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It’s A Match: What Tinder Can Teach Us About HR Technology

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tinder for hr technologyFor all the people spending time trying to make the Internet better, it’s actually quite rare to see a unique idea. Think of the first time you saw Twitter, or Facebook, or a blog, or used Google.That’s what I felt when I first started playing with Tinder.
Tinder, if you don’t know, is a dating app. You log in, connect to Facebook, and say if you are looking for men or women. You can adjust the settings to show people only in a very near locale, or fifty miles away. And away you go.You are shown a very slim profile of a person. It’s a few pics, a headline, any shared common interests or friends you have (based on your Facebook profile), and occasionally a paragraph. That’s all.

From this surprisingly slight information, you only have to make one decision: swipe left or swipe right. Swiping left means that you aren’t interested.

Swiping right means you are. Simple as that.

After that, it’s like a game: you are shown one profile at a time (think of them as cards in a deck), and you swipe one way or the other. At some point, someone who you were interested in will swipe your card to the right and you’ll get a notification. Time to chat!

Now, while it’s a dating app, think about what’s going on – and its implications for HR Technology and talent acquisition.

swipeCards:

Cards contain just enough information to help someone make a decision. These are Match.com or OKCupid profiles that can be hundreds of words long.

This is a visual impression and some things you are both into – that’s it.

Mobile:

Because the cards are so small, and because you only see one at a time, this is an idea built for mobile. You can “play” on the train or in meetings. You don’t need a big screen to see all the info.

You don’t need a keyboard to do a lot of complex interaction. You’re swiping left or right.

The Unilateral Like:

When you are dating in person, there’s the issue of two people having differing levels of interest in each other. If I like you but you don’t like me, things can get awkward. Even online, I might spend two hours building my profile and hours sending emails to interesting people. This is a huge investment, and if that interest isn’t returned at the same level, it’s discouraging.

Here is a model where, with the swipe of a finger, I am sorting. This is less an investment in time than it is a fun way to kill five minutes on the way home. And I only get notifications about people who picked me, too.

The Handshake:

In a way, this two-part process, where two people have to unilaterally “like” one another, is like a handshake: you can’t shake someone’s hand if they don’t want to shake yours. A handshake is a one-to-one connection, not a group connection or a multi-person connection. The handshake denotes that each person has some stake in this relationship as well as some power in it.

The handshake establishes a connection that has rules baked into it. It begins a deeper and more meaningful conversation.

No other tool, medium or game, online or off, offers these kinds of opportunities to find like-minded individuals in a fun and relaxed way – opportunities that lead to complex and deep relationships.

Tinder and HR Technology: The Talent Acquisition Connection

Q2041A493434There is no Tinder for job seekers, currently. But imagine recruiters scanning cards that each contain just enough information to determine value and fit. Imagine a job seeker scanning companies or jobs, looking for interest and fit. Only when each signal their own interest does anything happen.

I’m not promising a world of Tinder-like cards that will generate all the interest of recruiters and job seekers, but it’s worth noting that Twitter is growing its own card system. Twitter cards allow Twitter users to be pitched music, video, pictures and even app downloads through Twitter. What started as a so-called “micro-blogging” service is now growing via cards.

We’re seeing a world where the shift in power has swung from the employer to the applicant, especially in the most crucial roles. What if we found a more even playing field, where the bar to initiating engagement was much lower, where conversations could start after both parties expressed some level of interest in each other.

Instead of recruiters launching full-court press campaigns targeting someone’s LinkedIn profile, they can leverage HR Technology to cast a wider net of people who expressed casual interest. They can winnow those cards down to their best prospects, growing the relationship into something greater than just a resume.

Is Tinder starting a card revolution? Well, it certainly adds a very different way of looking at interactions. And with Tinder facilitating ten million matches a day, they may have something worth saying about the future of talent acquisition and HR Technology.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP 

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

 


Why Marketing Shouldn’t Own Your Career Site.

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boss-on-phone-job-applications-cartoonTwo years ago, I applied for a job at a very well-known retail company. I was applying for some web or marketing job, and I had to run the hour-long ATS application gamut. The futility of having to re-type my resume into a system (again!) – hoping that it wouldn’t fail on some level, that I wouldn’t have to re-re-type every word – made my job search process feel like an ordeal.

But at the thank-you page, instead of getting bland pabulum about how super-excited this brand was to review my resume, I got something completely different.

I got a marketing message asking: now that I had filled out a job application, would I like to go shopping? They even included a 10% off coupon.

How effective do you think it was to pitch a sales message at someone who just survived the ATS application? It seemed to say to me, “Hey, you’ve just wasted an hour of your life with us, so why don’t you spend some money now as well?”

Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But this was a site in which the marketing department clearly owned the career site and called all the shots. It was an extension of the corporate store. And while marketing can do an excellent job driving buyers to a store or e-commerce site and convincing them to buy, it’s simply not the same as what you need your career site for. Where marketers want to convince a browser to spend some money, you need to convince them to change their life.

So when people ask me if marketing should own the career site, or if the career site should be part of the corporate site, that’s the story I tell. But there are other reasons why you shouldn’t let marketing own your career site.

There’s A (Job) App for That.

funny-tenPeople who are looking for product information are looking for two things: information about the product and reasons not to buy the product. Unless they are buying an expensive watch, a car or a home, they assume that the research and decision process will take a few minutes to complete.

How much time do you need to select a robe, a book, a vacuum, a drill or a yoga mat? Ecommerce sites are geared towards getting people to see the information they need to make a decision as fast as possible so that they don’t lose momentum.

Compare that to a career site. Only entry-level applicants will value “speed of application.” All the rest of the people are looking for a compelling reason to apply.

The shopper came in inclined to buy, but the higher up a career ladder one goes, the less that’s true of prospects. Valued prospects need to understand what they are getting into, the pluses and the minuses, before they hit apply. They wouldn’t be valued prospects if that wasn’t true.

Look at the silver bullet of marketing. You can drive significantly more interest and more sales by launching and promoting a 50% off coupon for your store, product or service. It’s not that there’s no corollary within talent acquisition; it’s that such thinking is counterproductive. Talent managers want fewer but better applications, not more.

Clearly, how Marketing and Talent approach issues are not only different, but nearly at cross-purposes.

Marketing Doesn’t Care About Your Career Site.

wtaw13_introHaving been born into the marketing tribe (yes, my parents left me in a basket by some nice marketers in the woods to raise me), I know that most marketers prize three things: sales, awards, and buzz (usually in that order).

You’ll notice that Talent Acquisition has no bearing on those goals. Driving more applicants will not drive more sales, the awards for best career site are not in any of the magazines they read, and people simply don’t get excited about a great career site.

Consequently, HR and Talent Acquisition’s needs fall far down the list of things Marketing cares about. This shows when you need an update to your site. When you make a change, does marketing learn your publishing cadence, or do you have to work within theirs?

This also means you won’t get the best and brightest eyes and hands working for you. You’re far more likely to get the “the new guy/girl” who hasn’t been brought up to speed on the rest of the site or brand. HR becomes the training wheels for them to learn what works.

Please note that no one has ever won the Tour de France (or any bike race) while still wearing training wheels.

Get Down With EVP.

RvYJhaIapKHow many of you have an Apple device? An iPad or iPhone or even a Macbook? Based on Apple’s most recent filings, it is now one of the biggest companies in the world, building products desired by people all over the world.

The clean and easy-to-use look and feel influences the computing, telecom, electronics, music and film industries. Some new cars are clearly influenced by the work Jony Ives and his design team have done in recent years. People who like Mac products aren’t just preferring them – they fall in love.

Compare that to Apple’s more complex employer value proposition, which knows that such amazing devices are the product of long hours and late nights. While they might be in love with the outcomes, they may also find that love tempered by a lack of home life.

What a consumer thinks about a brand and what a prospective employee thinks about a brand can often be two different things.

And if marketing is going to lean towards highlighting their consumer or brand messages, that means employer brand messages get pushed down or even out.

The power of a strong employer brand doesn’t just drive the number of applications, but the initial interest and engagement with the brand. A strong employer brand means that you will be able to offer less money to a candidate in order to convince them to come on board, that you can shorten the time to hire, and lead to lower turnover.

Marketing doesn’t value these key performance indicators, meaning their site will be designed to drive their own KPIs (sales, length of visit, repeatability, etc). Having marketing own the platform doesn’t just have your KPIs relegated to second-class status, but that there may not even be a process by which to measure them.

Career Sites: When UX & Candidate Experience Collide

hoopsHave you noticed that most corporate and brand sites, when they link to the career site, usually do it in the footer – in the most out-of-the-way place they can think of? And would you rather ask people to type in jobs.brand.com or brand.com/departments/hr/career?

From a very logistical and tactical level, hosting the career site within the larger brand site is a great way to get missed or forgotten.

Passive candidates, or at least less active ones, can’t be expected to jump through hoops in order to find jobs. It’s up to the career site to provide the shortest path between a candidate and the material that will compel them to apply.

Forcing them to wade through corporate messaging and platforms just gives that valuable passive candidate an excuse to leave without applying.

Clearly, letting marketing own your career site means you lose control of your own destiny. You can build a site that abides by marketing’s brand look and feel, but having it held within the marketing department not only makes your job harder, it can actually be counterproductive.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

How To Make Twitter Work for Talent Acquisition.

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twitter boxThere’s no denying that I love Twitter. And I know a lot of you do, too. With 284 million registered users, its a perfect place to look for candidates, especially those active in their industries and are thought leaders.
Recently, I can’t help but notice that a lot of people are trying to shoehorn their “usual” talent acquisition strategies into Twitter’s framework, and I can already tell you this: It’s not going to work.

Why Recruiting On Twitter Doesn’t Work: A Blind Case Study.

Let’s look at the followers of the careers-focused Twitter account that belongs to a large and very well-known retailer. The account has thousands of followers scattered around the country, which seems great. (We’ll ignore followers from other countries in this example.)

The issue is that this company is huge, with retail branches in pretty much every metropolitan area in America. (For example, here in Chicago, there are three different branches I can frequent without driving more than a few minutes.)

Along with all those retail branches, they have a massive headquarters in the Midwest and regional distribution centers scattered across the country. In the world of talent acquisition, we think every problem can be solved by sending more job postings. And that’s not true at all.

So when the company tweets a job, what percentage of its followers will actually be able to apply for that job? For a job based at the Midwest headquarters (where there is the highest fan density), only 14 percent of the followers could reasonably expect to apply because they live within driving distance. This means that the company just spammed 86 percent of its followers. And if it promotes a branch manager job outside its HQ, it could only be reaching 1 percent (or less) of its follower base.

How many useless tweets does it take for a person to stop following your Twitter account? 10? 20? If you continue this strategy, you’ll find out pretty quick.

But that’s what most companies do. They have a channel, so they flood the channel with job postings. It’s like the joke that “to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” In the world of talent acquisition, we think every problem can be solved by sending more job postings. And that’s not true at all.

Recruiting on Twitter: Welcome To The Real World.

The_real_world_title_cardThis isn’t a hypothetical situation. One talent acquisition Twitter account, that I won’t name, just posts directly from their ATS. They’ve tweeted 2,500 times and only have 130 followers. This is a massive national brand you would all recognize, and their careers account only has 130 followers?

Given a pretty standard distribution relative to the U.S. population, that job in Pensacola was potentially only of interest to one of the 130 followers, annoying the other 129. The next job in Pittsburgh might be attractive to two of their followers.

Who would follow an account where 99% of the material wasn’t useful? I wondered if the follower list was just bots and spam accounts, so I used a spam tool (Simply Measured has a decent tool), I found that Twitter lists the talent acquisition account as a spam account.

This national brand, by automating its job feed into Twitter, turned itself from a beloved consumer brand into a spammer without ever realizing it. And without getting any return on their efforts.

The Real Problem With Talent Acquisition on Twitter.

stuff twitterBeyond the logistics of having a very geo-targeted job distributed to a wide network of people, there’s another major issue with Twitter: You can’t convince anyone of anything in 140 characters.

Here’s a list of things Twitter is great at: complaining, asking people for ideas, quipping, talking about what you are doing/seeing/feeling, sharing news and thanking someone. Unfortunately, none of these things are particularly persuasive.

If you post a job to all your Twitter followers and someone applies, I can only tell you this: They were already going to apply for the job. “Project manager job at our San Diego location, great team! [link]” is about as persuasive as “Hey you! Click this! [link].”

