Talent Acquisition Digest for January 3, 2014

Happy New Year!!  I hope you had a chance to relax and spend time with friends and family over the holiday period.  While we were all (hopefully) taking a much-needed break, several great articles were posted across the web:

The Top 10 HR Resolutions for 2014, published by Automated Trader, highlights the things that HR leaders want to concentrate on in the new year.  Note that 4 of these items are directly related to talent acquisition.  My favorite resolution, however, is #5 – Align Organizational Goals to Individual Goals.  I strongly encourage TA leaders to ensure that every member of their team has goals that can be directly linked to your organization’s goals.  Knowing how your responsibilities directly impact the success of the company can be very motivating for an individual recruiter.

Still trying to figure out how to best leverage your company’s Facebook page for recruiting?  Check out this article from Houston Recruiter Spot: 10 Examples of Social Recruiting Using Facebook.  It provides many great examples of what leading brands are doing.  Not mentioned in the article, but another great example is Home Depot’s Facebook page.

In 2014, I encourage you to stop thinking about your “social media recruiting strategy” and instead think about how social media can be leveraged in your overall recruiting strategy.  This shift is being encouraged in marketing, as well.  Check out this quick article by Jeremy Epstein on Switch & Shift.

Speaking of marketing, David Bernstein of eQuest published a great article on ERE.net this week: Time to Step Up to the Marketing Plate.  As recruiters, we are marketers.  He provides a list of things that you should stop doing if you want to be a great marketer.

Workforce.com just published a white paper, Best Practices in Recruiting & Sourcing Candidates.  The first part of the white paper, written by Jobvite, is a no-nonsense piece on why you need to change the way you are recruiting.  Share this white paper with individuals (hiring managers, execs, etc.) who insist on the ‘old ways’ of recruiting.

 

Talent Acquisition Digest for December 18, 2013

Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season and a new year filled with great accomplishments!!  This will be my last digest post for 2013.  See you in 2014!

Still trying to convince your executive leadership that you need to have a mobile apply process?  Stop killing

The National Christmas Tree, one of my favorite holiday symbols

yourself building the business case and just show them this slide deck by Salesforce.  It is pretty compelling.   Check out the trends about mobile apps noted on slides 16 and 17.

LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions team was very hard at work this year developing new products to enable recruiters to identify specific talent more quickly.  At Talent Connect in October, they announced the mobile version of their Recruiter product, but that one only one of their many innovations.  Check out this unique blog post by Leela Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s Director of Marketing for Talent Solutions, that provides a summary, in poem format, of everything they released this year.  I, for one, am just happy to not read another post about the most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn (since when is ‘organizational’ a buzz word?).

Isra Garcia has a great post on Social Media Today titled “How Do We Keep Social Media Alive and Well?”  While the post is written from a sales perspective, it is relevant to talent acquisition, as well.  Item #4 in his post is a great reminder — we have to try things in social media to know whether they work or not.  Sitting around an analyzing the potential results is not really helpful.

 

Talent Acquisition Digest for December 12, 2013

It has been a busy week for interesting content in the talent acquisition space.  Here are a few of my favorite articles and posts:

Is your intern program still primarily a summer jobs program for your executives’ relatives and your

Mary Barra, GM’s next CEO

clients’ neighbors?  If it is, it is time to get serious about developing a program that creates a true talent pipeline for your organization’s future.  The best example of this is General Motors’ new CEO, Mary Barra.  Not only is Barra a female CEO in a male-dominated industry, but she started her career at GM as an intern.

Speaking of business leaders and talent acquisition, I was pleased to see James Caan‘s LinkedIn Influencer post “Big Idea in 2014: Be Ruthlessly Focused on Talent Attraction” this week.  I know many company leaders often express that recruiting and talent acquisition are a top priority.  What I’d like to see next is organization structures and program funding to be in line with this priority.

In an ERE post this week, Jacque Vilet makes the argument that Recruiting should report into Marketing, not HR.  That would be one organization structure change that could indicate executives understand the strategic importance of talent acquisition.  Be sure to read the comments to the post as there are some other interesting ideas presented there.

Jibe‘s Jed Hamilton had a post this week, “No More Half Measures,” about the most popular topic in recruiting now, the mobile application.  He makes a great argument that just mobile-optimizing your career site isn’t enough and we should be providing fully mobile solutions for every step in the process, but most importantly, the application.  He also provides a great list of requirements to use when selecting a mobile solution.  Unfortunately, as most technology vendors in our space do, Jeb states that implementing a fully mobile process “isn’t as difficult as you might think.”  I think I speak for most TA leaders when I say (and have said in two separate blog posts – one on mobile and one on the candidate experience), we know that it looks easy to simply implement a new solution, but corporate requirements and processes make it more difficult than you might think.

