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The January 2017 Jobs Report: What It Means for Recruiters

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics just published its much anticipated January 2017 Jobs Report. While most news outlets focused on the highlights—227,000 new jobs were added in January, and unemployment in the United States is approaching its lowest rate in nine years—it’s important to look at the full report to get a better sense of how the job market looks in your industry. Doing so will give you a more nuanced sense of hiring, training, and compensation trends—and other best practices—on an industry-by-industry basis.

Here are a few ways you can use the information in the report to your advantage:

Be Open to More Training

The labor market is tightening—the pace of hiring has slowed, despite the increase in number of jobs reported in January. Most of the job gains were concentrated in the retail trade, construction, and financial industries. Small businesses, in particular, are reporting difficulty in finding quality candidates. Nearly 70 percent of HR professionals said that they faced challenges hiring qualified candidates in the current talent market, according to the “New Talent Landscape: Recruiting Difficulty and Skills Shortages,” a June 2016 research report released by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). As a result, many HR professionals are casting a wider net, hiring less experienced people and then investing the time and money to train these new hires themselves.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of small businesses reported that they are spending more time training workers than a year ago, according to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, a San Diego executive advisory group. Conducting in-house training can be costly, but doing so provides you with the ability to ensure consistent training among a group of workers. It can also save you money in the long run by increasing productivity.

Opportunity to Increase Diversity

Is one of your goals this year to improve the diversity among your workforce? If so, you’ll benefit in more ways than one by targeting your recruitment efforts toward one of the minority groups listed in the report with higher unemployment. African American adult males, for example, had an over 7 percent seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, as compared to the 4 percent unemployment rate among white males.

Depending on your business, you may want to take advantage of hiring younger, too. The unemployment rate among 16- to 19-year-old African Americans was 26.9 percent, as compared to a 13.2 unemployment rate among white teens. African-American women had a lower unemployment rate—6.7 percent—but it was still higher than the rate of white women ages 20 and older.

Modest Salary Increases on the Rise

Wages have steadily increased in the past few months, meaning you might have to pay more to attract new hires. As Baby Boomers begin to retire and unemployment has decreased, businesses are competing for a smaller pool of workers. Another factor that may have led to the January wage increase: Minimum-wage amounts rose in 19 states.

Salary increases for new hires are still on the modest side. In fact, fewer employers in both the services and manufacturing sectors increased new-hire compensation in December, according to the SHRM Leading Indicators of National Employment report, which was released about a month before the most recent Jobs Report. Only 13 percent of respondents in both sectors said that they increased pay for new hires. For the services sector, that represented a 4.9-point decrease as compared with a year ago. The majority of businesses surveyed said that new-hire compensation remains flat. Overall, wages rose by 2.5 percent as compared to last year, below expectations of 2.7 percent, according to the January Jobs Report.

While the January 2017 Jobs Report offers a big-picture overview of current labor trends, digging deep into industry-specific data is key to ensuring that your hiring, training and compensation practices are aligned with sector-specific growth and opportunities in the coming year.

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New Year – New Employees: Energize Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy in 2017

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As we prepare for the upcoming year, talent management may be the last thing on your mind. We still have many Sunday night football games, post-turkey naps, holiday treats, and family traditions to look forward to. On the other hand, we all have performance goals to meet, budgets to create, and strategies to strategize before 2017 arrives. Who has time for recruitment marketing and talent management, right?

But the reality is recruitment marketing and talent management are two things that companies should never stop focusing on. Talent is the foundation that your strategies and performance goals rely on. Talent is the key to innovation and growth. Talent equals success. Without the right talent, how will your company create, innovate, and grow profitable and thriving businesses?

Recognizing that recruitment marketing is an important part of your organization’s overall strategy and using data-driven initiatives and fresh thinking can help you build a solid pipeline of talented leads that could implement positive change—and that spells good things for your business.

Equally as important as using data as part of your recruitment and talent management operations is understanding that when it comes to a job search, candidates are like consumers. They research prospective employers the same way they research products. Their candidate journeys might involve as many as 12 touch points with your employer brand and the content that exists about your company on the web. That includes visiting your corporate website and blog, your LinkedIn company page, and the LinkedIn profiles of your key executives and folks with whom they are interviewing. That might also include following your company on Twitter, watching the videos on your corporate YouTube channel, and reading those all important Glassdoor reviews.

Smart companies and recruiting teams learn how to form relationships with candidates from the point of attraction and in a wide variety of different channels, and not later on, from the point of application. By doing this, you can influence a prospective candidate’s decision to take their next career step with your organization.

It all starts with you—recruiter and HR pro as change agents. New ideas about talent management don’t intimidate you; they motivate and inspire you to take a step back and look at the strategy behind recruitment. If you want to be a part of turning the recruitment marketing process upside down, you’re not alone. Want a deeper dive on this topic?

CNN Commentator Mel Robbins, Applied Futurist Tom Cheesewright, and SmashFly CEO Mike Hennessy are ready to lead the discussion of change management. To hear from these experts and learn more about the latest in recruitment marketing join this live stream and join the conversation starting November 2. Join Now.  This exciting event will feature stories and tips from key employer branding industry leaders including GE, PwC, Great Clips, Thermo Fisher, and more. We hope you’ll join us!

Join the online version of the Transform Event for free, you can listen to great content from Nov 2-4. Join Now.

 

 

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This post is sponsored by TalentCulture client, Smashfly

Four Ways To Make Candidate Experience A Recruiting Brand Win

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We are all job seekers. You can bet that at some point you’ll get contacted by a recruiter, whether or not you are: actively looking, entrenched in the C-suite (especially then), a hungry upstart in new clothes, even wanting to notice — chances are, you will. There’s a moment when we, even more a moment, shift to the mindset of a candidate — we remember there are jobs to be had, new firms to work in, new things to do. In that sense, we’re all just waiting to be, well, activated. Weird and awesome all at the same time, huh?

My friend Kevin W. Grossman was recently reminded of this when he was contacted by a recruiter himself. As he points out, recruiting predates human resources by thousands of years — Julius Caesar practiced employee referral incentives back in ye ole days of 55 B.C. And wars or not, there have always been talent shortages — which means the better experience you can provide job seekers, the more competitive advantage you can gain.

Let’s look at four key parts to the candidate experience we can all do better at from a brand, leadership and recruiting angle:

  1. It’s a small world

Not to be cavalier, but candidates expect to be treated well. To ignore that is to possibly lose not only them, but their possible employee referrals down the line (remember Caesar). The Talent Board, responsible for the annual Candidate Experience Awards (CandEs), recently looked at data gleaned from some 250,000 completed surveys on the candidate experience (from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand). A quarter of the candidates who say they had a bad experience said they would go out of their way to discourage others from applying. And 60 percent of those who had a positive candidate experience said they would go out of their way to encourage others to apply.

  1. Get social

After that Come to Jesus moment staring into the workplace bathroom mirror, when we realize our supervisor is a psychopath, our workplace culture will never fit our values, or that “advancement” means getting an software upgrade and incentives include logo post-its, where’s the first place most of us go? We reach for our mobile phones, Google searches and social media. But most organizations still do not yet understand the importance of mobile and social for job seekers. A recent social recruiting DICE webinar offered this unsettling (to me) fact: that while 93 percent of recruiters plan on using social in the coming year, only 18 percent of them say they feel confident in their social skills. Big skills gap comin’ at you.

