Matt Charney

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Archive for the tag “Marketing”

12 Sep 2012

Marketing for Recruiters: A Handy Dandy Guide

Originally Published on the Talent Technology Blog

There’s an entire cottage industry of consultants, analysts, prognosticators and gurus out there with the sole raison d’etre of forecasting the future of talent acquisition and what businesses need to do to today to more effectively compete for the top talent of tomorrow.

Of course, this speculation is about as exact a science as phrenology, and since it’s impossible to predict the future, the consultants have, well, pretty much invented it.

Ostensibly meaningless jingo like “Talent Communities” and “Social Engagement” have become accepted business terminology (although no one can actually agree on a definition), obfuscating the fact that, beyond the buzzwords, the goal of talent acquisition remains pretty much the same as it always has: to find the best talent possible as efficiently as possible.

I kicked off last week’s ERE Expo and Conference by participating in a webinar with Sarah White and Susan Strayer, two innovators whose work is truly shaping the future of talent acquisition (click here to check out Susan’s take).

During our discussion, a key theme emerged, one that was continually reinforced throughout the conference:

The game hasn’t changed.  Only the tools.

Preparing for the future of talent acquisition, and overcoming the talent shortage (real or imagined), means rethinking the way we approach recruiting.  During the webinar, Sarah White looked at the top five trends shaping talent acquisition culled from her recently published white paper.

Among these trends was the increasing overlap between recruitment and marketing, a theme underscored throughout the conference, and perhaps the most significant – and seismic – shift in the landscape.

The Basics of Recruitment Marketing

Marketing and recruiting are becoming inexorably intertwined, with recruitment marketing emerging both as a distinct discipline and a core competency affecting every part of the talent acquisition cycle.

For recruiters, that means increasingly thinking like a marketer, and adding some core marketing competencies into their talent acquisition toolbox.

Here’s the good news: like recruiting, marketing ain’t rocket science.

Here are three key marketing concepts recruiters need to know:

1. Brand Marketing: Employer branding, while a relatively new discipline, used to mean creating slick collateral and creative campaigns created under the auspices of an outside agency, allowing organizations themselves to shape perceptions and employer value propositions.

With the rise of social tools and technologies, however, there’s been a democratization of information, and, as much as HR wants to believe otherwise, the organization no longer controls its employer brand.  Your current (and prospective), employees do – and people are talking about your brand, whether you like it or not.

That means ditching the generic smiling stock photos and platitudes about people being your greatest asset on your career site and actually developing a brand that shows what it’s really like to work at your organization, warts and all.

As Susan pointed out, not only does authenticity resonate more profoundly with candidates and current workers, but it also acts as an effective screening mechanism when it comes to ensuring culture fit and meeting expectations set forth in the hiring process, leading to better quality of hire and, ultimately, retention.

2.  Lead Generation: Another of the major trends outlined in Sarah’s whitepaper is the increase in proactive sourcing; increasingly success at recruiting, like marketing, has become incumbent not only on being able to create a pipeline of the right leads, but nurturing them, as well.

This means that applicant tracking systems, once designed to capture exclusively inbound leads, must now have the functionality to generate outbound leads as well, transforming once dormant databases into CRM systems.

The days of the proverbial “black hole” are rapidly disappearing, and it’s not too hard to predict that as these capabilities become more prevalent and more utilized, organizations will err on the side of over communicating with applicants, a significant shift when it comes to candidate experience.  Of course, there’s still a long way to go.

3. Lead Nurturing: Striking the right balance, and turning leads into hires, means not only generating candidates, but nurturing them as well.  Enter talent networks.

According to a recent Talent Technology poll, 78% of candidates will join talent network and share information with potential employers, but only about 19% of companies actually have one.  This represents a tremendous opportunity for employers to help close the talent gap while building an easy to engage pipeline.

Of course, when it comes to building talent networks, candidates do have expectations; it’s not the recruiting field of dreams: building it isn’t enough to make them actually come.  Creating a meaningful talent network, and the lead nurturing that goes with it, requires adding value, rather than simply trying to extract it.

That means not only blasting job postings, but also sharing information and insights on your company, the hiring process, and general job search best practices which create not only more engaged leads, but better – and more viable – candidates.

And ultimately, those qualified leads are what define success in marketing – and recruiting.

Posted in Social Media, Technology and tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment
20 Jan 2012

Social Media Tool Time

What is the top driver for worker engagement, satisfaction and employee retention?

Numerous studies show that an employee’s relationship with their immediate supervisor or manager is key, a correlation that’s even more pronounced in the burgeoning ranks of the Gen Y workforce.

