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Improve the Candidate “Shopping” Experience

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I’ve written before about my passion for the candidate experience…quite a bit, actually. As a board member for the Talent Board, you’ve hopefully witnessed my advocacy for candidates; Of course I also offer kudos to employers who are taking strides toward improving the journey from stranger to employee.

However, let’s take it up a level and talk about the overarching strategic level of the candidate experience. Yes, it’s about thank-you notes and avoiding miscommunication, but it’s so much more. The entire process begins long before anyone opts into communication from you or applies for a position.

When shopping for a new dishwasher, people read online reviews, walk the aisles of Home Depot, Google different brands, ask friends on Facebook, and have at-home discussions with anyone else whom shares dish duty. And this is an appliance. What about when they are making a career change? Let’s assume their priorities are straight and care more about their job, personal brand and impact on the world than a dishwasher’s decibel levels.

So what does that mean? As candidates become increasingly more like consumers, they shop around, scour websites – employers and sites like Glassdoor.com – vet opportunities, compare and ask meaningful questions. Research shows that candidates use approximately 12-18 sources of information before they apply.

So employers, heed my warning: BE READY. Don’t assume that you can throw together an attractive job ad and it will suffice. Candidates already know about the organization and have (very) likely done major research.

The term Recruitment Marketing comes into play here. When people are looking for a new position, they need compelling language everywhere they turn. Don’t shut the door on quality talent by lacking the right kind of messaging on your website; be sure to include clear employer brand language, employee stories, job-specific explanations, helpful career resources and more. And be sure to do the same on all social media profiles and across all other available platforms.

Data from SmashFly states that 74% of candidates drop off of the apply process. For one reason or another these consumers – uh, candidates – weren’t sold yet on your employer brand, weren’t engaged by the application process or weren’t ready to apply yet. Can’t you just hear them say, “Moving on….”?

So, think through your recruitment marketing strategy with a strategic lens to decide if candidates will even be interested in making the candidate journey with you.

Run these three tests:

Is it Helpful?

Put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. You want someone to help you understand the opportunity. Don’t be cryptic or hard to find. Use informative language when explaining your EVP (Employee Value Proposition); make frequently asked questions easy to answer on their own. Don’t lose people because they think you don’t care enough to help.

Is it Inviting?

Are you front-and-center, inviting people to learn more about you as an employer? Do you seem open and welcoming to queries about your workplace culture, job path opportunities or other burning questions? Don’t appear like that dark haunted house on the hill. Be so lit up that you’re transparent. And transparency is a whole different story.

Is It Engaging?

Are you offering ways to invite potential and current candidates to engage with the organization? Are there forums, videos, Q&A sessions, or open dialogue with team members? Do you have a cool newsletter that outlines the day-in-the-life of an employee in your organization? Is there another way for potential candidates to show interest and learn more without applying immediately, like joining a talent network?

Last fall, SmashFly researched and evaluated every 2015 Fortune 500 organization’s career site for 13 recruitment marketing practices. Of those companies, SmashFly found that 57% used employee stories on their career sites through either text or video. This practice should continue to grow, and employee stories should be used to engage and nurture potential candidates in social media and in your talent network.  People listen to people over brands, which is why employee stories speak so much more to candidates!

Is your social media presence one that makes people want to engage with you and be part of the family? Don’t get sucked back into that archaic one-way communication where you simply spit out messages. Everything goes both directions these days. Open up those channels, engage and learn from what you are hearing along the way.

Lastly, because I am a tech geek, I highly recommend capitalizing on the technology that can improve your entire methodology. Recruitment Marketing Platforms like SmashFly track the candidate experience in every recruiting touch point and effort, from before employers know the candidate to after they opt-in to receive additional communication or apply for a job. Let data do some of the work! This way you can see what’s working, what’s not, where people are dropping off and how to mitigate just that. It’s always better to track and measure the candidate experience than simple guess, which is where technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform can really offer insight and facilitate change.

Whether you personally like shopping or not, that’s what people (e.g., candidates!) are doing every day. Be the place people want to visit – and buy from.

This post is sponsored by SmashFly. All thoughts and opinions are my own. For more content like this, follow SmashFly on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and SlideShare.

Photo Credit: cornerstoneindia via Compfight cc

Improve the Candidate “Shopping” Experience

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I’ve written before about my passion for the candidate experience…quite a bit, actually. As a board member for the Talent Board, you’ve hopefully witnessed my advocacy for candidates; Of course I also offer kudos to employers who are taking strides toward improving the journey from stranger to employee.

However, let’s take it up a level and talk about the overarching strategic level of the candidate experience. Yes, it’s about thank-you notes and avoiding miscommunication, but it’s so much more. The entire process begins long before anyone opts into communication from you or applies for a position.

When shopping for a new dishwasher, people read online reviews, walk the aisles of Home Depot, Google different brands, ask friends on Facebook, and have at-home discussions with anyone else whom shares dish duty. And this is an appliance. What about when they are making a career change? Let’s assume their priorities are straight and care more about their job, personal brand and impact on the world than a dishwasher’s decibel levels.

So what does that mean? As candidates become increasingly more like consumers, they shop around, scour websites – employers and sites like Glassdoor.com – vet opportunities, compare and ask meaningful questions. Research shows that candidates use approximately 12-18 sources of information before they apply.

So employers, heed my warning: BE READY. Don’t assume that you can throw together an attractive job ad and it will suffice. Candidates already know about the organization and have (very) likely done major research.

The term Recruitment Marketing comes into play here. When people are looking for a new position, they need compelling language everywhere they turn. Don’t shut the door on quality talent by lacking the right kind of messaging on your website; be sure to include clear employer brand language, employee stories, job-specific explanations, helpful career resources and more. And be sure to do the same on all social media profiles and across all other available platforms.

Data from SmashFly states that 74% of candidates drop off of the apply process. For one reason or another these consumers – uh, candidates – weren’t sold yet on your employer brand, weren’t engaged by the application process or weren’t ready to apply yet. Can’t you just hear them say, “Moving on….”?

So, think through your recruitment marketing strategy with a strategic lens to decide if candidates will even be interested in making the candidate journey with you.

Run these three tests:

Is it Helpful?

Put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. You want someone to help you understand the opportunity. Don’t be cryptic or hard to find. Use informative language when explaining your EVP (Employee Value Proposition); make frequently asked questions easy to answer on their own. Don’t lose people because they think you don’t care enough to help.

Is it Inviting?

Are you front-and-center, inviting people to learn more about you as an employer? Do you seem open and welcoming to queries about your workplace culture, job path opportunities or other burning questions? Don’t appear like that dark haunted house on the hill. Be so lit up that you’re transparent. And transparency is a whole different story.

Is It Engaging?

Are you offering ways to invite potential and current candidates to engage with the organization? Are there forums, videos, Q&A sessions, or open dialogue with team members? Do you have a cool newsletter that outlines the day-in-the-life of an employee in your organization? Is there another way for potential candidates to show interest and learn more without applying immediately, like joining a talent network?

Last fall, SmashFly researched and evaluated every 2015 Fortune 500 organization’s career site for 13 recruitment marketing practices. Of those companies, SmashFly found that 57% used employee stories on their career sites through either text or video. This practice should continue to grow, and employee stories should be used to engage and nurture potential candidates in social media and in your talent network.  People listen to people over brands, which is why employee stories speak so much more to candidates!

Is your social media presence one that makes people want to engage with you and be part of the family? Don’t get sucked back into that archaic one-way communication where you simply spit out messages. Everything goes both directions these days. Open up those channels, engage and learn from what you are hearing along the way.

Lastly, because I am a tech geek, I highly recommend capitalizing on the technology that can improve your entire methodology. Recruitment Marketing Platforms like SmashFly track the candidate experience in every recruiting touch point and effort, from before employers know the candidate to after they opt-in to receive additional communication or apply for a job. Let data do some of the work! This way you can see what’s working, what’s not, where people are dropping off and how to mitigate just that. It’s always better to track and measure the candidate experience than simple guess, which is where technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform can really offer insight and facilitate change.

Whether you personally like shopping or not, that’s what people (e.g., candidates!) are doing every day. Be the place people want to visit – and buy from.

This post is sponsored by SmashFly. All thoughts and opinions are my own. For more content like this, follow SmashFly on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and SlideShare.

Photo Credit: cornerstoneindia via Compfight cc

Four Things HR Can Learn From Marketing

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With the consistent growth of concepts like “Employer Brand” and “Recruitment Marketing,” HR departments everywhere are adding another role to their already burgeoning workload: marketing. And while some elements of marketing were already there for some HR and recruiting pros, the level of expertise required has grown exponentially. So if you are finding yourself marketing without ever having cracked a textbook in that territory, here are some things to learn from marketing.

Be Consistent with Messaging. Frankly, don’t be all over the place. Whether you are conveying information on open enrollment, a workplace wellness program or open positions, be clear and consistent across all platforms. Don’t have a different job description on your website than on a job board and don’t have three variations of the workplace wellness program. Treat each campaign like a true campaign, with some up-front decisions about the language, the look-and-feel and the appropriate channels to use.