  1. Talk to me

An essential part of the candidate experience continues to be the interview — in the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” category of candidate experience that, too often, someone seems trying to replace with a lesser process. The CandEs 2014 awards showed that the interview is crucial for candidate as well as employer; among its other purposes, it’s the essential drill-down to potential fit. It’s also expensive, requiring travel, time and resources. But in terms of ROI, there’s no replacing it.

Some interesting takeaways here:

  • For candidates who did not have a good interview experience, 16.4 percent said they felt the interviewer did a bad job determining if they had the skills and abilities to perform the job they’d applied for.
  • Follow-up has some weaknesses: while only 15.4 percent stated they had not received any information for follow-up or next steps after an interview, this small percentage is reflects a far too major oversight, and could be a make or break on whether or not they actually went through with the hire.
  • Finally, nearly 61 percent said there was no feedback after the interview, a woefully missed opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t.
  1. Flip the Script

Which brings me to the most essential step we need to take:  a serious shift in perspective. As my friend pointed out, we have yet to put a larger frame around recruitment as a profession, not just an occupation. Over at Jibe they created two fictional job seekers to remind all of us of just what candidate experience is really like. I think they are on the right track with the idea of “walking a mile in another’s shoes” approach to this leadership and culture mindset. Thinking like a job seeker also dovetails with the fact that job candidates are, in essence, consumers, and that they factor in the issue of employer brand. A LinkedIn survey in the UK found that more than half (53 percent) of job seekers polled would not accept a job offer from an organization with a lame employee brand — which includes poor job security, dysfunctional teams, bad leadership, current or ex employees who have bad things to say, or a shabby reputation in the industry.

We’ve got our work cut out for us.  While a good candidate experience may not have the most profound effect on your hiring success “yet”, a bad one certainly will — and there’s a proven ripple effect. There’s a lot of rumblings in this direction: a great chat coming up on this very subject, and, coming up at the end of this month, the next CandEs conference in Fort Worth. The more data we gather, the more surveys, the most we actually discuss this, the better it’s going to be.

A version of this was first posted on Forbes.

Discrimination: A Workplace Disorder

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I came across an article recently that caught my attention. The story centered on the topic of discrimination as commented by and seen through the eyes of a few recruiters in the staffing industry. At first I assumed this was an outlier situation, but upon finishing the article I was met with a startling realization. This story, in fact, was not an isolated instance, but something much worse. The comments in this article illustrated the very nature of systemic discrimination across America and how well engrained it is in this country.

The Civil Rights Act Of 1964

No, workplace discrimination is not a new topic. Discrimination has probably been around since the beginning of humankind, but started to get some notable attention in the 1960’s.

In 1964, the U.S. Congress passed a law, called the Civil Rights Act, which stated no employer will discriminate on the basis of sex or race in hiring, promoting, and firing. In the final legislation, the wording was expanded to include it’s unlawful for an employer to “fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, privileges or employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” I support this law and would like to believe so does every other employer, but the reality is, it’s been over 50 years since this law passed and we are still battling discrimination in this country.

It’s 2016

Fast forward to 2016. The article I mentioned previously was published in January of this year. The story is about the conversations and actions taken by temporary placement agencies across the country. The people who spoke out were recruiters who recanted stories of incessant, and often times, blatant discrimination stemming from clients who would instruct them to not send particular people for interviews, as well as comments and actions from their own managers in the staffing office. These recruiters were used as messengers to carry out the discriminatory acts, however, it does not absolve them from their actions, as they chose the path of less resistance. Over time the offenders become desensitized to this way of thinking and acting. As in the case of the placement agencies there is, all too often, a monetary value placed on discrimination, as in the case of job placements, that creates a justification for its existence. In essence, it becomes a systemic process and accepted way of doing business.

When staffing agencies do business with companies that stipulate biased hiring requests, staffing firms, in effect, propagate the act of discrimination for the benefit of client relations and a healthy bottom line. In reality, these actions compromise staffing’s integrity and create a false sense of economic well-being within their firm. Attempting to justify these actions because “that’s our policy” or “our client wants it that way” or “my boss gave me an order,” takes on a permanency and acceptance that once started is very difficult to stop. Further, companies that use staffing agencies, as an extension of their hiring process, need to observe and adhere to the labor laws and not use third-party staffing as a way to circumvent their moral responsibility to hire responsibly and non-discriminatorily. According to economist Marc Bendick, “The fact of the matter is that a lot of the regular employers basically want to contract out their discrimination. They know the workforce they want, but they don’t themselves want to violate workplace discrimination laws. They want clean hands.”

Further, companies that refuse to observe fair and sound labor practices may use this to their advantage to exclude benefits, proper compensation, rewards and recognition, and to deny contractors and part-time workers from seeking recourse in the instance of an unwarranted termination.

Conscious Versus Unconscious Versus The Social Conscious

Discrimination is something many, if not most, people from all walks of life have experienced. Unlike what the staffing professionals described in the article, discrimination is often times a sense or feeling someone has about how s/he’s been treated. This is why covert discrimination is tough to prove and more difficult to identify.

To add more complexity to the topic, the act of discrimination can be categorized as either conscious or unconscious. Conscious meaning that someone is knowingly and with intentional malice discriminating against people. Of the two, unconscious is the most dangerous. It’s bigotry that sits inconspicuously within the hearts and minds of people who display it in ways that come naturally to them and without forethought of consequences. Like conscious bigotry, unconscious is intentional and delivered with malice, though not always realized by the offender. The discernible difference between the two is, unconscious is so finely ingrained into the deliverer’s character that s/he may not view the bigoted comment or action as being offensive. Neither conscious nor unconscious is more or less odious than the other. Both lack social consciousness and subsequently, greed, want and fear are at the heart of these biases.

Add Social Media To The Mix

Social media has opened very wide doors into knowing a lot about people and in the case of employers, a lot about job candidates. Profile information that may house photos alluding to or disclosing age (think ClassMates updates on Facebook), religious affiliation (pictures of a brother wearing his yarmulke), and even something as innocuous as pictures of your child, dog and life partner. These images reveal information that can potentially be used against a person and further given social media is a digital venue, all information is saved for posterity. My comments are not an attempt to discourage anyone from using social media, whether it’s the company or job seeker. The point I’m making is that social has added another dimension to the ways discrimination may rear its ugly head and something everyone should approach with sensitivity.

Where To Begin

Without acknowledging the egregious nature of discrimination and implementing structured processes to eliminate it, bias and subsequent discriminatory acts in the workplace will not change. The only way to combat discrimination is to take it on with full intention. It should start with non-discriminatory practices for hiring and carry through the entirety of each person’s employment.

