Can 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.

It 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?

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.

Why 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.

The post The Secret Sauce: Why It’s Time To Shut Up About Social Recruiting. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

For 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.

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.

Social 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.

But 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.

A 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.

About 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.

The post Beautiful Struggle: Why Social Recruiting Shouldn’t Be Easy. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

I 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).

I’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.

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.

A 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.

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.

Maybe, 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.

About 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. 

The post Highway to Hell: The Future of Recruiting is Terrifying. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

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.

Establishing 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.

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.

Once 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.

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.

Once 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.

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.

The post How To Make Sure Your Recruiting Content Doesn’t Suck. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Voice 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.

Voice 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.

The post Speak Now: How Voice Search Will Change the World of Job Search and Recruiting. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

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 it comes to hiring.

Talent acquisition remains largely untouched by trending topics, tech or tools (at least in the trenches), since recruiting is still fundamentally built on personal relationships instead of personal data, and the science of predictive analytics still hasn’t managed to displace the art that is “going with your gut when making critical business decisions, big data be damned.

Everything Has Changed.

In recruiting, of course, even the cutting edge can be fairly dull.

The status quo has become so entrenched even the most profound changes in recruitment are more iterative than innovative, which makes sense considering that while the rules may have slightly shifted, the game itself is still all about finding the right person for the right role at the right time, every time.

The focus on short term tactics over long term strategy has long been endemic to our industry, which is why we remain largely reactive instead of proactive, more focused on days to fill than bottom line impact.

The recruiting, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Which is why our job descriptions are still so poorly written and pithy, honestly.

But while the pace of change in talent acquisition can be so slow it’s nearly imperceptible to most people looking for jobs, or most companies looking to fill them, what can’t be ignored is how much recruitment marketing has evolved over the past few years. It’s gone from marginal activity to mainstream discipline, and bit by bit, little by little, recruitment marketing has evolved so much that it’s become almost unrecognizable.

If you’re a recruiter, the rise of recruitment marketing has created a world of work that looks less and less like it used to. Your job has changed. The expectations have changed. The tools, technologies and talent have changed, and the way recruiting works has been inexorably altered by its collision course with marketing, for better or for worse.

Turns out if you take enough baby steps, there’s no amount of ground you can’t cover – and slow and steady win the race, right? In recruitment marketing, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, as the saying goes.

The distance this discipline has moved in terms of market and momentum in the past few years alone is actually pretty profound, if you take a step back and look at how far we’ve come.

Begin Again: The 15 Keys To Killer Recruitment Marketing Every Employer Should Know.

Think back to three years ago, when we were counting down the final days of 2013. Daft Punk’s Get Lucky was at the top of the charts along with Lourde and Miley Cyrus. Frozen was frozen in our collective consciousness, and while we still can’t fully “let it go,” back then we didn’t have to, since Donald Trump was doing the firing for us as a reality TV star (and not the star of our reality). It doesn’t really feel all that long ago at first.

Then, consider three years ago, you’d never sent a Snap or swiped right on Tinder (or Bumble, for that matter). Slack was a pejorative, not a platform. And bots, augmented reality, machine learning, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, drones, Alexa, Siri and Cortana hadn’t yet hit the market, so you hadn’t heard of any of this stuff, let alone how these trends and tools could be used for talent acquisition.

While it can feel like an eternity in tech terms, make no mistake about it: this is no gradual evolution. Instead, it is a radical shift in the way people look for jobs, what they look for when looking for those jobs, and how to systematically shepherd those candidates to your open requisitions more efficiently and effectively.

If you’re still stuck in the recruiting status quo – hell, if you’re even a couple years behind the adoption curve, at this point, here’s the hard truth: you’re in trouble.

You Belong With Me: How To Build A Recruitment Marketing Strategy.

If your recruiting organization hasn’t shifted sourcing strategies and talent tactics, you’re not only falling behind – you’re already losing.

You might not know it yet, but when your pipeline runs dry and your cold calls go unanswered, when traffic at your job fairs and open houses dries up, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally get why recruitment marketing matters so much.