Massage the Message. What action do you want people to take? Make your call to action palatable, encouraging and appealing. Forceful, jargon-heavy or boring language can be a main reason for slow conversion rates. Depending on your culture, make it hip and playful or strategic and savvy. Words matter. Ask any copywriter about the power of words and you may open the floodgates.

Sell the idea. If you need or want to sell a concept, sell it. Don’t just tell people the boring who, what, when, where and why; persuade them. You can use the old 5Ws format to start (remember the tip about clarity) but throw is some attention-grabbing language that makes it compelling. Answer the So What? Or What’s In It For Me? right away.

And this is absolutely critical when it comes to recruiting. If you aren’t already up to speed on Employer Branding and how to entice and engage candidates, hit the books. Make sure you know what to say and where to say it.

Change Messages to Audiences Based on Needs. You may have similar needs from a wide variety of audiences, from potential candidates to internal departments, but it’s key to also know their differences and pain points. Just as if you were forming a strategy to market to teenagers versus retirees, think about what will resonate with vastly different groups. This doesn’t need to negate the point of being consistent, but maybe think about the best ways to reach them. Is it through an App? Social media? Or is a poster more appropriate? Take the time to think about what will reach and influence them and make a plan that aligns with those realities.

HR and marketing really do have a lot in common. When it comes to reaching humans with needs, the leaders in these two industries know what’s up. So, my HR friends, as you consider rolling out a campaign to your internal audiences or are focusing on external outreach to potential candidates (Recruitment Marketing), put on some Mad Men and have some fun.

This post is sponsored by SmashFly. All thoughts and opinions are my own. For more content like this, follow SmashFly on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and SlideShare.

 

Photo Credit: Executive Search Toronto via Compfight cc

Why Talent Acquisition Should Own Recruitment Marketing

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Recruiters and marketers used to sit in different areas of the office, playing distinctly different roles. But as we all know, that’s shifted quite a bit with the focus on recruitment marketing. A marketing hat is now an essential part of a talent acquisition leader’s wardrobe. The most successful recruiters and talent acquisition leaders have embraced the entire world of marketing, from tactics to metrics.

According to The MRINetwork Recruiter Sentiment Study, a biannual survey conducted among nearly 2,000 U.S.-based executive search recruiters of MRINetwork, 90 percent of recruiters say the market was candidate-driven in 2015, up from 54 percent in the second half of 2011. When the landscape looks like that, candidates need to be wowed and wooed. And let’s be honest, the best employer brand often wins the race.

Within this same study, 31 percent of respondents say that hiring managers are not finding enough suitable candidates. And when that happens, they have to fight that much harder to find, grab and retain high quality candidates – or someone else will.

So creating a brand that compels people to want to work there is absolutely critical. Whether it’s a perk like free lunches, a dog-friendly workplace or a generous vacation policy, those messages need to be blasted loud and clear. What are even more important to share are those deeper cultural messages such as commitment to transparency or the opportunity to do meaningful work. And who should be behind this communication? Talent Acquisition! (With the support of executives and current employees, as well.)

LinkedIn recently released Global Recruiting Trends 2016, offering both predictable and interesting findings. It states 59 percent of respondents are “investing more in their employer brand compared to last year.” So with this investment, it’s once again obvious who should whole-heartedly, passionately and strategically own the employer brand and the correlating recruitment marketing: the Talent Acquisition Team. Here are a few reasons why.

Consistency of Message. This is Marketing 101. When you want to send a message, make it clear and repeat it. When you are marketing to potential candidates, it’s the same concept. If there are inconsistent messages coming from social media profiles, job boards, talent networks, online employee reviews and other platforms, candidates are just confused.

When Talent Acquisition owns the employer brand and recruitment marketing efforts, it is a great opportunity to fully grasp the company culture, put it into compelling words and sell it. This requires savvy research, solid writing and constant management. Simply put, employer branding needs to be placed as a high priority and coddled a bit. With all the visibility that comes with our online culture, monitoring and engaging potential candidates is part of the big picture.

Universum’s research showed that “74 percent of respondents claimed to have at least a moderate employer brand presence on social media, only a third said they had dedicated employees posting content and responding to users on a regular basis. Even more surprising was that only about half of respondents said they measure their social media activities.”

Candidates Care More. I talk a lot about the candidate experience because expectations have changed. With a talent shortage and shifting generational demands, people want to be courted a bit. The process of the candidate experience is a slight jump from what we’re talking about, but it starts with effectively reaching talent. With companies like Google, Salesforce and Wegmans out there topping Best Companies to Work For lists, candidates want a little cultural dazzle with each job posting. Research continues to show that Millennials and Gen Z are more extremely interested in company culture.

Virgin Pulse’s report, “Misunderstood Millennials: How the Newest Workforce is Evolving Business” states that “73 percent of Millennials seek meaningful work at an organization with a mission they support, and a remarkable 90 percent say they want to use their skills for good, suggesting that Millennials seek workplaces with a culture of altruism that enable them to give back. Millennials also care about workplace culture, with 77 percent noting it is just as or more important than salary and benefits.”

And I’ll throw it out there again … who needs to own these messages, illustrating a commitment to altruism or a hip company culture? Talent Acquisition.

 

Here’s a little warning for you, though. If a talent brand is misrepresented – by flat-out false promises or simply poor word choices – or even through silence – quality of hire will be affected. You want employees to be there for the right reasons: They knew what they were getting into and they want to stay. They are more productive, visionary and committed. When Talent Acquisition effectively manages its marketing efforts, the overall workplace will reap the benefits.

So how do you put in into action? To understand how to become a modern recruiting organization, SmashFly offers a great resource that outlines some of the key skills and roles within the recruitment marketing discipline in 5 Essential Roles of the Modern Recruitment Marketing Team.

This post is sponsored by SmashFly. All thoughts and opinions are my own. For more content like this, follow SmashFly on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and SlideShare.

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6 Recruitment Marketing Trends Changing Talent Acquisition

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It’s a very exciting time to be a talent acquisition professional: Talent acquisition is becoming more strategic, adding new responsibilities and investing in new technologies. It’s not just about the job anymore, it’s about the brand. It’s not just about hiring talent, it’s about measuring and predicting business impact. It’s not just about applicants, it’s about finding and engaging leads to start relationships earlier. And it’s not just about today’s reqs, it’s about building pipelines for the future.

We really are transforming the way we find and attract talent, inspired by core marketing best practices like branding, nurture, content marketing and lead generation.

Recruitment marketing is at the core of this transformation. This front end of the recruiting funnel is an arena talent acquisition hasn’t even considered in the past. But with unemployment low, the competition for talent high and the savviness of candidates increasing, organizations must shift the way think about recruitment and invest in new ways to communicate and build relationships with candidate leads.

To stay ahead of this wave of innovation in this space, take a closer look at how you can understand and address these six major trends in recruitment marketing.

  1. EVP is King

The Employee Value Proposition is not new, but it’s never been more important. As people are becoming savvier job seekers, standing out as a great company to work for is the key differentiator.

  • Employee amplification makes your EVP real. When you invest in your EVP, your employees inherently believe you’re a great company to work for, which means they will be more engaged. Your great, engaged employees know other great people, and when they believe in your EVP, they are more likely to amplify your message and refer other great talent.
  • Brand over job. A strong EVP attracts talent to your company, not your jobs. The future of recruitment marketing is about attracting the right talent to your company first and then matching them to a position. You have to think brand first and always answer, “Why is it great to work for this company, and why do other amazing people work here?”
  1. Candidate Journey is Not Linear

The candidate experience is no longer linear. Over a decade ago, it was, and it went like this: “I need a job. I look at job ads. I send in my resume.” Today, there are so many influences on a candidate’s decision to even apply, let alone accept a job offer.

  • There is no single path to apply (or hire!). A report from Google and Inmar revealed that it takes consumers 12 touchpoints before they make a purchase decision. We can expect a similar path for candidates today. Different candidates move through touchpoints in different ways at different times. These sources of influence drive relationships and a better candidate experience and are just as important as source of hire.
  • Don’t miss a touchpoint. All your recruitment marketing channels ─ mobile, social media, events, Glassdoor, career site, job boards ─ are opportunities to create a relationship. If you miss one, it could cost you a candidate. With the right technology, automation can allow for high-tech and high-touch, helping recruiters be more efficient, taking over simple actions that can help create a more seamless candidate experience. More touchpoints don’t have to mean more work!
  1. It’s All About the (Candidate) Leads

The candidate journeyJust like marketers, talent acquisition has started looking at the buyer’s (or candidate’s) journey and the marketing (or talent acquisition) funnel. And at the very top of the funnel comes leads, a new focus for the talent acquisition function that has traditionally only prioritized applicants.