People who do click are already predisposed to click. Alternatively, the people who click are simply “click happy” and will click on every job posting they come across without any discrimination; perhaps they are incredibly desperate to find a job.

And you don’t want to interview the person who just clicks on every available job posting, do you?

So, based on all of the above, it sounds like Twitter is a waste of time for talent acquisition, right? Wrong. Twitter can be a powerful tool if you treat it as a tool that can do more than simply distribute job postings.

Talent Acquisition on Twitter: Starting Small, Thinking Big.

TwitterRecruitingWhat Twitter (and, to be honest, most social media) does well is something we can think of as “micro conversions.” Twitter can’t get someone to buy something, but it can get a reader interested in a picture of the product.

That interest in the picture can then inspire interest in the product and eventually, result in a sale. The tweet didn’t create the sale (or conversion), but it led to a webpage where a conversion could happen.

How do we apply this approach to talent acquisition? A tweet shouldn’t link to a job, but rather, it should link to a place where the reader can find material that engages and informs. This “place” sounds like your career site to me.

Keep in mind that you can’t just drop your Twitter followers onto your career site homepage—that’s asking for trouble. In the second or two it takes to get from the tweet to your homepage, readers will forget what prompted them to click the link in the first place. Directing them to your homepage is like saying “There’s something amazing in the next room!” and then leading them into a room filled with worthless junk.

Maybe, if they look hard enough, they’ll find a gem in all the detritus, but more often than not, they’ll just turn around and walk away. You can’t expect them to do the work. If you want them to see something, create the shortest path to that thing.

The best way to maintain their interest is to send them to a page with content that engages and informs them. That content should be connected to the job you really want them to see in a way that’s easy to see—don’t make people search for it.

Imagine that you are the large retail chain I previously mentioned and that you are trying to drive more interest to your IT jobs. You could build a great page of content about what it’s like to do IT work at your company and include Instagram pictures of real employees doing real work. You could also incorporate employee quotes and testimonials from those who appreciate or benefit from your employees’ work. Most importantly, you could include links to your 5-10 most-needed IT jobs.

In this example, the tweet’s job was to get followers interested in the content. Once landing on the content page, followers learned more about the company at hand, including its work culture and the everyday life of an IT employee. And right there, in a semi-obvious place, was a way for followers to look at job listings and sign up for job alerts.

Using Twitter to generate micro conversions is much more beneficial than just using it to push jobs onto whomever happens to be reading. When you recast Twitter as a tool that creates interest in your content, you can finally harness Twitter’s full power. (And that’s a lot of power!)

As a result, your talent acquisition strategy will receive an incredible boost, and you’ll stop driving away followers.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Recruiting Content Is A Game Any Employer Can Win.

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moneyballNot having the ability to market and pay salaries like Google and Facebook doesn’t mean you are relegated to second-tier talent.  
If you tell your own compelling story with recruiting content, you can build engagement and ties that money simply can’t buy.
I love Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, the story about how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane used different metrics to discover overlooked talent to win far more games than his budget should have allowed.I love it so much I started re-reading it (for the third time) again on the plane last night.

Recruiters love to reference Moneyball, because on one hand, it is the story about how the way we measure talent has changed.

Beane was drafting kids who didn’t “look the part” but were still able get on base more than average, while the rest of the scouting focused on trying to see some ethereal sense of “talent.”

But because the scouting community regarded and measured talent the same, someone who fit the expectations of what a ballplayer looked like could expect their price to rise ten-fold because the demand was so high.

Recruiting Content: How To Win At A Rigged Game.

recruiting-content-rigged-game-620x320The company with the biggest budget can buy the most ad space, promote the most jobs, stage the most events, and buy the most recruiter seats.

Would you rather play this game as you or as Google?

But while Moneyball is all about how we measure talent, that’s only the story on the surface.

The real story of money isn’t clear until the sixth paragraph, when Lewis starts to talk about how the playing field for all teams isn’t level – that some teams have exponentially more money to recruit players than others.

A team like the A’s, who had one of the lowest payrolls in the league, was almost expected to lose to a team like the Yankees, who can afford to pay almost without regard to budget.

But the A’s weren’t losing. In fact, they made the playoffs again and again by offering peanuts to talent no one ever heard of.

So in a game where the other players have far more resources than you, the real question the book asks is: how can a underfunded team like the A’s compete and win so well?

How were they able to win a game rigged against them?

To Succeed, You Have To Think Beyond Salary.

Winning a rigged game chanceThe parallels to the nuts and bolts of talent acquisition are pretty clear. In a world where Google and Facebook seem to have no limits on the cost of talent acquisition, how can you possibly compete in this rigged game?

Again, on the surface of it, Moneyball talks about how changing the way we measure and value talent can give someone an opportunity to hire hidden gems and build a winning team. But at a deeper level, what’s happening is that Beane realized he would always lose the game if he played it like everyone else did. He needed to find a new way to play the game.

Taking a step back, the modern recruiting model is that you need to get as many people to see your job openings as possible, then have those job openings lead to an ATS.

You have any number of tools to get people to those job lists: ads, job boards, search engine marketing, microsites, billboards, hiring events, college events, recruiters, etc., etc., etc.

You can see that in this game, the company with the biggest budget can buy the most ad space, promote the most jobs, stage the most events, and buy the most recruiter seats. If I laid this game out in front of you, would you rather play as you or as Google?

Obviously, if you want to win this game, you need to have the most resources to grab the most attention, to generate the most awareness, to drive the most traffic. The lesson in Moneyball isn’t how to change what you measure, but how to move the game to a place where you have a fighting chance – or better yet, a distinct advantage.

You win a rigged game by changing the game.

That’s all well and good, but how can you change a game we’re all already playing? Who will let you change the rules halfway through?

Winners Play Their Game, Not Someone Else’s.

winning rigged game community chestBack in the book, the big change was the use of data to help evaluate prospects, to find candidates who didn’t pass the muster of the recruits. They figured out what skills and metrics lead to wins, not just what common wisdom suggested a ballplayer should look like. In the same way, go back and look at what you are trying to achieve.

You actually don’t want more ads and more traffic and more applications. You want one amazing candidate for every job opening you, not dozens or hundreds of prospects.

That changes the game immensely, doesn’t it? Instead of fighting an ever-escalating arms race of who can put the most ads in the field, who can cast the widest net, and who can get the most applications, you need to think very differently about drawing that one perfect candidate in.

There are a couple of ways you can do that.

First, get specific. If you don’t want a thousand resumes but just want one good candidate, don’t write the broadest possible job description and ad. Picture the right person who would rock that job and try to think of all the traits they possess.

Then think about what they do now, what they like to do, how they spend their free time, etc. It’s not that they can do Excel, or that they know how to build formulas, but that they love building dashboards. It’s not that they have pets, or have dogs, but that they have a shiba inu, or rescue pugs and bulldogs.

When you get specific about what you’re really looking for, it allows you to rewrite the information around the job description to appeal to exactly that person instead of a vague idea of what all people are.

You can’t please everyone, so stop trying. Just focus on that one strange mix of skills and attitudes that will rock the job.

Recruiters might call them purple squirrels, but I’ll quibble with that label. A purple squirrel is a set of needs that are nearly impossible to find.

I’m talking about getting specific with who you want to attract.

Listen to Celinda Appleby, Head of Global Recruitment Marketing at Oracle, talk about why she assembled her own internal team of employer branding pros rather than hire a recruitment marketing agency, her approach to building Oracle’s employer brand and what it takes to sell a recruiting content vision inside a global organization.

 

The Game Isn’t Money, It’s Recruiting Content.

The second way you can change the game is to excel at something most other companies can’t – something that compels more applications from more selective applicants. You could invest in content.

Most companies ignore recruiting content, or assume that their brand or their marketing team are doing enough to drive and compel applications. To which I say, if that’s true, why are they also spending so much on ads?

Content isn’t magic, but companies treat it like it requires a blue-ribbon committee to even admit that you have a benefits package.

We’re not talking about revealing the secrets of the universe. The first five pieces of content you should publish are:

  • Why I Love This Company, written (not ghostwritten) by the owner/CEO
  • We Take Our People Stuff Seriously, written by your head of HR/TA
  • Every Job Is A Chance To Grow, written by one of your department heads
  • My Career Path, written by the person with the longest and strangest career path within the company
  • I Started Here, written by the most senior person who started their career at your company

None of these pages or articles or essays will be mind-blowing. In fact, some of them won’t be all that well written.

But by publishing these five things publicly and connecting them to every job, you are now in the top ten percent of all hiring companies in terms of telling a story people would want to know. You’ll convert prospects at a higher rate and attract a larger pool of potential applicants just by starting there.

If you show that you are willing to talk about yourself without sounding like a team of lawyers is coaching you, you’ll be light years ahead of the competition.

You Can’t Attract “Special” or “Amazing” If You Aren’t.

content attract candidatesFinally, the willingness to say and publish content is good, but saying something unique and interesting and authentic is how you really change the game.

Think of a big company, having to appeal to millions of customers, hundreds of thousands of applicants and tens of thousands of employees.

With so many different audiences, there’s no way to appease and energize all of them with a single message. And yet, that seems to be what so many big companies want to do.

On the face of it, it must appear cost-effective, but when you get into it, it’s the millions of potential customers who will be served by broad, sweeping messaging.

You need to pull your message away from the marketing team to make sure your audiences are properly served. Otherwise, anything you say will have to be watered down to avoid offending those potential customers. Then, you need to narrow your focus, not just to all potential prospects, but to likely prospects and even likely fits.

If your company is focused on changing the world, your message has to appeal to people who also want to change the world. Just because there are talented people out there who could work for you but aren’t as invested in changing the world, don’t try to fit them into your message. They won’t fit in your culture long term, so stop trying to attract them. Build your message and content around the people who you really want to see in your interviews.

Being specific in your message means you can be real. It means you can tell stories about who you really are without turning them into meaningless “marketing speak” or vague niceties.

Why Recruiting Content Is A Game You Can Win.

monopoly-manContent is often a place where smaller companies, ones who have miniscule budgets, are making their stand. It’s not that they chose content, but much like the A’s, their budgets didn’t give them much choice.

They know their company backwards and forwards, and know how to tell their story in many different ways. They even let their staff tell the story for them.

If you’ve ever seen a job description that was interesting, well-crafted and communicated the emotional heart of the brand, chances are it came from a small company, because they can afford to (and in fact must) be laser-focused on who they want to have work for them.

I’ve seen funny job descriptions that were effective because they reflected the humor of the people who worked there – people who took their work seriously, but themselves less so. That’s the sort of leap that you need to think about taking.

If you started a game of Monopoly with a smaller stack of cash than your opponents, you can’t count on buying up properties with the same speed as they will. Your circumstances dictate a very different strategy.

The trick is to admit you can’t play the game the same way they can.

When you look at the stack of marketing cash in front of you and compare it to that of your rivals, don’t be dismayed to find you are not the fattest cat at the game. The game, no matter how well rigged, can be won.  You just need to find a better way to play the game.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Phantom Menace: Why Google Thinks Your ATS Is Spam.

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how-google-reads-your-ats-620x320It’s always great when people within the recruiting business share information, as I believe it helps us all serve our clients and candidates better in the long run. An article entitled Applicationgeddon – Google Thinks Recruiting Systems are Spammy? caught my eye recently.

It’s worth a read, but the gist is that in late April 2015, companies started seeing large drops in applications likely due to decreased web traffic because of recent Google updates.

Hmm, well, that sounds concerning. I decided to take a look to see if “#applicationgeddon” was something we could replicate by examining six major career sites to see if Google really is punishing ATS based sites.

Google Updates: Beware, The Phantom.

google-phantom-update-indifferent-searchesThe author calls out Google’s Phantom update as being a likely reason for this ATS performance drop. This update was dubbed Phantom 2 because there was an apparent update to Google’s algorithm, but Google stayed rather quiet about what the desired effect was.

Since then, they’ve acknowledged that there was an update, and that it focused largely on the quality of the content on the web page. The ‘quality’ of written content appears to be backed up by Searchmetrics’ findings showing that many news-focused websites saw lifts in organic visibility after this update.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are necessary, crucial tools in the recruitment process from application to hire. In terms of SEO friendliness, user experience, and content quality, however, they can leave a lot to be desired. As my colleague James Ellis points out, job descriptions (and, in many cases, job titles) can be “horribly written, barely comprehensible strings of roughly 500 words of stuff that only barely resembles reality if you squint hard.”

ATS’s appear to be getting friendlier to search bots than they were 3-5 years ago, but even if a search engine can find your page, ranking it highly is a whole new challenge.