1. Quality Beats Quantity in Recruiting. Every. Single. Time.

Let’s be clear that recruitment marketing is not consumer marketing. The goal isn’t to generate a million applicants, because for pretty much every req out there, only one candidate is going to end up getting hired. Instead, we want to focus on finding 5 amazing candidates to present as finalists for every open role. If a candidate, passive or otherwise, isn’t going to ultimately run the hiring gamut and make that final cut, then they’re not actually candidates. Everything else beyond what it takes to develop a great slate of top talent is inefficient and superfluous.

Therefore, recruitment marketing should be understood as concerned only with candidate quality, and not vanity or volume metrics (see: “time to fill”).

2. Anything That Leads To Higher Volume Without Higher Quality of Hire Is A Waste of Time.

3. The End Matters More Than The Means.

With the proliferation of job boards, social networks, company review sites and the seemingly infinite amount of potential platforms or touch points now involved in the candidate journey, it’s easy to get caught up in the next channel or newest tool and focus on where you can make the biggest impact with the time and resources available to you. If that candidate journey doesn’t end in a hire, then even the most cutting edge tech or sexiest system can’t save you.

Don’t worry about “missing” candidates just because you’re not on a platform or channel that doesn’t make sense for you. If SnapChat or Pinterest or Medium or whatever else everyone else seems to be doing doesn’t make sense for your organization, then don’t worry about opportunity cost. A focused approach almost always pays off. You never know the hires you don’t make, but you will know if you’re doing it right when highly qualified, interested and engaged candidates start seeking you instead.

4. Inbound and Outbound Are Two Sides of the Same Recruitment Marketing Coin.

Outbound and inbound marketing strategies are both imperative to success. These two distinct disciplines must coexist and complement each other as core components of any comprehensive recruiting strategy. The key is balancing the familiar outbound marketing elements of recruiting (things like traditional ads or paid job postings) with inbound marketing campaigns compelling enough to drive engagement – and candidates – directly to your ATS.

One is not better than the other, but without one, there’s no point in having the other, either. Master your mix.

5. Great Content Is Platform Agnostic.

Inbound recruitment marketing is driven by career focused content; this can range from brand stories to employee testimonials, company mission, vision and values to videos of your workplace or top performers.

Social media is a great way to make sure this content reaches the right audience, but it’s only one spoke – the hub of the hiring process is your ATS, and you should focus any strategy on driving candidates to this destination instead of, say, Twitter or Facebook.

6. Don’t Be Boring.

Marketing only works when you can break through the buzz with a message that’s getting heard. To get people’s increasingly divided attention (and increasingly shorter attention spans), just remember that standing out isn’t rocket science. You can leverage attention, buy it, steal it or earn it, but either way if you’re not getting noticed by the right people, then you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Once you have an audience, of course, then you’ve got a whole other problem entirely. Because getting noticed is half the battle. You’ve got to keep that attention, too. This is a much more complex challenge, but it’s not a bad problem to have.

The worst indictment of any recruitment marketing campaign is silence. Even negative feedback or public criticism is still a conversation and a chance to make a connection.

It’s silence that should really worry you.

7. Turn Attention into Action.

Content for content’s sake, just like an automated jobs feed, is worthless. So too is attracting the right talent and failing to actually convert them into candidates. The way to inspire a passive candidate or qualified job seeker to take action and apply once you’ve gotten their attention is fairly straightforward: create content candidates care about.

The Story of Us: Recruitment Marketing Content.

8. Content Is Not A Tactic.

Make no mistake. Content is not a medium or a message – it’s a mindset. And in recruitment marketing, that mindset has to be aligned with that of the candidates you’re trying to reach. If your content can help people understand who you are and still leave them wanting to learn more, then you’ll never have to make another cold call again.

Content should be incorporated into every step of the hiring process and support each stage of the candidate journey. It should augment and enhance any other inbound or outbound tactic, and should inherently increase the value of those recruitment marketing activities.

