Category Archives: Recruitment Marketing

The 2016 Fall Michigan Recruiter’s Conference!

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This is the third annual conference we’ve done and they just keep getting bigger and better! We’ll have 150 Corporate TA Pros and Leaders joining us this conference, all working to become the best damn TA pros we can be!

This year’s lineup includes:

– Laurie Ruettimann – Mrs. Punkrock HR-Cynical Girl-Marathon Runner!

– Gerry Crispin – The Godfather of Candidate Experience & Co-Founder of CareerXRoads!

– Ambrosia Vertesi – Mrs. HR Open Source

– Chris Bailey – Mr. TEDx Seven Mile Beach, the King of Cayman Islands HR & Anything Over Ice!

– Kerri Mills – 2015 SourceCon Grandmaster Sourcing Champion, Indeed TA Pro & @TheJobGirl

Friday, October 14th onsite at the Amway World Headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan!  You can check out more details here – Michigan Recruits! 

Registration is now open! It’s $49! Why?  Because we think paying thousands of dollars to attend a great conference is out of reach for most Talent Acquisition budgets! At least it was in almost every organization I went to!  We wanted to bring great recruiting content, national level content, to our own backyard in Michigan!

REGISTER HERE! (It’s filling up quickly, we have limited space!)

We’ve designed this conference to be a corporate Talent Acquisition safe-zone! What does that mean?  Third party agency recruiters will not be invited. It’s not that we don’t like the agency folks. It’s that agency folks can’t shut themselves off when it comes to selling!  We want an environment that is about learning and development, about raising the recruiting game of all those attending.

Check it out! You won’t find a better one-day lineup anywhere in the world for $49! It’s crazy. Also, a big shout out to our two main sponsors – ViziRecruiter and CareerBuilder – without them we couldn’t keep it this cheap!

 

Transform Your Recruitment Marketing

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I’m headed off to Boston this fall, November 2-4 to Emcee the 1st ever Recruitment Marketing Conference, called Transform! Developed by the great team over at Smashfly, this is not a user conference this is a pilgrimage of the top recruitment marketing minds in the world being brought together in one place! I’m super geeked! I’m nerdy that way!

You can register now for the early bird pricing of $795, plus if you use the super awesome code TIMSACK you can get an extra $50off and a personal, not creepy hug from me until August 31st. After that is jumps up to $1195. So don’t wait, book it now! We can all show-up and make fun of Boston accents and say stupid stuff like, “wicked smart”.

So, besides the not creepy hug by me, what else will you get? Check it:

– Mel Robbins keynoting! – CNN commentator, author, and TEDx famous for her “How to stop screwing yourself over!”

– Great Practitioner-led content sessions on, developing your RM strategy, increasing your candidate experience, how multiple organizations built their RM from the ground-up, and the hottest trends in RM today that you’ll be killing your competition with tomorrow!

– Tom Cheesewright – A futurist keynote on how you can shape your own future outcomes!

– Plus, so much more, the agenda is packed!

Session I’m most looking forward to?

Shaunda Zilich from GE telling us how she and her team at GE built a billion dollar recruitment brand with $0 budget! We all love to think big brands have big dollars for marketing, and they do! But, not for recruitment marketing! GE’s recruitment marketing story is fascinating! 

If you’re in recruitment marketing, responsible for recruitment marketing, or just need to get better at recruitment marketing this is a must-attend conference! 

Inbound Recruiting Is Killing Your Talent

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Most recruiting done today is inbound recruiting. This is organizations posting jobs everywhere, people seeing these jobs and then applying. These candidates are coming ‘inbound’ to you in some form or fashion – into your ATS, into your email, showing up at your front door, whatever it takes for them to find you.

Outbound, then, is the opposite. It’s you finding them.

Too much inbound recruiting kills your overall talent.

Why?

Inbound recruiting relies on active applicants. There are hundreds of studies about who is actually active, but most fall around the 20-25% of the total workforce are actively looking for a new job (this includes those unemployed looking and employed). So, you’re filling most of your jobs with 20-25% of the overall talent that is available.

You aren’t even touching 75-80% of the total workforce by using inbound recruiting. But, Inbound Recruiting is great because that 25% is still a huge number and boy can we still get a bunch of applicants and, well, it’s easier.

I don’t have stats on this (if you find them please share!) but I would guess 90% of organizations only use Inbound Recruiting!