Redundant Job Titles.

Redundancy-A-564x376Another issue that the author goes on to talk about is the number of redundant job titles for large companies, and how a search engine like Google could view that as a poor user experience – or as he puts it, “From a content perspective, this doesn’t look great.”

I do agree that it’s not an ideal situation, and I kept this in mind for the clients that I looked into. I focused on a variety of these clients who hire for large volumes of the same position across the country (or globe), and who have many open job recs for the same job title.

In each case, Google had indexed large quantities of the same job title, which eased my concerns a bit.

It’s possible that the minor differences like geography help separate these very similar pages of content. In reality, each one of these is meant for a different end user, and the duplication is an unfortunate side effect of the number of opportunities available.

The Findings.

SEOI took a look at traffic and rankings for six career sites around the time frame mentioned, looking at patterns from April 27th to June 15th and comparing them to the time frame directly beforehand (March 8th – April 26th) in order to make sure our comparison was as up to date as possible.

For the most part, we saw some very nice gains across the board during this time frame, with a couple exceptions. Some findings:

  • Organic search traffic grew for all six sites measured. Five of the six grew by double digits. Whereas the ATS’s mentioned in the article saw declines, we saw above average growth.
  • Apply Click conversions grew for five of the six sites. Most grew by double digits, which doesn’t point to a drop in applications.
  • We did notice an initial drop in organic search traffic from one of the sites, which recovered in mid-May. After the recovery, this site clearly outperformed the previous time frame.

The author makes a point that you should have a mobile-friendly site, and that you should utilize social media and rich media. I definitely agree with that, as social signals and quality of content have been growing signals over recent years.

However, he also states that, “the industry needs to work with Google to see what the recruiting world can do to make sure the search algorithms don’t impact the ATS systems.” I don’t think that Google will ever be this clearly collaborative with any segment of the Internet in their approach to organic search.

Their little Easter Eggs and hints, combined with the rare direct statement (e.g., the Mobile Friendly checker and algorithm update), will be the closest that we’ll get to that.

A career site’s main goal is to get the right opportunity in front of the perfect candidate doing a search query, then get them into the ATS for the interview process, and eventually into the ideal job for them. According to the data, it appears that the sites examined actually benefitted from this Phantom update.

It would seem that if you focus on content, user experience and solid SEO, you’ll be in a great position to benefit from algorithm updates, and to react accordingly if an adverse change occurs.

The Data.

Large Food Chain #1 Large Food Chain #2 Large Telecomm #1 Large Telecomm #2 Large Retailer #1 Large Retailer #2
Overall Traffic +42.5% +28% +5.9% -7.7% +27.5% +9.15%
Organic Search Traffic +55% +15.9% +1.76% +12.8% +41.2% +36.3%
Apply Click Conversions +41% +22.6% +10.2% -10.2% +40% +9.2%

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

 

Waiting for Superman: Why Your Employer Brand Is Holding Out for A Hero.

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employer-brand-superman-clark-620x320Super hero comics and movies are often predicated on a simple idea: that the superhero has a secret identity no one knows about.

While the world may be searching for the masked hero, no one notices the boring lawyer, reporter or coffee barista in plain sight who just happens to have a secret.

No one knows that that boring guy or girl they bumped into on the train just saved the earth.

It’s a drama that works because the hero knows something the rest of the world doesn’t, leading up to that amazing moment when they take off their mask in front of someone who only knows their boring identity.

Having a split identity must be incredibly trying, as our hero is surrounded every day by the clues to the truth, that while they may look like a reporter, at night they don a costume and fight crime. And if the villains ever discover their alter ego, everyone they love will be in danger.

That tension drives so many exciting moments. Think of the day when a friend comes over spontaneously and the hero’s signature red gloves are laying on the table. When our hero sees it, to him or her those gloves are like a buzzing beacon shouting to everyone, “This is a hero’s costume and there’s something strange going on!” But to the friend, it just looks like some red bit of clothing and they walk right by it.

The hero is surrounded by reminders of their heroic identity, and to them, it must feel like everyone knows their horrible secret. It’s their tell-tale secret.

Holding Out for A Hero: Employer Brand Identity and Alter Egos.

reevekent_02In a way, your employer brand is suffering through that same problem. You work at your company. You spend eight, ten, twelve and more sitting in that office, surrounded by your logo and the reminders that your company is innovative or work-life balance-oriented, or focused on saving the world. It’s clear to you because everything, from how you write an email to the state of your desk, is a reminder of that culture and brand.

You think it’s obvious that you’re Superman, but the rest of the world just sees Clark Kent. Unfortunately, what is clear to you because you live it day in and day out is completely opaque to the world.

You think it’s obvious that you’re Superman, but the rest of the world just sees Clark Kent.

The thing is, Superman was trying very hard to be ignored. He wanted to make sure his secret identity stayed a secret so that he could spend his days as a mere mortal, trying to get Lois Lane to notice him.

I can’t think of a single brand that should emulate Clark Kent and keep their employer brand a secret.

But as often as I might say this, you will likely say, “I totally agree! Luckily everyone knows who we are!” And that’s where the real problems happen.

Because you’re surrounded by the reminders of your brand and your employer brand, because you touch these every hour of every day, you get convinced that everyone knows what you know. This feeling intensifies when you’ve surrounded yourself with people like co-workers and family who feel the same way.

If you like knitting, you might browse knitting forums and make friends who are into knitting. Almost without realizing it, you’ll have removed non-knitting elements from your life and replaced them with definitively pro-knitting elements. It won’t take long before you start to assume that everyone is as aware of knitting and cares as much as you do. But they aren’t.

Careers and Kryptonite: Will You Still Call Me Superman?

supermanI think of my friends who are very political, who watch shows and read websites that agree with their beliefs.

Suddenly, their Facebook news feeds are filled with aggressively political screeds that assume you know all the references that they make and care about these things the same way they do.

The truth is that most prospects have no idea what you stand for. Why?

Because you don’t see things the way your prospects see them.

How many times have you looked at your career site? I bet many of you could recite every word on the home page, simply because you went over this again and again with your creative team. You know the story behind every picture, page and period because your blood, sweat and tears went into it.

But a prospect might spend five seconds glancing at the page on their way to what they really want. If you look at your analytics, you might see that as much as 80% of your traffic never sees the home page at all.

Just because you know everything about your company doesn’t mean anyone else does.

How much can your candidate really know about you if they don’t see any of that?

Remember, a candidate is either looking for a job or content that validates their interest in a job (you didn’t think anyone was reading your About Us page, did you?), and anything else gets ignored.

You can’t just take off the glasses in the hopes that people will see the super hero in front of them. You need to announce it, and insinuate that information on every page of your career site. You need to hold events that support that idea. You need to promote that idea actively, making sure every word choice and photo selection is aligned to the fact that you are a super hero.

That’s how you activate your employer brand, by making it not only the foundation of who you are, but in making it a key element in every communication you make. If you ignore this part, no one will discover how amazing you really are.

Read more at the Meshworking blog from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

 

From Pipedream to Pipeline: A Closer Look At Quality of Hire.

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can-you-predict-candidate-quality-620x320The amount of time it takes candidates to go from passive prospects to active applicants has increased significantly since the job market surplus shifted (along with the balance of power) from too many candidate to too little talent.

Despite the cutthroat competition for new hires, employers are taking longer than ever before to finally decide on a final candidate.

In the last two years alone, our data suggests that the recruiting consideration funnel shows an increase of 41%, which is a pretty stunning slowdown in the hiring and onboarding process across the board.

This poses a big talent challenge, and significant threat, to many employers, as that same data leads us to worry that many candidates might get lost or simply lose interest before finally making their way through the funnel and into our open opportunities.

Since we spend billions of dollars every year investing in increasing awareness of open jobs and opportunities through paid media like online recruitment advertising like job ads, employer branding initiatives and other spend to stand out enough to capture job seeker attention, then why, exactly, are so many employers letting that slip away by not converting more quickly?

Why do we squander speed for the sake of holding out for that perfect candidate who might be out there, but never actually is – by which time, Plan B is normally already onboarded with the other guy, anyways. It’s a good question, and a deceptively simple one: why the hell, exactly, is recruiting taking so long these days?

Why are we statistically suffering such paralysis by analysis instead of having enough guts to make a choice and stick by it without second guessing ourselves? Why are we always looking out for the next hire when the right one’s almost always right there?

Quality In: Why Content Counts.

In the last year, I’ve heard less and less about the need to find more applicants. Filling the pipeline with names for each role is no longer much of an issue.
Instead, I’ve been hearing more and more about the need to increase candidate quality. Sometimes, that conversation comes in the form of “fit” and sometimes in the form of “length of interview process.” Sometimes it’s just a conversation about hiring developers in San Francisco. But the issue is the same: how can we get better candidates and improve quality of hire?

The more content a candidate reviews and considers before applying, the higher the likelihood that they will be deemed a higher quality candidate and hired.

Of course, too few companies actually do the hard work to report back into their ATS the quality level of most of their candidates, so trying to determine what channels are driving quality is nearly impossible. Instead, we were looking at an interesting metric: the number of candidates per hire for each channel.

What we’re looking for is the relative density of candidate quality. So if Channel A has 100 candidates per hire and Channel B has 20 candidates per hire, Channel B has a far higher density of quality candidates (we are assuming a company only hires candidates of quality).

Quality of Hire: The Glassdoor Effect.

why-understanding-the-evolving-candidate-journey-gives-you-a-recruiting-advantage-36-638In evaluating a huge retailing and logistics company, someone who hires blue and white collar candidates all across the country, we discovered that candidates from Glassdoor were being hired at a significantly higher rate than outside of Glassdoor.

While I can’t reveal numbers, the relative density of candidates from Glassdoor was 60% higher than from outside of Glassdoor.

At the same time, candidates from Glassdoor also made twice as many stops through the consideration funnel as those outside Glassdoor.

While this says positive things about Glassdoor, the potentially more important takeaway is that there’s a clear correlation between the amount of content a candidate consumes about the job and brand within the consideration process and the candidate’s quality level.

The more content a candidate reviews and considers before applying, the higher the likelihood that they will be deemed a higher quality candidate and hired.

When I first reviewed the data, I assumed that this was mostly for higher-status roles, where candidates tended to be more selective about where they applied. But this client hires a huge number of entry-level and blue-collar workers across all channels.

While we intend to look at this result across multiple companies to confirm its validity, this is a strong first indication that content drives quality candidates. Not that we ever really had any doubt.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

 

Recruiting Content: How To Catch A Purple Squirrel.

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purple-squirrel-food-620x320I bet you’ve already noticed how much harder it has gotten in the last year or two. The economy is improving, so everyone’s willing to look for a new job, so your hiring managers assume it must be the time to start looking for purple squirrels – those crazy-good candidates with such strange combinations of skills or rare quality levels that they come at a premium.

Assuming you can even find them, that is.

Your ads are increasing overall awareness and are solid at driving people who are already looking for a job. The same can be said for job boards. But your purple squirrels don’t click ads, and they don’t look on job boards.

Start your purple squirrel hunt by having the right bait.

The Hunt Begins: How To Feed A Purple Squirrel.

psSo, demand is going up while supply stays flat, and you see the outcome: it takes longer to find purple squirrels, and longer to induce them to apply.

You can’t ignore purple squirrels because they have the potential to make deep impacts to your business’s goals. The proficient writer is useful, but a proficient writer with experience in the financial sector who can make complicated ideas clear is a purple squirrel because they make wonky subjects available to whole new audiences.

So if ads and job boards don’t work, what’s left? How do you hunt the majestic purple squirrel?

If it were me, I’d start my hunt by having the right bait.

You might think of purple squirrel bait in the usual terms: high salaries, perks, great office space, ability to work from home, a brand that connotes excellence, etc. And those work, obviously. The problem is that very little of that bait is under a recruiter’s control. Maybe you can work for a few weeks to show that getting that particular purple squirrel will require a salary adjustment, but that’s not your call to make.

But there is purple squirrel food that you can make yourself. You can start building recruiting content. More to the point, you can start collecting stories.

Once Upon A Talent Time: Purple Squirrels & Recruitment Storytelling.

HR-P-SQUIRREL-640-640x375As a recruiter, you have dozens of stories about the company in your back pocket.

You talk about the time the company had to come together across three offices and pull an all-nighter to complete a complex project the client was amazed by. Or about the recent publications by your staff.

Or how the last person in this position was promoted to oversee a huge new project. Or the patents this team has been granted. Or the annual corporate retreat. Or that the manager of this job was named “boss of the year.”