Candidates are consumers of work, and top talent always has choices. That’s why “selling” in recruitment marketing content only does so much, but career collateral that’s entertaining, educating or engaging sells itself.

Which is way easier for recruiters.

9. Content Is The Voice of Your Employer Brand.

Content is the only way people learn about you, your jobs, your employer brand and your unique selling proposition. It differentiates, positions and compels.

Your brand is not that thing in the binder or that mission statement. It is who you are and how you behave every day. You can’t express these things without content, because content is what breathes life into your brand. It’s your voice, and speaks for you when you can’t speak for yourself.

10. Your Culture Should Drive Your Content.

Good content can both attract likely fitting and qualified candidates while at the same time repelling poorly fitting and unqualified candidates. The value is not in the quantity of applications, but in the culture fit of candidates once they get past your screening process and in front of your hiring team. If your culture isn’t the centerpiece of your content, then it’s just another job ad.

Of course, job ads can be measured and managed, but creating a baseline for content about culture is almost impossible, as no single metric can capture one of the most valuable parts of recruitment marketing: keeping candidates who aren’t a match for your company culture from even bothering to apply in the first place. Self-selection is really the only effective and accurate way to screen for culture fit. Everything else is just educated guessing and confirmation bias.

Shake It Off: Playing The Long Game With Recruitment Marketing.

11. Attention Is A Precious Commodity.

Only publish content when you have something worth saying.

12. Work With Intention.

If you don’t have clear intent when pushing out content to your audience, or if you don’t have a clearly defined purpose for publishing, then your recruitment marketing is worthless and should be stopped immediately. No amount of filler content, social noise or boring B2B blog post can provide the same sort of value as a single, simple story. Be eloquent, be authentic, and know your audience always knows when you’re phoning it in.

13. Quality Eats Quantity’s Lunch.

Everything is content. A job description is technically content. So too is career site copy, InMails or whatever it is you post about on the social networks you choose to post on. The thing is, not all of that content is good content. In fact, most of it pretty much sucks.

Don’t suck.

14. Quality Takes Time.

But it’s worth the wait.

15. There’s No Such Thing As Old Content.

Most recruiting and career content is evergreen, so timeliness really doesn’t matter as much as stickiness. Even if you’ve used something once before doesn’t mean that you have to continually reinvent the wheel or that it’s worthless. Just repackage, repurpose, reframe and relaunch. Chances are no one will remember (or notice) that it’s not necessarily recent, as long as it’s still relevant.

Social media has a short attention span, and candidates have an even shorter one.

Or at least, here’s hoping.

Read More on the Meshworking blog from TMP Worldwide.

The post Blank Space: A Recruitment Marketing Manifesto. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

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).

Maybe it’s because they get approached by so many different vendors or “partners” that they assume that anyone who’s not a candidate or hiring manager isn’t worth taking the time to talk to.

But within the first five minutes of any conversation, recruiters are almost guaranteed to tell you, in one way or another, that they don’t have a whole lot of budget to spend (and are probably not spending what they have with you).

Look, I get it. Quick show of hands: has any talent acquisition professional ever had enough money to spend on all the stuff they wanted to?

Has anyone ever had all the resources they probably need to be the most efficient and effective they can at filling reqs? No one? That’s weird.

Let’s try another one. Who in the consumer marketing space, or any other business function, really, ever feels like they just have too much money and resources?

Still no one? That’s what I thought.

The High Cost of Transfer Fees.

So, let’s go ahead and agree that no one has money (or at least, not as much as they’d like or need). Cash might be king, but it’s certainly not the only consideration limiting recruiters from hiring the best talent available for every role, every time. I know most of these probably sound familiar (if not downright cliched): not enough recruiters.

Not enough headcount to support the overall work. Not enough hours in the day. Not enough tools or time to actually engage candidates and develop real recruiting relationships.

Considering these often steep limitations and constraints commonly placed on recruiters, it’s easy to throw up your hands and give up. Or at least, have a little pity party at how badly you have it, poor you.

