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.