To start, whether required by law or not employers need to incorporate a structured process into their hiring practices where unbiased policies are adhered to by all parties involved in the vetting and acquisition of new talent. There are many technological tools available for companies and staffing firms which help remove the element of doubt when identifying candidates and aid in EEOC reporting, contrary to what was stated by someone in the aforementioned article. Once people are onboarded, these individuals should be provided access to the employee handbook that outlines what will not be tolerated in the workplace. (Employers must be familiar with their legal obligations as prescribed by national and state laws.) All employees, regardless of tenure and position, need to access the handbook and should be required to review and be given opportunity to ask questions if something is not easily understood. Many legal professionals recommend handbooks that outline general workplace policies and employees’ responsibilities, with emphasis on consistency and accountability. Further all employees, especially managers, need to be trained to identify what’s discriminatory and what’s not and to be provided resources to either wage complaints or manage complaints without suffering retribution. Above all, a governing power needs to be in place to ensure that consistency and adherence are being practiced by everyone within the organization.

What I mention here is important, albeit, just the tip of the iceberg. Much more is needed to eradicate discrimination in the workplace, but the most important steps are recognizing the signs (intentional or unintentional) and taking action to eliminate it from your business. Leadership needs to live up to their mission statements and create workplaces that value and recognize diverse contributions and further how this can tie into customer service delivery and positively affect the company’s bottom line. In recognizing that people are not commodities, but are contributors to the advancement of a company’s mission, the culture of the organization takes a different view of the human relationship with each person.

Lastly, until people reevaluate the attitude of “greed is good” and balance that with the greater good of humankind, discrimination will continue as part of the business machinery in this country. Will you be that person who steps up to make a difference?

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What Gen Z’s Arrival In The Workforce Means For Recruiters

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Generation Z’s arrival in the workforce means some changes are on the horizon for recruiters. This cohort, born roughly from the mid 90s to approximately 2010, will be entering the workforce in four short years, and you can bet recruiters and employers are already paying close attention to them.

This past fall, the first group of Gen Z youth began entering university. As Boomers continue to work well past traditional retirement age, four or five years from now, we’ll have an American workplace comprised of five generations.

Marketers and researchers have been obsessed with Millennials for over a decade; they are the most studied generation in history, and at 80 million strong they are an economic force to be reckoned with. HR pros have also been focused on all things related to attracting, motivating, mentoring, and retaining Millennials and now, once Gen Z is part of the workforce, recruiters will have to shift gears and also learn to work with this new, lesser-known generation. What are the important points they’ll need to know?

Northeastern University led the way with an extensive survey on Gen Z in late 2014 that included 16 through 19 year-olds and shed some light on key traits–-here are a few points from that study that recruiters should pay special attention to:

  • In general, the Generation Z cohort tends to be comprised of self starters who have a strong desire to be autonomous. 63 percent of them report that they want colleges to teach them about being an entrepreneur.
  • 42 percent of them expect to be self-employed later in life, and this percentage was higher among minorities.
  • Despite the high cost of higher education, 81 percent of Generation Z members surveyed believe going to college is extremely important.
  • Generation Z has a lot of anxiety around debt, not only student loan debt, and they report they are very interested in being well-educated about finances.
  • Interpersonal interaction is highly important to Gen Z; just as Millennials before them, communicating via technology, including social media, is far less valuable to them than face-to-face communication.

Of course Gen Z is still very young, and their opinions as they relate to future employment may well change. For example, reality is that only 6.6 percent of the American workforce is self-employed, making it likely that only a small percentage of those expecting to be self-employed will be as well. The future in that respect is uncertain, and this group has a lot of learning to do and experiences yet ahead of them. However, when it comes to recruiting them, here are some things that might be helpful.

Generation Z Is Constantly Connected

Like Millennials, Gen Z is a cohort of digital natives; they have had technology and the many forms of communication that affords since birth. They are used to instant access to information and, like their older Gen Y counterparts, they are continually processing information (Hyperink here to MB Managing Millennial CEO post). Like Millennials, they prefer to solve their own problems, and will turn to YouTube or other video platforms for tutorials and to troubleshoot before asking for help. They also place great value on the reviews of their peers.

For recruiters, that means being ready to communicate on a wide variety of platforms on a continual basis. In order to recruit the top talent, you will have to be as connected as they are. You’ll need to keep up with their preferred networks, which will likely always be changing, and you’ll need to be transparent about what you want, as this generation is just as skeptical of marketing as the previous one.

Flexible Schedules Will Continue To Grow In Importance

With the growth of part time and contract workers, Gen Z will more than likely assume the same attitude their Millennial predecessors did when it comes to career expectations; they will not expect to remain with the same company for more than a few years. Flexible schedules will be a big part of their world as they move farther away from the traditional 9 to 5 job structure as work becomes more about life and less about work, and they’ll likely take on a variety of part time roles.

This preference for flexible work schedules means that business will happen outside of traditional work hours, and recruiters’ own work hours will, therefore, have to be just as flexible as their Gen Z targets’ schedule are. Companies will also have to examine what are in many cases decades old policies on acceptable work hours and business norms as they seek to not only attract, but to hire and retain this workforce with wholly different preferences than the ones that came before them. In many instances this is already happening, but I believe we will see this continue to evolve in the coming years.

Echoing The Silent Generation

Unlike Millennials, Gen Z came of age during difficult economic times; older Millennials were raised in the boom years. As Alex Williams points out in his recent New York Times piece, there’s an argument to be made that Generation Z is similar in attitude to the Silent Generation, growing up in a time of recession means they are more pragmatic and skeptical than their slightly older peers.

So how will this impact their behavior and desires as job candidates? Most of them are the product of Gen X parents, and stability will likely be very important to them. They may be both hard-working and fiscally savvy.

Sparks & Honey, in their much quoted slideshare on Gen Z, puts the number of high-schooler students who felt pressured by their parents to get jobs at 55 percent. Income and earning your keep are likely to be a big motivation for GenZ. Due to the recession, they also share the experience of living in multi-generational households, which may help considerably as they navigate a workplace comprised of several generations.

We Don’t Have All The Answers

With its youngest members not yet in double digits, Gen Z is still maturing. There is obviously still a lot that we don’t know. This generation may have the opposite experience from the Millennials before them, where the older members experienced the booming economy, with some even getting a career foothold, before the collapse in 2008. Gen Z’s younger members may get to see a resurgent economy as they make their way out of college. Those younger members are still forming their personalities and views of the world; we would be presumptuous to think we have all of the answers already.

Generational analysis is part research, but also part theory testing. What we do know is that this second generation of digital natives, with its adaption of technology and comfort with the fast-paced changing world, will leave its mark on the American workforce as it makes its way in. As a result, everything about HR will change, in a big way. I wrote a post for my Forbes column recently where I said, “To recruit in this environment is like being part wizard, part astronaut, part diplomat, part guidance counselor” and that’s very true. As someone who loves change, there has never been a more exciting time to be immersed in both the HR and the technology space. How do you feel about what’s on the horizon as it relates to the future of work and the impending arrival of Generation Z? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Three Trends Changing The Way Of The Recruitment Industry

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Predictions of future trends typically range from spot-on to far-fetched, and just plain silly — the latter being more likely. Take the second installment of the popular “Back to the Future” trilogy, for example.

It took place primarily in the year 2015, which Bob Gale, who wrote “Back to the Future Part II” with director Robert Zemeckis, predicted would look a lot different than it does today (i.e. we can’t yet take our flying cars to robotic gas stations before heading to a holographic cinema).

