Category Archives: HR Technology

How can a HR vendor standout in a sea of competition? #SHRM19

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Just flying back from the SHRM National Conference. This SHRM conference was the biggest ever. Over 20,000 HR and TA pros and leaders all in one location. Thousands of others from vendors and support staff. It was a bit crazy and awesome all at the same time.

When you go into the expo of SHRM National (and other giant conferences like the HR Technology Conference in Vegas in October) it can be a bit overwhelming. Not only for the attendees but for the vendors as well. How the heck are you supposed to connect with the people you want? Both sides, by the way, have this problem.

Vendors only want to connect with a small segment of those attending, their actual buyers. Attendees also only want to connect with a small segment within the expo, those products, and services they actually have a need for. The current design of expos at large conferences doesn’t help either side.

Do you know why Home Depot and Lowes build across the street from each other? If someone wants to buy home repair type of items it makes it super convenient for them to be so close. One location doesn’t have what you need, the other might and it’s right across the street.

What if expos put all the same types of tech within the same areas? Need a recruiting tool? Go over to the Recruiting section of the expo and you can see all of the products, solutions, and vendors in one place. Need performance management tech, go over to the performance management selection area, etc.

Seems like this would actually be a better design for both sides, yet we don’t do this because of traditional sales strategies of the conference community. How much are you willing to pay for prime spots and how long have you been coming? Thus we end up with this scatter blot of an expo floor with people wandering around aimlessly collecting bad swag.

I don’t think any conference will change anytime soon, but sometimes you just have to throw out ideas to the universe and see what happens.

So, how can you stand out in a world of expo chaos?

  1. You can’t just sit in your booth and wait for people to find you. Hire some “interns” for the week and have them moving around the expo dressed up in a way people will take notice and want to find your booth.
  2. Give an email, direct mail offer so enticing that people have to show up to your booth. Come to our booth, do a 20-minute demo, and we’ll give you a $25 gift card to whatever. People who aren’t interested in you will not waste twenty minutes for $25 bucks so the lead gen is good and cheap.
  3. Zig when others are zagging. You can have the most expensive, and brightest booth on the planet or you can do something totally different. I’ve seen companies just put down astroturf and fill it with puppies and their space was full all day. I have an idea that you could go buy a bunch of really high-end women’s shoes. Shoes that every woman is interested in trying on, but in reality could never afford. You basically use your booth a shoe store, but you aren’t selling them, you’re just giving them the experience of trying them on and seeing if they would actually want these for real, without the stress of going into these high-end stores. Your salespeople turn into old-school shoe salespersons and have great conversations. In the end, the women trying on shoes can register to win the shoes they like the most. You would have a line into your booth for the entire show. (partner with Zappos or something and probably can get the shoes at cost for the try-on experience)
  4. Celebrity guest and photo opportunity. You would be amazed at how cheap you can get someone to come to your booth for an hour. Again, partner this with an ‘if you demo, you get to get your photo at the meet and greet” of this celebrity. It might cost you another $10-20K, but if that turns into an additional 200 demos, you win! We are in a world where we are all enamored by celebrities.
  5. Make it extremely clear what you do. I can walk by 90% of booths and have absolutely no idea what you do and why I would want to buy your product. In big expo environments, less than 10% of the audience is your potential buyer, so you can’t miss anyone, and if one of those buyers walks past your booth because it’s not 100% clear what you do, you lost. No, we don’t know your brand. Just tell us!

I know you already spend a tremendous amount getting the booth, the swag, and having your entire team travel out to the event, but if you don’t attract buyers, all of that expense is just a waste! In expo lead gen, you are either all in or you’re just burning a giant pile of cash.

The best booth experience is one where you are only attracting the buyers you want and not spending half your time handing out stuffed animals to people who don’t know you and will never buy your stuff. I know it’s a risk not doing what everyone else is doing, but great marketing is risky.