Now, a bunch of people will tell you that ‘active’ applicants aren’t the only thing. CareerBuilder’s Talent Behavior study recently found that if you combine Active and Those Open to Hearing About Openings that number climbs from 25% to 75%! Okay, now we’re talking! The problem is that extra 50% isn’t responding to your Inbound Strategy!

To get the full 75% of the workforce who might be interested in your job you must have outbound recruiting strategies. These include getting your butt on the phone and talking people into why you’re the best damn place on the planet to work! These people might actually love you as much as those people who are freely sending you their resume, but they’re waiting for you to contact them!

This is confusing to many people in Talent Acquisition.

If you only post jobs and wait to see who applies to your posts, no matter how many places you post, you’re only possibly getting 1 out of 4 possible candidates.  In a perfect scenario of using both inbound and outbound, you could get 3 out of 4. No one gets 4 out of 4 because about a quarter of the workforce is considered truly passive, meaning you and G*d couldn’t talk them into leaving their current job.

Also, you calling a candidate who has applied to your job is not considered outbound recruiting! You need to go out and find talent that doesn’t even know you have a job opening and entice them to apply, to fall in love with you, to show interest! This is ‘real’ recruiting. This is the recruiting most organizations have lost, or never had, to begin with.

This is why sourcing became a thing. Sourcing, in its best form in a corporate structure, is only about outbound recruiting. About uncovering that talent that most organizations aren’t even going after and getting them interested in your organization.

The interesting piece to all of this is annual TA spend. Take a look at your own inbound vs. outbound spend. What I find is most organizations tell me they want the best talent but they are spending the majority of their budget going after the minority of the talent. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, the majority of your budget going after the majority of talent?

T3- @WeVue – Where Culture Comes to Life

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This week on T3 I review the employment branding/culture mobile app WeVue. WeVue is a mobile app that enhances the experience of being on a team by bringing company culture to life through the power of photo and video sharing. It’s a mobile platform that turns your entire employee base into one big social network of sharing and communication.

It has a little Snapchat/Instagram Stories feel to it, but with a lot more functionality to communicate amongst teams. An employee gets started on WeVue by downloading the app and using their work email address as their way into company side of WeVue. From there the first thing they are taught to do is a step-by-step process of making a video of themselves for everyone in the organization to view, share and comment (think great first-day orientation exercises!).

WeVue allows your employees to share their stories and experiences with your organization simply and effectively. The platform also allows the team, or an individual, to celebrate accomplishments, start events, give positive feedback, etc. They can push these notifications to individuals, teams or the entire organization.

5 Things I really like about WeVue: 

1. WeVue is a mobile platform that has a very familiar UI/UX for most employees who are familiar with using social apps on mobile. This makes it user adoption much easier because almost everyone will download and immediately be able to begin using the app and setting up their profile.

2. I love that WeVue starts out by having each employee making an introduction video. This has so many applications to begin great orientations and make people feel instantly welcome in your environment. The profile can also be easily changed and added to as an employee sees fit.

3.  Ask questions/Get Feedback. WeVue’s platform allows users to ask questions and gather feedback quickly and easily. App admins at your organization can control access and whether you want this to be anonymous or open, also who can ask questions can also be controlled by company admins.

4. Culture Feed. WeVue has a timeline type function where most of your employees will spend time on the app, this is your ‘Cultural Feed’. As people share items, give shout-outs to each other, etc., all will be seen by the entire company here (similar to a FB timeline). Also, you can Broadcast announcements on the app, one-way communication by leadership, HR, marketing, etc.

5. Social share to a custom landing page. The app allows users to share information and you can have it go to a custom landing page, like maybe your career site!  This easily allows you to share your culture with perspective candidates and drive additional traffic to where you want it.

WeVue is an organizational culture app.  Designed for organizations who want to share and drive a strong sense of what and who they are as an organization. As companies grow quickly this is one of the first things that gets lost, and once it’s gone, it’s almost impossible to get back. This helps companies stay small, as they get big, and let’s big companies seem a bit smaller. WeVue is like having your own private social media site for your employees.

Check out WeVue. Easy quick demo. Fairly inexpensive for what you get and can build in terms of culture. I’m a huge believer in letting your employees be your brand advocates through sharing their stories at work, and WeVue makes this very easy.

How WeVue changed Logan’s career? from NiceGuy with a HeadFull of Ideas on Vimeo.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great HR, recruiting, and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Recruiting Secret #36

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, but I will!