The recruiting industry is growing and evolving, and in order to set yourself apart from the competition for top talent, it’s essential to anticipate and adopt the latest recruiting trends. Fortunately, the trends making their way to the recruitment industry are much more practical than incorporating hologram interviewers into the recruiting and hiring processes.

Where is the industry going? Here are three data-backed trends that will change the way we find and place top talent:

Shifting From Resumes To Online Profiles

Social professional networks, like LinkedIn, have changed the way professionals of every age interact and find jobs. They have also transformed the way recruiters find quality talent. And, according to LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Trends report, quality of hire is the most valuable hiring metric, followed by time to fill.

The report by LinkedIn also revealed that social professional networks are recruiters’ best bet in finding high quality talent. In fact, these networks are currently the fastest growing source of quality hires globally, increasing 73 percent over the past 4 years.

With sites like LinkedIn, job seekers can leverage their network in search of new opportunities, and recruiters can better find and connect with talent. As more companies begin to switch out the traditional, one-page paper resume for an updated online version, it will become essential for recruiters to utilize these sites when searching for and placing great talent.

Passive Candidates Are Becoming Highly Sought After

Typical recruiting methods — the alluring job description, company career page, and attending job fairs — while successful at luring in active job seekers, don’t do much for the passive candidate. These candidates are usually already employed and not looking for a new job — but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth adding to your talent database.

In fact, with 75 percent of professionals categorizing themselves as “passive” candidates, it’s crucial to capitalize on the passive candidate pool now, more than ever. Not only does their experience make them ripe for the picking, but because they’re not actively searching for a new job, they’re not likely to be interviewing with any other companies. This makes them an ideal target when recruiting.

How do you appeal to these elusive job candidates? Reach out to them via their social professional networks. Not only do these social sites provide an optimal situation for interacting with passive job candidates, but they serve as an efficient learning tool for you, and a way to showcase employer brand.

Video Becomes An Essential Tool In The Recruiter’s Toolbox

Video technology is going viral within the recruitment industry. Visual content, in general, is a rising trend across all industries — not a surprise considering that most people respond better to visual communication.

One piece of video technology more recruiters are getting on board with is video interviewing. Currently, more than 60 percent of the 500 companies surveyed by OfficeTeam are utilizing video interviews in their hiring process. Both one-way and two-way video interviews enable participants in various time zones and locations to connect on a more personal level, during the screening and interview process.

The video interview trend isn’t going anywhere, for a number of reasons. For starters, they help recruiting professionals place great talent for clients while saving time, money and energy. Video screening, for instance, is replacing the outdated phone screen, largely due to the fact that you can watch 10 one-way video interviews in the time it takes to perform just one phone screen.

Finally, being able to provide clients with a recording of the video interview can give recruiters the competitive edge they need to attract and retain happy clients. In addition to video interviews, video job descriptions and postings, videos for employer branding, and video resumes are all great tools for appealing to job seekers and clients.

These emerging trends, within the recruitment industry, can help recruiters find and attract quality talent, build a solid talent pool of active and passive job candidates, and stay one step ahead of the competition with innovative recruiting tools and strategies.

Photo Credit: Big Stock Images

Don’t Let Bad Reviews Get You Down In The Dumps

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You can’t guarantee every employee is going to have a perfect experience with your company. Job dissatisfaction is bound to happen no matter how great the company culture and management team are. Bad reviews will happen and disengaged or unhappy employees will surface.

Unfortunately, according to research conducted by recruiting technology comparison agency Software Advice, 50% of job seekers look online for reviews when they research companies to work for, so it’s inevitable they will come across a bad one.

In the case there are bad reviews of your company, don’t let this distract from the positive ones. Instead, use these 4 effective ways to ensure quality employer branding to prevent (and respond to) poor reviews.

1. Awareness Baseline

Instead of shoving the bad reviews into a corner and acting like they don’t exist, acknowledge these weaknesses and turn them into strengths. One way to do this is by creating a strong website as a counteractive response to the reviews. Answer your reviews in a professional and courteous manner. 

If you’ve never checked the reviews on your company online, it would be wise to do so as this is the main line of reference for job seekers. Nine out of 10 job seekers are looking online for jobs, and the majority of the job hunting process is performed on the web. Create your positive and negative answers ahead of time so you go in prepared.

2. Responding To Candidates Who Inquire About Poor Reviews

Pretending like you’re unaware of the bad candidate reviews online is only going to make your recruiting team look unaware when an applicant notices or mentions your company reputation. Instead, tackle the problem head on by answering reviews as quickly as possible and encouraging those who have a good experience to record it online as well. 

If a candidate does bring it up, view it as a chance to show the candidate a bad review is something your company takes seriously. Show the impact both bad and good reviews can have on your company’s brand and culture.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to detect a fib. In fact, 54% of the time people are likely to detect or suspect a lie. Therefore, practicing transparency is your best method. This includes: framing the review in context, showing steps the company is taking to fix it, and ensuring that every review is responded to online in a timely manner. 

3. Creating A  Consistent Online Brand

Before you meet with a candidate, they’ve read your website. Online is where your company should begin practicing those consistent messages they wish to send to all audiences, including candidates. The more information on your site, the more prepared and informed candidates will be about the company. 

In addition to showing off your culture and teams hard at work, explain what you do and how you do it. Work hard to get your online reviews high enough that they can be a bragging point instead of a source of embarrassment. If you use social to recruit or market, chances are candidates will be looking at these channels as well, so make friends with your marketing department to get an idea of how they deal with online complaints and reviews. Work as a team to create an overarching and consistent message.

4. Focus On Onboarding

Extend the company message past the website by making new hires feel welcome when they’ve made it through the front door! Recruiters and hiring managers should act as candidate advocates to ensure their welcome is smooth and stress-free (after all, you worked very hard to get this candidate in the door!) Anxieties about not having anyone to talk to or lacking a sense of direction, even not knowing where the bathroom is on the first day can create a discomforting first experience with a company. If left to chance, this can create the conditions for a crummy review. In fact, some companies find their reviews stem from being recruited aggressively and then left to fend for themselves once through the process.

Online reviews aren’t the end-all, be-all of your candidate experience or company culture, but they are increasingly important as the world of recruiting moves further online. Ensure that you monitor your online reputation, respond to reviews (both good and bad) immediately and politely, address recurring issues with managers and recruiters, encourage current employees to discuss good experiences and educate executives on how to make those reviews even better.

Image: pixabay.com

Recruiting Analytics: Reducing Your Hiring Timeline

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As a recruiter, it can be difficult to manage a large number of candidates and the data that comes along with it to make your department more efficient and in tune with the candidates you attract. The deeper you dig into the data the more your actual recruitment practices fall by the wayside. So, in order to make sense of all of the data and all of the information within the candidate files, you need the right tools to get the job done. Your recruitment department needs an intuitive recruiting platform.

Aggregate Data from Recruitment Software

Applicant tracking systems, human resource information systems, and the like are all invaluable tools for the recruitment field. While these are wonderful applications for recruiters, they often don’t communicate to produce the data recruiters need to improve their processes.

While an ATS is vital to the recruitment process, 54% of recruiters are not completely satisfied with the capabilities of the platform. Adding a supplemental program that aggregates the data from recruitment software like an ATS into one digestible piece of information takes a large portion of the administrative burden off of recruiters. Adam Ward (@wardadamp), Recruiting Lead at Pinterest, said:

“As recruiters, we can download the data we need, manipulate in a way to show leading indicators for clients and hiring managers. That puts everyone in a better position to make sure we’re getting the best talent.”