  • Not everyone is ready to apply today. For most companies, apply is the only call-to-action they offer a candidate―but 74 percent of candidates who start the application process drop off before they complete it (SmashFly data, 2015). This means there needs to be another way interested candidates can opt in to learn more without applying: a talent network.
  • Candidates are like consumers. Both Gartner and Forrester say that 80 percent of the “buying process” happens without any human contact. Candidates’ assessment about your company and your employer brand is made in the top half of the funnel, in every touchpoint pre-apply: social media, career site, Glassdoor, job boards, events, a mobile experience, a referral. Using a talent network can capture these leads and enable you to nurture them with the right content so they can learn more about you. 
  1. Fill for Now and Later

Filling open positions will always be a priority, but there needs to be a shift in thinking from reactionary to strategic. Talent acquisition teams need to also focus on building pipelines of talent for the future.

  • Reqs and pipeline go hand-in-hand. Why focus on only one of these goals when you can focus on both? The recruitment marketing channels you’re using to fill immediate open reqs will also help you generate pipelines for future roles. Filling positions is a lot easier when you can source from a strong pipeline of talent who you’ve already paid to attract.
  • Use technology to automate. Two goals sound like more work, but it doesn’t have to be. Using technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform to help you build talent networks, automate processes and track all of your efforts will help you see huge returns on the growth of your own database, which means less reliance on third parties liked LinkedIn.
  1. Measure Like Marketers

We need to measure quality! Hires and source of hire is not all that we should care about. We need to care about good hires! Companies who are spending more money on talent acquisition retain hires longer, which means they likely become stronger brand advocates and refer more often. Plus, we don’t have to refill positions and start the process all over again.

  • We can’t just act like marketers. We have to measure like them too. We’ll see a shift in metrics that prove ROI of your entire recruitment marketing strategy, like time to find, source of influence, cost per quality lead, the size and health of the talent pipeline, source of quality and conversion rates by tactic.
  • What is your agnostic source of truth? Technology needs to be holistic and accurate. Compiling data from multiple sources and comparing apples to oranges will not give you the insight into how your tactics are performing side-by-side. We’ll see a shift away from point solutions and instead to a holistic, one-platform software like a Recruitment Marketing Platform that can be an agnostic source of truth for all of your data in and out.
  1. Rise of Specialization

Recruitment marketing is an emerging profession, and it will follow the track of most professions. In marketing, there was initially a marketing director that oversaw every single aspect of the marketing function. But as the discipline became more savvy, more specialized and more important, roles became specialized for digital, social media, content, data, product, communications, demand generation and more.

  • Take baby steps. What does that mean for recruitment marketing this year? Don’t be scared! Now, there is an HR generalist or a talent acquisition leader. But we are starting to see roles specifically for recruitment marketing and employer branding and talent advisors. The next evolution will be ERP managers, data analysts, social recruiting and content. Take one role at a time or add a specialization to a current role.
  • Test and learn. This is a new frontier―you can make mistakes. Recruitment marketing is a new way of thinking in talent acquisition, and there is no perfect path to success. Test nuanced messaging. Be bold in social media. Show some personality on your career site. Be transparent. But make sure you can track how new messaging or tactics work.

Which of these trends do you think will have the biggest impact on talent acquisition this year?

Listen to the live webinar recording that inspired this post, featuring SmashFly’s Director of Recruitment Marketing Tracey Parsons and Co-founder of Aptitude Research Madeline Laurano.

photo credit: Week 6 via photopin (license)

 

SmashFly is a client of TalentCulture and sponsored this post.

Key Points from LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2016 [Report]

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Each year, technology brings new recruiting trends to the HR world that impact both how we recruit, and retain, employees. It’s up to businesses to stay on top of these changing trends if they want to acquire the best talent. Obviously, that’s easier said than done, especially for smaller businesses that may not have the time and resources available. That’s why LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends for 2016, created by a panel of experts, is a fantastic guide for HR professionals and hiring managers

The report is geared toward small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to upgrade their recruiting processes for the New Year and is the result of surveying some 3,894 talent acquisition decision-makers who work in corporate HR departments. With recruiting talent and retaining employees becoming more important than ever, businesses are constantly on the lookout to improve HR. Thanks to this report—and the experts surveyed—a lot of the hard work is already done. Let’s take a look. 

Identify Top Priorities

HR duties are widely varied, so prioritizing business needs is important for small businesses. The first section of the report found that businesses are focusing heavily on recruiting the very best talent and incentivizing employees to stick around. This certainly isn’t a new priority for any HR department anywhere: 42 percent of those surveyed said recruiting highly-talented candidates is a main priority, while 38 percent said the focus should be on employee retention. Other concepts, like improving the quality of hires, sourcing techniques, and pipelining talent were further down on the priority list.

Increase Hiring Budget for Better Hiring Practices

SMBs are growing steadily and that growth, as reflected by the HR pros participating in the survey, is likely to continue. 62 percent of respondents reported they expect an increase in hiring volume over the next year. Likewise, 46 percent predict their hiring budgets will increase accordingly. The two directly affect one another: the need for more employees necessitates a larger hiring budget, and better practices mean better employees.

Use New Ways to Find Top Talent

Recruiting high-quality talent seems to be the top priority among survey respondents, and many are wondering where to find it. The survey found that Internet job boards and social professional networks are the most popular sources for finding talent. SMB recruiters reported they lean more toward Internet boards (45 percent), while enterprise recruiters favor social networks (46 percent). Other recruitment methods mentioned include employee referrals, staffing agencies, and company career sites. Social media has been an effective way to find exceptional talent, and it appears that will continue to be a solid trend.

Win Over Top Talent and Measure Quality of Hire

SMBs and enterprise businesses alike are fighting over young professional talent. Most companies report looking to hire those who are freshly out of school (0-3 years). Internal candidates are also a source of talent, but not as popular as hiring Millennial talent. The tricky part is that there’s a lot of competition over this age bracket. The experts identified a few specific challenges SMBs have when trying to recruit Millennials:

  • Competition was rated as the biggest challenge, at 35 percent
  • Creating attractive compensation packages was second, at 32 percent
  • A lack of interest or awareness in the company brand was third at 31 percent

After beating out the competition, SMBs report that measuring the quality of hire is the most important way to assess ROI. The majority of companies (51 percent) measure this using new hire evaluation, while 48 percent look at retention and turnover rates, and 41 percent measure the hiring managers’ satisfaction. This suggests that SMBs are shifting toward employee satisfaction as a valuable metric. A happier employee will show better performance, and that’s important to both employee and employer. 

Brand Development for Effective Marketing and Recruiting

It’s no surprise that a lack of brand awareness is troubling to many businesses. Candidates’ familiarity with your brand is just as important as customers knowing your brand. Brand confusion is a business killer, so businesses are spending more money than ever on brand development. Furthermore, experts feel that a combination of channels is the most effective way to promote a brand. Respondents reported their most popular brand awareness channels, in order, as:

  • Company websites
  • Online professional networks
  • Social media
  • Word of mouth
  • Employee advocacy

believe that with an overall goal of brand awareness, the most effective strategy is to use a mixture of channels. A great company website—with a side of social media and industry authority—is a good starter recipe for raising brand awareness. And it’s important to note that any one of these alone probably isn’t enough to deliver the kind of results you’re looking for when it comes to attracting the best and the brightest. Recruitment today is as much about smart marketing as it is about anything else. If this topic interests you, it’s one I explore in depth in a Recruitment Marketing Series that I did for IBM, and contains lots of information you’ll find valuable.

The Future of Recruiting

Looking toward the future, finding and keeping top talent will continue to be a major priority. As technology and innovation evolve and continue to change the world of work as we know it, the way we recruit and retain talent will have to change and adapt as well. Businesses will focus on brand messaging related to corporate culture, innovation, social awareness, and other key things that are attractive to candidates, in an effort to not only attract, but retain them as well. As mentioned earlier, marketing now plays a central role in recruitment strategies, and it’s going to take much more than a few perks to get the attention of top talent. Lastly, measuring the quality of hire will continue to be the most valued metric by HR pros moving forward, especially as recruiting becomes more about the talent and less about the budget.

What do you think? Do the results reported here mirror your thoughts on this topic? What didn’t the experts cover that you find to be a challenge? Grab the report here if you’d like to explore in more detail: LinkedIn Global Recruiting Trends 2016.

Other posts on this topic:

Increasing Engagement and Retention With Progressive Benefits
Employee Retention Begins in the Interview Process
4 Reasons Social Media is a Top Recruiting Tool
Ending the Phony War for Talent: Why the language we use in recruiting matters

 

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Think Beyond Mobile Apply for a Stronger Mobile Candidate Experience

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For more insights on recruitment marketing best practices employed by the world’s leading organizations, including mobile candidate experience, get a free download of SmashFly’s Recruitment Marketing Report Card for the 2015 Fortune 500. 

This September, SmashFly researched and evaluated every 2015 Fortune 500 organization’s career site for 13 unique recruitment marketing practices. The research itself was pretty illuminating (see a snapshot here in the Report Card Infographic), especially as more organizations are aggressively investing in better ways to attract, engage and convert candidate leads into applicants.

While I highly encourage you to check out all 13 practices in the report card and use the data to benchmark your recruitment marketing strategy, I want to focus on four recruitment marketing best practices I consider crucial to how organizations find and attract the right talent to their organizations.