Job Descriptions vs. Job Postings with @LRuettimann and I (Video) @HRTMSInc #SHRM19

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Laurie Ruettimann and I discuss the differences between a job description and a job posting and review a great piece of technology called, JDXpert, we did a demo on. Check it out!

HRTMS Inc. is a human resources software company that specializes in Job Information and Description Management. Its groundbreaking solution JDXpert allows you to bring structure and efficiencies to the way job information is constructed, managed and stored. HRTMS works with a wide range of organizations including manufacturing, healthcare, education, retail, finance, pharmaceuticals, energy, technology, hospitality, professional services, and media services. Since its release in 2010, JDXpert continues to be the most comprehensive and powerful job description management tool on the market.

HRTMS is allowing Laurie and I to give away a free Ebook – “10 Ways To Improve Your Job Descriptions”! (Just click on the link to download!)

 

Why Don’t We Have a ‘Yelp’ for HR Tech?

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The HR Technology ecosystem is a multi-billion a year enterprise. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 different HR technology solutions in the marketplace. If you can think of it, there are at least a dozen solutions on the market or in development in our space.

Every single day, in some form or fashion, I have some ask me a question about which solution they should select? While I demo and review over a hundred different technologies across the entire landscape of HR technology each year, I only see a small fraction of what’s on the market, and within a year of seeing a certain technology, most have changed so much that you would need to demo them all over again.

All of this makes me wonder why don’t we have a practitioner lead site, like Yelp, where we all share and talk about the technology we’ve used, implemented, demoed, purchased, etc.

There are small pockets of this in certain spaces. Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin, the two principles at CareerXroads, started something like this for their members. ATAP has talked about starting this for our members. SHRM has chat boards that are active with members who are asking these questions and sharing. But the reality is, there isn’t a one-stop shop to get these answers, especially if you’re an SMB HR shop!

The enterprise HR shops will go to places like Bersin by Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. and pay a ton of money to work with specialized analysts in the field who work to try and stay on top of the tech. Some will go with smaller specialized firms shops like Aptitude Research, Lighthouse, HRWins, H3 HR Advisors, etc.

It seems crazy to me that we can’t just log into a TripAdvisor-type site, search for “Workday” and hundreds, if not thousands of reviews come up. New reviews, old reviews, reviews segments by module, etc. Segmented chat groups talking about how good or bad a tech company is at implementation. A group about how much they are paying for a tech!

Why isn’t this a thing!?!

I think there might be some reasons:

  1. We all think our tech stack is some big differentiator and the secret sauce of our success. (This isn’t true, by the way)
  2. The HR Technology community, especially the biggest players, have nothing to gain from a site like this.
  3. You have to start something like this without a revenue model and hope that somehow down the road, the revenue model is the data you collect. (I would think someone like TechStars, etc. would easily find funding for a site like this)
  4. It’s so hard to get all those parties together in one place – HR, benefits, compensation, recruiting, LOD, etc. We all have our own associations and spend time on separate sites.

I wish we had this. Imagine the power of our collective knowledge of what we are using that is working and what we are using, or have used, that isn’t working!? Holy crap, the time and resources we could save our organizations!

What do you think? Do we need this? Why don’t we have it?

 

@ZipRecruiter Launches a New Product to Help Get Candidates Recruited by You!

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I’ve been trying to tell people for the past year or so that you shouldn’t be sleeping on ZipRecruiter. They have quietly been working on their tech with their heads down and they might currently be the best value recruiting product on the planet that no one is really talking about.

Well, yesterday they launched another product enhancement that is an AI-based matching technology to help candidates get recruited by organizations. Check it out:

The company’s AI-powered matching technology now instantly presents strong-fit potential candidates to hiring managers who post a job on ZipRecruiter. Employers can signal their interest with a single click, and ZipRecruiter connects the two sides to fast-track the hiring process.

“The number one job seeker complaint is applying to jobs and hearing nothing back,” said Ian Siegel, ZipRecruiter Co-Founder and CEO. “We’ve flipped the process on its head by letting employers initiate first contact. Job seekers can, of course, still apply to jobs, but now employers have the option to, in effect, apply to job seekers.” 