 

The Talent Acquisition Digest for December 10, 2013

Here are some articles not to miss so far this week:

We are all aware that our interview process has a major impact on a candidate’s decision to join a company, but unfortunately, many of our hiring managers and those that participate in the interview process don’t get it.  Share this USA Today article by Andrea Kay with them.  It may help them understand that impact.

Mobile, mobile, mobile.  We have heard about the possibilities of a fully mobile recruitment process, but haven’t heard many specific examples of the impact.  Well, here’s one example.  UPS just won Workforce.com’s Optimus Gold Award for Recruiting for using a fully mobile apply process to hire 55,000 seasonal employees.  Many of us are prioritizing mobile recruiting in 2014, but as I discussed in a recent post, we are facing many challenges to make it happen.

Speaking of mobile, check out this article on CMO.com by Nadia Cameron about a UK study concluding that individuals spend more time reading emails than they do reading text messages and social posts.  What does that mean for our recruitment marketing?  I think we need to continue to use multiple communication methods with candidates.

And finally, we should continue to look to other functions for ideas on improving our talent acquisition processes.  I think supply chain management is a great area for us to emulate.   In SCM, they perfect the process of moving parts and products through a process in the most efficient manner.  We do the same, except we are moving candidates through our process.  Check out this article about how Ford has used Big Data to improve its supply chain process and become one of the world’s most profitable auto makers.

Related articles

• The B2T Revolution (chinagorman.com)

 

The Talent Acquisition Digest for December 6, 2013

Friday is finally here!!  There have been several valuable talent acquisition articles and posts this week.  Here are a few I think you shouldn’t miss: 

The idea that HR and Marketing are very similar is reinforced in the Forbes article “HR Executives Need to Think Like the CMO.”  While the article is written by a VP at Oracle and does push a few Oracle products, the points are very valuable.  If you aren’t already segmenting your candidate pools and creating separate marketing plans for each of them, you are behind the curve.

In an ERE.net post, David Martin argues that we need to move to fully mobile-enabled recruiting processes.  This piece reinforces the recent iMomentous’ Mobile Readiness Report that shows very few companies have accomplished a fully mobile process.

For over a decade, we’ve heard about the unique needs (or are they demands?) of the Millennials in the workforce.  Check out this article, “Forget What You’ve Heard: New Data Suggests Millennial Talent is Misjudged” by Britni Salazar for an alternative view.  I have long argued that this generation is really not that different from those that came before it (check out my post on the topic) and the data presented in this article confirms that.

Have you read anything this week that others shouldn’t miss?  Please post it in the comments below.

Have a great weekend!

 

 

The Talent Acquisition Digest for December 4, 2013

Today, I’m starting a new feature on talent chatter – the Talent Acquisition Digest.  These short posts will highlight the best talent acquisition blog posts, articles and announcements on the web.  I plan to provide digests 2-3 times a week.

Lou Adler provides his predictions for The Future of Hiring and Recruiting, Circa 2020-2025 in a LinkedIn Influencer post.  A few of his predictions are based on his performance-based hiring model, which I guess is to be expected.  He makes great points about successful internal mobility programs and auto-engaging top prospects.

Are your company’s policies impacting your recruiting efforts?  Scott Keenan of Priority Personnel provides unique insight on The Priority Blog.  The best quote in this blog: “your policies should read like a list of features and benefits rather than an adult babysitting manual.”  Ahh…refreshing.

A great article to share with your hiring managers is “9 Ways Not to Look Like a Clueless Hiring Manager,” by Jenn Steele at RecruitLoop.

Cool new product worth checking out:  RightHire.  Free pre-hire assessments for over 900 jobs based on the O*NET database.  Plus, they offer culture fit assessments, as well.  In full disclosure, RightHire is a client of mine, but I wouldn’t be working with them if I didn’t think they had something unique to offer.

 

Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 3

So, you followed the advice in Part 1 of this series and assigned your social recruiting activities by talent segment to one of three phases – awareness, engagement or action.  Then, you used the suggestions in Part 2, to develop measurements for each of your phases and began to collect the data.

In Part 3, we’ll discuss how that data can be used to make social media recruitment decisions going forward.  Essentially, you’ll be using the past data to predict which social media recruitment activities will yield the best results in the future.  As a talent acquisition leader, your budget for social media and marketing is probably very tight.  Thus, you want to spend your money (and time) on the activities that bring the results you are after.  This is exactly where the data come in.

The first thing you need to do, is build a simple report or dashboard for the data you are collecting.  For example, if you executed specific activities or campaigns to increase your awareness with a specific talent segment and you decided to measure awareness by the number of followers for your company page on LinkedIn, you could create a simple graph like the one to the right.  Note that not only tracks the change in followers over time, but it details when specific awareness-building activities took place.