Analyze Candidates

Big data is a concern for many organizations as the growth of information explodes. Careful insight into who you recruit can play a big part into the success of company hiring decisions later on. Diversity is a growing buzzword in the recruiting space, and with the EEOC and OFCCP tracking statistical significance, it’s vital organizations pay attention to candidate data. Because data analytics can be very complex in human capital management, it is essential organizations prepare their recruiting departments have the right tools and personnel in place. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the U.S. alone will be 1.5 million data analysts and business managers short of being able to use this information in merely 6 years.

Evaluate Recruiting Costs

What better way to assess the effectiveness of your recruitment practices than evaluating the cost? It sheds light into areas in which the department can save money and time. The current average hiring time is about 25 days. That means extra time hiring, which ultimately means more money in recruiting. If that amount of time doesn’t agree with your recruitment goals, you need a tool that accurately helps you decipher the data that tells you how much you currently spend and where you could save. John Burleson (@jwburleson), Marketing Content Manager for Randall-Reilly, said:“Recruiting drivers is more than just getting enough applications to find the drivers you need. Your campaigns need to be as efficient as possible. Breaking down your cost per hire by channel can give you a better idea of where your most qualified applicants are coming from, even if it is primarily from one source. It can also help you identify which tough points are effectively driving these qualified drivers to apply for your positions.”

“Recruiting drivers is more than just getting enough applications to find the drivers you need. Your campaigns need to be as efficient as possible. Breaking down your cost per hire by channel can give you a better idea of where your most qualified applicants are coming from, even if it is primarily from one source. It can also help you identify which tough points are effectively driving these qualified drivers to apply for your positions.”

The effectiveness of the recruiting department is ranked on how quickly they attract candidates and how precise their efforts are. To gather this information, you need a platform that collects this information from each of the recruitment systems your department uses. Acting as a medium, this platform will communicate with these systems to analyze and interpret important information for recruiters. What does this platform need to be effective? It has to be able to gather information and analyze it, as well as track recruitment effectiveness and evaluate the cost of recruiting.

Are you ready to take the administrative burden off of your recruitment team?

photo credit: unsplash.com

Recruitment: LinkedIn Is A Tool, Not The Tool

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LinkedIn took the recruiting world by storm not too long ago. This user-friendly, massive network of talent has become an indispensable tool for hiring professionals, but some of us have gotten a little LinkedIn-happy, and it has lead to a sort of too big for their britches scenario in hiring. What I mean is many employers are buying into the idea that LinkedIn, or other web-based products and services like job boards are enough to take over the job of recruiting experts, and that simply is not the case. Business Insider author and former recruiter, Vivian Giang said:

“The internet has changed the way a lot of markets work, because everyone can now be their own “gatekeeper” in a sense. Everyone is an expert because they have all the information available at their fingertips, hence there’s no need to pay someone else a handsome fee to do the research for you. In other words, the middlemen — headhunters — have been cut out.”

Recruitment: A Dying Profession?!

So let’s talk about this notion that recruitment as a profession is dying.

  • Wanted Analytics recently pulled together data that revealed an increase in the number of online job listings for recruiters by 4.5% in August from the same time period in 2013.

  • The US currently has the second highest demand for recruiters.

  • Recruiters rated a 72 out of 99 on Wanted Analytics difficulty-to-fill scale.

If anything, recruiters are now in greater demand. With 52% of companies listing hiring and retaining talent as their top business challenge, the role of recruiters is becoming even more vital. The question still remains though: Can LinkedIn actually replace recruiters? Nope, and here’s why…

LinkedIn Has Not Yet Become Self Aware

LinkedIn iconWhat I mean is that web-based services can’t offer the level of personality and care that a recruiter can bring to the hiring experience. The hiring experience can make or break a relationship, regardless of whether or not the candidate becomes a hire. In fact, 90% of candidates who were treated with courtesy and a personal touch would encourage others to join the company in the future.

The role of a recruiter is not what it used to be. Job seekers are expecting a lot more now, and recruiters have become experts in delivering. Recruiters understand the importance of constantly having a finger on the pulse of job seeker needs. For instance a recruiter would know well-informed candidates have a 35% lower dissatisfaction rate, or that 34% of job candidates strongly agreed that their experience during the hiring process –whether positive or negative –affected their decision to accept a position.

Consider The Following:

If you truly believe that matching skill sets with job requirements is enough to successfully hire, then by all means give it a whirl, but first please consider the following:

  • 89% of hiring failures are a result of poor cultural fit and the average cost of replacing an employee in a mid-range position can be about 20% of the annual salary. For example, the cost to replace a $40,000 per year manager would be $8,000. So how solid are your cultural assessment tools, background and experience?

  • Human capital is commonly known as any organization’s most valuable asset. Additionally, payroll will almost always be the highest expense in any given organization, but sure, LinkedIn will do…

  • Experts in the recruiting field estimate that screwing up a game-changing hire can cost as much as $1M. The good news is that someone who doesn’t specialize in recruiting could never calculate that cost. Ignorance is bliss?

  • Recruiters are able to expedite the hiring process because that is their core job requirement. Hiring without experience or resources will result in a lengthy time-to-hire and 21% of candidates believe that a lengthy hiring process is not worth their time.

Ultimately, the ‘I can just recruit’ attitude will result in a biting off more than you can chew outcome. Recruiters have experience, industry knowledge and connections that are very specific to their professional success. You could also learn to code or how to analyze data, but odds are a professional would do a much better job. In conclusion, recruiters are on the way up, not out.

These Are The Moving Recruiting Money Shots

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I played Patrick the recruiter in our customer conference general session skit. It was less than 15 lines and shouldn’t have been a problem.

But it was, mostly because I’m a ham at heart and like to improvise whenever possible. Forget the fact that there would be a floor monitor and a laptop showing the players the script.

So there I was on stage with some of my esteemed colleagues in front of hundreds of customers – heads of HR and talent acquisition – plus partners and peers – delivering my lines like a seasoned actor.

And then Megan, our VP of strategic accounts, queued me up for my big finale:

“What if you could pin your most frequent searches on your dashboard, and have the results refresh automatically as new candidates show interest, eliminating barriers between you and the next great member of your team?”

“That would be fantastic!” I exclaimed.

Wait for it…then nothing. Odd, I thought, what’s she waiting for? 

Seconds go by. “Um…Patrick…um…would you like me to set up a job search for you?”

Wow. I missed the money shot line. How did I do that?

“Um…yes! Can you set up one for our Store Manager position we’re always looking to fill?”

“Absolutely. We’ve set the Store Manager search to include the important parameters you define and that are unique to the job, including keywords, tags and location…”

Megan wrapped up the Patrick segment, and that’s when I added:

“Megan, sorry, but I’m managing over 60 reqs right now and it’s hard for me to remember which one is which.”

Smiles. Laughter. Some claps. I had my money shot after all.

Okay, maybe not 60 reqs, but I know many talent acquisition teams are carrying heavy job loads because finding and hiring the best people. Tech talent is especially tough today, to find those with the necessary skill sets that are critical for today’s companies – primarily, software programmers and developers, as well as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) positions.