How can anyone ever expect you to actually do your job of filling reqs efficiently and finding the best candidates on the market when you don’t have the money, people, time or tools to actually keep up with that market? How can you possibly overcome the probability of perpetual failure?

I mean, statistically and anecdotally (at least from the recruiters I’ve talked to), you’re already pretty screwed. So why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum required and simply post, pray and hope for some halfway decent applicants to somehow find you.

If you can fill a req cheaply and quickly, it shouldn’t really matter if the candidate is an all star or a B player to the talent organization. You think if you keep making hires, you’ll keep everyone happy, right?

Think again.

Championship Manager: Running The Talent Tables.

It’s like soccer (or football, for the rest of the world), in which part of what makes “The Beautiful Game” so compelling is that you’re forced to play without the ability to use some of your most important appendages. Doing so, even accidentally, is an automatic penalty.

That is, unless you’re the goalie, which is the position most recruiters find themselves in – playing a defensive and predominantly reactive role instead of pushing the ball forward and proactively going after the competition.

Attacking, though, means going ahead knowing you’re going to have to play on the field with 11 other people who are comfortable working with constraints.

You can’t win without coming out of the box and figuring out how to beat the competition with your hands effectively tied behind your back. This extended metaphor, obviously, has some important lessons for recruiters.

Look, if everyone could use their hands when they played soccer, it’d be called rugby. Which is to say, if you’re not willing to recruit without a whole bunch of external restraints (and personal restraint), you should probably consider a playing a different entirely.

Because this business probably just isn’t for you. But if you recognize that those constraints are a commonality shared by pretty much every recruiter out there and start focusing not on limitations, but how to overcome them, then you’re going to be way more effective at making great hires.

Everyone is more or less on a level playing field in today’s candidate driven talent market – too many demands, not enough time or money to handle them all. We get it. So, talent acquisition professionals and recruitment marketers must realize that no one has the assets they want. No one probably has the tools and staff they need to succeed. No one.

Not even the biggest brands or budgets are ever truly enough to corner the candidate market. It really all comes down to the connection and relationship between an individual recruiter, and an individual candidate.

And that’s something money can’t buy (although it sure can do a decent job faking it for a while).

Pro Evolution: Learning To Stay Onside In Talent Acquisition.

Once recruiters realize that they have a choice between complaining and bitching about the impossible jobs they’ve been given, or they can shut up and put up results against every other employer out there who are effectively competing with the same restraints. Those that can actually put up, well, they’re the ones who win the war on talent. And they’re not content to sit around and let applicants come to them.

The best recruiters in the business, the employers of choice the choosiest employees choose the most, know how to overcome recruiting restraints and break through to the truly top talent every top employer is competing for at the moment – including you and your company.Don’t just stand back in the box and hope that you can make a last second block.

Because no matter how good a recruiter you are, if you’re playing goalie instead of striker in this game, sooner or later you’re bound to get burned. Promise.

So once you realize that this is scratch golf, where all handicaps are wiped out and everyone’s playing for the same score, you realize that you’re not really competing against the other players out there – you’re competing against yourself. If you focus on doing your best instead of constantly looking to the leaderboard and waiting for lucky breaks, you’re going to come out ahead.

Failure happens when you get distracted from the singular goal of beating par on every hole. And the best of us may get the occasional double bogey, but as badly as that sucks, that doesn’t mean you should suddenly stop shooting for eagles, either.

When the Wright Brothers first developed the airplane, of course, they didn’t have all (or really any) of the answers. They were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, after all, not wealthy by traditional standards nor formally trained in aeronautics, physics or engineering. The one thing they did know from bicycles, though, was the concept of lightweight mechanized propulsion.

That’s a fancy way of saying they studied how to go the furthest distance possible while putting in the least amount of effort, and built their prototypes around the core concept of efficiency.