Or that you have a volunteer program that paints and repairs local schools once a year. Or that people in this job never leave because people love the company and the mission. You don’t create the stories, but you collect them. The issue is that you know exactly how useful they are in compelling action, so you hoard them.

If something works as well as your stories, stop hiding them and put them front and center in your search for talent. Because those stories are purple squirrel food.

Purple squirrels became that way because they fell in love with something, either a separate skill set, or a job or an industry or process or something.

They fell in love with it to the point of near-obsession, and now they are an expert. They didn’t become an expert because there was a raise in it, but because they discovered a passion in themselves for it. Ask a writer or an editor: they are in love with words. If they became an expert in the financial industry or health care, it’s because they also fell in love with that, too.

So don’t try and think money will draw their passion. Passion attracts passion, so tell stories that show off that passion. The real mission of the company, the department or the people who will surround them is what’s going to draw them close enough to pitch. Stories and content are the only way to illustrate that passion.

Gotta Keep ‘Em Compensated: Why Recruiting Content Is Currency.

funny-dog-picture-you-must-become-the-squirrelAt the same time, content has a viral quality. Unlike a job description, an interesting story gets shared to people you might never know (or who aren’t obsessively polishing their LinkedIn profile).

Finally, content doesn’t draw people to you – it enables better hunting. Turning those stories into content helps close the deal on a purple squirrel.

When a recruiter pitches me, I know we’re in “first date” land and everything is happy and shiny. To that end, I take everything said with a grain of salt. The same story I discount when a recruiter tells it to me over the phone takes far more authenticity when it’s been “published” online.

Recruiters can leverage that authenticity by sending the same story to the prospect rather than telling it, putting them in the position of selling an idea or story that purple squirrels can envision themselves in.

Yes, building content can be a slow process. But it is an investment in landing purple squirrels over the long run. Which is ultimately an investment in you.

 Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.
james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.
For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.
Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

The Cure: 6 Hiring Problems Recruiting Content Can Actually Solve.

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curLike many marketers, I’ve always been a huge fan of content; after all, it not only gives me something productive to do on the train, but it keeps me informed, too.

It also keeps me paying for cable, not to mention my monthly subscriptions for magazines, Netflix and, of course, the good old fashioned newspaper (although mainly for access to the premium content most newspapers now post behind a firewall online).

Content is not only what I love personally, however; it’s what I do professionally, and as someone more or less fully immersed in the world of content, I assume everyone else is as enamored with content consumption (and creation) as I am, too.

But turns out, in the world of talent acquisition, that’s not the case. In fact, many talent professionals and HR leaders I meet are not big fans of content, even though, it seems, most of them have some ambiguous understanding that recruiting content can play a significant role in solving their talent challenges.

How, exactly, recruiting content will solve talent acquisition’s problems remains more or less a mystery to many in the industry, which is why I put together this list of six specific talent acquisition challenges that recruiting content can actually cure.

Fascination Street: Recruiting Content Attracts More Talent.

the cureLet’s knock this one out first: Content works. Content gets people to pay attention and become aware and engaged with your company and your ads. How can I prove that?

Well, for one, the entire television industry is based on the idea that if they produce content, you’ll stick around and watch the ads. This is a $74 billion dollar industry, dwarfing the online video industry by a factor of twenty.

The publishing, music, movie and news industries are also based on content. In fact, the entire web works because people build content worth reading or watching or listening to that can get surrounded by ads.

The question isn’t whether or not content works, but if you are going to going to use content by being a media purchaser, or if you are going to make your own content to draw those eyes your way.

Just Like Heaven: Recruiting Content Tells Candidates Why They Should Work for You.

fff9ed573b72311667b2caf5700a005aThere are plenty of people who will come to your job site purely because you put a job description online and an aggregator scraped it.

But do you really want to hire people from the “I built it and then they came” school of thought?

They aren’t really applying to your company; they are simply applying. It takes no skill to draw flies like these – just leave an orange out on the kitchen counter for a while and you’ll see what I mean.

You don’t really think your job description is accurately and engagingly portraying your company, do you?

Go look at your job description and tell me if you’d apply for that job, let alone work at that company.

The only thing that draws in candidates who are excited to work at this company (and not just any company) is content. Content tells your story. It builds a narrative. And for those elite candidates who you really want, it answers their question, “What’s in it for me?”

Recruiting content isn’t just link bait. It doesn’t just draw people in; it also pushes the wrong people away.

A candidate can see what it’s like to work there and filter themselves out if it doesn’t seem competitive enough or seems too competitive. And it does this before you and the hiring manager get their hopes up and lock in on that candidate.

Never Enough: Recruiting Content Lowers Cost Per Hire.

never enoughIf you are targeting a specific job search, like management trainee, you could bid on keywords so that your ad shows up when potential candidates search that term.

At the same time, if you develop a set of great pieces all centered around the management trainee role, people would link to it and talk about it. If enough people link to it, you will rank for it.

If you rank in the top ten, you don’t have to spend money on SEM ads to be seen on those terms. You can start to organically own that term and move your SEM budget to terms that are more expensive to compete for.

And given the fact that people trust organic search results more than paid search results, you’ll have a higher click-through rate.

Close To Me: Recruiting Content Increases Your Click To Apply Ratio.

come bacIf I bought an ad that said, “Click here for free pizza and beer,” I might get double or even triple the average click-through rate of other ads (though that still wouldn’t even be 1% of all viewers).

But if those people clicked on the ad and saw a landing page all about how a fresh set of tires can keep your car healthy, how many would read the whole thing?

The thing is, traffic is easy to get. You can trick plenty of people into clicking some variation of the “free pizza and beer” ad, but good luck getting them to be interested in you once they realize they’ve been tricked.

Thus, I may get double the clicks from the ad, but I’ll get double the number of bounces. I’ll have to buy ever more clicks to get to a conversion.

This is the Click to Apply ratio: the number of people who apply for a job as a percentage of people who clicked on your ad.

A good ratio means that lots of people who liked your ad converted, meaning that your ad did a lot of good work. A bad ratio means you paid good money for traffic that didn’t apply.

Some people try to increase that ratio by tweaking the landing page (the apply button should be closer to the top, or all the way to the bottom, and it should be bright green or obviously orange, etc.). The idea being that you can use design and psychological trickery to get people to click.

Or you can build your Click to Apply ratio by filling your landing page with content that tells a compelling story and gets people to read more and click more. It gives people a reason to keep going. It maximizes the value of the people who click your ad.

In Between Days: Recruiting Content Boosts the Value of Your Search Engine Marketing.

tumblrSearch engine marketing campaigns aren’t like regular media campaigns. With a big enough check, I can buy space during the Super Bowl and show you 30 seconds of turtles racing.

No logo, no call to action, no reason why – I just wanted to play it and the network is happy to sell it to me; I can do with the 30 seconds pretty much whatever I want, within reason.

SEM doesn’t work that way. If you search “nursing jobs in Boston” and Google suggests you look at my turtle racing video, you are going to stop using Google. So Google is committed to making sure the ads that someone sees when they search for nursing jobs direct people to nursing jobs.

To do this, Google assigns a quality score on the landing page based on a lot of things, but mostly on the content of the page and the kinds of links pointing to it.

Point your Nursing Jobs in Boston ad to your nursing job description and you will be one of hundreds (if not thousands) of employers with very similar job descriptions. If you build content around Nursing Jobs in Boston, and point your ad to it, it will have a higher quality score for that keyword.

Why does that matter? Because the higher your quality score, the lower you have to bid to be the top-rated ad. So yes, building good, targeted content can lower your SEM campaign score by increasing your landing page quality score.

Pictures of You: Recruiting Content Creates Candidate Engagement and Excitement.

d12da78da3df42e9140d86e64b6713e6Surely you remember the J. Peterman catalog (or at least the Seinfeld episodes dedicated to it). How could a catalog selling women’s clothing stand out in the crowded market of later 1980’s catalog shopping? It did it by telling stories about each piece of clothing. This content, when done well, generates excitement and engagement for its products.

The same idea can and should be applied to your jobs. Tell the story not just of your company, but of your department, your tribe, and the job itself. Think of how pictures of that empty desk surrounded by potential co-workers and future friends can turn a boring job description into something more.

Wrap that job description in quotes from every new co-worker saying what a successful applicant for this role would have, each written in their own words. A picture of the coffee shop they’ll be getting their morning oatmeal from and a map of all the best places to get lunch paints a picture.

Content gives your social media teams something to talk about. Heck, it gives your employees something to talk about with their friends – people who might make excellent candidates.

So there you have it: six ways content can solve your talent acquisition problems. Whether your problem involves getting more people to apply or managing the increasing prices of media, content can do a lot of good. It’s no magic bullet, certainly.

But let’s be honest: the only reason you made it to the bottom of this blog post is because of good content.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmp
About the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.
For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.
Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Has Recruiting Content Jumped The Shark?

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Henry-Winkler-The-FonzFor many of us who work in the content marketing space, one of the biggest trending topics is the question of whether or not there might not just be too much content out there, sparking an ongoing conversation about how we are living in a “content glut,” or even “peak content,” if you like.

Supporting these statements are a litany of facts, specious statistics like, “there are 2 million blog posts published every day.” “Every day, we publish a million more minutes of footage online than anyone could consume in a day,” which, on the surface, at least, suggest a pretty compelling case.

And when it comes to recruiting, the perpetual source of so much crappy copy and cliche career advice, how could you even make a case that this industry actually needs to keep cranking out content?Here’s the thing: I’d go so far as to suggest that, in fact, there isn’t nearly enough recruiting content out there. Not by a long shot.

Sit On It: 57 Channels and Nothing To Do.

1196162003_1There was a time when there were only three television networks. Even when you added in a local UHF station and a PBS affiliate, there were rarely more than seven stations to chose from. Each channel tried to gain the most audience by broadcasting things they felt the most people would watch.

Shows became simple, shallow and repetitive. How many sitcoms use “let’s switch jobs to show how hard we have it” as a premise? And aren’t we still seeing “surprise twin” and “amnesia” storylines on soap operas, themselves pablum content disguised as content, to draw housewives in so they could be sold soap?

When cable became the de facto at most suburban homes, Bruce Springsteen complained that we had 57 channels and nothin’ on.Because, as the number of channels split, they couldn’t all show the same pablum to their audiences (the TV audience, split 3–6 ways, could support these shows, but when you couldn’t realistically expect more than one-sixtieth of the viewing audience, you can compete in a different way.

That’s why MTV and ESPN and CNN (and the like) were created, to focus on specific markets. Sure, housewives might like drama, but maybe some like news more than soap operas. Or game shows.

As the channels continued to fragment from 57 to more than 300, they could get more narrow in their focus. How many different news channels are live right now? Enough to appeal to almost every flavor of political interest.

Recruiting Content: ‘Aaaaaay’ for Effort.

2016-01-11_12-37-09And then the internet came, and 300 channels became three million. If you can’t get enough of Fox or MSNBC, certainly there is an online publication tailored to your very specific interest. Many of them have just enough of a viewership or readership to maintain some version of profitability despite splitting the audiences into ever-shrinking slices.

The content that drives an entry-level nurse isn’t the same story that motivates an experienced one.

The same is true for recruiting content. In the beginning, there was marketing and corporate brand content. Why you should do business with them was just as good a reason as to why you should work for them. There was one channel, and marketing owned it.

It was fine, but it had to appeal to everyone, be they consumers, investors or prospects. And the content reflected it. There were rarely specifics, and when there were, it was geared toward the consumer, marketing’s client.

Then we realized we needed separate channels to talk to those interests, and the career site was born – the one that was more than a list of jobs. But still, this channel had to speak to all prospects the same, be they intern or executive, working in Atlanta or Austin, technical, medical or administrative. And so channels got more specific again, one to each region or each job type.

What differentiates recruiting from marketing is that recruiting doesn’t need the largest possible audience, they need the right audience. And often that right audience is only a handful of people.

Happy Days?

Jumping-the-sharkWhich is why we find ourselves in “peak content.” The goal of recruiting content is to tell the right story to the right prospect in order to get them to apply (though a better goal might be to provide the right story—one that so engages the prospect that they feel compelled to apply and engage themselves with the entire process).

This means more and more specificity. It might not be enough to talk to IT prospects in general, when the facilities and departments staffing them in Austin and Atlanta are so different. Or that the content that drives an entry-level nurse isn’t the same story that motivates an experienced one.