According to Computerworld’s 2015 Forecast survey, job growth in IT remains very healthy – nearly one-quarter of respondents said that they plan to add more IT employees this year.  At the same time, unemployment for IT professionals is extremely low – just 2.5% according to figures from one of the latest Dice Tech Trends report – making it even harder to find top people with technology skills in high demand.

Conversely, the non-technical positions companies need to fill continuously takes a candidate pooling and constant “warming” approach, as well as engaging candidates with relevant content in various mediums, especially video.

Competing for the best people, regardless of role or classification, has again become priority number one with an emphasis on the speed and quality of the hiring process. But it’s really much more complicated out there: the hiring economy today is like an original screenplay we keep rewriting and reordering, with a lot of sweat and tears, through every economic boom and bust story.

Yes, it’s complicated. According to the U.S. Department of Labor:

  • Job Openings have increased 28% in 2014, more than any other year since 1999.
  • For the last 12 months we’ve added on the average 200K per month.
  • At the same time, wages aren’t keeping pace, which is causing increased turnover.

And yet, a study last year from Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University found that 47% of jobs are at risk of computerization over the next two decades.

And for the past few years, companies on the average receive an excessive number of resumes per every open full-time permanent position. This according to the Candidate Experience Award (CandE) data (you can now download the 2014 report here and then participate in the 2015 CandEs here) from the past two years alone that shows open requisitions for all levels of positions are tracking over 200 resumes each. At the same time, more than half of job applicants are applying for up to four jobs per week, while nearly a third applying to up to nine jobs per week.

Although the competition for top talent is fierce, employers must still find creative ways to entice people with in-demand STEM skills to join their company – getting to know whom they’re targeting is critical prior to and especially during outreach. Thankfully, research and relationship building are alive and well in recruiting today for whatever the roles being hired. We’ve covered this topic detail on the TalentCulture #TChat Show more than once recently.

But what are some specific examples of delivering better talent acquisition regardless of the complicated backstories and plot twists? We keep pitching the “better experiences” for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers, but what productions have made it to the big screen?

The CandEs have them in the spotlight and since founding them in 2010, the Talent Board has created a global benchmark process for companies to gain needed insight into their recruiting processes and more specifically, how their candidates feel about the process and how they were treated.

The CandE benchmark is the foundation for how companies are recognized for the awards, by their candidates. This award process is truly the first and largest “People’s Choice” award in the recruiting industry, and remains the largest single source of candidate experience and recruiting performance benchmark data in the world. (For those keeping score at home, about one-third of the 2014 winners are PeopleFluent customers.)

Here are give great examples of from the CandE winners with distinction, those companies who by far have exceeded the first-tier winning benchmark:

  1. MetLife has built a validated simulation that not only helps assess a candidate’s qualifications, but that candidates also find informative and educational about job requirements. They also distribute surveys to get detailed input from new hires at from day one, after three months and again at one year.
  2. Capital One launched their CandE effort two years ago to build “consistency” of treatment from call center employees to executives. Every person who applies is asked a series of CandE-related questions and their response rates are north of 50 percent (10,000 asks per month) and their Net Promoter Scores are then segmented by location, level, function and recruiter.
  3. NBCUniversal holds Tech Talk Tuesdays and Ask the Experts every Wednesday, every single week. By measuring and acting on their source of hire and other hiring data, their speed to hire has improved from 75 days to 29 days.
  4. Hyatt has begun aligning their well known and well developed “guest experience” to the CandEs. One thing they’ve done as a result is to introduce applicants to employees during the interview process, and much earlier in the process than most companies usually do.
  5. RMS, a three-time CandE winner with distinction conducts weekly and sometimes daily online chats that focus on providing “honest answers” to “honest questions.” They measure hiring like dating and equate the recruiting process to first-date impressions and beyond.

These are the moving recruiting money shots if there ever were. Thankfully there are more killer premiers and sequels like this every year.

Step right on up for your screen test. My people will call your people and we’ll do lunch.

About the Author: Kevin W. Grossman co-founded and co-hosts the highly popular weekly TalentCulture #TChat Show with Meghan M. Biro. He’s also currently the Product Marketing Director for Total Talent Acquisition products at PeopleFluent.

photo credit: DSCN3961 via photopin (license)

#TChat Recap: Recruiting Like It’s 1999

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Why will this year be the best in talent acquisition since 1999?

Because we’re bringing recruiting back to what matters most: relationships.

Smart businesses acquire and maintain top talent with great company culture and transparent relationships.

This week: Will Thomson, Founder of Bulls Eye Recruiting, joined our #TChat community and let us know how this year has the hiring potential to be the best since 1999.

What do job seekers want from today’s global, social, and mobile World of Work?

Recruiters must also determine how a potential hire will fit with their company culture. Educate them. Guide them. Tell them:

Company culture matters. The bottom-line is: 

Recruiters want to attract talent with the right cultural fit and reward their efforts. Recruiting has to be on its A-game this year. Employer brands must tell the truth: be true to “Brand You.”

 

Recruiting has always been about relationships. Let’s celebrate that!

See What #TChat-ters Said About Recruiting! 

 

What’s Up Next? #TChat Returns On Feb. 25th! Next Wednesday!

TChatRadio_logo_020813-300x300#TChat Radio Kicks Off at 7pm ET / 4pm PT — Our weekly radio show runs 30 minutes. Usually, our social community joins us on Twitter as well. The topic: The Three Essential Elements of Compelling Business Vision.

#TChat Twitter Kicks Off at 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT — Our halfway point begins with our highly engaging Twitter discussion. We take a social inside look at our weekly topic. Everyone is welcome to share their social insights #TChat.

Join Our Social Community & Stay Up-to-Date! 

The TalentCulture conversation continues daily on Twitter, in our LinkedIn group, and on our Google+ community. Engage with us anytime on our social networks or stay current with trending World of Work topics through our weekly email newsletter. Signing up is just a click away!

Passive-Recruiting

Photo credit: Todd Quackenbush via Unsplash cc

#TChat Preview: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

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The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, July 30, 2014, from 7-8 pm ET (4-5 pm PT). The #TChat radio portion runs the first 30 minutes from 7-7:30 pm ET, followed by the #TChat Twitter chat from 7:30-8 pm ET.

Last week we talked about about workplace bullying, and this week we’re going to talk about passive recruiting strategies.

Converting job seekers into job applicants via relevant career content is easy when they’re looking for a job. But what about those who aren’t?

The elusive passive candidate — that’s where you have to be smarter and engage them in conversations around relevant career content, but not literally job-specific content, at least not all at once.

According to this week’s guest, after a 90-day case study on social media content, conversation-based content increased response rates by 54%.

We should teach recruiters and sourcers how to engage prospects in real conversations. Whether it’s on a forum, user group, blog, simple email or any social network, the conversation should always be the goal.

How do you get the passive ones to start a conversation with you? Strike up a conversation as you would face to face. Talk to them about things they care about first.

Recruiters should always know their market and their talent. Recruiting is only human and all about relationships. Always.

Join #TChat co-creators and hosts Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman as we learn more about passive recruiting with this week’s guest: Bryan Chaney, a Global Talent Sourcing and Attraction Strategist and Sourcing Executive at IBM.