This didn’t extend just to the actual plane, of course: economy was everything in the nascent days of aeronautics. Finding donors with enough vision and capital to fund their highly experimental enterprise proved nearly impossible. They had no idea what mechanical or material resources they’d need, how many people it would take and the improbability of actually achieving the long dismissed dream of human flight.

They just knew what they did have: a first class understanding of the mechanics of lightweight propulsion, an ideal site for the winds and climate required to literally get their business off the ground, and two brothers who had the willingness to do whatever it took to accomplish their vision, even if that meant figuring out a way to make it happen with next to no money or material resources.

There’s a reason it’s called “doing the impossible,” but sometimes, as with the Wright Brothers, the impossible gets done.

Champions League: How To Take Home The Hardware.

Visionaries who push ahead despite knowing the odds against them are objectively overwhelming are often seen as naive or even ignorant, but theirs isn’t a “glass half full” sort of optimism, operating on blind faith and dumb luck alone to tilt at those windmills. The willingness to actually try to confront – and conquer – the steepest of all odds is a gift.

But like all gifts, it comes with certain strings or expectations attached.

In recruiting, getting huge returns on no investment other than time, expertise and elbow grease means making choices. This can be tough. It’s important to remember that “choices” isn’t some thinly veiled code for, “OK, so maybe you can’t do every cool idea that comes into your head.”

Instead, it means being able to judiciously and justifiably allocate your limited resources for maximum impact. There’s no magic formula for doing that, no best practice or case study, really, for telling you the best recruiting resources for ROI, since every req and requirement is different.

Just remember success or failure in recruiting lies primarily not only in being decisive, making hard choices and accepting tradeoffs, but in making sure those are the right choices, too.

Sometimes, that means taking a chance. Just know that you no longer have to spend money on a tool or technology nor time on a tactic or talent strategy just because it’s what you’re expected to do, forget business as usual and start figuring out what actually works for you.

The cool thing about experimentation is that if something doesn’t work, you can pretty easily throw it out and keep iterating until you find what’s going to work best for the work you do. Rest assured that no matter how confident recruiters sound when they assert that they know what they’re doing, we’re all mostly making this up as we go along.

Realize that recruiters today are expected to try new things, and that the only way to systematically find out what works is by first seeing what doesn’t work. Eventually, you’ll figure it out, or you’ll fall out of recruiting like so many others who just couldn’t deal with the challenges, ambiguity and hard work this business requires.

Those who survive – and thrive – in recruitment do so because instead of being content with using your budget based on what the status quo might say you’re supposed to do and instead focus on what you have to do to do your job, instead.

Man of the Match: Standing From the Competition.

Most recruiters know their weaknesses, but too few know their strengths. That’s because we’re too busy with business as usual to figure out what’s really working to get the best business results.

If you want to beat the competition, it’s critical to focus on looking yourself in the mirror, forgetting everyone else for just a minute and really being honest about what you have that no one else out there on the market can offer top talent.

This shouldn’t be aspirational, but self aware. You know what’s good and what sucks about working at your company. It’s essential to accentuate the positive, rather than minimize the negative. Doing so means remembering that it’s just as important to figure out what sets you apart from other recruiters as it is to focus simply on what sets a role or req apart from other opportunities at other employers.

So, what is it that makes you, well, you? Is it your engaged workforce, compelling corporate culture or your killer employee generated content? Is it your great employer brand and word of mouth reputation?

Is it your internal mobility initiatives, flexible policies, amazing benefits or unique perks? Whatever that answer might be, focus on figuring out how you can extend and amplify those assets within your employer brand and recruiting conversations.

If you have an amazing mission, compelling employer value proposition or  share real people talking about their real jobs in their real voices that really resonate with your candidates and customers alike, you don’t need to spend any money or time on accentuating the positive and transforming these assets into real recruiting results really quickly.

It all comes down to being able to tell stories that effectively engage and excite external candidates and internal stakeholders alike while conveying what it is that really makes working at your company different.

Professional Premiership: The Key to Avoiding Recruiting Relegation.