Building more content that connects those dots, so that the prospect feels like the content is talking to just them, requires more stories told. Lots more.

Peak content comes from the marketers who worry that they can no longer command a huge audience just by telling a pablum story. They are the networks complaining that they can’t compete with what HBO and AMC are putting out there, because those networks learned how to leverage smaller but passionate audiences.

What differentiates recruiting from marketing is that recruiting doesn’t need the largest possible audience, they need the right audience. And often that right audience is only a handful of people. After all, if you have a mid-level IT job opening in Omaha, would you rather have a dozen qualified candidates or a thousand? Because marketing wants thousands, and you really only need a few.

This is a world where our Netflix queues are straining from the number of great stories being told in the form of TV and movies. We have amazing podcasts and Twitter feeds that we follow. Do you complain that you have too much good stuff to watch? Of course not.

There can’t be too many stories, just too many bad stories.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmp
About the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.
For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.
Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

 

 

Good Side, Bad Side: How To Stop Sucking At Employee Generated Content.

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master p 2If you’re like most employers, there’s a good chance that you’re already investing in employer branding by now.

In fact, a recent Harvard Business Review study showed that fully 74% of all recruiters responding are already involved in some form of proactive recruitment marketing or brand building.

Another recent study suggests almost half of in-house recruiters actually plan on increasing their employer brand related spend in 2016 (and beyond).

What is interesting, however, is that same survey showed of the 46% of recruiters planning to increase their 2016 employer brand budget.

Only 14%, by contrast, also reported plans for increasing their use of third party recruitment marketing and advertising agencies as part of those efforts.

This shift suggests talent organizations are starting to take what has traditionally been a discipline dominated by third party agencies and replacing these with dedicated internal programs and initiatives and, often, headcount.

employee generated content

This is not to say that the recruitment advertising agency model is going away anytime soon; these trends, however, do suggest many talent organizations are just now discovering that, dollar for dollar, there’s no content more powerful, authentic, compelling or capable of maximizing recruiting ROI than employee generated content.

Employee Generated Content: Shake What Ya Got.

imageEmployee generated content creates a powerful direct communications channel for companies to cut through the corporate copy and careers speak to tell a direct and intermediate story that cuts through the marketing BS and buzzwords to establish a direct, credible perspective on a role, location or business unit within a larger company or brand.

The advantages are obvious, but long story short: real employees telling their real stories in their real voices is really powerful when it comes to generating the real results real recruiters need.

That said, even employers with the most advanced or sophisticated employer branding functions still struggle with employee-generated content.

Despite the relatively straightforward, simple concept of employee generated, it isn’t ever easy – that is, if you’re doing it right. The mistake too many employers make is to make the assumption that by simply asking existing employees to participate in these programs, it will automatically open the employee generated content funnel as the contributions and content come rolling in.

If only it were that easy – but it should go without saying that while employees are the most important part of any employee generated content, they’re often hesitant to share content, or, even worse, deluge recruiters with ‘contributions’ that are off brand, off message or just completely worthless for your recruiting efforts.

This brings up a pretty obvious fundamental problem with employee generated content: your average employee isn’t a content professional (and most likely, neither is the recruiter responsible for those efforts).

Master P: The 5 P’s of Employee Generated Content.

5 PsSo, how exactly should employers and recruiters go about getting the wealth of employee generated content they need to succeed at employer branding and recruitment marketing success?

While it can be a challenge, the reality is that there are more or less five key principles every employer and recruiter should know when it comes to developing kick butt employee generated content.

Here are the 5 Ps every employer should think about to make sure their employees’ voices get heard -and that word of mouth can effectively build a compelling enough call to action to actually get heard, particularly when there’s so much recruiting related noise out there.

So next time you’re in doubt when it comes to employee generated content, just think of this list and tell yourself, “I gotta P.” Actually, on second thought, maybe not. But still.

These will make or break your talent organizations’ chances at employer branding success – or employee generated content failure.

1. Make ‘Em Say Uhh: The Platform.

maxresdefault (6)Simply put, an employee generated content campaign can be boiled down to something as straightforward as emailing all your existing employees for stories, sitting back and letting all the good stuff collect in your inbox.

But if your department or company has more people in it than you personally know, you’re likely going to need some sort of tool or technology to manage this submissions and review process.

High-end standalone platforms can cost close to six figures, putting them out of reach of most people.

But you can either leverage free tools online (Google Forms for example), or work with your web team to build out two or three pages within your web platform to do the same things. To be successful, all a platform needs to do is be a one-stop shop for everything you want staff to know and do.

So if you want them to take a picture of their desk, you need to explain what you want, what it will be used for, who owns the picture, rules about what isn’t allowed in the picture, and dates and deadlines.  A rule of thumb is to make sure there’s enough information on that page so that even a fairly new employee doesn’t have to ask any questions to get the job done.

In my experience, a good platform is mobile-friendly, mostly because any pictures and videos you ask for will likely come from the computer in their pocket.  Asking them to figure out how to download the file to their desktop and re-upload it to you is tantamount to asking them to not bother.

2. How You Do Dat: The Process.

200_s (2)If you see an employee generated content project as a one-off―something you just do once and forget about forever―you’re missing out on the point of employee generated: to motivate employees to engage with the brand and talk about or illustrate the brand from their perspective. This is about building and strengthening relationships, not a one-time gimmick.

To that end, think from the beginning about building out employee as a process, not a product. You want ways for employees to become a perpetual source of stories and content about what it’s really like on the job.

In a large company, perhaps the process is to rotate the campaign’s focus from one location to the next each month, or to pick a team every week and collect content that way. In smaller companies, it might be a call for stories on the last Friday of every month.

Once collected, the content doesn’t have to be single-use. If you plan ahead, you can build a library of images, videos and stories to be used on every social channel, every blog post, and every internal newsletter you offer. Even if you are focusing on a new location every month, showing the differences and similarities across all locations can become an interesting article.

A successful process starts with a single person charged with managing and sustaining the campaign. Assuming that you will throw the idea in the air and someone will jump at the chance to manage it assumes that people aren’t already insanely busy.

After that, let that person design a process that works for them, but can be migrated to include other teams or can be transferred to someone new next year.

The part of the process most people forget is the step that comes between collecting content and using content.

How will you filter the content so that it is able to be approved for use? Who will approve it? Who will write the rules for what’s appropriate and what’s not?

These steps are crucial to ensure that the next steps are executed properly.

3. I Got the Hook-Up! The Publicity.

2016-01-26_04-41-47You know the line “If they build it, they will come” was fiction, right? Complete fiction. I mean, it was Kevin Costner, for crying out loud – and yet for some reason, this still seems to be the mantra of most recruiters out there.

The primary failure of an employee generated campaign is that recruiters or stakeholders didn’t plan for enough internal marketing. It assumed that a launch and an email from the boss would be enough. And it’s not.

I’m not suggesting you have to build a complex glossy marketing campaign with posters and other collateral, but if you can, you absolutely should. Physical reminders like posters, props, elevator signs, etc., have a long shelf life, driving awareness long after that first email announcement.

Even if you don’t go the showy route, one part of publicity that many people forget about is to leverage the corporate structure.

If someone on the front lines gets an email from the CEO, the first thing they are going to do is ask their boss a question.

If the boss doesn’t have a complete understanding of what the project is, why it’s being done, what the deadlines are, and if she was caught blindsided by the announcement, the employee will assume that this isn’t important and ignore the entire project. If you leverage middle managers and supervisors to become ambassadors of the project, it will feel like a new policy to the entire staff, increasing the overall participation.

4. Who You With? The Prompt.

200_s (1)With a great process, a solid platform and engaged managers, you’ve set the stage. But what will you actually ask employees for? You can’t just say, “Send us stories!” and expect to get anything useful.

That kind of request is too broad, and staff who don’t immediately understand the request or can think of exactly how to respond will ignore it as soon as something more compelling (like work) comes along.

Designing smart prompts is the difference between collecting junk and collecting treasures.

In effect, you have to inform the staff about what you want; what’s useful to your outcomes.

Do you want pictures? Video? Text? Can they take pictures in the building?

Can they take pictures at home or outside the office? If you’re asking for video, are you asking for phone-quality video or does it have to be more polished? Is there anything in the picture or video you aren’t allowed to show (like other company logos or work-in-progress)?

The fastest way to do that is to start small. Make the prompt simple and easy to understand. Ask them to take a picture of their desk, of their favorite spot in the building, or of people at lunch. Then start to increase the size and challenge of the request.

Ask people to take pictures together outside of work. Ask them to take on a work challenge together and document the process. Ask them to tell the story of how they helped a client or have them introduce a friend they recommended for a job.

As a wise person once said, begin with the end in mind. If you have no way of using video, don’t ask for it. If vetting and approving images is too hard to do, don’t ask for them. If you can’t use anything more than 200 words (for some reason), make that clear in the prompt.

Assume that you will get exactly what you ask for, so be smart in what you ask for.

5. Get Away Clean: Publishing.

master-p-kids-editCollecting all this content is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You collect this content to use it, to share it, to tell stories about your company, your team and your locations.

How you put it out into the world is as important as how you collect it.

Here are some of our favorite ways to use (and reuse) employee generated content:

  • Careers Sites: If you asked your team the same question or you asked for information from a single location, putting all that approved content on a single page to give a 360-degree view is very powerful.
  • Social Media:  Images and videos uploaded natively into Facebook and Twitter attract attention. So let them draw people from those social networks to compelling stories about you.
  • Employer Branding: Whatever you write about, “authentic” photos and quotes tend to convert users better than super-glossy photos or (shudder) stock art.
  • Internal Marketing: If you take an employer brand video, post or other update and your employer chooses to use it as part of their external content, no matter what your contribution, there’s a good chance that employee not only feels like their voice matters, but that they’re being heard, too.

That’s as powerful a recruiting message to current employees as it is to potential new hires. Plus, it helps other employees feel connected with what’s going on at their company, what some of their co-workers really do and a full sense of the breadth and scope of careers – short and long term – at your company.

Done right, employer branding is going to get your current employees just as excited as your future ones. So, no matter what, sprinkle employee generated content into your other recruitment marketing materials, so that no matter who’s telling your brand’s story, it’s those real voices that are getting heard.

Because no one wants to listen to a bunch of recruiters or copywriters represent what it’s really like to work at a company – besides, only real employees can do that.

 

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

The Secret Sauce: Why It’s Time To Shut Up About Social Recruiting.

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2016-03-24_18-09-50Can we be honest for a moment?

Maybe, as the kids say, “get real?”

When you and your talent acquisition team started talking about social recruiting, did you actually have a conversation as to why you needed social media, or did you just end up at “we need social recruiting because we need it?” Or “we need social recruiting because everyone else is doing it?”

It’s not a crime. It’s not even rare. We talk to lots of people looking to do social media who can’t really answer the “why” question. It’s not an easy question to answer. In fact, it might even be the wrong question to answer. Because unless you’ve got a lot of content to distribute, the answer to that question is a resounding “no.”

You don’t need social media. You need content.

Focusing on your social media strategy without worrying first about content is like building a network of high-end gas stations before anyone even invented a car in the first place.

Drop The World: Why You Should Stop Worrying About Social Recruiting.

d8c5aa14897d40657192df3fd7955dbc.500x300x12It takes content and helps you get it in front of people with whom it might resonate, allowing them to engage with it and share it. That’s all social media does. But note that the first part of that process is “it takes content.”

Without that content, what are you hoping people engage with? What will people be sharing?

“Remember, social media is a channel, not a strategy.”

You don’t need a social media strategy – you need a content strategy. Having a solid content strategy begets its own social strategy naturally in the same way that inventing affordable mass-produced cars will naturally beget support and supply systems like gas stations, garages, and high-end floor mat manufacturers.

You don’t start by inventing the floor mat and hoping the car will come along to support your business.

Take a look at social media champs. Everyone’s favorite social media success story is Gary Vaynerchuk, who took a struggling wine store to multi-million dollar success with the help of social media. But that’s not right.

He did it by building great content regularly, shooting cheap-o videos on wine and uploading them to the web every week. He was brash, goofy, opinionated and funny in these videos, all while providing helpful and useful information. He educated and entertained. Occasionally, he inspired. And in the end, you bought wine from his store in New Jersey and he became a millionaire.

It wasn’t social media that made this work. It was great content. Had Facebook and Twitter never been invented, people still would have found his videos, shared links via email, and the story would end up the same.

The secret sauce is great recruiting content, not social media.