This is the second post in a four-part series highlighting each integral best practice and how to use it in your recruitment marketing strategy. Up today: the mobile candidate experience.

 

Mobile Candidate Experience

Today, mobile is affecting how we interact with our customers and, in recruiting’s case, our candidates. In 2014, the number of global users eclipsed desktop users for the first time ever, and there are many compelling statistics that show mobile increasing as the main channel through which consumers research and ultimately consume information. It’s no longer a question if or when, but how we adapt our strategies to ensure a personalized experience for our target market no matter the device they use.

Now as recruiting organizations, when we think about mobile our thoughts head directly to mobile apply. However, with SmashFly’s recent research, we wanted to measure the whole candidate experience from attraction to research to apply. After visiting every 2015 Fortune 500 company’s career site (yes, each and every one!), here’s what we found (we used the Google Mobile Friendliness tool to verify each site):

  • 59% of the 2015 Fortune 500 have a mobile-optimized career homepage (the page that links from the “Careers” navigation on their website)
  • 36% of the 2015 Fortune 500 have a mobile-optimized careers search (the page where a candidate clicks “Search Jobs” or the equivalent)
  • 38% of the 2015 Fortune 500 have a mobile-optimized apply process (the actual apply process once the candidate lead clicks the “Apply” button on a job)
  • Only 14% had a fully mobile-optimized candidate experience across all three of the above processes.

As the largest companies in the U.S., very few of this year’s Fortune 500 are providing a fully mobile-optimized candidate experience to find, research and ultimately apply to their organization. It’s an interesting and surprising percentage to say the least, especially with such a huge focus around mobile recruiting the past few years. But this means that there is a big opportunity for other organizations to step up their mobile game and offer their candidates an end-to-end engaging and mobile-optimized experience.

 

Key Takeaways

What’s important to take away from the research above on mobile recruiting? At a bare minimum, it’s imperative you start thinking about mobile’s impact on the candidate experience (check out our Mobile Recruiting Checklist for tips on getting started). Second, it’s all about what to tackle first. Here are a few thoughts:

  • Mobile isn’t just mobile apply! The mobile candidate experience starts way before the apply process. If you have a mobile-optimized apply process but no way to easily find and search jobs via mobile, very few candidates will even make it to your company’s apply flow.
  • Mobile means better search engine optimization (SEO): Mobile searches are increasingly growing as a percentage of all search engine searches (with reports that it’s now a majority of all search engine searches). And search engines such as Google have been adjusting their algorithms to ensure mobile-optimized sites and pages are credited in mobile search results. What this means for you is that if your career site homepage, job search or individual job pages are not mobile-optimized, they will not appear in search rankings for mobile searches that candidates type into their smartphones. I suggest you use the Google Mobile Friendliness tool to test your career site today.
  • A multiscreen strategy is key: While mobile should be top of mind as you build out and revamp your current career site, it’s also important to understand the percentage of visitors you receive from PC, mobile and tablet. It’s integral to take a multiscreen strategy for building and improving your candidate experience so that the experience is great no matter which channel or device a candidate wants to research, consume information and apply.
  • Capture mobile users through talent network forms. Talent networks are a trend I’ll write more about in a few weeks, but offering candidates an option outside of applying to provide their information for further communication is incredibly important and useful. Any talent network initiative should make sure that forms presented to candidates are optimized for the device the candidate is using, mobile included.

At SmashFly, we work with and speak to a lot of recruiting organizations who are looking to improve their recruiting strategies for mobile. However, many are so laser-focused on mobile apply that they neglect the other integral elements for mobile such as SEO, mobile search and mobile capture.

As you look to create a better candidate experience, mobile needs to be considered across all the touchpoints you have with your candidate leads in how they find, research, opt in and ultimately apply for job opportunities.

 

 

Smashfly is a client of TalentCulture and has sponsored this post.

How to Better Use Employee Stories in Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy

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For more insights on recruitment marketing best practices employed by the world’s leading organizations, get a free download of SmashFly’s Recruitment Marketing Report Card for the 2015 Fortune 500. 

This September, SmashFly researched and evaluated every 2015 Fortune 500 organization’s career site 13 unique recruitment marketing practices. The research itself was pretty illuminating (see a snapshot here in the Report Card Infographic), especially as more organizations aggressively invest in better ways to attract, engage and convert candidate leads into applicants.

While I highly encourage you to check out all 13 practices in the report card and use the data to benchmark your recruitment marketing strategy, I want to focus on four best practices I consider crucial to how organizations find and attract the right talent to their organizations.

This will be a four-part series highlighting each integral best practice and how to use it in your recruitment marketing strategy. Up first: Employee Stories.

 

Employee Stories

Companies are increasingly trying to provide more transparency in their recruitment marketing strategies by leveraging employees and their unique stories in their messaging and on their career sites. Within the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, SmashFly found that 57% used employee stories on their career sites through either text or video. That’s a tremendous stat and probably one of the most encouraging findings in our report. However, that’s only Step 1. Step 2 is utilizing these stories better throughout the candidate experience journey.

As you look through career sites, employee stories are typically grouped together on their own page. A candidate interested in learning more will go to the employee stories page on the site and be able to consume content across various employee types and disciplines. This is great, but the problem is that candidates have to proactively find and choose to consume this content on their own. How can we get better at delivering this content directly to the candidate in their journey?

Employee stories are the best content we own in talent acquisition, and any good content marketer understands that great content should be repurposed four to five different times in your marketing program. So what can we do to repurpose, extend and highlight our employee stories? Here are a few ideas:

  • Job Descriptions: Most candidates that come to the career site will view or search a job. However, very few will complete an application ― 74% drop off based on the most recent SmashFly data. So how do we make job descriptions more compelling? We include our videos and stories in the job description. Only 1% of job descriptions today include a video or image on career sites (found in our 2015 Fortune 500 research), so there’s a huge opportunity to stand out and deliver employee stories at the point that candidates decide to apply for a job position.
  • Landing Pages: Most organizations are leveraging landing pages to deliver relevant content to specific job families and skills (think engineering page for engineering candidates). But while most only include sparse copy and targeted jobs, the most successful ones deliver employee stories and videos, highlighting “Why Work Here as a [CANDIDATE TYPE]?” and focusing on the compelling reasons targeted to that audience.
  • Email Nurture Campaigns: Our research didn’t dive into email nurturing for the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, but this is another area to better leverage your customer stories. Say an engineering candidate joins your Talent Network: What content are you going to deliver to them? First, you should send a “thank you for joining” email and set expectations for what they will receive. But an even better next step? A great video on your engineering team and the interesting projects they are working on.
  • Sourcer/Recruiter Talking Points: Whether in email or in phone calls, your recruiters and sourcers should know your employee stories and use them when talking with candidates. Create messaging for your team to use during these interactions and measure the success of when this messaging is used vs. more generic messaging. I assure you that employee stories will provide better interactions.

 

Most organizations put a lot of work into creating great employee story videos, but then they regulate them to a page that most candidates don’t see. As employers, let’s proactively get these employee stories in front of candidates at each and every touch point in their journey. This will help give candidates a clear picture of what it is like to work at your organization, providing a better, more personalized candidate experience as they decide on their next career opportunity. In turn, we ensure that we convert more candidates into applicants across our strategy.

 

 

Smashfly is a client of TalentCulture and has sponsored this post.

Recruitment Marketing: Your Key to Recruiting Success [Webinar]

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Recruitment marketing has never been more important. Why? Today’s hiring economy is highly complex and competitive–and finding top talent is harder than ever. Unemployment is at a seven-year low, and it’s taking increasingly longer to hire. If you’re a recruiter in search of top talent, this is likely something you live and breathe on a daily basis. 

In fact, attracting candidates and retaining current employees is a lot like attracting and retaining customers. Consumers can take up to 12 touch points with a brand before they make a purchase decision. Candidates are researching your employer brand the same way: They’re following you on LinkedIn and Twitter, reading reviews of your managers on Glassdoor and checking out your latest blog posts and YouTube videos. That means your relationships with candidates don’t start from the point of applying; the begin long before–from the point of attraction.

Candidates seek a relevant, transparent, and personalized experience–and expect it in every interaction, before they even get to submitting an application. How valuable are your social media posts? How authentic are your career site stories or employee testimonials? And how transparent are your emails?

Bottom line: How you treat every candidate has a direct impact on your brand. In today’s digital age, where sharing experiences online is commonplace and even expected, a poor candidate experience can be bad for business, bad for branding–and translate to millions in lost revenue annually.