If candidates don’t know what makes you special, they won’t think you’re anything special. And you’ll probably not get a whole lot of special candidates, either. The focus on differentiation not only works to attract the right candidates to your organization, but also screens out those who might not be a great fit for your culture, vision or values.

If your candidates don’t want the same things your organization can offer, well, there’s no sense in wasting anyone’s time – which, of course, is one of the most precious resources any recruiter’s got, really.

When you’re focusing on employee generated content and finding out the best way to craft and share the stories in a way that will resonate best with the top talent you’re looking for, it’s important to remember you don’t have to get too cute or creative. You don’t have to be conceptual or abstract, you don’t have to hyperbolize too much or try too hard.

You just need to make sure that the stories you’re telling represent life at your company, and your company’s impact on its employees lives. This can be surprisingly straightforward.

For example, SAS is renowned for its amazing perks related to work/life balance and employee flexibility – a well known benefit that pays far greater dividends than offering huge salaries or spending a ton of money on recruitment marketing.

They know that their commitment to work-life balance is unique, and extremely attractive to both current and potential employees, and really use that as the foundation for their recruitment messaging and marketing. Everyone claims to be a great place to work, but it’s your job to explain to candidates why you’d be a great place to work for them.

In other words:

Ask not what candidates can do for you. Ask what you can do for your candidates.

Listen to what they really want. And find out how to deliver on those unique career aspirations and expectations, even if playing that game means doing so with constraints.

The sooner you figure out how to dominate your competition, even with your hands effectively tied behind your back, the sooner you can start scoring the points required to run the talent table in 2017 – and beyond.

About the Author: James Ellis is a digital content strategist focused on helping Fortune 1000 companies and other enterprise employers develop recruitment marketing strategies to find and attract the best talent.

James has served in a variety of recruitment marketing and employer branding leadership roles, and has almost a decade of experience managing content and inbound marketing projects and initiatives for some of the world’s biggest brands.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where he was the social media voice of Bucky The Badger, James currently lives in Chicago, where he is one of the branding brains behind SaltLab and also anchors the popular TalentCast podcast.

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

The post Recruiting Is A Game of Constraints. Play It. appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

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 acquiring top talent today can often be steep (or even prohibitive) for many employers.

Factor in the price of posting on paid job boards, SEO/SEM, social media, content marketing, in person hiring events, direct sourcing and pipeline building activities, the right tools to obtain actionable analytics and the technologies required to effectively attract passive candidates (and convert them into active applicants for open requisitions), and you’ll see why employers spend an average of $140 billion every year on recruiting related activities alone.

Turns out, there’s a lot that goes into talent acquisition today, and success requires more resources, and more spend, than ever before. Companies are devoting an inordinate amount of money, resources and time into simply sourcing candidates.

Trust The Process.

Unfortunately, as companies invest in delivering the right talent for the right role at the right time, many employers are neglecting to consider that getting great candidates to hiring managers is only a small part of the hiring process.

Too many, however many spend far too much on acquiring and developing candidates (both passive and active), mostly to the neglect of the rest of the process – which is getting those candidates to accept an offer.

The best recruitment marketing in the world isn’t worth a dime if you can’t actually fill a req. All the sourcing and pipeline building in the world, similarly, is worthless if those leads can’t make it through the rest of the recruiting process and actually convert into actual hires.

This is why it might be time to take a step back and reconsider the relative costs and bottom line results of the entire recruiting process, not just the front end of the funnel.

For example, how much money and time has your talent team spent on training people on core recruiting competencies like phone screening, candidate relationship management and offer negotiation?

What kind of tools or tech do you have in place to streamline not only sourcing, but also to make candidate screening and selection more effective and efficient?

How much thought goes into establishing process improvements like structured interviewing, skills testing or optimizing onboarding?

You Get What You Pay For.

Employers spend a ton of time and money on making first impressions count with candidates through recruitment marketing and employer branding, but few focus on what that candidate will experience once they accept an offer and become an actual employee.

