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4 Tools To Help You Attract Talent to Your Company

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While the job search has almost gone global thanks to the Internet, it’s getting harder and harder to find qualified enthusiastic employees. Manpower’s 2016 Talent Shortage Survey found that 40 percent of global employers are not able to find the right talent for jobs that need to be done.

What’s the answer? Making sure that the right talent is naturally flowing into your company is the first step to take. Here are four tools to help you do that:

  1. Serpstat: Boost your Google rankings for relevant terms

According to Unbridled Talent, 30 percent of all Google searches, about 300 million per month, are employment related. Google is the most popular job search tool among job seekers. If your company “Hiring” page ranks high for related job seeking terms, you are guaranteed to constantly receive resumes from interested candidates.

Serpstat is a keyword research and competitor intelligence tool that helps you discover relevant keywords and identify those you may be able to rank high for. Look for lower competition numbers: These are the keywords you stand a chance to rank on page of Google search results.

Serpstat

  1. Twchat: Launch a branded hashtag

Launching a branded hashtag is an effective way to turn social media noise into a meaningful brand asset. A hashtag will let you stream your company updates allowing future job candidates to monitor your job openings and career opportunities.

Twchat is a great way to claim and brand your company hashtag. You can set up a regular Twitter chat to discuss your company culture and vision  (like Zappos did back in 2008) or you can set up a stream to archive tweets mentioning your hashtag.

Tweetchat

A few tips for you to come up with a great hashtag:

  • Keep it short: Tweets are only 140 characters long, you want people to to be able to say a lot when they use your hashtag
  • If you are into local business, try and incorporate your location name into the hashtag. Check other local businesses to avoid any terms that may confuse your business with another local one. Use sites like Yelp and DirJournal for that
  • Always Google your hashtag and check Urban Dictionary to make sure your term is not branded by someone else or that there’s some wicked slang connotation
  1. Drumup: Get your current employees on board

Most of your employees are already on social media, most of them are discussing their workplace with their friends. It is a wise idea to turn this activity into something useful and beneficial for your brand.

Employee advocacy is a sadly often ignored marketing and talent recruiting channel that opens up lots of opportunities. According to Inc., using employee advocacy results in five times more traffic and 25 percent more leads. On the hiring perspective, employee referrals have the highest applicant to hire conversion rate – only 7 percent of applicants are via employees but this accounts for 40 percent of all new hire hires (Source: Jobvite)

Drumup employee advocacy program offers tools for your team members to share and re-share brand updates. Use Drumup Leaderboard feature to setup monthly contests awarding most active or creative employees sharing updates about the company.

Don’t forget to encourage your employees to use your brand hashtag whenever they share their workplace experience.

  1. Cyfe: Monitor your progress

Finally, making it a process means creating a system around it. Cyfe is a multi-purpose business dashboard allowing you to monitor lots of things and metrics within one page. You can use Twitter search widget to monitor your branded hashtag. You can import spreadsheets to keep keyword ideas handy. You can use a custom widget to import anything else though native APIs.

Cyfe

Turning your company into the talent magnet takes time and effort and having the right tools handy is the key. Are there any tools we are missing? Let us know!

Photo Credit: thebiblioholic Flickr via Compfight cc

5 Habits Of Leaders Who Create Workspace Culture

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When I was a student (once upon a time I thought I was to be a clinical psychologist), and broke, and spending time in New York City (also about the time I decided I was not to be a performing artist, choreographer for my career after spending years here doing so), I used to make extra money volunteering for psychological studies at Columbia University. I arrived one day and was told to wait in a small room for the study to start. The room started to fill up with other people, also waiting, until it was jammed and people were sitting on the floor shoulder to shoulder. Things got testy, arguments broke out, there was jostling. After 45 minutes the researchers came in and announced that the study was over: they had been measuring how we reacted when we were crowded into a small space.

I love this story from my past because it perfectly illustrates the power of our environment to influence our mood and actions. Anyone who has ever worked in a fluorescent-lit, gray-carpeted cubicle wasteland knows exactly what I’m talking out. It’s depressing, deadening, and you feel like the bosses don’t really care about your comfort and wellbeing. That is no way to design a 21st century company. In this economy, talent is your most valuable asset. And talented people don’t want to work in a soul-killing office space. They’ll take their special gifts elsewhere, thank you.

Well-designed office spaces ignite creativity, create team collaboration, and drive peak performance. They show respect, lift our souls and make people want to dig deep and give their all. Your workspace is a physical manifestation of your leadership culture. Make it unique.

How can you make your space a dynamic part of your vision and mission, and a driver of success? Here are 5 habits and how to make this happen:

1.) Think urban. Cities are hotbeds of creativity and enterprise for a reason. People are social beings, and cities provide the perfect balance of inspiration, contact, and privacy. Provide spaces for all of these: kitchens are great places for folks to hang out and connect (and share ideas on current projects). Outdoor space gives a sense of freedom and possibility, and contact with nature is always enlivening. Cities surprise us with their diversity and spontaneity. Celebrate everyone’s idiosyncrasies by encouraging them to decorate their personal spaces with pictures, objects and toys that make them feel at home. The goal here is to create a buzzing microcosm of urban energy in your workplace.

2) Keep it moving. Sitting at a desk all day is a downer. It’s stagnant and unhealthy and breeds lethargy and eyestrain. Encourage people to move around, to take the stairs, to go out for a short walk. Have a yoga, stretching, exercise room. Have informal work areas, couches and chairs with plenty of nearby power outlets. Make conference rooms available to everyone for meetings, even one-on-ones and informal brainstorming sessions.

3) Play at work. Put in a ping-pong table, foosball, Legos and other games. They are great for building bonds, relieving tension, engaging in playful competition, and renewing our psyches. We all hit a wall at work now and then — a quick game can be the play that refreshes.

4) Bon appetit! Coffee shops like Starbucks SBUX +0.09% and Peet’s have become embedded in our culture and psyche. They are defacto town squares, places where employees can hang out, grab a bite, do a little texting, work, flirt, have fun, whatever – you get the idea. Consider creating one in your workspace. Design it to be comfortable, warm and welcoming. Serve healthy food at great prices. People love getting a good deal, and having a coffee shop at work makes everyone feel like they’re part of the bigger world. And work inevitably gets done over those mochaccinos.

5) One size fits no one. Some of the most talented people in the world are introverts who like to be left alone to work their magic. Other talented people thrive with almost constant contact and stimulation. You want to design a space that is yielding and flexible – and has room for all personality types to thrive. So while you’re creating a vital environment that encourages connections, make sure there are quiet spaces where talent can go and work in peace.

Great design nurtures talent. It’s as simple as that. Look around at your workspace. How can you make your culture a talent magnet?

A version of this post was first published on Forbes.com

Image credit: Google Inc. – Office Hamburg, DEU