How To Love: The Secret Sauce for Social Recruiting Success.

lil-wayne-syrupWhy do you choose to follow a certain person or brand online and not others? Are you in love with the brand enough to listen to bad content over and over again? How many posts about things that don’t interest you will you read before you stop following?

If you live in San Diego, how many posts about job openings in Washington, Chicago and Boston will you listen to before you give up and leave?

The fact that you put content that didn’t resonate with your followers on social media didn’t suddenly make the content better. Social media isn’t fairy dust that makes useless content useful. Bad content on social is just an opportunity for more people to see that you produce bad content.

The level of content determines the complexity of your social recruiting strategy. For example, if you have a lot of great content (white papers, videos, blog posts, stories, pictures, slideshows, conversations, etc.), your social strategy can be as simple as “we should put these online at semi-regular intervals.” Great content can easily be fed into a social media automation process and become a huge success.

But if you have almost no good content, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to create the illusion of a silk purse made from that sow’s ear. You’ll be focusing on the smoke and mirrors instead of the thing itself. That is time far better spent on building the content, which just won’t need as much propping up.

So stop worrying about which social media channels you are on. Focus on your process for building great content. It will take you much farther.

Read more on the Meshworking Blog from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.

For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.

Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Beautiful Struggle: Why Social Recruiting Shouldn’t Be Easy.

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talibFor years now in the world of social recruiting, there’s been a litany of subjective stories, anecdotal evidence and “thought leadership” (or lack thereof) about how “one simple trick” or “silver bullet” that can be effectively, easily and universally leveraged to double or triple your online engagement, impressions and reach.
These new wives’ tales fall pretty much into one of two catch-all categories: an old trick that’s already obsolete or a new “hack” that might work once or twice over the short term before backfiring to undermine your social recruiting strategy over the long term.
The sacrifice is almost never worth it, as these silver bullets seem mostly to shoot employers in the foot and set them back in a worse position than they were before.
For example, let’s all stop pretending that people actually give a crap about things like adding a hashtag to everything you publish; a branded hashtag is much more likely to be ignored or seen with scorn than it is to ever achieve its purported goal of increasing overall awareness and visibility.I mean, the click through rates on hashtags are just terrible – maybe in 2008, back when Chris Brown and Flo Rida were topping the Billboard Top 100, The Dark Knight was dominating the box office and real estate was still as safe a bet as you could make.

Back then, Twitter had that new app smell, but it’s subsided to the point where people just generally don’t search for or click for hashtags, particularly promoted ones.

Social Recruiting Just To Get By.

Apart from maybe a few well managed, well maintained “communities” with active, engaged membership and regularly scheduled events (looking at you, #Trumunity and #HROS), throwing on the hashtag of the college you’re trying to target with your University Relations efforts, for example.

Or even worse, just adding #Jobs to the end of a tweet and hoping some qualified candidate happens to see it aren’t going to help you with anything other than looking like you still don’t get how any of this social stuff works.

talib gif

Sure, maybe back when we were all just figuring social recruiting out, hashtags might have been cool and useful, but Twitter is no longer brand new, and the proliferation of platforms using hashtags since have more or less negated the intrinsic value of a convention whose novelty has long since worn off.

There’s an inverse relationship between how easy something is to do on social and how useful it is to do.

The other issues are tricks with high short-term gains and deep long-term losses. For example, those tools that help you post your jobs to your employees’ social media pages. Asking them for permission to spam their friends is an easy way to expand your network in the same way that losing a limb is a simple and fast way to lose twenty pounds.

The longer social media has been around, the more one rule only gets more and more true: there’s an inverse relationship between how easy something is to do on social and how useful it is to do. That is, if something is easy to do, everyone’s already done it, destroying its power today.

And if there’s a short cut that no one is using, it’s because the cons outweigh the pros.

talib stupiditySocial Recruiting’s State of Grace.

So that simple trick I promised you?

Well, it’s actually not that fast, and it takes a little effort, but it is incredibly effective. The trick is:

Invest in others before you ask anything in return.

I know social recruiting works because I have seen its effectiveness. One of my staff is a soccer nut.

She gets up early on Sundays to hit the bar to watch matches at 8:00 a.m. while most of her friends sleep. She belongs to multiple soccer communities and reads lots of soccer blogs. So when one of those magazines posted a tweet about needing someone to help with their social network, it was as if her dream job had materialized before her.

She was a passive candidate, not looking on job boards for something new. She was happy enough where she was. But a community that gave her a lot of information, wisdom, entertainment, camaraderie and support asked if she could help in return.

If she wasn’t interested in the job, I’m sure she would have happily passed the job opening to a friend who would be perfect.

That’s how social recruiting works. No one logs onto Twitter or Facebook to find a job when job boards are showing all of those jobs already in an easily searchable format.

They log into social to build community. To give and to get.

Eardrum: Breaking Through the Social Recruiting Noise.

giftsBut brands almost never do that. Brands are narcissists of the worst kind: they offer little in return for your money, time, and loyalty.

Employer brands aren’t much better.

Most career sites pretend to be prospect-facing, but every element is about the brand – press releases shouting why the brand is great, inauthentic pretty pictures of fake employees who always smile, and a surprising lack of depth when it comes to what the job is or why people would want to take it beyond the paycheck.

That same narcissism is obvious on social channels.

Here’s the typical feed on a recruitment social channel:

“Apply for my #job, apply for my #job, article someone else wrote, clever request to apply for my #job, self-serving press release, apply for my #job, apply for my #job, #job event nowhere near 99% of the followers, apply for my #job, Happy Mother’s Day, apply for my #job.”

Nothing about that is about the reader. It’s all about the brand.

It seems surprising, so many of you are looking for tricks to help with that mess. So what works?

Give.

Give information. Be honest. Point to good and bad reviews. Ask people questions. Ask them what info they would really like to see on your career site.

Respond to people who engage. Laugh at a joke.

Liberation: Why Quality Counts for Social Recruiting.

life talibA long time ago, I was Bucky Badger (the official mascot for the University of Wisconsin) on Twitter.

In fact, I started and ran @BuckyBadger for two years, growing it into an extremely popular and highly engaged account.

Along the way, I learned some important social secret sauce that’s still paying dividends for me even after all these years.

Posting boring news didn’t work. Asking people to attend events didn’t work.

However, when I started engaging with the audience, answering questions, and treating them less like a “market” and more like fellow fans, audience growth skyrocketed.

Social recruiting isn’t a trick. It’s a strategy to build and grow an engaged audience by being an engaged audience member.

I would watch football games at home, make jokes and comment on plays. Badgers stationed in Afghanistan asked for scores. I once helped someone reset their iPod. Was I Apple tech support? No.

But I knew the answer and jumped in to help. I asked alumni what their favorite spot in Madison was. I spent the afternoon taking pictures of what those places looked like that day, and when I got back I sent those pictures directly back to them and the group.

Social recruiting isn’t a trick. It’s not even a tactic. It’s a strategy to build and grow an engaged audience by being an engaged audience member.

It’s simple, but it isn’t easy. But that’s the only trick that works.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

james_ellis_tmpAbout the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist forTMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency. For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives.
As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.
Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn. Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.

Highway to Hell: The Future of Recruiting is Terrifying.

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acdcI don’t get out a whole hell of a lot, at least as far as the trade show circuit is concerned; taking the time out of my day job for “thought leadership” inevitably leaves me running behind schedule. Factor in the fact that my company pays me on the basis of billable hours, and the opportunity cost for taking this kind of time off is pretty much prohibitive, at least where our business and bottom line is concerned.

Which is why it was so unusual for me to find myself attending two different conferences in two consecutive weeks recently. All I can say is, the future of recruiting is truly terrifying – and the view ahead for conventional HR looks even worse, if you can believe it. I probably wouldn’t have if not for my most recent road trip, honestly.

Two weeks ago, I was in New Orleans to attend the Collision Conference, and the week after went from the Crescent City to the Windy City to attend the HRO Today Forum in Chicago.

While there’s a ton of talk about how repetitive and interchangeable most industry events or trade shows can be, I have to say that these two conferences were about as disparate in terms of focus, agenda and attendees as any two events could possibly be.

Hell, I’m going to bet that the GOP Convention in Cleveland and the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Philly have more in common than the two consecutive conferences I’ve just covered. Seriously.

Fly on the Wall.

I mean, it should be pretty obvious that one of the world’s largest showcases for high tech startups and a closed industry symposium dedicated to the exciting world of offshoring, outsourcing and other contingent workforce issues.

One, obviously, was dedicated largely to company growth, as Collision brought together thousands of entrepreneurs, potential investors and partners; the other, inherently, focused largely on company retraction – that is, how to eliminate the costs and associated liability (legal and fiduciary) of full time employees by partnering with a third party provider to make headcount count for more (in theory, at least).

Despite the diffusion and disparate dialogue, however, both of these conferences turned out to have a somewhat surprising connection, a commonality that starts with the fact that both the HRO Today Forum and Collision stood on opposite sides of what is in fact, upon closer inspection, the exact same line.

HRO Today brought together the senior HR leadership and executive management representing some of the world’s biggest brands and biggest MSP/RPO/BPO providers – a very Gordon Gecko kind of crowd.

Collision, by contrast, was the usual startup suspects, all hoodies and moustaches and skinny jeans, a largely male crowd that looked a little bit like the Hobbit gone hipster.

The strange thing was, even in the startup Shire, it was almost impossible to avoid HR and recruiting – literally dozens of the products and platforms being pitched and previewed in New Orleans were dedicated to fixing what’s broken in HR and recruiting, which have emerged from something of a provincial backwater into one of the sexiest sectors in the SaaS startup space.

Like the HRO Today attendees, the entrepreneurs showcasing their stuff at Collision have dedicated themselves (and their businesses) to improved talent acquisition and management outcomes, only their approach to doing so probably couldn’t be more different, in style or in substance. It was clear that over these two weeks, I was watching what represented the two opposing factions fighting the proverbial “war for talent,” one that seems to have slowed into something of a stalemate.

It’s pretty much The Empire versus the Rebels right now, startups versus the status quo, the traditional world of work versus the technological (or Gen Y versus the Boomers, if you want to get all HR about it).

Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap).

acdcI’m aligned squarely with the latter camp, and from the point of view of those of us wild and crazy kids fighting for what’s new and what’s next, all I can say is that we’re not only hungry – and ready – for a fundamental change in the way the world of work works, but also, confident that we can finally move the needle on the slow, unchanging, stodgy, bloated and largely ineffective function entrenched in the mindsets and methodology of the old guard fighting for the Pyrrhic Victory of professional preservation.

The traditional HR practitioners of HRO Today see “disruption” as a pejorative; the emerging entrepreneurs and twentysomething techies see “disruption” as a possibility. One fears change, the other needs it – and the tension between these two contrary camps can prove tangible, as the last two weeks seemed to suggest.

It reminds me of the dichotomy that I saw startups positioning themselves as would-be disruptors to the hugely ineffective and inefficient healthcare industry a few years ago.

While the biotech and pharma sector traditionally has limited competition due to manifold barriers for entry, including rules and regulations designed to stifle competition and slow innovation under the ostensible guise of “patient safety,” somehow, even this most staid and stable of segments has seen its status quo inexorably altered by the startups largely responsible for driving much of the conversation – and change – within the healthcare industry today.

If you don’t believe the fact that we’re seeing an unprecedented change of pace in patient care, just look at the proliferation of step trackers or wearable tech (ala FitBit, Nike Fuel, the Apple Watch) even the least geeky of your friends probably has on most of the time these days. The rise of these personalized technologies as a core component of our collective approach to preventative health proves the fact that if there’s a chance for change, and change is needed, it will find its way into whatever space it’s most needed.

The goal, of course, is simple: to solve even the most perpetually pressing or persistent of old problems through new approaches, solutions or technologies. This possibility is the very foundation upon which pretty much every startup starts up – the possibility of positive change is one of the most powerful motivators there is.

The fear of this change, conversely, can also be one of the scariest scenarios in business – or in life – because, well, the fear of the unknown is something most of us know all too well, really. The question becomes, is the problem we know worse than the unknown change required to finally fix it?

The verdict in HR and recruiting, it seems, remains somewhat split.

2016-05-08_07-25-22

Thunderstruck.

Clearly, the legacy of legacy applicant tracking systems (ATS) and human capital management (HCM) systems shows just how far many HR leaders would go to avoid change, renewing with the same shitty service provider year after year only because starting from scratch seems like too much time, effort and money. Of course, the fact that your system is probably running on an archaic code base and has the UI/UX sophistication of an Atari 2600 (and the processing power to match) proves who really pays the costs for software or systems stasis.