Maybe instead of equipping our candidates to succeed at getting through the recruiting gauntlet, we need to also consider giving our new hires the information and insight they need to make their first days and weeks as employees as smooth and productive as possible.

Remember, recruiting doesn’t stop with an accepted offer.

So why does our spend seemingly stop well before an offer is even extended?

It’s rare to find a company that invests in process improvement instead of simply pipelining candidates, so rare, in fact, that many employers simply neglect to consider what happens after an applicant becomes an candidate. Recruitment marketing is only as good as the recruiting process supporting it.

Inherently, employers know this, but neglect to focus on the fundamentals because marketing and sourcing are way sexier than the more mundane parts of the talent acquisition process.

Hiring is a marathon, but almost every employer spends like they’re sprinting, instead. Only the right process can companies truly find the right pace for winning the race for top talent.

So why do so many companies assume that recruiters – who have a tenuous connection to the role they’re recruiting for, little functional experience or specific expertise in screening for skills and finding candidates based not only on the position prerequisites, but success propensity and growth potential, too?

The problem starts at the same place as most searches: the job description.

The Root of All Recruiting Evil.

Let’s face it: job descriptions kind of suck.

These much maligned documents are not known for their utility or clarity, and are often ambiguous, misleading or incomplete, and yet, we’re reliant on these to shape our strategies, define our spend and dictate how and whom we hire.

The irony is that as much as we spend on recruitment advertising and marketing, we largely ignore the single most important component of those efforts.

In doing so, do a disservice to our hiring managers, our candidates and our own talent teams, too.

Occasionally, the hiring manager will either be open minded enough to let the recruiter look for personal potential over professional experience, but it’s rare that we hire for anything but skills, which is why job postings almost always play a bigger role in determining candidate fit than either the recruiter or the hiring manager.

This is why recruiters struggle with submissions, and hiring managers are rarely happy. What the recruiter is looking for and what the hiring manager really wants rarely matches what’s on the job description, which explains why so many hiring processes break down not during sourcing, but during screening and selection instead.

With the clearly established criteria constraining recruiters to more or less taking orders, talent acquisition practitioners tend to play it safe, delivering candidates who meet what the job description requires instead of what the real requirements of the hiring manager and the bigger business picture.

This leads to filtering out potential game changers and A Players who might be missing out on one or two preferred qualifications, but whose professional skills, attitude and potential might be far harder to find than the basic criteria listed on the job description.

Bad job descriptions aren’t written for great candidates, only minimally qualified ones. This is a huge loss for your candidates and clients alike.

Steal This Post.

By overemphasizing the job description, the hiring process is subordinate to the job posting. In this model, the JD drives the process rather than the recruiter or hiring manager. Sometimes, when an opening is created, the hiring stakeholders will take the time to edit and optimize these JDs for the type of talent the role really needs instead of the basic skills the opening requires, but this is exceedingly rare.

Too often, a JD is nothing more than a copy of a copy of a copy of some outdated and archaic compensation document that was written long enough ago where most of the requirements long ago rendered extraneous or irrelevant by changes in market conditions or business needs.

These should be dynamic documents, but too often, these remain static and stuck in a status quo that’s stuck in the past.

In fact, I’d wager that at least 25% of all job descriptions posted to the public steal entire sections from other companies wholesale, reflecting what other companies are looking for in a candidate instead of what your company and hiring team really need or want.

The more short cuts you take with a JD, the longer the hiring process will probably be; this is particularly true when a posting is approved and effectively locked in without any input from either the recruiter of record or the hiring manager; this leads to hiring managers screening and selecting candidates based off of someone else’s prerequisites rather than their personal preferences.

This disconnect is one reason recruiters have such a hard time keeping their hiring managers happy – and getting the JD right is an essential start to every search, not just a means to an end.

Most hiring managers see JDs as an obstacle to the goal, a hurdle that must be overcome in the hiring process. This means most don’t put the work in; instead, they’ve got their work cut out for them when it comes to recruiting.

Brand New Day.