This changing talent acquisition landscape requires a more proactive, engaging, multi-touch approach. Today, we call that “Recruitment Marketing.” Recruitment Marketing is the process by which you find, attract, engage and nurture candidates–your talent acquisition leads–to build a more qualified pipeline of candidates and ultimately convert more quality hires. Today, it’s important to understand that the goals and day-to-day focus of your recruitment marketing team is completely different from the goals and day-to-day focus of your recruiting team. A recruiting team’s job is all about conversion. Their focus is on converting the most highly qualified, most sought after applicants into hires. Recruitment marketing’s job, which is completely different, comes first. Their focus is on developing strategies that allow them to attract leads and convert those leads into applicants, so that your recruiting team can choose from a larger and more qualified pool of applicants. Recruitment marketing’s job is to attract and qualify candidate “leads” that can be delivered to the recruitment team to convert–and “close” with a job offer that’s accepted. This process, and the collaboration between recruitment marketers and recruiters are what is driving today’s modern recruiting organizations.

Today’s job seeker doesn’t want just a job. They want career development opportunities, stellar company culture, employee camaraderie,and a purpose. As a result, transparency up front, and in every touch point thereafter, is an essential start to building a better candidate experience.

Being transparent isn’t always as simple as it sounds. But a step in the right direction is a clear understanding of what exactly recruitment marketing is, and how to structure your team to deliver the best results. If this is what you’re focused on now and as we move into a new year, I hope you’ll join me and my friends at SmashFly for a webinar on best practices for recruitment marketing and how it’s driving transparency in today’s modern recruiting organizations. The webinar will be on Tuesday, November 17, at 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST.

Here is what you can expect to learn: 

  • The edge of the talent funnel in HR and recruiting
  • What recruitment marketing is and isn’t
  • The critical importance of transparency in recruitment marketing (and how to be transparent)
  • The primary components of a successful recruitment marketing strategy

Good stuff, I promise. Take a quick minute to register for the webinar using the link below and I can’t wait to see you there.

Webinar Registration Link: Why Transparency is Key to Recruitment Marketing Success & How to Master It, Tuesday, November 17, 11am PST/2pm EST 

Photo Credit: flazingo_photos via Compfight cc

Recruit and Hire with the Real Atmospherians

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“Some world views are spacious, and some are merely spaced.” —Rush, Grand Designs

 

Scene 1: Pacific Avenue was closed for Halloween. Throngs of families dressed up for the holiday, passed one another while children chased each other in circles, their bags of candy swinging round and round. As we trick-or-treated from merchant to merchant, homeless panhandlers hit us up for money, while some staggered among us like the living dead.

Scene 2: The banner hung askew along the chain-link fence. It read “The Home Depot Is Hiring – Inquire Within.” As we drove into The Home Depot parking lot, day laborers eyed us eagerly, hoping for work. Some stood in small groups while a few others hung out alone waiting to be approached. When we left, an older white male was in the process of hiring three of them for a local job.

Scene 3: Like an end-of-days story, the motorhome is parked on on the side of the highway, not too far from where we live. Makeshift sections of plywood where aluminum siding used to be cover one side of the motorhome and it looks like most of the motorhome’s contents have been moved outside. Right behind the motorhome construction workers put the finishing touches on a new hotel.

If these were movie or TV sets, the extras would be straight out of Central Casting. I had heard the expression before, but I didn’t know that it referenced a real casting agency called Central Casting located in Burbank, CA, not until I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts 99% Invisible. These extras are stereotypical to the context required for any given scene, to convince us they’re real, or as close to it as possible for us to buy in to the staged reality.

The podcast referred to the term “The Atmospherians,” something Theodore Dreiser, American novelist and journalist from the 20th century, had coined nearly 100 years ago. These are the backgrounders, those who give a scene its subtle yet visceral breadth and depth that helps tell a story.

But in the scenes above, real-life scenes that I experienced of late, these were real and contain the people companies don’t to be seen as the company backgrounders. They just don’t want that much reality associated with their employment brands. In a world gone bedazzled with authenticity and transparency, they still double-down on some form of compromised storytelling because of their inherent biases and need to control the marketplace message. They want to make recruiting movies to inspire and believe in, and they believe this is how they compete for the hearts and minds of candidates and customers alike.

So it’s no surprise that most high-performing companies invest in marketing their messages of community, values, diversity and culture – all of which make up the most of the top recruitment marketing messages of the winners and survey participants of Talent Board’s Candidates Experience Awards research five years running now.

I’ve been in marketing a long time, and I know the compromise is real, has to be. It includes a combination of living and breathing all the messages above, positioning one’s strengths as consistently and continuously as possible while allowing for some of the real stuff to be seen, like the Halloween community scene above (which the candidates/customers are going to see regardless).

This is a good thing, something we’ve discussed time and time again on the TalentCulture #TChat Show, and something I’ve lived again and again. Businesses who risk process exposure in order to improve candidate-as-customer experience are personified stories of decent places to work. Here are three examples from the Talent Board Story Teller recipients, all winners of this year’s Candidate Experience Awards:

  1. Cumming: Transparency is the key to their success with Candidate Experience by requesting a Glassdoor review from candidates, their commitment to a 5-day turnaround on decisions on resumes, exposing their process and even how their ATS rates and ranks candidates on their career site. In addition, they understand the business impact of a bad experience.
  2. Enterprise Holdings: Recruiter contact information is made available to candidates, including photos and social links and they pledge to get back to candidates within 5 days. Enterprise also measures the candidate’s’ time in each step in the process. In addition, they treat their internal candidates equally well and show the rate of promotions within the company in real time.
  3. Spectrum Health: Hiring managers and recruiter are partners in the candidate experience at Spectrum Health. They both commit to follow-up with candidates – for recruiters, within 3 days upon receiving a resume and for managers within 7 days of receiving candidates from the recruiting team. Disposition emails include the recruiter’s name and phone number if the candidate needs more information.

However, no matter what they risk, employers big and small still have to differentiate and market and sell their products and services in order to have a viable business. One that sustains itself by reinventing and reinvesting, and one that aspires to hire the most qualified people in a consistent and sometimes transparent process. I’d rather recruit and hire with the real Atmospherians anyway. Wouldn’t you?

Selling the Recruiting Process Isn’t a Gamble

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“Wheel goes round, landing on a twist of faith
Taking your chances you’ll have the right answers
When the final judgment begins
Wheel goes round, landing on a leap of fate
Life redirected in ways unexpected
Sometimes the odd number wins
The way the big wheel spins…”

—Rush, The Big Wheel

 

Step right up and spin the HR technology Conference career wheel – a winner every time!

Well, not quite, but the nostalgia of the all my previous HR Technology & Exposition conferences overcame me at the latest one when I realized that all my best and worst career incarnations and near misses are collectively linked to this conference.

What’s fascinating about going to the HR Technology & Exposition (or any industry event that you’ve consistently gone to year after year for well over a decade), is what goes on in the sidebars. I’m not talking about the straight networking, or analyst or influencer briefings, or the marketing and PR agency pitching, or the investor pitching, or the parties or the shows or the gambling (when the HR Tech conference is in Las Vegas as it has been for the past three years). I’m talking about the targeted sourcing and recruiting that goes on and on and on.

First and foremost, it’s a personable recruitment marketing and sourcing gold mine for all happy or unhappy perpetual candidates (which we all are) in software sales, marketing, customer service, product management and even software development and engineering. It’s also a potentially diamond-studded referral pool for any and all HR and recruiting technology companies as well as all the attendee companies that are there shopping for HR tech and talking HR tech shop. I witnessed it all around me while I was at this year’s show.

But companies are only a winner only when these investments pay off. Unfortunately, beyond the rush of the front-end schmoozing and selling, companies can neglect to share enough information about the overall recruiting processes and pre- and post-hire expectations, leaving the candidates feeling like a loser.

My reminiscing morphed into the related recruiting and candidate experience data analyses we’re going through now at the Talent Board. Talent Board is a non-profit organization focused on the promotion and data benchmark research of a quality candidate experience. Tired of hearing the same old stories of poor candidate experience, the Talent Board co-founders set out to elevate the mission of a creating and sustaining a better recruiting process and business performance through research.

There were 200 companies and 130,000 candidates that participated in the 2015 North American Candidate Experience Awards, and we’ll round out all of this year’s research in our research report due out in January 2016.

What’s not a surprise from the research surveys over the past four years is the fact that one of the top ways companies engage with potential candidates who haven’t yet applied for any openings are employee referrals. This year, for both CandE winners and non-winners alike, nearly 55 percent of companies consider it a differentiator and another 35 percent consider them a part of their regular recruiting processes.

While I only anecdotally took in the what and how of personable recruitment marketing and sourcing delivered in the sidebars at the HR Technology Conference, we did discuss the bigger picture on the TalentCulture #TChat Show live from the conference.

According to this year’s CandE research candidates found these top five types of marketing content the most valuable prior to them applying for a job:

  1. Company Values – 41.81%
  2. Product/Services Information – 36.59%
  3. Employee Testimonials – 34.89%
  4. Answers to ‘Why’ People Want to Work Here – 30.78%
  5. Answers to ‘Why’ People Stay Here – 23.68%

This is all well and good to the current kinds of recruitment marketing that most companies engage in. But when there’s a misunderstanding (or no understanding) of the entire recruiting process, candidates end up in the “black hole” application process.