You will then use this graph to evaluate the effectiveness of your activity/campaign.  In this example, using LinkedIn’s follow company ads appears to have had a significant positive impact on the number of followers.  However, the sponsored updates campaign was not as effective at increasing followers.

As you decide on future campaigns to increase followers, you will use this data to guide your spending decisions.  If you budget is the same as last quarter, you may want to shift all of the sponsored updates campaign dollars to follow company ads, or you may want to try another type of campaign.  It would not make sense to keep the same spending levels on sponsored updates given their lack of effectiveness in the past period.

You would repeat the process of creating a report, evaluating the effectiveness of the campaign and changing your investment strategy for the next period for each candidate segment and phase that you identified in Part 1.  Obviously, the more candidate segment/phase combinations you have, the more reporting and tracking your will need to do.

As you continuing your measurement and evaluation across time, the most successful campaigns and activities will become clear.  You can then use this information to adjust your spending on certain types of campaigns.  You could also shift some spending to new ideas and campaigns.  Since you have already created a measurement and evaluation process, you will be able to quickly identify if a new campaign is producing results or not.

And most importantly, you will now have data, trends and decisions to present your leadership and executive teams to illustrate how your social media recruitment campaigns are working and exactly what you are achieving with each campaign.

What other ideas do you have for measuring and evaluating your social media recruitment campaigns?

Related articles

• Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 1 (talentchatter.com)
• Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 2 (talentchatter.com)
• We’re all Peeping Toms: Social Recruiting Best Practices (theresumator.com)
• Social Media for Recruitment – Infographic (altoconsulting.com.au)

 

Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 2

In last week’s post, Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 1, we discussed the three primary phases of social media recruitment:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Action

In part 2, we will discuss the platforms and measurements you should consider for each phase.

Awareness.  In this phase you are simply trying to increase the reach of your employment brand and career opportunities in your target candidate segments.  The social media platforms to consider, of course, include LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  But having a presence on these platforms is not enough.  You must use strategies and tactics to gain followers.  Consider sponsored updates and direct advertising on these platforms.  You should also consider platforms specific to candidate segments to drive awareness.  Place ads on industry blogs and popular social sites for specific skill sets (like StackOverflow for software developers).  Those ads should drive individuals to like or follow your page on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Measuring success in the awareness phase is somewhat straightforward.  You should measure the increase in your likes and followers on each platform.  You should also measure the percent increase in likes and followers after you launch a sponsored update or ad campaign.

Engagement.  The engagement phase requires you to create an environment of interaction – interaction between your company and potential candidates and interaction between potential candidates and each other.  Many platforms lend themselves to this type of interaction.  Obviously, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook allow such interaction.  You should also, again, consider platforms specific to your targeted candidate segments (like Viadeo if you are recruiting in Europe, India, China or South America).

You can use very gross measurements for engagement, such as number of comments, likes, re-tweets and shares.  You can also take the measurement further by monitoring the increase in the number of candidates joining your CRM and responding to messages from your recruiters/sources.  Finally, you should also measure and track your Talent Brand Index on LinkedIn.

Action.  In this phase, you are using social media platforms to encourage potential candidates to do something specific, often apply to an open position.  Your choices for platforms in this phase should focus on those that provide the ability to market specific job openings to your already aware and engaged candidate segments.  Often, you will have most success on the same platforms you used in the awareness and engagement phases.  So, when selecting the appropriate platforms for you, be sure to keep your future action phase needs in mind.

Measurements for this phase can include clicks and applies from each of your platforms.  You can also use more sophisticated measurements to this phase.  Consider measuring the quality of candidate or hire from these sources vs. your other sources.  Also consider measuring speed to interview or hire.

Check out the webinar I delivered through HCI, “How Do You Measure Social Media?” for more ideas on measurements to consider.

Once you have determined the platforms and measurements to use in each of your phases, you will need to start measuring and tracking the data.  If you use a recruitment marketing platform or other 3^rd party service, tracking will be much easier.  If you need to start with spreadsheets, that’s OK.  Just tracking some data and trends will help you understand how your social media recruitment efforts are paying off.  These data and trends will also help you show your key company decision makers that you have goals and measurements around your efforts.

Part 3 of this series will cover what to do with the data and results.

Related articles

• How Employers Use Social Media For Job Recruiting (Infographic) (business2community.com)
• 4 Ways to Decide Which Social Platforms are Best for Your Business (business2community.com)
• 10 Surprising Social Media Statistics : 5. Social Media Has Overtaken Porn As The No. 1 Activity On The Web (huguesrey.wordpress.com)

 

Word on the Street: Mobile Careers and Apply Top Priority for 2014

Have you seen the Corporate Mobile Readiness Report, 3^rd Edition, by iMomentus?  If not, download it now.  It’s free!  Mobile readiness was a key topic of conversation (and a very insightful breakout session) at last week’s recruitDC event in Silver Spring, MD, attended by over 250 talent acquisition professionals in the DC area.