The product debuted in early April. During that month, 624,000 job seekers received outreach from employers, contributing to a 13% month-over-month increase in hires* across ZipRecruiter.

Here’s what Zip has figured out. The single most powerful recruiting tool any organization has is its ability to make candidates feel wanted. Sure they can make more candidates apply to your jobs, but what candidates really want is for you to want them. That’s a powerful attraction component that we miss when all we think about is getting more applies.

Having AI reach out and match candidates and give your recruiters the ability with one touch to show interest will deliver a highly engaged candidate that matches the needs of the position. With really very little effort on your teams part to get it all started.

Good, solid candidates, the kind that doesn’t need to apply to jobs, want to be wanted. We all want to be wanted.

Now, this might sound like recruiting 101, but the sad fact is most corporate recruiting, especially for SMBs, is just post and pray. Post a job on a site like Zip and pray someone will apply. This doesn’t work when there are over 6 million jobs out there for candidates to apply to! We have to show candidates we are interested in them and ZipRecruiter has created a technology that will make this simple and efficient.

Take a look and check it out, well worth a demo. ZipRecruiter is very inexpensive to test, so there’s really no reason not to.

Transform Recruitment Marketing Live Stream Registration is Now Open! (Free!)

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June 20-21st I’ll be in Boston as the Emcee at Transform Recruitment Marketing conference. This is the 5th year of Transform and I’m super excited to be attending, but also super excited that Transform has opened up this conference to a virtual audience for those who can’t attend in person, for free!

I’m constantly speaking and writing about all kinds of Recruitment Marketing tactics, ideas, and strategies. It’s still a very new and fast evolving function within talent acquisition. What I love about Transform is they’ve gone out and really worked to bring in actual corporate TA pros who are recruitment marketing practitioners to share what they are doing and what’s working for them!

The 2019 Transform conference will have speakers from: Delta Airlines (“The Kid” – Holland Dombeck), Intel, CVS, Washington Post, IBM, Sprint, Fiserv, Cox, etc. It’s loaded with practitioners sharing all of their secrets and best practices around recruitment marketing and talent attraction.

So, what do I expect to learn at this year’s Transform?

– Connecting Employee Experience and Candidate Experience

– Next generation Talent Analytics

– Increasing Conversion Ratios of Career site Visitors

– How do we recruit Gen Z vs. all the rest

– Enabling and Sustaining Your RM Strategy

– Activating Talent Communities at Scale

Plus so much more!

I love that Transform is opening up the content to a virtual audience. Let’s be honest, so many of us just can’t afford to attend a live event each year, or you already have planned a different event. Is it the same as being there in person, no, but in TA we make do with the resources we have! If you get the chance to come next year, the real miss of not being there in person is building the connections and community of other like-minded folks that you can share and build ideas from. It’s really the reason we all go to live events!

Register for the Free Virtual Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference (who won’t get all of the content, let’s be fair some great folks paid a ton of money to be with me in Boston at the Live event, but you’ll get a lot!) Already thousands have registered, so I know this content is needed by so many!

 

Recruiter Roundtable with Loxo CEO Matt Chambers and I!

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In this discussion, Loxo CEO, Matt Chambers, and I discuss trends in recruiting that is here to stay, and how modern recruiters will need to evolve to address these changes.

 

Question 1: What do you see as the most impactful changes you’ve seen in the recruiting industry?

Tim’s Answer:

It continues to be the speed at which recruiting is expected to find talent for openings. We’ve gotten to a point where hiring managers have this expectation where you’ll start showing them candidates in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. All of this is driven by technology.

Matt’s Answer:  

Let’s start macro and work our way down to share why these changes are happening.

A generational transformation is underway.  Baby Boomers are retiring, millennials are taking over their leadership roles, and Generation Z is entering the workforce as the first digitally native generation.  This generational transformation is hitting at the same time that the web 3.0 is emerging and we are going to cross a tipping point to broader market adoption.

