain a clean browser environment to prevent adware and spyware bots

How to setup and maintain a clean browser environment

 

dean_dacostaAbout 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.

 

Facebook Search: Search Conversations, Topics and Events

Facebook Search is back and ready to consume your daily dose of search.  This morning as I did what most of us do, I skipped the morning coffee, walked past the newspaper and clicked my way on to Facebook to get my morning news… Most of that is sarcasm, with the exception of Facebook.

As I powered up for the day, I was presented with a “search option” and a few key points as to how I can now use Facebook to search the more than 2 trillion posts and data points available in the Facebook universe.

Curious, I snapped a screen shot and started to run a few searches to test the waters. Rather than searching the presidential debates I took a stab at Engineers, because well, that’s what we do.

Here are my findings:

The notice that I can now search more than 2 trillion posts and news updates

As Facebook made the kind suggestion to search the king of pop, I opted for to take a run at the software engineers waiting for our calls.

Facebook_Search_1

Here are my first 2 attempts at running basic searches to see if I can dig up a few people talking about “Software Engineering”  You can see the searches below, highlighted in red.

Search 1:

“I am a” “software engineer” “new job” ::  The idea behind this search was basic. I want to identify people saying that they are a software engineer and mention the phrase “new job” in that same conversation.

Results:

Taking a look at Jamil’s posting in red, you can see that he mentions a job that he started just four months ago. Also, he states that he is not happy indicating he may be looking for a new job. Comparing this back to the original Graph Search just a year ago, the results are were strong.  The advantage to me with the new search feature is that I see posts from the general public outside of my little world of Facebook friends. This includes news feeds, postings, status updates, group messages and events.

Facebook_search_3

Search 2:

“I am a” “software engineer.”

Results:

The results on the first search returned accurate results. As I scrolled through, I noticed that most results were targeted but did not stray too far into the land of suggestions, which I’d expect to change as the feature matures into a full system search tool.  What I searched is what I got. The second search was scaled back only to mention the job title and the phrase “I am a”. This search worked well across many different job titles (substituting for engineer, administrator and analyst) and seemed to pick up more results based on Facebook groups in place of person profiles.

Facebook_serach_2

Conclusion: My thoughts on the new Facebook Search

Here are a few key points to consider as the new Facebook search grows:

  • The new Facebook search is solid, but not yet great for recruiters. Searches provide strong results, but they are not laser targeted. Basic search works better than any blown out Boolean search you will itch to enter.
  • As the new Facebook search feature matures, I’d expect we’d see a serious contender for search, news and mindless time wasting activity. This will, in fact, eat into millions of offsite search queries once dedicated to a “Google Search.”
  • You have access to all 2 trillion posts, updates, status updates, groups and events and that is powerful
  • With that, you can expect to be smacked in the face with re-targeted ad placements and more scary “Facebook is stealing your data” posts that you can recopy into your status updates.

In all, I’m a fan. Let’s see where this takes us.

See the Facebook Search Demo

[vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/143213455″ width=”500″ height=”300″]

About the Author

Ryan_Leary_HeadshotRyan Leary is COO of RecruitingDaily and is responsible for driving technology and innovation in to the recruiting community. Ryan helps create the processes, ideas and innovation that drives the community at RecruitingDaily. He’s our in-house expert for anything related to sourcing, tools or technology. A lead gen and brand buzz building machine, he is the force behind the marketing automation process for some of the industries top fortune brands and some of the most progressive start ups in our space.

Connect with Ryan on:   Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or RecruitingBlogs