Related Reading:

Lou Adler: Use Benchmarking To Build A Passive Candidate Recruiting Machine

Meghan M. Biro: Smart Recruiting Strategy Drives Relationships and Conversation

Charles Coy: 5 Stellar Strategies For Recruiting Passive Candidates

Lisa Jones: Passive Talent Is The New Black

Glen Cathey: Building Talent Pipelines vs. Lean/ Just In-Time Recruiting

We hope you’ll join the #TChat conversation this week and share your questions, opinions and ideas with our guests and the TalentCulture Community.

#TChat Events: Passive Recruiting With Conversation-Based Content

TChatRadio_logo_020813#TChat Radio — Wed, August 6 — 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT Tune-in to the #TChat Radio show Our hosts, Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman talk with our guest Bryan Chaney.

Tune-in LIVE online this Wednesday!

#TChat Twitter Chat — Wed, August 6 — 7:30 pm ET / 4:30 pm PT Immediately following the radio show, Meghan, Kevin and our guests will move to the #TChat Twitter stream, where we’ll continue the discussion with the entire TalentCulture community. Everyone with a Twitter account is invited to participate, as we gather for a dynamic live chat, focused on these related questions:

Q1: What are the best strategies for engaging passive candidates today? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q2: How should recruiters and sourcers initiate conversation-based content? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Q3: How can recruiters gauge success based on the conversion of conversations to hires? #TChat (Tweet this Question)

Throughout the week, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter feed, and in our new TalentCulture G+ community. So feel free to drop by anytime and share your questions, ideas and opinions. See you there!!

photo credit: eye2eye via photopin cc

#TChat Preview: How Talent-Centric Recruiting Improves Business Outcomes

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The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, May 14, 2014. #TChat Radio starts at 6:30 pm ET (3:30 pm PT) and the convo continues on #TChat Twitter chat from 7-8 pm ET (4-5 pm PT).

Last week we talked about building resilient workplace cultures, and this week we’re talking about how talent-centric recruiting improves business outcomes.

Progressive organizations today are looking for every possible advantage to attract and retain the best candidates. These organizations are continuously searching for new ways to engage candidates earlier, communicate their compelling employment brand story, and enhance the candidate experience, as well as the recruiter and hiring manager experience.

The 2013 Candidate Experience Awards survey results from nearly 50,000 candidates from over 90 progressive companies show the emerging importance of communicating a company’s culture as a key point of differentiation, as well as decreased emphasis on job benefit details.

The good news is that according to the CandE data, the top marketing content employers make available, and the content candidates consume, includes company values, why do people want to work here and why do they stay, and other related “cultural fit” topics.

Talent acquisition processes and systems that are built around the unique needs of not only candidates, but recruiters and hiring managers as well, are what give those progressive companies a competitive advantage.

Creating a personalized recruiting experience that is talent-centric, fostering consistent employment branding through video, continuous peer-to-peer collaboration and critical analytics are what lead to better business outcomes like faster recruiting, better hires, and improved retention.

Join #TChat co-creators and hosts Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman as we learn more about how talent-centric recruiting improves business outcomes with this week’s powerhouse guest: Elaine Orler, President and Founder of Talent Function.

Sneak Peek: How Talent-Centric Recruiting Improves Business Outcomes

Elaine and Jeff Interview

Watch Now!

We spoke briefly with our guest Elaine Orler, to learn a little about improving business outcomes with talent-centric recruiting. Check out our YouTube Channel for videos with other #TChat guests!

Related Reading

Elaine Orler: Candidate Experience 2013: The Good, The Bad, The Better

Adam Eisenstein: Putting the Candidate First: MHFI wins Candidate Experience Award

Kevin Grossman: How to Improve Your Recruiting Strategy Through Candidate Sourcing Data

Meghan M. Biro: It Takes Talent To Become A Top Recruiter 

Maren Hogan: What They Tell You To Do About Candidate Experience

We hope you’ll join the #TChat conversation this week and share your questions, opinions and ideas with our guests and the TalentCulture Community.

#TChat Events: How Talent-Centric Recruiting Improves Business Outcomes

TChatRadio_logo_020813 #TChat Radio — Wed, May 14 — 6:30pmET / 3:30pmPT Tune-in to the #TChat Radio show Our hosts, Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman talk with our guest Elaine Orler!

Tune-in LIVE online this Wednesday!

#TChat Twitter Chat — Wed, May 14 — 7pmET / 4pmPT Immediately following the radio show, Meghan, Kevin and our guests will move to the #TChat Twitter stream, where we’ll continue the discussion with the entire TalentCulture community. Everyone with a Twitter account is invited to participate, as we gather for a dynamic live chat, focused on these related questions:

Q1: What is the current state of recruiting for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers? (Tweet this Question)

Q2: How can companies improve the overall talent acquisition process? (Tweet this Question)

Q3: What does it mean to be talent-centric versus process-centric? (Tweet this Question)

Q4: What are three key recruiting performance metrics that drive actionable talent analytics? (Tweet this Question)

Q5: How has technology impacted candidate, recruiter and hiring manager engagement experiences? (Tweet this Question)

Throughout the week, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter feed, and in our new TalentCulture G+ community. So feel free to drop by anytime and share your questions, ideas and opinions. See you there!!

TalentCulture World of Work was created for HR professionals, leadership executives, and the global workforce. Our community delves into subjects like HR technology, leadership, employee engagement, and corporate culture everyday.

To get more World of Work goodness, please sign up for our newsletter, listen to our #TChat Radio Channel or sign up for our RSS feed.

Do you have great content you want to share with us? Become a TalentCulture contributor!

Photo Credit: M I S C H E L L E via Compfight cc

Recruiters On Twitter: Rise of "Coffee Talk" Learning

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Written by Mona Berberich

In college, one of my teachers regularly told me that the room with the coffee maker is the most important place in an office, because it’s where people learn the most. At the time, I thought that this guy was perhaps a lazy coffee addict who was definitely in the wrong job.

However, 10 years later, I realize that he was right. The space near the coffee machine was where people gathered to briefly put work pressures aside and open up in an informal way — sharing what was on their minds, getting advice from peers and even generating new ideas.

The New Coffee Room

Today, there’s a whole new world of coffee rooms out there — it’s called social media. Whenever people tweet, retweet, read, share or like, they are contributing to something bigger — the social learning community. One of the most important platforms for social learning is Twitter, where many business people “gather” to share information and ideas on an ongoing basis. These behaviors are studied by companies like Leadtail, a social analytics platform vendor, which published a detailed Social Insights Report last week, focused on the Twitter activities of HR professionals.

That report deserves attention because the HR community is vital in transforming workplace culture, defining social business policy, and driving workforce development. In short — talent-minded executives, recruiters and training professionals are shaping the future of social learning.

What Is Social Learning?

For those who aren’t familiar with it, think of social learning as a process where people rely on digital tools to connect with one another, and exchange information with a specific purpose in mind — typically to expand their knowledge, to develop their competence, or to collaborate in resolving a common challenge. In contrast to formal classroom training, where an instructor “lectures” to a group, social learning is characterized by a two-way communication flow. Thanks to advances in mobile, web and collaborative technology, most of us can engage in social learning whenever and wherever we want. And Twitter is one of the most powerful engines of social learning — with information flowing on the stream 24x7x365.