Unemployment is at an all-time low, and we are also on the longest bull run in history.  A tight labor market magnified lazy hiring practices which relied exclusively on job board postings. Ineffective hiring and subpar results created a robust demand for recruiting agencies and passive recruiting solutions.   Today talent acquisition is strategic; having top recruiters either in-house or as recruiting partners is a major competitive advantage.  We are starting to see a hybrid RPO boots on the ground model becoming very popular.

Executive search, staffing, RPO, and recruiting agencies are facing pressure to find ways to differentiate. Five years ago, the biggest changes were happening on the corporate side, but now executive search, RPO, and recruiting agencies are playing catch up.  It’s a lot of energy and effort for an organization to change software solutions and to consider new approaches to recruiting.  It also can take a year or more for an organization to switch out and upgrade their technology, so those who wait risk putting themselves out of business to modern recruiting practices that just have too significant an advantage.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Hiring managers are being sandwiched by both technology innovation on the vendor/supply side but also from their C-levels measuring progress via KPI metrics.  I think Tim and I would both agree that quality of hire is the most important metric, but as he said to be successful in today’s world you have to get the job done fast or someone else will be there to beat you to it. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

As much as we see recruiting evolving and changing, it’s still out on the edges for the most part. The most used recruiting strategy across all functions, markets, and industries is still “Post and Pray”. Post a job, pray someone will apply. While we see the leading edge of recruiting at an advanced stage, it’s still mostly in the minority. One issue, especially on the corporate side, is recruiting is still part of HR and HR hates to recruit. So, they’ll do almost anything else besides picking up a phone and reaching out to a potential hire.

The growth of RPO is a straight-line direct reflection of this failure. Organizational leadership is giving up on recruiting at a colossal level because CHROs can’t figure out how to fix recruiting and make it work, so let’s just shop it out to experts. The reality is, you’re not shopping it out to experts, you’re shopping it out to 25-year-olds working in call centers who are paid to call candidates. That is now your employment brand, a 25-year-old who probably have never been to one of your locations and knows nothing about you.

It’s not a hit on RPO, they are hired to find talent and fill a position, and they need to do that as efficiently as they can to produce a profit. Turns out, many do a great job at that, but many organizations give up too easily instead of just fixing the core issue. Talent Acquisition is not HR. It can’t be run like HR, or it will keep failing.  

 

Question 2: Process-wise, where do you see recruiters putting in the most effort into moving forward?

Tim’s Answer:

I would love to tell you it would be quality over speed, but I fear it’s still going to be speed. For me this isn’t either/or, it’s both. Yes, I want you to find me talent fast, and, yes, I want you to find me great talent. Far too often, in most shops, recruiters turn this into one or the other. It doesn’t have to be that way. But, that takes a really great process, supported by great tech, supported by high expectations and performance management. BTW – it also costs money!

Matt’s Answer:

At the very top of the funnel. 

Executive search firms and internal talent acquisition teams are focusing most of their effort at the very top of the funnel.   Relying exclusively on job boards for “sourcing” is lazy and results in the lowest quality, yet still remains the primary way most organizations (and even most staffing agencies) recruit.

We have crossed the tipping point, and it is no longer cost-effective to source manually, when there are superior sourcing options on the market that can programmatically deliver an extremely high-quality talent pipeline at a fraction of the cost. 

To give you a concrete example, Loxo AI™ helps our customers build extremely high-quality talent pools.  It removes 90% of the hours spent sourcing by recommending only the very best people for each open position.  This is automated.  Why would you have a dedicated sourcing team when you could have this? Solutions like Loxo AI™ are gaining popularity as more recruiting organizations learn about them and realize how big of a game changer it is to their productivity.

The largest recruiting organizations have started to invest in building their own in-house technology systems.  I think almost everyone except these organizations realizes this is a catastrophic mistake that will lead down a black-hole.  The pace of technological innovation in the open market is 100x faster, so the tens of millions of dollars of investment will cost these organizations a decade of lost opportunity cost.