In fact, a recent Monster poll revealed that even in today’s tight job market, fully 60% of responders would leave their companies because of a bad boss, while 21% cite “great boss and coworkers” as the single most important element of their loyalty to their current employer (only 6% less than those driven primarily by employee compensation).

A Shift in Recruiting Analytics

Ascertaining a candidate’s organizational fit has traditionally fallen into the realm of pre-employment screenings and behavioral-based interviewing. But today’s highly selective, employer-driven job market often favors pipeline-building and profile-based recruiting over traditional just-in-time hiring methods.

Couple these trends with an increased emphasis on long-term, throughput metrics (such as quality of hire) over the more traditional, short-term analytics (such as days-to-fill and cost-per-hire.)

The result puts the onus of matching the right candidate with the right manager increasingly on the recruiter. This remains one of the most subjective, and therefore complex, components of successfully placing a candidate during the search process.

Your Social Media Recruiting Toolbox

The good news?  The methods that recruiters use to source, develop and engage with candidates and customers are only one piece of the Recruiting 3.0 tool box.

Recruiting using social media also offers a competitive advantage, both in how to present a qualified candidate to a hiring manager, and in how to prepare a candidate for an interview. Both are critical components of the job recruitment process:

Create a Job-Specific Blog: Successful job searches start with successful job descriptions, but creating a comprehensive, targeting job posting strategy should involve more than simply repurposing the same position over and over again.

Using a free service like Google’s Blogger or WordPress, you can set up a basic blog for each of your searches in minutes.  It doesn’t have to be visually complex; just enough to create a hub for your other job posting efforts and social recruiting activities.

By setting up a simple blog for each job, you’ll organically boost SEO to your careers site as well as other platforms where your job is posted.  Most importantly, it provides a format where recruiters (and hiring managers) can provide perspective on a job while engaging candidates.

Film your Hiring Manager: While a good job description is often an important starting point, one of the most important (but often neglected) step in the hiring process is a three-way “kick off” meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter and HR partner to discuss the current employment situation. This will allow you to build a profile of what a successful candidate might look like and review the anticipated challenges and opportunities for the job search.

Critical to this meeting is the opportunity for both the HR Business Partner and the hiring manager to provide perspective on the hiring manager’s professional history, leadership style and management philosophy.

Rather than simply use these notes as background material, however, streaming video technologies make it easy to record this information and possibly use it as recruitment advertising collateral during the search process.

For example, at a relatively low cost, talent organizations can purchase a shared FlipCam to bring to these ‘kick off meetings,’ capturing the hiring manager in their office, conference room or other meeting space where the interview is likely to take place, sending important visual clues about things like company culture and managerial style that can’t be conveyed in a typical job description.

First, be sure to have the hiring manager’s consent to do film. If everyone agrees, you can record a few quick clips of them discussing their philosophy and the job position.  A few questions to get you started:

1. Describe what it takes to be successful in this role.
2. Discuss your management style and philosophy.
3. What do you look for in a candidate during an interview?
4. What’s the most interesting thing about you that’s not on your resume?

Once approved, you can post these videos on a company careers site, job blog or YouTube channel, along with a link to the written job posting.

This content can provide great insight (and differentiation) for potential candidates while augmenting your current online employer brand presence, giving greater transparency to the company’s culture.

It’ll also give candidates a better idea of what to expect when they come to an interview and allow them to assess how their values stack up against a potential managers. Naturally, such information is also invaluable data to screen candidates against when assessing corporate and departmental culture fit.

At minimum, you can have this footage readily accessible when executing a candidate search, creating a digital record that’s easily shared among recruiters or for reference on future searches. It also can come in handy to help recalibrate and refocus priorities in the event the search takes longer than expected or requires a change in approach.

Source for Similarities and Connections: Creating a match between your hiring manager and prospective candidates starts with looking at your hiring managers’ online footprint. This can easily be done using a ‘people search’ site like pipl.com or 123people.com.

These sites aggregate such things as social network profiles, available videos, pictures, blogs, etc. and provide a quick glimpse into things that might not make it into a job description or the initial meeting when opening a position.

Look for things like volunteer work, interests, hobbies and non-professional networks in which the hiring manager might be involved. While you’re probably already searching for candidates who worked in the same companies or went to the same school as the hiring manager, these can also provide powerful ammunition in focusing your sourcing efforts on job search engines like Monster and within social networks.

A shared philanthropy or membership in the same professional organization can often help turn an applicant into a candidate and create an instant connection that often provides the foundation for a successful interview.  Not to mention, a happy hiring manager.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Posted in Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
11 Jan 2012
1 Comment

How To Create A Blog Post in 10 Easy Steps

There are a few common misperceptions when it comes to creating blog content.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be a writer to blog, nor do you need to actually have anything to say.