It’s the end users like me and you, not the HR leaders signing the contracts, who are the ones getting screwed. This also explains why so many recruiters treat specious social networks like Facebook and Twitter like some sort of silver bullet, only these “brand new recruiting technologies” are at least a dozen years old (LinkedIn, for example, has been around 14 years – which was around the last time Taleo or Successfactors updated their interfaces, coincidentally).

HR would like to believe that they can control the way change happens, on a timetable that they define. Change much more manageable a step at a time – even if HR should probably be leaping more often than they’re looking. HR sees change as incremental, a new policy or procedure or process or platform, but the fact is, the most meaningful changes are the ones that employers have nothing to do with – because the truth is that HR is no longer the primary agent of change within our function, our employees are.

That’s why we’re occupied with projects like determining an employer brand, or teaching recruiters how to tweet, or planning on an enterprise wide approach to posting Glassdoor reviews as part of some pilot program you’re working to roll out across the company.

Or some bullshit like that. You see, we distract ourselves from the real changes happening all around us by creating problems that don’t really need fixing, but allow us to sweep the big stuff under the rug for someone else to deal with at a later date. You’re too busy creating employee social media policies or requiring your staff to attend some sort of stupid “social recruiting” training instead of, say, figuring out what the best messages, mediums and messages might be for the candidates you’re actually trying to target.

We’d rather create rules and red tape than change or innovation, and the result is a profession whose “best practices” are anything but, frankly.

Flick of the Switch.

acdc-acdc-funny-highway-to-hell-led-zeppelin-Favim.com-352202A note to my HR peeps out there: more regulations, more rules and more rigor is NOT the answer to slowing or stopping change – as the cliche goes, change is inevitable, and whether you like it or not, you can’t defend against change. It’s gonna come, and if you’re not ready, you’re screwed – and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

More rules calcify the system and the status quo; we should be looking to shatter structures instead of embrace them, in fact. Business as usual is anything but in the business of human capital.

You already know most of this, of course, and probably if you’re one of the HRO Today crowd (the “adults,” if you will), you think that you’ve not only gotten that seat at the grownup table you’re been bitching about for years, but that those of us still sitting at the “kid’s table” have no idea what the hell we’re talking about.

I mean, there’s no way that those wild and crazy Millennials can understand the realities or the intricacies inherent to recruiting and retention; fat chance they have the wherewithal to deal with senior leaders or the C-Suite, which is just as well, lest we remind those P&L powerbrokers of the fact that we’re a huge cost center heavily scrutinized internally for potential cost savings while having to also stay out of the external spotlight, avoiding employee relations pitfalls and bad PR while keeping and employees and clients happy.

This is what keeping your HR job takes, and the fact is that even the most junior recruiters or freshly minted HR pros are acutely aware of the fact that keeping your head down is critical to keeping your headcount. That’s why we’re so used to putting up and shutting up, common sense and bottom line be damned.

Because recruiters, as the canary in the economic coal mine, know work is largely temporal – and when our time is up, turns out, is when the HRO Today crowd steps in.

The HRO Today Forum, held in the swanky Drake hotel in Chicago, felt to me a little like some sort of exorcism crossed with a cheesy self-help seminar. Think Joel Osteen meets Rosemary’s Baby, or “Chicken Soup for the Faustian Capitalist Soul,” with every session on the agenda, every topic, and every conversation designed to scare the shit out of attendees and convince them that not only is the end nigh, but that by adopting what’s new and what’s next, that change can be slowed from a seeming deluge into a trappable trickle.

For example, no one in HR and TA really cares all that much about metrics, but time-to-fill and cost-per-hire only show what’s happened, not what can happen – which is why the “predictive analytics” and “big data” sessions at the conference were all presented as tools for HR leaders to support business cases and decisions they’ve already made, rather than influence the ones we’ve yet to make. This is great for convincing our CFOs to give us budget – after all, you’ve got numbers that tell whatever story you need to save your ass, even if that means outsourcing the rest of your colleagues or replacing FTEs with contract recruiters.

Hey, why look at past profligate spending when you can look at potential cost savings instead? HR likes safe, and there’s nothing safer than knowing how a story ends before it begins.

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Plug Me In.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the flow of the money, and you’ll see that the real use of technology in this space is to reassert control and slow change while appearing superficially different and cutting edge. The vendors selling into HRO Today are peddling products in search of a problem; the entrepreneurs at Collision, conversely, seemed to be engineering real solutions to solve real problems, or the exact opposite approach as most HR Technology plays or recruiting tools out there today.

As a marketing guy, I’m kind of a geek for copy and collateral, and took tote bags full of printed handouts, product one sheets, biz dev business cards and, of course, shitty swag from both events – and when I got back from my two weeks, as drastically different as these two events obviously were, I admit, I had a hard time telling which conference each set was from, at least at first glance. The thing is, whether you’re pitching to VCs, starting up a startup or selling software into an enterprise, you’re focusing on the same stuff as everyone else: scalability, reliability and support.

Of course, client logos and testimonials from business leaders at big brands are far more commonplace than technical specs, meaningful product information or even some sort of cogent case use or quantifiable justification for exactly how whatever product is being pitched will actually save time, money or energy – much less provide any sort of numbers whatsoever, except maybe a price point – on the one hand touting analytics while on the other completely ignoring the fact that most of the claims in this collateral is almost impossible to measure.

“Quality of hire” is tilting at windmills; and you can’t measure stuff like an “employer brand” or “corporate culture,” really, which is why we love measuring ourselves on these nebulous concepts so damned much.

It’s no secret that the key to sales is by “selling the problem,” as they said in Glengarry Glen Ross; you’ll never listen to a pitch for a better painkiller until someone reminds you just how miserable migraines can be, and how bad your headaches can be, even when you’re taking your usual aspirin. Sure, the new stuff is a lot more expensive, but who wouldn’t pay to avoid unnecessary pain, right?

The only problem is that in wandering the expo hall in Chicago and stopping by the recruiting and HR tech startups in New Orleans, I realized that it’s impossible for these vendors to “sell the problem,” because in most cases (video interviewing, looking at you), there’s no problem at all.

Just a bunch of solutions in search of someone to spook – from competitive intelligence to compliance to compensation, these vendors all have the perfect fit to the stuff that really scares the shit out or HR practitioners, because they more or less invented this stuff. There’s nothing to fear but fear itself – unless you’re selling HR Technology, in which case, it might just be your best friend.

Now, while it seemed that the kids in the Collision crowd were trying to tackle bigger problems and actually provide solutions to the stuff that actually needs solving, the fact is their inexperience, outsider perspective and naivete about how the real world of work works – particularly for the end users who have to live inside these products every day – leads them to propose silver bullet solutions, “disruptive tech” or “game changing software” before really understanding the rules of the game, their clients’ business problems or the specific challenges HR and recruiting practitioners and leaders are trying to solve.

They have all the answers – the problem is that they’re not sure what the question really is.

No Bull.

beevisMaybe, just maybe, this bifurcation is the split that’s really the bigger change in business, beyond simply the tech and tools – the emerging providers, platforms and partners out there, the Collision crowd, seem to be completely obsessed with solving pain points or overcoming problems, whether or not they’re actually fixing stuff that’s really broken.

Conversely, the more traditional HRO Today crowd seems to be obsessed with categorically denying those pain points or problems exist at all.

Talk about “maturity cycles” – ignorance is the first step towards obsolescence, which, like their legacy systems, seem largely where most enterprise HR leaders are heading these days. It’s not too late to change, though; what if – and I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me.

Instead of saying, “it takes a ton of time, money and a 3 year contract to take a chance on a new ATS and migrate away from the old one; we’ve invested so much into that system already, let’s not bother with changing to one that actually works,” we could say:

“Very little of the data coming from our ATS is valid because we have so many damn point solutions filling the capability gaps in our process, and because this patchwork of tools is almost impossible to train recruiters on, much less get them to adopt, let’s cut our losses and blow the whole thing up.” 

Better yet, since we’re starting from scratch, maybe it might make sense for us to take a step back and redesign our processes and policies so that they’re more simple, straightforward and streamlined instead of adding more complexity through another layer of technology. And while we’re looking at what tech will work the best for our specific business needs, let’s maybe look at what’s going to be the most impactful for our long term business and bottom line results instead of just buying a replacement based off strictly off of RFP and price point.

Makes sense, right? I don’t think the Collision crowd or the HRO Today crowd has this middle ground figured out, at least not yet. But I’m encouraged that the two sides, the disruptors and the traditionalists, seem to be converging closer than ever before.

If the two can compromise, then that’s where the real change will happen. It takes more than someone who sees the future to choose the best tools and technology – it takes someone who knows the past, too. It takes someone who knows what’s new and what’s next, but only if that person can also consider what’s working and what’s always worked (or never has). I

t’s this place where pragmatism and possibility meet that real change really happens – and I’m convinced that these two sides are actually closer than most of us probably think. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, as someone once said, “find an industry where there are always lines or there are no fans if you really want to disrupt things.” HR is a pretty good choice, by this litmus test. Cable companies, telecoms and once venerable brands like Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia and Circuit City already know the steep costs of stasis, and the terrible price of hubris – which begs the question, is HR and TA going to be able to embrace real change and move far enough ahead of the market to avoid a similar fate as these once venerable, and profitable, businesses and brands?

Or are we going to stand there and watch the flood waters rise, unable to tread water fast enough to swim ahead? One thing is clear: we’re already drowning, and after HRO Today and Collision, I can tell you that while both conferences represent different styles, approaches and philosophies to technology, both the New Kids on the Block and the Powers that Be can agree that we’re in this together

If we don’t get it right, right now, we’re not going to be around long enough as a dedicated function to get another chance. And that’s one opportunity cost none of us can afford to pass up.

ellisAbout the Author: As the VP of Inbound Marketing at TMP Worldwide, James Ellis has been a digital strategy thinker of the MacGyver/Mad Scientist school: hacking disparate digital ideas together to serve a strategic business objective.

Whether it was bringing Bucky Badger to the social world or content marketing to the pharmaceutical space, James pushes boundaries regardless of the industry. He currently helps Fortune 500 companies attract and retain the best employees.

Connect with James on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter @TheWarForTalent or check out his work at SaltLab. 

How To Make Sure Your Recruiting Content Doesn’t Suck.

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Your job descriptions, as you likely already know, are all but worthless. They are poorly-written technical specs built by lawyers who don’t know much about the job in the first place – and yet, they are the crutch most businesses lean on when it comes to describing the role, the job experience, the location and your employer brand, vision and values.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a salesperson with a history of landing ‘whales,’ or an influential logistics expert, or a VP at a fast-growing startup. These people are the people your company needs, not to fill orders or solve everyday problems, but to help your company bend the growth curve up, those who change the game, who themselves attract talent to surround them.

Not one of them looks at a job description and thinks, “I don’t know this company very well, but this buzz-word salad of a job description has convinced me to spend an hour writing a cover letter and filling out the application and possibly change my life forever.”

That’s what’s at stake. The talent your business needs hates your job descriptions, so you need something more. You need recruiting content that doesn’t suck.

That part should be an easy sell.  Every marketer knows that telling a product’s story helps give people a reason to buy a product, so it isn’t much of a leap to say that getting people to “buy your brand as an employer” is supported by content that gives them a reason to join.

The hard part is knowing where to start, knowing what content you need to build-in order to achieve your hiring goals.

The Who: Finding An Audience for Your Recruiting Content.

audience1Establishing an audience segment is crucial for effective content marketing, but the marketer must play a balancing act between making the segment so small and personalized that they are effectively writing individual messages to specific prospects, and making the segment so big that it is effectively everyone, leading to non-specific messages that lack a compelling reason to move forward.

In this framework, we breakdown the different factors by which you can segment your audience into personal and situational.

Personal factors start at the career area. Content that speaks to nurses won’t be the content that speaks to accountants or IT professionals. One of the biggest disconnects between content and the audience is when the audience sees broadly branded content and can’t see how that brand or brand promise ladders down to their specific career area.

For example, Google’s employer brand likely speaks well to developers and big data experts because that’s what Google is grounded in as a brand. Yet, for a human resources professional, it won’t be clear how Google’s mission statement and employer brand promise connect to HR roles.

Related to that is someone’s basic demographics: their gender, age, location, etc. One of the most popular content campaigns rooted in this space is the “women in STEM” campaign, signifying that many people start in this “personal” area.