Corporate recruiters are relentlessly testing and trying new solutions, but often have to figure out workarounds or even pay out of pocket due to the slow and bureaucratic nature of big enterprise. As a compromise, I think you are starting to see market forces demanding open API integrations so their recruiters can use best of breed solutions rather than being forced to use these monolithic systems that put the recruiter’s needs last.  Recruiters will select and choose solutions that they want to use and that solve their problem, even as big enterprise struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation and global regulatory environment.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Spot on –it’s always about the time, quality, cost tradeoff!

The Project Management Triangle is one of the most important constraint models in business operations. Clients always want it faster, better, AND cheaper and service providers always have to remind them that we can do two at once, but you Mr. or Ms. client select the two you want and we’ll adjust accordingly.  Technology innovation in a fully optimized system is the only thing that can improve all three at the same time, but technology will only get you so far so if you don’t have exceptional leaders, process, and people.  If you do you can achieve better quality hires faster than ever before. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

Totally agree with you, Matt. Although, I don’t see corporate recruiters “relentlessly testing and trying new solutions”, I would encourage them that they should. They should be demoing and looking at new tech at least once per month. It has to be a priority or the function just falls too far behind, too fast.

I do think as we see more and more of the top of the funnel be automated the real value of recruiters comes back to can you influence the decision of a candidate to believe that the position you have open is right for their career path? Can you get them to say, “Yes!”? That only happens when they trust you and believe that you have their best interest at heart. That takes expert-level relationship building at scale and speed.

 

Question 3: Where do you think the biggest opportunity is for recruiters to drive more value?

Tim’s Answer:

Click over here to finish reading this interview! Matt and I went back and forth for a few more questions!  (FYI – I get asked this A LOT – Loxo is our ATS and it’s awesome! Also, Individual Recruiters you can sign up use Loxo for FREE! Give it a try.) 

The Future of Work, is More Work!

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I’m sure you’ve read an article or listened to a podcast in recent weeks that had something to do with “the future of work”. It’s a hot topic to talk about, primarily because it’s all just a big fat guess and the best content is content where I just get to tell what I think will happen, but really have no idea for sure.

When I take a look at the HR technology landscape and see the tech that is hitting the market around work and performance, I think the future of work is actually just more work!

When I say ‘more’ work I really mean “More” work! Much of the technology that is being created and launched around HR Technology falls into a few buckets:

  1. How can we make workers more efficient at what they are currently doing?
  2. How can we monitor workers on what they are doing (tracking)?
  3. How can we leverage A.I. to do certain tasks workers are doing right now?

Don’t get me wrong, the technology doesn’t scare me in the least, I think it’s amazing, but the reality is much of it is designed to help us humans reach our full potential. If my couple of decades in HR has taught me anything it’s that very few of us humans want to reach our full potential!

Reaching your full potential means you are working really hard!

I have a great story about working in a union job the summer I first got out of high school. My Dad got me the job working in a grocery warehouse picking orders to be delivered to supermarkets. The warehouse just implemented a new software system that tracked the productivity of each worker.

Basically, I would be given an order and the system had estimated how long that order should take for me to complete. If the order was complex I got more time, it is was simply pulling a full pallet of one type of item, I might only get ten minutes or so to complete, some orders were estimated to take 75+ minutes to complete.

The union had negotiated that I only had to work 77% of the time. Yes, you read that correctly! If you added up all of my order minutes, in theory, to keep my job, I had to be 77% efficient. So, in an eight-hour shift of 480 minutes, once I reached my 369.6 minutes of work, I could actually just stop. In fact, I was encouraged very strongly by my union brothers to stop at the exact point!

Now the “new” computer system didn’t account for extra effort. So, if I had an order that was supposed to take 60 minutes, but I worked really hard and completed it in 45 minutes, I just earned myself an extra 15 minutes. By the end of the summer, I was efficient enough in getting orders completed that I spent about three hours a shift playing cards with my union brothers in the back of the warehouse until my shift was done!