After all, you’re creating digestible, disposable content that’s probably going to get skimmed.

That is if anyone actually reads your stuff (and chances are, they won’t…particularly if it’s a corporate blog).

But if the fact that blogging remains the least time effective and most labor intensive form of online communication doesn’t dissuade you, or if you’re solipsism is sated by any byline, here are 10 steps to creating a blog post.

Fake It Til You Make It: 10 Steps For Becoming A Blogger

Creating is the imperative word here, because the more writing you do, the more time you’re wasting.  And in that spirit, on to the list:

1.       Choose A Keyword: Many assume that it’s imperative to choose a topic to blog about.  This adds an unnecessary level of complexity, because topics imply expertise or personal investment, and almost always more than 500 words to fully flush out. 

Keywords, on the other hand, are single words or phrases that are effective simply through repetition – and search engines reward keyword density.  This is a fancy way of saying that the only audience that really matters is, in fact, an algorithm.

The most effective way to find a keyword is to use Google Insights (because, c’mon, even Bill Gates doesn’t use Bing) and looking up the highest impact, lowest competition search terms.

These are constantly in flux, so it’s nice to verify how well these keywords resonate by cross-referencing their frequency on Twitter.

You will quickly see that an article on Justin Bieber is going to have more impact than, say, if you were to post the cure for cancer, but remember:   When it comes to blogging, it’s not about what you want – it’s about what the people want.  And turns out, it’s generally the lowest common denominator.

This means that if you’re tasked with the unfortunate job of actually having to blog for business, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you can figure out a really creative way to incorporate current events or celebrity gossip.

Which might explain why so many editorial calendars essentially overlap the Gregorian one.

2.       Choose A Number: Now that you’ve got a topic figured out, you’ve pretty much added the noun to the Mad Lib that is the blogging genre.  Now, it’s time to pick a number, preferably a multiple of 5, or the number corresponding to the current calendar year.

The lower the number, the less you have to write.

3.       Add The Phrase “How To”: Remember, blogs aren’t designed to get people to actually think, only give the illusion of intellectual edification, kind of like Sudoku or majoring in a liberal art.  And they want advice, not opinions.  This is why the phrase “How To” is a blog title’s best friend.

4. Choose A Verb: Because every complete sentence needs a verb.  This is a good place to work in some buzzwords, like engage, or innovate or lead.  And while it’s not covered by Strunk & White, the correct tense when creating a blog title is always the present – mostly because action verbs make for more effective tweets.

5. Combine Steps 1-4: The formula is simple: How To + Verb + Number + Keyword = good blog title.  For an example, see the really big, bold text at the top of this story.

6. Write A Specious Lead: The eye is naturally drawn to white space, a phenomenon well understood by effective cinematographers, bloggers and segregationists.  That’s why you shouldn’t think of your audience as readers, because most will avoid any text block and simply scan for bolded text.

7. Create A List: Lists are the best way to work in a bunch of bolded text without anyone being aware that you’re essentially psychologically manipulating them.  The exact number of your list should correspond to the number you’ve selected in step two, but don’t worry, you can always change your number if you have too much or not enough content.

If that number is less than 10, you’ll need to craft some copy to accompany the bolded text so that people think there’s really more there and you actually put some time and thought into this post, even if they’re not going to fall victim to the same trap.

Joke’s on them – this is where you work in the keyword you’ve identified in step #2 to help boost SEO.

If the number is greater than 10, people will assume you’ve put so much time into putting the list together that it’s OK if you don’t have any copy to accompany it, but you’ll likely need to lay off the bolded text in favor of white space.

But that’s OK, because people are more likely to scroll down with their cursors than scroll across with their eyes.

8. Add Quotations and Links: “This not only helps free up space, but also gives the illusion of external expertise, even if there isn’t one present,” according to a completely arbitrary source that you’ve never heard of.

But that’s why you add links, according to blogger Zahid Lilani, who I hadn’t heard of before Googling “Linkbacks in Blogs.”  Lilani’s post, 5 Simple Ways To Get Linkbacks for Your Blog, is the top ranking result, and proof that he probably gets the concept – and the numbered list formula for blogging success.

Then, add some links to your own blog posts – but not too many or people won’t click on them, which is the entire point.  And don’t worry, the internal links you use don’t actually need to have anything to do with your selected anchor text.

9.       Insert A Picture:

Don't Sue Us

Worth a thousand words (and one trackback, courtesy of blogforprofit.com.

10.   Add A Quick Conclusion:

 If you don’t have anything profound to add in your wrap-up, consider saying something snarky.

After all, that’s what’s referred to as “having a voice.”

Although as this list should demonstrate, that’s pretty overrated.

Posted in Social Media and tagged , ,

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