The data from iMomentus’ study reinforces what we already know:  Internet usage is quickly moving to mobile devicies (53% of adult cellphone users in the U.S. use their phones to access the internet).  It also highlights the shift in job seeker mobile behaviors:

• Over 30% of job searches on Google are from a mobile device
• Over 33% of traffic on job aggregators is mobile

The breakout session at recruitDC highlighted the mobile career experiences of 3 area companies – Marriott International, GEICO and MITRE.  All 3 companies shared successes and actions to avoid.

The most fascinating thing to me, however, was the discussion from the audience.  Specifically about the fear of doing the wrong mobile ‘thing’ first – mobile optimized career site, mobile job search, native mobile app, mobile apply, etc.  This fear seems to stem from the rapid pace of change in the technology and the industry.  By the time a talent acquisition leader works all the internal corporate channels (IT, Marketing, Communications, Compliance, Privacy, etc) to get a mobile initiative started, things have changed drastically.

Almost all participants in the break out session indicated that some form of mobile career activity was a top priority for them in 2014.  Some are just getting started and some are moving from a mobile optimized site to mobile search or beyond.  Considering only 5% of the Fortune 500 now offer a full mobile apply process, all companies have work to do.

So, don’t let the fear and paralysis of picking the wrong ‘thing’ stop you from moving forward.  Try the following steps, many suggested by the panelists last week:

1. Make your business case.  Use the data from the iMomentus study, multiple other mobile device studies, and the amount of mobile traffic to your company’s home and career pages to build the case.
2. Find partners inside your organization.  Sometimes IT is looking for a function to be the ‘test case’ for responsive design.  Sometimes Marketing needs more data to help with their mobile case.  Team up with these departments and approach the executive team together.
3. Research and talk with vendors and consultants in the mobile recruitment space.  Ensure they are focuses on selecting a proper mobile strategy for you that is directly tied to your talent acquisition strategy.  If they start recommended solutions before you have an in-depth strategy discussion, move on.

Related articles

• HireFuel Introduces Cloud-Based Mobile Resume Upload Technology (prweb.com)
• 5 mobile myths that could mortally wound your recruiting efforts (venturebeat.com)
• 5 Reasons Why You Need To Be Mobile Ready For 2014 (business2community.com)

 

Measuring Social Media for Recruitment – Part 1

As we approach 2014, most employers are using at least one social media platform for employment branding and recruiting.  Many are using the big 3 (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), and a few are using niche and emerging platforms.  One of the biggest challenges organizations face when launching social media branding and recruitment campaigns is effectively measuring their efforts.

In this 3 part series, I will cover:

1. The 3 primary phases of social media in recruitment – awareness, engagement and action.
2. Platforms and measurements to consider for each primary phases.
3. What to do with the results.

When launching or revising your social media recruitment strategy, you must consider the goals and purpose of your activities.  I recommend separating them into 3 primary phases – awareness, engagement and action.

If you are trying to build awareness of your company, employment brand or career opportunities, your approach and measurements will be specific to this phase.  For example, you may be opening an office in a new location and need to build awareness with the local workforce.  Or, you may be entering a new market where you aren’t known as an employer.  In these instances, your social media platform selections would include those with the greatest reach with your target candidate segments.  Your activities and initiatives would be closer to large branding advertising and further from specific job postings.

If you have established awareness with specific candidate segments, but need those individuals to have a greater understanding of your employment value proposition and keep you top of mind in their career planning efforts, you are in the engagement phase.  You should select social media platforms that allow for significant engagement with candidates – where candidates can share information about your company, where they can ask questions and get answers, where your employees can talk about their career experiences with your company.  You may be in the engagement phase for a specific candidate skill set that is going to be important to your company in the near future, but you aren’t yet hiring for those roles.

Finally, you are likely to be using social media to encourage action with your target candidate segments.  In this phase, your platform selection and activities would be designed to elicit specific actions by a candidate.  The desired action is typically a qualified candidate applying for an open position.  You are usually in this phase for candidate segments for which you regularly hire and candidate segments that are needed to fill open positions.

One important note:  you can, and should, have strategies and activities in each of the 3 phases, depending on your business needs.  You should carefully look at each of your candidate segments and assign them to a phase.  It is also possible that you could be in more than one phase for a specific talent segment.

In part 2 of this series, I will discuss the platforms and measurements to consider for each phase of your social media recruitment.

Related articles

• Social Insights Show How Recruiters Engage on Twitter (cmswire.com)
• Use Of Social Media For Hiring Is At An All-Time High [Infographic] (socialbarrel.com)
• Why More Companies Should Use Twitter for Their Recruitment Efforts [Study] (sproutsocial.com)
• Are you using social media for your recruitment needs? (notforprofittips.wordpress.com)