For example, according to this year’s CandE data, the types of job and employment content potential candidates found most important while learning about career opportunities included:

  1. Job Descriptions (duties, skills, requirements) – 74.08%
  2. Salary Ranges/ Compensation Structure – 38.97%
  3. Benefit Details – 33.48%
  4. Successful Candidate Profile for the Job – 24.61%
  5. Career Path Examples – 22.89%
  6. Overview of Recruiting Process – 17.53%

Now, when you compare this year’s non-winners and winners on the types of recruiting process content they make available prior to potential candidates applying, it’s clear why the winners win (based on this category):

CandE Non-Winners

  1. Employee Testimonials – 73.78%
  2. Details of Application and Next Steps – 67.68%
  3. Events – Career Related Listings, Dates and Locations – 62.80%
  4. Overview of Recruiting Process – 56.71%
  5. Frequently Asked Questions – 54.88%

CandE Winners

  1. Events – Career Related Listings, Dates and Locations – 76.74%
  2. Details of Application and Next Steps – 72.09%
  3. Employee Testimonials – 72.09%
  4. Overview of Recruiting Process – 72.09%
  5. Frequently Asked Questions – 60.47%

That’s a 15% difference between winners and non-winners, which is more than enough to have a competitive edge in today’s highly complex and competitive hiring economy. Companies shouldn’t worry about revealing their recruiting processes and exposing their hiring weaknesses. Candidates want to be valued and have an engaging and transparent experience and how companies treat them has a direct impact on whether they’ll invest their time or not – that’s the winning combination. In today’s digital age, where people share experiences online, a poor candidate experience can be bad for business and translate to millions in lost revenue annually.

Today’s savvy job seekers want career development opportunities, a great company culture, a positive candidate experience, and a complete understanding of their potential suitor’s recruiting process – before they ever apply. Transparent marketing and selling the recruiting process isn’t a gamble, it’s a prize investment that pays off every single time.

Recruitment Marketing: Understanding and Maximizing the Candidate Journey

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Technology plays a big role in the process of talent recruitment for today’s recruiters. Forward-thinking HR pros understand that success with talent acquisition today is all about understanding and maximizing the candidate journey. This requires a focus on developing marketing and recruiting strategies that are attuned to the “recruiting funnel,” as well as a focus on creating an optimal candidate experience along the way.

Recruitment as Lead Generation

One thing the smartest recruiters have in common is that they treat their workflow as a business development team would treat lead generation. Having a pipeline (and a process) fueled with enough candidates at the top, a good screening process in the middle, and which provides them with the opportunity to move the most talented applicants quickly to the bottom of the funnel, is what makes or breaks a good recruiter.

And just like lead generation for business purposes, recruiters must understand that potential employees are going through their own journey as they become aware of, learn more about, and potentially become interested in opportunities with your company. HR pros who can create great, customized experiences for candidates as they experience that journey are well-positioned for success.

The Candidate Journey Begins: The Recruiting Funnel

Let’s talk about the recruiting funnel. The top of the funnel is all about corporate culture. At this stage of the journey, potential job applicants are looking to see what kind of company you are, what kind of corporate culture exists within the organization, and what others think about your company. At this stage of the funnel, they’ll be deciding very quickly whether you’re worth looking into further.

And, as a recent CareerBuilder study suggests, they’ll be looking to assess themselves, and the market to see what the next best fit is.

Here are some important things to focus on specific to this stage:

Fine-tune your website messaging. When it comes to leveraging the power of your website, which is often the very first stop for a prospective candidate, think about the story you tell about your company and how compelling you make the case for a prospective candidate to want to join your team.

The power of a blog. Your corporate blog can augment the story that you tell on your website, and can allow a candidate to see the kind of work your team and your company does, as well as the kind of things you do for and with your community. The blog is as much of a place to tell your story and share your culture as your website is, so keep that in mind as a part of the candidate journey you are creating.

The role of social media. Today’s job seekers are well aware of the power of the Internet. Naturally, they look at your website and your corporate blog and the messaging there, including the story you tell about your company, but they don’t stop there. They check out your presence in the social media space, they search for reviews from previous employees, and they know how to monitor and listen to see what current employees are saying. They also ask their connections in the social media space what they know about your company and what kind of culture and opportunities exist.

Details, Details, Details

Once a potential candidate perceives a potential fit between themselves and your company, they’ll be looking for details. In this stage of the candidate journey, they are likely to be digging a bit deeper. They may have already looked at a review of your company, but now they are examining a variety of review sources to get a sense of what the day-to-day experience is like (micromanagement vs. flexible workflow, etc).

As they move deeper into the recruiting funnel, candidates will be looking to understand exactly what they would do if hired by your company. Clarity on job description, salary, etc., are part of this stage in the journey. You’ll want to make sure to do things like:

Ask current star employees to provide reviews on Glassdoor and other sites. Ask them to be honest, and to share what motivates them to work at your company. This goes a long way toward telling the story of your organization’s culture.

The power of video. The utilization of video as a recruiting strategy is becoming more prevalent. Consider tapping some key members of your team and creating video vignettes to feature on your website about what it’s like to work for your company and the opportunities they’ve experienced as a result. You can also use these videos on your corporate YouTube channel, and even share them regularly in social media channels. A little bit of rich media content can have a big impact.

Provide specific examples of work that matches to the job description. In the utility stage, job applicants are looking to see if what you’ve said about your company matches the actual work they’ll do.

Social media channels. As candidates get deeper into the candidate journey, they begin to think about the opportunities a particular position might provide, as well as other team members they might be working with. Social media can play a big role here, as candidates turn to LinkedIn to dig deeper into profiles of potential co-workers and the kind of work experiences showcased on their profiles, and/or check them out in other social media channels. Savvy recruiters know this, and work internally to help fine-tune social media profiles and ensure that the team collectively has their best foot forward with regard to their online presence.

The Decision

Once they’ve applied and interviewed, a candidate is in the consideration phase, which is the final phase of their journey. This means they’re considering all of the information they’ve gathered, as well as what you’ve provided so far. The most critical aspect of this stage is to make sure that every question (even the ones they don’t ask out loud) is answered.

At this stage, your most important tool is simply to stay in touch. Be present in their world, follow up with information that’s actually useful to them, and provide resources to help make their decision an easy one.

Here are a few ways to close the deal:

Learn two to three things about their values, and connect over those. It can be as simple as remembering a mention during an interview about a topic that was of interest to a candidate, and emailing a quick note including a relevant article. If it’s a candidate considering relocation, send along information about goings-on in a community that might be appealing to them.

Ask for clarity about your candidate’s bottom line. Is there a salary number they feel they need to hit? Does being able to occasionally work remotely matter to them? It can be tempting to avoid these conversations, and finding out the answers doesn’t obligate you to reach them, but opening up the conversation can help move things along.

Welcome negotiation. Even if the salary for a job is set, there are always other things that can be negotiated. Negotiating the ability to work remotely one day a week, or adding flexible work hours to the equation, might be things the candidate really values and which can help close the deal.

Today’s HR professionals are embracing the nuances of the candidate journey, and developing strategies that touch candidates in different ways at different points in that journey, based on where they are in the recruiting funnel. As you’re developing your strategies, keep that funnel in mind, think about your messaging and your internal processes, and how you are not only filling your recruiting funnel, but how you are nurturing those candidates and moving them along. The goal is always attracting, hiring, and retaining the best and the brightest—understanding that candidate journey is how you’ll make that happen.

Image: BigStock

Engage Passive Candidates: The Three Rules of Recruitment Marketing

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Longer job vacancies and slower time-to-fill can derail an organization’s ability to reach business goals, making it imperative to have a robust talent pipeline at the ready to stay well connected to high-quality candidates. Technology, such as a recruitment marketing automation tool, mobile-optimized career sites, and a social media presence, can streamline processes and provide you with pools of warm talent from which to source when your organization is ready.

Three Main Components of Recruitment Marketing

In many ways, recruitment marketing is simply getting in front of the right people, at the right place, at the right time, with the right information. But most importantly, it’s about developing and driving an employment brand so organizations can attract and hire the best and the brightest. There are three crucial tenets of recruitment marketing: consistency, relevance, and authenticity.

  1. Create a Consistent Experience

When establishing a strong employment brand, a focused message that is true to your company’s core mission and values is key. Regardless of the methods of communication, it is important to keep a consistent brand across all channels—from career sites, social media sites, and job listings, to screening and interview questions. Each touch point with candidates is a valuable chance to make an impression with your brand.

As candidates turn to social media more to look for jobs—increasingly so from their mobile devices—it continues to be an important channel for attracting passive candidates. Employers should also have a content-rich presence on social media, in order to reach savvy job seekers and on-the-go-candidates. Statistics show that 88% of job seekers are using at least one form of social media, while 70% of companies have made at least one hire through social media.

  1. Deploy Relevant Content

Engaging with candidates regularly is a vital aspect of recruitment marketing, but what you are communicating is just as important. When it comes to communications directly to candidates, develop tailored messages that speak to their interests based on location, industry, job level, etc. Be clear about what sets your company apart from other employers.