The new HR Technology that is in play right now, based on AI and machine learning, would have made these corrections individually within a few shifts, knowing I could do that work more efficiently than another person and soon my orders would have been adjusted. The technology would have ensured that my ‘extra’ effort turned into my normal effort.

We already know that my warehouse work will be replaced by robots, so my example is already dated. But what about that office job? Will a robot replace you? No, not right away, we are a ways off from that, but that same AI/Machine learning technology will track and measure everything you do and soon you will feel as busy as ever, because ‘down time’ is unproductive time and the tech can compute that!

The future of work is more work.

 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Facebook Partners with ATSs to Bring Jobs to Your Company Page!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I let you know about some changes coming to Facebook and how Facebook is partnering with ATSs to make it easier for employers to get your jobs posted on your Facebook company page.

Facebook has long been that one person we’ve always wanted to dance with us, but they seemed uninterested in having anything to do with the recruiting community. The reality is, FB has more active users than any other social network and that means the potential for us to some serious hiring on FB has always been a dream of most TA pros.

Recently Facebook announced some partnerships with ATS providers SuccessFactors/SAP, JazzHR, Talentify, and Workable. While SuccessFactors, JazzHR, and Workable are all in the ATS space, Talentify is more of a CRM-like, programmatic job posting tool. Both Workable and JazzHR are strong SMB value ATS providers, while SuccessFactors wasn’t originally designed to be an ATS, but because of the acquisition by SAP has built out that functionality, although I think most using it probably feel that recruiting still isn’t its strongest point.

I’m not sure exactly why Facebook choose this group to start, but like most things, my guess it’s probably a combination of relationships being leveraged (hello, SAP), and just scrappiness by the smaller players mentioned to find a way to get this done.

So, what’s actually being done?

“Jackie Chang, head of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said the social network will “continue to identify strategic companies” in order to help businesses hire and people find work. “We’re looking to grow these partnerships,” she said. “We know many businesses are already working with HR solutions providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap into the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.”

Also, from Chris Russell:

There are two ways that the new integrations will work – an onsite, “native apply” experience and an offsite “redirect” experience. In the native apply experience – the messenger popup will still occur.

Onsite, “native apply” experience:

    • We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
    • Job seekers can apply to those roles directly on Facebook, and the application information is sent back to the partner.
    • This allows employers to reach qualified candidates while staying connected to the systems they already use.
    • Employers can also create jobs in their ATS, and publish that job to Facebook.

Offsite “redirect” experience:

    • We have a Jobs XML Feed, which enables partners to publish job posts on behalf of employers directly on Facebook.
    • Job seekers are redirected to the employer’s career site and can apply to the role on the employer’s career site.
    • Employers can also create jobs in their Applicant Tracking System, and automatically publish that job to Facebook.

Very cool stuff, as Facebook has been one of the hardest nuts to crack when it comes to recruiting, and these integrations should make it easier for employers to start getting their jobs in front of FB users more easily. Facebook won’t be the holy grail for everyone, just as LinkedIn isn’t the holy grail for every employer either, but the potential is there for it to be a very good source for so many that don’t see the pools of talent they need on sites like LinkedIn, or other job boards.

Does your ATS have this integration, or are they working to make it happen? The only way to find out is to actually give them a call and ask that question!

The HR Technology Conference Brings Back Pitchfest!

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So, I’ve written about this in the past, but LRP just announced last week that they will be bringing back The Pitchfest to the 2019 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, October 1 – 4. The Pitchfest was my single favorite event at any conference last year!

What’s the Pitchfest? 