Who Helps Recruiters Learn?

At the request of ERE.net, Leadtail also drilled down within the HR realm to focus on Twitter behavior among recruiters — looking at engagement, reach and sources of influence from March-June 2013. During that time, recruiters shared 55,576 tweets with a total of 835,336 followers. And, as the graphic below reveals, Meghan M Biro, founder and CEO of TalentCulture, is the HR personality that recruiters most often retweeted.

ERE_Recruiters_MeghanMBiro

When you recognize that Meghan has attracted almost 56,000 Twitter followers to-date, the reach and importance of her Twitter presence becomes clear. A single tweet immediately can touch 56,000 people. But her impact doesn’t stop there. As the “most retweeted” recruiter resource, her Twitter “multiplier effect” is astonishing. For example, even if only 10% of her followers see and read a tweet, and only 4 followers retweet that item to their followers … and so on … and so on … you get where this is going. Even one tweet has the potential to get attention from thousands of people, over time. (Example below.)

The ERE.net Leadtail report features several other key metrics — top 25 media content sources, leading brands that attract recruiter attention, and recruiters’ favorite hashtags. Among those hashtags is #TChat – a moniker that many people associate with Meghan M Biro. Anyone can use the #TChat shorthand to “tag” information of interest to talent-minded professionals. It’s also the tag used to drive the TalentCulture community’s weekly interactive Twitter chat events. Bottom line: It’s hard to move around the Twittersphere and not bump into Meghan or TalentCulture in some form!

Social Learning Hot Spot

As these examples show, Twitter is becoming a magnet for social learning — by facilitating informal knowledge exchange, topic-driven chat events, or even backchannel for industry conferences (as recruiters discovered recently when rallying around the #SHRM2013 hashtag). The attraction is easy to understand. It’s a simple, low-cost, immediate way to engage with people — and it’s a natural extension of social recruiting best practices.

Many recruiters are now at the forefront of social learning on Twitter. And as a recent Huffington Post article suggests, people like Meghan M. Biro are leveraging Twitter to engage the HR community in a way that not only positions her as an expert, but also boosts the credibility and visibility other HR professionals, as well.

What’s Your Social Learning Hot Spot?

Are you a recruiter or HR professional? How are you using Twitter or other social tools to expand your expertise? What challenges and opportunities have you experienced? Let me know in the comments below, or share your perspective on the BetterWeekdays website!

Mona Berberich2(Editor’s Note: Mona Berberich is a Digital Marketing Manager at Better Weekdays, a Chicago-based company that has developed a platform to help HR leaders source, screen and develop talent based on job compatibility. She is a researcher and writer covering HR, career growth, talent management and leadership development. Contact Mona on Google+ or LinkedIn or Twitter.)

 

Image Credit: Stock.xchng

Recruiters On Twitter: Rise of “Coffee Talk” Learning

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Written by Mona Berberich

In college, one of my teachers regularly told me that the room with the coffee maker is the most important place in an office, because it’s where people learn the most. At the time, I thought that this guy was perhaps a lazy coffee addict who was definitely in the wrong job.

However, 10 years later, I realize that he was right. The space near the coffee machine was where people gathered to briefly put work pressures aside and open up in an informal way — sharing what was on their minds, getting advice from peers and even generating new ideas.

The New Coffee Room

Today, there’s a whole new world of coffee rooms out there — it’s called social media. Whenever people tweet, retweet, read, share or like, they are contributing to something bigger — the social learning community. One of the most important platforms for social learning is Twitter, where many business people “gather” to share information and ideas on an ongoing basis. These behaviors are studied by companies like Leadtail, a social analytics platform vendor, which published a detailed Social Insights Report last week, focused on the Twitter activities of HR professionals.

That report deserves attention because the HR community is vital in transforming workplace culture, defining social business policy, and driving workforce development. In short — talent-minded executives, recruiters and training professionals are shaping the future of social learning.

What Is Social Learning?

For those who aren’t familiar with it, think of social learning as a process where people rely on digital tools to connect with one another, and exchange information with a specific purpose in mind — typically to expand their knowledge, to develop their competence, or to collaborate in resolving a common challenge. In contrast to formal classroom training, where an instructor “lectures” to a group, social learning is characterized by a two-way communication flow. Thanks to advances in mobile, web and collaborative technology, most of us can engage in social learning whenever and wherever we want. And Twitter is one of the most powerful engines of social learning — with information flowing on the stream 24x7x365.

Who Helps Recruiters Learn?

At the request of ERE.net, Leadtail also drilled down within the HR realm to focus on Twitter behavior among recruiters — looking at engagement, reach and sources of influence from March-June 2013. During that time, recruiters shared 55,576 tweets with a total of 835,336 followers. And, as the graphic below reveals, Meghan M Biro, founder and CEO of TalentCulture, is the HR personality that recruiters most often retweeted.

ERE_Recruiters_MeghanMBiro

When you recognize that Meghan has attracted almost 56,000 Twitter followers to-date, the reach and importance of her Twitter presence becomes clear. A single tweet immediately can touch 56,000 people. But her impact doesn’t stop there. As the “most retweeted” recruiter resource, her Twitter “multiplier effect” is astonishing. For example, even if only 10% of her followers see and read a tweet, and only 4 followers retweet that item to their followers … and so on … and so on … you get where this is going. Even one tweet has the potential to get attention from thousands of people, over time. (Example below.)

The ERE.net Leadtail report features several other key metrics — top 25 media content sources, leading brands that attract recruiter attention, and recruiters’ favorite hashtags. Among those hashtags is #TChat – a moniker that many people associate with Meghan M Biro. Anyone can use the #TChat shorthand to “tag” information of interest to talent-minded professionals. It’s also the tag used to drive the TalentCulture community’s weekly interactive Twitter chat events. Bottom line: It’s hard to move around the Twittersphere and not bump into Meghan or TalentCulture in some form!

Social Learning Hot Spot

As these examples show, Twitter is becoming a magnet for social learning — by facilitating informal knowledge exchange, topic-driven chat events, or even backchannel for industry conferences (as recruiters discovered recently when rallying around the #SHRM2013 hashtag). The attraction is easy to understand. It’s a simple, low-cost, immediate way to engage with people — and it’s a natural extension of social recruiting best practices.

Many recruiters are now at the forefront of social learning on Twitter. And as a recent Huffington Post article suggests, people like Meghan M. Biro are leveraging Twitter to engage the HR community in a way that not only positions her as an expert, but also boosts the credibility and visibility other HR professionals, as well.

What’s Your Social Learning Hot Spot?

Are you a recruiter or HR professional? How are you using Twitter or other social tools to expand your expertise? What challenges and opportunities have you experienced? Let me know in the comments below, or share your perspective on the BetterWeekdays website!

Mona Berberich2(Editor’s Note: Mona Berberich is a Digital Marketing Manager at Better Weekdays, a Chicago-based company that has developed a platform to help HR leaders source, screen and develop talent based on job compatibility. She is a researcher and writer covering HR, career growth, talent management and leadership development. Contact Mona on Google+ or LinkedIn or Twitter.)

 

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