Leverage technology to create talent pools for sourcing candidates to automate this process. Engage and nurture passive candidates who may not yet be ready to apply for a job, but are interested in the company’s employment brand. This not only provides access to a warm pipeline of talent, it also creates a positive image of your company, and keeps your brand top of mind when a candidate begins to shift from being a passive candidate, to one that is ready to take action and apply.

  1. Make It Authentic

Generic descriptions and stock photos are a common practice for career websites, but the lack of your company’s true culture can be damaging. Savvy job seekers want to know what it’s like to work for you, what the office environment is, and who their potential coworkers are before they decide whether to apply for a job. The more realistic, the better.

Through their individual, real-life stories, current employees can support your company’s value proposition and key messages. Leverage those workplace stories and bring them to life. Story-telling, video, and images can be used to craft recruitment marketing campaigns tailored to showcase what you have to offer and convince passive candidates that your organization is one for which they want to work.

Get Started

Job seeking behavior has forever changed, making the old tools and the status quo irrelevant in today’s new era of job seeking and recruiting. Achieving your recruiting goals requires a strategic recruitment marketing plan. The talent is out there— you just need to have to right tools and strategies to find them and keep them connected until you are ready to hire and they are ready to make the leap.

Photo credit: Bigstock

What is Recruitment Marketing and How Your Business Can Use It

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While recruitment and marketing may traditionally have been thought of as separate entities, they can actually work hand in glove. Recruitment marketing uses elements of both traditional recruitment strategies and brand marketing. The appeal that is created by powerful marketing can be harnessed by recruiters to develop job adverts that will attract candidates and potentially improve the quality of applicants to vacancies within a company.

Here are three ways you can mesh these two areas of expertise together in order to benefit your business:

Keywords That Attract Customers, Attract Job Searchers Too

Savvy companies who are competitive online know the value of SEO for their websites and target specific keywords in order to make conversions. Like customers, job hunters are also googling keywords when they’re searching for job vacancies. They’ll also use keywords for searches on job boards and networking sites like LinkedIn. You can extend the reach of your job ad by targeting specific keywords and phrases in the same way that marketers, advertisers and SEO and PPC specialists do to attract customers.

For example, if your company is looking to hire a new accounts manager, then you will want to look at the most frequently used keyword variations for this job role. This could include “accounts specialist,” “senior accounts manager,” “business account manager,” and so on. Using Google Keyword Planner and checking these against current job board adverts in your industry will help you to select the best keywords for your job ads.

Make An Impact, Do Something Different

There are adverts absolutely everywhere these days and marketing professionals know that in order to complete in a crowded marketplace they need to pull something special out of the bag to get people interested. There’s quite a bit of science behind this. You need to consider the messages that are being conveyed through imagery, colours, and the wording of job adverts. Avoid producing job ads that just replicate those of another company as job searchers are more likely to pass these by or not notice them at all.

Don’t Underestimate Brand Recognition, Utilize It

Your toaster has just broken and you’re shopping online to replace it. You already know what model you want so you type it into Google. You see ads for Amazon, a brand that you recognise, but also for an independent business that you’ve not heard of before. Which do you choose to buy from? The answer is nearly always the brand that you recognise because you already trust them, so it feels like the safer option.

With job hunting, the same situation applies. Job seekers are much more likely to be interested in jobs with companies who they know about, rather than companies that they’ve not heard of before. That’s where good branding and strong marketing presence comes in. Ideally, potential applicants will recognise your company from their branding and then notice the same branding on a job advert. If your company is smaller and lesser known, you want a candidate to be able to google the company and find links to well branded social media pages and articles featuring your company from reliable sources.

Online recruiting strategies can utilize company marketing, including branding as well as marketing strategies, to improve their job adverts and job descriptions, communicate the message they need, and attract the best candidates for your business.

Article by Ron Stewart, recruitment specialist and CEO of Jobs4Medical, a medical job board.

Photo Credit: Bigstock

The ATS Alone Is Not Enough

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This is the final part in a four-part series on why talent acquisition doesn’t need to reinvent the ATS. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. 

In my last post, I outlined the parallels between marketing and sales and talent acquisition. The traditional recruiting process exemplified by the ATS has been focused on the bottom half of the funnel, similar to sales, with the main goal of hiring qualified applicants.

Because of this goal, the ATS was built with process and compliance in mind and admirably serves this function. It enables recruiters to better understand open job requisitions, work with hiring managers and manage the hiring process for candidates. The ATS does exactly what it was asked to do when it was built 10 years ago for the part of the funnel it addresses. Most of this functionality is still very relevant and, in most cases, crucial to talent acquisition in today’s environment.

But the problem is that we want it to do more. We want it to be an engagement platform. We want it to help our recruiters market our jobs and employer brand better. We want it to measure the full funnel from view to hire for all our sources. And we don’t just want it to―we expect it to. In most cases, this is why we hate our ATS (although you may have other reasons as well).

The question, though, is: Where the fault should lie? Is the fault with the ATS for not adapting, or is the fault with us for unrealistic expectations?

With the shifts mentioned earlier, organizations are starting to understand the need for more robust recruitment marketing strategies on the front end of the recruiting process. It’s no longer about just posting jobs to the right channels, but how we use the budget and resources to create a strategy that consistently converts high quality leads to applicants in our ATS.

Most importantly, recruitment marketing is fundamentally different than traditional recruiting―complimenting what the ATS is meant to solve while providing the attraction capabilities many recruiting organizations are eager for.

Technology for the Front End of Recruiting

The ATS is just like the Sales CRM. It’s meant to be the system of record for converting qualified applicants into hires, or in the Sales CRM example, for converting qualified leads into customers.

Attracting and converting prospects into qualified leads requires a different system of record. Recruitment marketing uses different strategies and tactics and therefore requires different technology to be successful. It’s about engagement, multiple sources, promoting your employment brand, content outside of jobs, measuring every step of the funnel, providing candidates multiple calls to action and most importantly, creating and nurturing lasting relationships with the right skilled candidates.

And that means technology built with a recruitment marketing focus.

The technology marketplace has been flooded with products that are focused on one aspect of the pre-applicant recruiting process, such as social, mobile, job distribution, CRM or SEO. And these products have helped organizations make progress in attracting and engaging better with candidates, but not without limitations.

As organizations have evolved their recruitment marketing capabilities, these siloed products have exposed the need for integration between them not only from a usability standpoint (i.e., logging into four to five systems), but also from a data analytics perspective (i.e., pulling and trusting reports and data from multiple sources).

Recruitment marketing is channel-agnostic. It doesn’t matter what initiative or channel generates the most qualified candidate leads, whether it’s a job board, email campaign, career site, social media or employee referral program, as long as it generates qualified leads within budget and time constraints. Underperforming sources should be eliminated, and good performing initiatives replicated.

At the end of the day, we need to execute and evaluate all of these initiatives side by side. Recruiters must understand what works in the aggregate, not just in the silo. A complete view of every data point from every source will help talent acquisition leaders better understand and use their resources and budget for candidate attraction globally across all possible channels.

But this is impossible to do with today’s ATS or point products.

An Integrated Recruitment Marketing Software Solution

We’ve been here before. Just like the ATS and the HRIS before it, we are seeing a technology category emerge to address this opportunity. There’s always talk about the large HCM systems building these capabilities into their products, but the reality is it usually doesn’t happen early enough to capitalize on the opportunity or is so lightweight that the overall impact is not felt.

So what’s the future in technology for recruitment marketing?

The name of the product category is Recruitment Marketing Platforms. Some consider Recruitment Marketing Platforms a next-generation CRM because recruitment marketing strategy is more than just a database.

A Recruitment Marketing Platform offers a holistic solution to execute and measure your entire recruitment marketing strategy and will include the following in a single system:

  • Job Marketing: Execute all job marketing on job boards, niche sites, banner ads, retargeting, pay per click and one-off channels.
  • Social Media: Manage social media publishing, including marketing your jobs and other thought leadership content, as well as measure the influence of your social channels on a candidate’s decision to apply; create and measure social career pages on channels like LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Facebook.
  • Recruitment CRM: House your candidate contacts in a full CRM database and attract, engage and nurture them through multiple initiatives, including:
    • Landing pages CTAs and sourcing campaigns.
    • Targeted and automated email and SMS.
    • Pipeline tracking for key skills and disciplines to determine candidate readiness and interest.
    • Social and video interview integration for richer candidate profiles.
    • Marketing automation to help recruiters and sourcers more effectively build, nurture and engage with targeted talent pipelines.
  • Career Site/SEO: Host, manage and measure the candidate-facing career site through a content management solution that ensures SEO optimization and mobile-responsiveness and provides full brand and content creation control for a better candidate search experience on both desktop and mobile channels.
  • Employee Referrals: Integrate an employee referral program that enables effective communication with both sponsors and referral candidates to encourage better and more timely referrals to jobs and general skills.
  • ATS Integration: Integrate multiple touch points with the ATS from a data and candidate contact perspective, offering seamless interaction between the two systems and a holistic picture of your candidate’s journey from first attraction touch point all the way through apply and hire.
  • Complete Analytics: Pull trustworthy data and analytics from all the above initiatives and channels in a single view and dashboard, including:
    • Full Pipeline Insight: All interactions from click to view to applicant to hire in the recruitment funnel by source.
    • Job Level: Actionable, real-time performance data on a single job level across all channels.
    • Aggregate Level: Actionable, real-time performance data on an enterprise strategy level across all channels, skills and categories.
    • Source of Hire: Universally track the final source that converted a candidate to submit a job application.
    • Source of Influence: Universally track ALL sources and channels that influence a candidate’s decision to apply, not just the last source of application. This is incredibly important to give credit to all channels that influence a candidate’s decision to apply, especially when you look to assign budget and resources.