“30 HR technology startups will have the opportunity to present their solution at this year’s conference. In the three preliminary rounds, ten companies will have three minutes to pitch the panel, with an additional two minutes to answer the judges’ follow up questions. Two companies from each round will advance to the Pitchfest final, where the top six will go head to head. Once selected, the overall winner will participate in the conference’s popular “Discovering the Next Great HR Technology Company” session, in addition to taking home a monetary prize from the Randstad Innovation Fund and exhibit space for the 2020 HR Technology Conference & Exposition®.

The preliminary rounds are scheduled for October 1 and 2 with the Pitchfest final on the morning of October 3. Any exhibiting HR Technology Conference & Exposition® startup can submit a Pitchfest application ahead of the June 29, 2019 deadline. Those selected will receive notice no later than August 9, 2019. The online application and additional details can be accessed here. There is no fee to apply.”

Last year I got to judge and Emcee this event. It was amazing to see these startups get on stage and pitch what they had. To hear it from the entrepreneurs themselves, but also see some ideas in HR and Recruiting that no one else on the planet was thinking about was super inspiring.

I would encourage anyone in the HR and TA tech space to click through and check it out. The coverage of the event is worth its weight in gold. The stage was constantly surrounded by a whos-who of HR Tech analyst, influencers, and investors. You cannot get better, more inexpensive, publicity on the planet than making the final cut of thirty and taking your shot at being the one!

The process alone of applying and being selected for the Pitchfest, for any entrepreneur and their team, is invaluable.

Again, I will be attending the HR Technology Conference this fall. I hope to see you there. Also, don’t forget the Women in HR Technology event that happens on the first day of the conference. It’s the largest event specifically designed for women in HR Tech on the planet, and content is tremendous. I’m on a panel for that event as well, getting to share my mother/son experience of working with my Mom at my company, HRU Technical Resources.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @HireOnLinkedIn Launches New “Help Wanted” Service for SMB!

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At LinkedIn Talent Connect last year, LinkedIn talked about how they weren’t satisfied with just helping white-collar workers network and find jobs. They spoke specifically of things in the pipeline that would help SMB employers hire blue collar workers as well. I think we all wondered what that looked like since those who network on LinkedIn’s main platform are not hourly workers for the most part.

This past week LinkedIn launched a “Help Wanted” job posting service aimed at SMB employers:

“Job seekers are looking both online and offline, but managing the flow of applicants — from job-seekers walking directly into your business and those applying online– can be a burden. That’s why we’re excited to roll out a new way to promote your roles offline and help you streamline incoming applications digitally. Now, when you create a LinkedIn Job Post, you can download and print out a “Help Wanted” sign to post in your business window. It directs potential candidates passing by your business to apply to your open positions on LinkedIn.”

If you take a look at the picture above you see what they are talking about. It’s the old school ‘Help Wanted’ signs that many employers would place in their store and business fronts.

I have a feeling there will be some that will make fun of this. It’s not modern. It’s not digital. It speaks to an era long gone by.

The reality is, I think it’s brilliant Recruitment Marketing!

Our job as HR and TA leaders, especially in SMB companies, is to make sure we let as many people as possible that we are hiring. We can do that through modern avenues like digital marketing and social media, but we can’t forget how to capture eyeballs in the environments where people know us best – our own businesses!

I’m a huge fan of old school marketing. When everyone is going one way, the best value and opportunity, many times is to go the opposite. What we know now is to attract talent we have to use every avenue at our disposal and LinkedIn just made it super easy for an organization that might have a modern recruiting platform can now advertise to applicants in a very modern way that allows them to apply to jobs via mobile, with a low cost of entry to make it happen.

Is it perfect? No. Will hourly candidates folk to traditional LinkedIn and build profiles? I don’t think so. But, it shows LinkedIn is serious about helping “all” job seekers and “all” employers in their hiring. First steps are rarely great, but this is a solid start in the understanding of what SMB employers need.

SMB Employers need simple. Post a job. Print a poster. Place it in your window and let your foot traffic work for you. When you lack a sexy employment brand and expensive technology, you have to use what you can afford and what will work in your environment. I think this new focus on SMB employers by LinkedIn is a great step for the industry.