When hiring managers overlook job descriptions, recruiters almost always play it safe, choosing cookie cutter candidates with similar skill sets and experience; this process is defensive and tactical, rather than strategic and opportunistic.

People who aren’t an exact fit are filtered out; instead, we choose the candidate who looks best on paper instead of the best looking candidate, period.

As any recruiter can tell you, there’s a big difference between the two.

In this model, hiring managers largely dictate the recruiting process, with the end results being inherently mixed. Recruiters review resumes that meet minimum qualifications, send stacks of these over to the hiring manager, and more or less make them pick between strikingly similar options.

Recruiters are tasked with delivering qualified, interested and available candidates, and hiring managers are left, largely, to do the rest. The core benefit here is that we can assume that the hiring manager has a better sense of what kind of candidate might be successful in the role.

They can be opportunistic and see the new skills a candidate might bring to the team and weigh the value of those new skills against someone who has exactly what was asked for and little else.

But there are areas for potential disaster here.  How does a hiring manager learn how to hire? We expect that someone who has achieved this station to have gone through the process as a candidate other places and can think clearly about what skills the new role requires.

That’s all. Raw experience and the hope that the hiring manager can see potential in new skills. You know how that story goes. In reality, hiring managers are incentivized, like recruiters, to make the safe choice instead of the best candidate.

Without anything other than a JD to distinguish good candidates from great ones, and without any training or support on standardized scoring, screening or selection, hiring managers’ choice is largely limited not to the best candidates, but the ones who look the best on paper.

Of course, resumes are almost as misleading as job descriptions, and trying to match these two documents and hope for the best is just wrong.

Hiring managers don’t generally have any specific expertise or training on how to hire, leading them to pick the candidate that’s the easiest to justify internally, both to their own teams and to their bosses and senior leadership.

Going With Your Gut Gets You Nowhere.

If we can assume that, on average, one hire out of every five doesn’t work, then it’s the hiring manager’s ass on the line for having made that decision; it’s far easier to justify making a safe pick who didn’t work out than taking a chance on a risky candidate and having that decision backfire.

As the old saying goes, “no one gets fired for picking IBM,” and no one ever got let go for going with the candidate who looked good on paper and met all the requirements, even if they weren’t the best fit for the role or the company culture.

The best choice isn’t always the safest, but in recruiting, the rewards of taking a chance are rarely worth the risk, at least as far as most hiring managers are concerned.

To make matters worse, that choice is largely influenced by hiring managers “going with their gut” in choosing one cookie cutter candidate over another who looks nearly identical on paper, and most of the time, that means opting for the candidate who’s the most like themselves, or who “looks” like a fit.

This destroys diversity, increases hiring bias, and can negatively impact a business and bottom line. . It doesn’t matter if you have invested in a diversity program if you haven’t trained your hiring managers to think through the entire process, determine quality metrics and spot internal biases before they start their phone screens.

So: who’s the boss? The recruiter or the hiring manager? If you’re like most companies, the actual answer is both are subordinate to whatever job description they’re stuck with. And all the recruitment marketing spend in the world can’t fix a broken JD.

Whether you’re a hiring manager or recruiter, that’s your job.

Remember: you’ve got to pay the costs to be the boss. And in this case, losing top talent to crap JDs is one cost no company can really afford.

About the Author:

James Ellis is currently Managing Consultant at BEX Consultants, which focuses on helping recruiting organizations develop and activate their employer brands while teaching hiring managers how to pick great candidates and radically improve hiring success.

Prior to joining BEX consultants, James most recently served as VP of Inbound Marketing at TMP Worldwide, where he was responsible for establishing TMP as the preeminent leader in recruiting content, tasked with developing and leading a global team dedicated to activating employer brand through content and media strategy. James started his career as a content consultant and commentator for SaltLab.

James currently lives in Chicago, where he hosts the Talent Cast podcast, and spends his time partnering with Fortune 1000 clients to develop recruitment marketing, digital and content strategies to find and attract the best talent.

Follow James on Twitter @TheWarforTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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