A dedicated recruitment marketing software solution will include all of the above AND integrate with your existing ATS solution. It will provide the foundation to begin to build and grow recruitment marketing at your organization. And if done right, it will be where your talent pipelines live ready to be tapped into the next time a job requisition opens up.

Let’s not focus on what the ATS can’t do, but focus on what other technology can do in order to take advantage of the emerging discipline of recruitment marketing.

 

Smashfly is a client of TalentCulture and has sponsored this post.

How To Train The “Mr Know It All” Type

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Some recruiters avoid hiring the “over-qualified” employee in fear they will lose interest in the position they are given, demand high wages or leave the company soon after being hired. Usually these common recruitment fears don’t prove true.. In fact, A-players can make or break a company and talent acquisition and management are fast becoming the true harbingers of organizational change.

Many professionals advise recruiters to take the leap and hire those over-qualified candidates. There are four distinct reasons why it’s a great idea to hire overqualified candidates:

Contrary to popular belief, the Harvard Business Review notes that overqualified candidates are typically very highly motivated. Not only does this allow them to complete outstanding work, they’re also able to encourage other team members to perform at their full potential.
While doing anything out of your comfort zone can feel like a risk, hiring a new candidate out of your regular talent pool doesn’t have to be.

Here are the common myths [busted], training methods and additional tips on what to expect with your newly hired, highly-qualified candidate:

Spotting The Candidate

Hiring the overqualified could result in onboarding a “Mr. Know It All” onto the team. If this situation occurs after hiring this new candidate, consider the following:

  • Think before you speak: sometimes working with a “Know it All” can be frustrating. Before speaking, think about what you’re going to say and say it with confidence and kindness.
  • Gain a sense of understanding: Step aside with the employee and fully communicate what you’d like to be heard and completed. Maintain your managerial demeanor and be firm and polite.
  • Don’t allow any abuse of other workers. While the overqualified might feel they took a position beneath them, do your best to focus on what they are bringing to the table and help them to see others’ contributions just as clearly.
  • Offer solutions: When a problem presents itself with the new hire, define the issue and offer solutions instead of stepping away. For example: Other employees are becoming frustrated and feeling belittled. Explain to all workers involved that work needs to come first and to avoid air opinions that have little to do with the project at hand.
  • During onboarding, focus on cultural norms and company specific information. In this way, you give the over qualified employee a great start to understanding the culture around them and the opportunity to avoid awkward work situations.

Placing The Overqualified

Not all overqualified employees are going to be “Know it All’s”. Whether they are or not, properly placing them in the appropriate position post hire is important to consider. The following are top tips in handling this process:

  • Place them as trainers once they’ve gone through company onboarding: A higher level of knowledge can be used to enlighten other employees to processes outside of the company while also allowing the overqualified employee a chance to contribute almost immediately.
  • Provide a variety of options: Some overqualified employees may have aimed for jobs below their skill level in attempt to slow down their workflow. Just because they were a manager at their last company, doesn’t mean they were good at it or even wanted to be in management. Shoot for quick, easily trackable assignments while you assess their strengths and goals.
  • Empower: In the case the overqualified wants to excel in your corporation, allow them higher positions and stretch assignments that can fluctuate in responsibility. The fear of hiring overqualified employees is often that they will become bored, and what isn’t commonly considered is potentially burning the employee out by giving them too many responsibilities. Assigning flex duties will give them the authority they need while not being fully pressured into higher-up positions at all times.
  • Train: So they are overqualified in one department, what about others? Many companies are facing a skills gap that can create frustrations in the upper echelons. Smart organizations are recognizing where transferable skills can be used to fill those gaps and training smart and capable workers from one place to another.

Common fears about hiring the overqualified can easily be busted by fully communicating with your candidates/new hires and applying their needs and goals accordingly. Once you gain an understanding of what the candidate wants from you, work through managing and training them properly; maintain a balance between keeping them on their toes without burning them out.

While it’s currently a candidate-driven market, there are still many overqualified workers looking for a place to land. Cultural acceptance has become even more important to the emerging generation and building a strong and talented workforce with qualified workers is nothing to turn your nose at.

Photo Credit: Big Stock Images

Hiring Culture: Creating A Recruitment Ecosystem

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Written by David Smooke

Every organization has its own unique “hiring culture,” in addition to its core company culture. Hiring culture deserves just as much attention as company culture, because the two are deeply intertwined. The way an employer acquires talent determines not only who works at the company, but also the very essence of how those people function.

Culture: A Reality Check

Before we look at ways to elevate your hiring culture, let’s first look at how esteemed cross-cultural researcher Geert Hofstede defines culture:

“Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values.”

By extension, a strong definition of company culture emerges: “the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one company from another.”

So, what attracts people to a particular company (and culture)? And what motivates them to move from one culture to another? Early interactions with a new company bring us face-to-face with that organization’s hiring culture. It’s essential to make those initial experiences as approachable and authentic as possible. How?

Elevate Your Hiring Culture — Focus On 3 Key Factors

1) Alignment With Company Culture

Hiring culture feeds off of company culture, and company culture feeds off of hiring culture. However, your company culture has more inertia. In other words, every day, a mass of employees brings your company culture to life. Each employee is essentially a walking, talking, full-fledged marketing campaign, demonstrating what it means to work at your company. Do those employees know what your business stands for?

Companies such as TOMS and Google are models of how to “own” a company mission that focuses on social good. TOMS employees speak proudly about how every shoe purchase leads to a free pair of shoes for someone in need. This positivity carries over to its culture. Google employees popularized the slogan, “Don’t Be Evil,” as a way of pledging not to abuse the company’s abundance of information.

Every employee at your organization should know what your corporate slogan means, and feel comfortable sharing that concept with others. For example, I’m proud to say that my company stands for Zero Unemployment.

2) Transparent Employer Branding

Adding transparency to your employer branding gives potential hires a better idea of the impact your company is trying to make on the world, and a more accurate impression what it’s like to spend a day in your environment. You want to attract people that want to be there. Therefore, you have nothing to lose by being bold and straightforward. For example, Zappos offers employees $2,000 to quit because, as they say, “We really want everyone to be here because they want to be, and because they believe in the culture.”

To increase the transparency of your employer brand, and attract people who will be passionate about your company, try these tactics:

•  Share authentic pictures of what it is like to work at your company (real pictures of real employees on the job)
•  Counsel employees on why and how they should talk about your company and share your brand message, and;
•  Be awesome. This cannot be faked. When a company’s mission, vision and values are worthy, it shows.

3) Streamlined Hiring Communications

Finally, take a careful look at your hiring process. Where do you see disconnects in communication? How do they affect the speed and quality of talent acquisition? Consider a more collaborative model. For example, with a team of 3 to 4 people (rather than only 1 or 2), the hiring manager draws on more perspectives for a well-informed hiring decision, and you can get your team more invested in each new hire.

No matter how you structure hiring teams, it’s essential to have a system in place that facilitates information exchange across all levels. Hiring managers must have a way to define and update the information they want from interviewers; interviewers need a simple way to capture and share their impression of candidates, and stakeholders need an easy way to review and exchange input, so they can make timely, effective hiring decisions.

Better Hiring Culture = A Better Business

According to HubSpot CEO, Brian Halligan, “If you’ve got a great product, it pulls in customers; if you’ve got a great culture, it pulls in employees.”

But here’s the rub: You can’t have a consistently great product without consistently great employees. And you can’t have great employees without a clear, coherent, compelling hiring culture. Hiring culture determines who you’ll attract as employees. Those choices will shape your company culture, and inevitably, your bottom-line.

Is your hiring culture attracting, closing and retaining the best talent for your company? What do you think it takes to develop and improve a hiring culture? Share your ideas in the comments area.

headshot(Author Profile: David Smooke is Director of Social Media at SmartRecruiters, the hiring platform. In addition to overseeing SmartRecruiters’ online communities, David is the Editor-in-Chief of the SmartRecruiting Blog and co-organizer of monthly Smartup events. He believes remarkable content determines the usage of every news feed.

David lives in San Francisco and enjoys walking the city, reading Dostoyevski, playing basketball, and discussions of the internet’s potential growth. Connect with David on Twitter at @DavidSmooke, and on LinkedIn at Linkedin.com/ClarkKent.)

Feature image credit: alborzshawn via Flickr