The next section is the situation space. This starts with the intersection of career stage and motivation. Research has stated with confidence that the single factor that connects segments of prospects is that of career stage, that an entry-level nurse has more in common with an entry-level project manager than an experienced nurse, primarily because entry-level staff tend to have the same motivations: opportunities to invest in their career and learn the skills to move them to the next level.

 

 

Experienced job seekers might have strong concerns about their ability to raise a family while working in a new role, despite career area. Executives or very experienced prospects might be looking toward how to give back, how to mentor, and what legacy they are leaving behind.giphy (82)

If you need to consider the motivations separate from career stage, there are eight primary motivations of a prospect. These include: Performance, Career, Development, Empowerment, Support, Values, Innovation and Status. These motivations are not mutually exclusive, and people can fluctuate their motivating factor depending on how powerfully these are communicated.

They can be communicated singly or as a group. For example, while a company like Goldman Sachs might generally be perceived to promote Career and Status, there is a very clear call to Values-based motivations to apply there. The issue is to focus on those motivations that you can and do support rather than building content for all of them, a pitfall of telling stories that don’t connect or resonate because they are so watered-down.

Finally, the content that will resonate with a given prospect is deeply connected to what stage of the consideration funnel he or she is in.

Some content is designed to attract someone’s attention to the career site, focusing on their position at the top of the funnel. Some content is more powerful when the candidate already knows the brand more. And some content should be focused on moving a candidate off the fence and encourage an application.

The What: Aligning Recruiting Content With Your Hiring Process.

message1Once a target audience has been established, you need to determine what message you want to deliver. More to the point, this isn’t a tagline or a story. This is the idea we intend for the prospect to walk away understanding.

Like audiences, messages can suffer from the Goldilocks problem, being too tightly focused to appeal to many people or two broadly focused to resonate. For the message section, we break down the considerations into three sections: Content Goals, Subject Area and Call to Action.

Content Goals comes from the concept that all effective marketing content boils down to four major reasons for being: to inform, to educate, to entertain and to inspire (sometimes referenced as “EEII” or “E2I2”). The reason people consume recruiting content is no different; it is crucial to identify the goal before building the content in order to focus its tone and message.

Because you have established a target audience segment, you will be better able to decide what goal to focus on. Content focused on prospects at the top of the funnel might need more entertaining content to draw them in, while someone farther down the funnel might appreciate an inspirational reason to apply.

The second factor in building your message is the recruiting content hierarchy. There are the four primary content areas that answer the questions job seekers have when deciding to apply: the brand, the location, the job and the working experience.

If you are opening a new office in a location, or a plurality of your openings are at your headquarters, build content that describes and illustrates what that office is like, as well as walkability/bikeability, parking, food options and other location-specific concerns. Remember that any given candidate will have questions about all four of these areas, so an effective career site will seek to support all of them, regardless of granularity.

This is referred to as a hierarchy because brand, location, job and experience content builds on itself.

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For example, if you are writing about how amazing the experience of working at your company is to employees, but you skip over information about the location, that the job is hundreds of miles away and not work relocating for, that message of a positive work experience is lost.

Finally, we have the Call to Action. In some models, we started with the call to action, but we found that career sites really only had four major calls to action, and that they generally connected to the funnel position: Read more, sign up to join a talent pool, connect with a recruiter, and apply.

These CTAs repeat on career sites over and over, corresponding to the how deeply into the funnel the prospect is. To that end, we started with the audience and their place in the funnel, but indicating an intended call to action was further focused in the message to that audience.

The How: Making Sure Your Recruiting Content Will Actually Work.

content1Once the audience and message are determined, recruiting content must be created through the lens of the brand. This should not imply that the brand isn’t significant, but instead, that the audience and message need to be established before determining how to express it. The impact of the brand can be felt throughout the model, as it should play a role in the motivation and the content area hierarchy.

At this stage, you need to take into consideration tone, brand language, the explicit and implicit brand promises, and aspirational ideal. Content written for Amazon, for example, needs to express the brand’s noted fixation on solving big problems with a peculiar sense of humor. Content written for T-Mobile, conversely, should maintain the snarky and irreverent nature of its very public CEO.

 

Then, it’s finally time for us to actually establish the content itself. What is the story you will be telling within the frame of the brand that delivers the message to the target audience? Content can be anything from an interview, a day-in-the-life concept, information about all the amenities of a given location, a description about someone who started as an entry-level staffer and rose to a high position, etc. The content is the delivery mechanism to get the right idea into the mind of the right audience, nothing more.

 

Finally, you must consider the format of the content. A tightly tailored message to a well-understood audience may be best expressed as a blog post, an article, an infographic, a video, an interview, or even a testimonial. Or it might be best expressed through just a select few. The long history of the brand might be best told through a polished and professional-looking video, while a “day in the life” posting might be a long-form article studded with short phone-based video snippets.giphy (83)

Taking all these ideas into account when creating content will initially feel awkward, but you’ll that they reflect the innate thinking of content marketers in this space. Over time, these practices will become innate to your team as well.

When nurture becomes nature, everybody wins. Especially when it comes to your clients and candidates.

Read more at Meshworking from TMP Worldwide.

ellisAbout the Author: As the VP of Inbound Marketing at TMP Worldwide,James Ellis has been a digital strategy thinker of the MacGyver/Mad Scientist school: hacking disparate digital ideas together to serve a strategic business objective.

Whether it was bringing Bucky Badger to the social world or content marketing to the pharmaceutical space, James pushes boundaries regardless of the industry. He currently helps Fortune 500 companies attract and retain the best employees.

Connect with James on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter@TheWarForTalent or check out his work at SaltLab. 


Speak Now: How Voice Search Will Change the World of Job Search and Recruiting.

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siri_620-620x320Voice search has become a nearly ubiquitous part of our existence, moving from the margins to the mainstream so quickly it’s hard to believe that just two years ago, only 41% of American adults over the age of 18 reported to having used what had already become a widely available (if not widely adopted) functionality.What a difference a couple of years make; Apple’s recent announcement that it was opening up its popular Siri platform to third party developers was only the most recent signal in this seismic technological shift from typing to talking. With its OK Google platform, the world’s biggest consumer tech property has only driven further adoption and innovation in developing voice command as a core component of UI/UX.

And let’s not forget Amazon’s hit Alexa-powered Echo platform, which should be popping up under most of our Christmas trees this holiday season, if early sales are any indication.  Even venerable Microsoft has gotten into the act with its Cortana platform, making it a native feature of every Windows 10 instance, mobile or otherwise.

It would be easy to dismiss voice controls as just another passing tech fad, akin to Palm Pilots, Google Glass or AOL Chat Rooms. All evidence, however, points to the contrary. Not only is voice search here to stay, but with Siri opening up its platform (and competitors inevitably quickly falling suit), this technology will quickly become even more embedded in even more aspects of our everyday lives.

That includes the job search, too.

Siri and the Future of Job Searching: Why Voice Search Matters for Recruiting and Hiring.

GE-Top-Marketing-Trends-2016Voice search is more than a new means of extending the existing web; it adds new functionality that changes the search. More to the point, this functionality will change how people find jobs.

Let’s start with the basics. First, most people use voice commands on their phones, which means that there is embedding information that doesn’t always exist on the laptop. For example, all phones have GPS, so Siri will know where you are when you ask it something. This matters because if I search for, say, nursing jobs, it will know that I am in Chicago or Phoenix and add that information to the query.Second, voice search tends to go through more data processing than straight text search. For example, we’ve all learned how to “think in Google” – that is, to frame our query in a manner which Google understands. We remove all the little words that don’t add value.

We don’t search “How much does an IT support manager make at IBM?”; instead, we generally search for something more like “IT support salaries IBM.” But on our phones, we are much more likely to ask the first question because it is more conversational.

Siri and the like use more natural language support to take something that sounds more conversational and turn it into something more query-like.

Voice Search & Sourcing: Two Sides of the Same Coin

helloThis means that searches will be very different on a phone voice search. Siri will be interpreting what you meant, rather than what you said.

In voice search, do you want ten thousand results? Or just one? This changes things.

Speaking of conversational, voice searches take into consideration what you just asked previously. If you go to Google and type “Where is Paris, Texas?” and then ask “What’s the best restaurant in Paris?“, it will ignore the first question and deliver restaurant recommendations for Paris, France. Text searches are almost always 100% independent of previous searches. Voice searches will not be.

This means that the process of finding and narrowing down results will start to become more natural as someone requests IT jobs in their area, then starts to filter those jobs based on qualifications or years of experience or management criteria.

The last major change coming with voice search is what people’s intentions usually are. For example, when you search Google and you get 10,000 results, you feel like there’s something helpful for you in there somewhere.

You just have to make adjustments to your query to fine-tune the request until you get something useful. And you’re comfortable clicking three or four links in order to find what you want.

Do You Hear Me Now? 3 Voice Driven Job Search Tips Every Recruiting and HR Pro Should Know.

In voice search, do you want ten thousand results? Or a hundred? What you really want in a voice search is a single result that answers the question and completes the request. Combining that with natural language queries means that people will be relying on longer and longer queries, usually referred to as “long-tail queries” because they don’t get a million searches a week, they get ten. But they get ten a week for years.

So if your prospects are going to be using voice commands to job hunt (and they will), what does that mean for recruiters?

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1: Stop Relying on “Words” and Focus on “Natural Phrases”

Your job descriptions are optimized for specific keywords. Usually they are your job title or career area with some geographic information thrown in. What happens when someone searches “What are great entry-level jobs nearby?”

They won’t find your job titles.

2: Tell More Stories.

Telling stories forces you out of the SEO-keyword-stuffing model. No one tells the story of Romeo and Juliet in a bulleted list. The form of a story dictates that you write in a more natural way, something that will better connect to the manner in which people talk to Siri.

On top of that, stories tend to use longer phrases and sentences than standard job descriptions do. This aligns more with how people ask questions and limits search results, increasing the likelihood that a searcher will get a handful of results rather than tens of thousands.

3: Answer More Questions.

People ask Siri questions that start with queries such as Who and What and Where. Building content in a question and answer structure not only helps you connect to voice searchers, it actually supports conversion rates, as people who are on the fence after reading your job descriptions will feel more comfortable applying because their questions are being answered.

These changes and additions to your jobs and career site will drive more voice search job hunters to you. Luckily, they align with a lot of the things you’ve been thinking about lately (employer brand, using content to differentiate, answering questions, etc.).

The rise of Siri should give you more motivation to change the way you are marketing your jobs online, because if you’re not already embracing voice driven search as an integral component of your overall search strategy, then chances are, you’re already falling behind your competition. The good news is, it’s not too late to turn talk into action and transform the literal voice of the job seeker into real recruiting results.

Hope you’re listening…

Read more on the Meshworking blog from TMP Worldwide.

ellisAbout the Author: As the VP of Inbound Marketing at TMP Worldwide,James Ellis has been a digital strategy thinker of the MacGyver/Mad Scientist school: hacking disparate digital ideas together to serve a strategic business objective.

Whether it was bringing Bucky Badger to the social world or content marketing to the pharmaceutical space, James pushes boundaries regardless of the industry. He currently helps Fortune 500 companies attract and retain the best employees.

Connect with James on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter@TheWarForTalent or check out his work at SaltLab. 

Blank Space: A Recruitment Marketing Manifesto.

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They say the only thing that you can consistently count on at work – and in life – is change. Of course, if your life’s work happens to be recruiting, sometimes the pace of that change is so glacial that it’s often almost imperceptible. Business as usual these days is anything but usual, except when […]

Recruiting Is A Game of Constraints. Play It.

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I’ve had the chance to talk to quite a few recruitment marketers and talent acquisition leaders over the years, and if there’s one thing that I can safely say about talent pros, it’s that they’re a pretty cynical bunch. Maybe it’s because they think that I’m there to sell them something (I’m not that guy). […]

Who’s The Boss: Recruiter or Hiring Manager?

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If you’re like most employers today, there’s a good chance that you’re spending a lot of money establishing your company’s recruitment marketing initiatives. Whether that’s establishing an employer brand, replacing or enhancing your existing applicant tracking system, developing a killer career site or purchasing premium versions of sites like Glassdoor or LinkedIn, the costs associated with […]

Busting the 7 Biggest Employer Branding Myths of All Time.

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Based on Google Trends data and anecdotal evidence in the form of podcast topics in the HR, this is the year of Employer Brand (at least in the talent acquisition community). I say this like people who say this is the year of women in Hollywood or the year of mobile in tech, that is […]
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