Recruiting Secret #36 – 

Most hires you will make as a recruiter will find you. You don’t find them.

The secret is to make it easy for them to find you!

There is still a prevailing idea in recruiting, especially on the corporate side, you should make it difficult for candidates to be able to get in touch with and find you. Great recruiters. The best recruiters in any industry, are easy to find.

Are you?

 

How did Monster Lose Out in the Job Board Wars?

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I’ve been a Monster customer for at least fifteen years.  I’ve used Monster in four different companies that I’ve worked for. I also use (or have used) CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, Indeed, and Dice. So, I’ve got experience dealing with large spends on the Job Board side.

Having a presence on Job Boards is part of almost every recruiting strategy that’s out there, it’s one place most organizations need to be, I truly believe that. If you’re not, you’re going to miss a pool of talent.

For those who don’t know Monster was purchased this week by multi-national staffing and RPO firm Randstad. I’m not going to speculate on why Randstad would buy Monster, but there’s no doubt Monster had a ton of data and clients that a staffing firm would find desirable.

My question is why did Monster lose out in the Job Board Wars?

In the big Job Board game, there are really only three players: CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, and Monster. Dice and a bunch of niche players in that category will always be around if they can actually attract talent to their niche. Here is the reason I think Monster couldn’t keep pace with CB and LI:

The Sales Team: Flat out job boards need to sell job postings, resume database memberships, branding opportunities, etc. CB and LI are modern day sales sweatshops! Monster barely recognizes I’m a customer and a fifteen-year customer. I know three levels of CB sales people on my account. I can’t tell you the last time I even got an email or call from Monster! LI is similar to CB. They constantly hawk me to buy.  In a game of three, the ones who can outsell the others will win.

At least quarterly I sit down live or on a call with my CB rep to take a look at metrics and how my team is utilizing their platform. Did I mention I never get a call from Monster? During these calls with CB I get numerous suggestions on how we can get better. Many times they’re trying to upsell me for more product, sometimes that works.

I get contacted from LI at least six times a year on various solution selling types of things for my business. I get invited to webinars constantly. The CRM machine for LI is strong. A little different than CB, which is more high touch, but LI’s selling automation is relentless.  As is Indeed’s. Indeed is another player in this game that has made all the job board players up their game. Their sales team took a page right out of CB’s selling book. I get at least a call a month from CB.

I got one call from Monster last year. It was to renew my contract. The call came from a person who I didn’t know and who didn’t know who I was or my business.

You can have the best brand (and I would argue of all the job boards Monster has the best brand), the best technology and the coolest stuffed animals to give away, but if you don’t sell, you’re going to get bought by a staffing firm for pennies on the dollar of what you really could be worth.

 

T3 – @Ratedly

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This week on T3 I review the anonymous employee review monitoring mobile app Ratedly. Ratedly is the brainchild of the godfather of recruiting thought leadership, Joel Cheesman.  When I entered this game eight years ago there were like four people in the world that talked about the Recruiting Industry and Joel was one of those folks, so he knows the industry very well.

Ratedly was built for HR leaders to be able to monitor employee review sites. When we hear that, most of us will only think of Glassdoor, but there are literally dozens of sites with employee reviews and new ones popping up weekly. Indeed now rivals Glassdoor with the number of reviews they have, and niche sites like InHerSight, AARP, and other local sites are collecting millions of employer reviews. Heck, it even monitors Twitter for notifications about your organization.

The problem will all of this is it becomes too time-consuming to monitor all of these sites and respond in a fashion that is representative of your employment brand. On top of being able to monitor, these sites run 24/7/365, and most of our HR and TA teams don’t! Yet, our executives want these reviews, especially the negative ones, responded to immediately!

Ratedly was built on a native mobile platform, meaning it’s built to be used on smartphones and tablets. It was done this way because of the expectation that whomever in your organization was responsible for this, more than likely, they would want 24/7 access to these reviews the moment they came in, with the ability to share with others in the organization, and be able to respond in real-time.

5 Things I like about Ratedly:

1. The UX is designed to be similar to a news feed you’ll find on many other apps, so the feel is very familiar and easy to use. Ratedly allows you to scroll through your employer reviews all in one spot, at the same time.

2. Bookmarking. On the Ratedly app you can easily bookmark reviews to go back to later and find them quickly. On each review, you will also have access to read the full review, see job title, location, star rating, etc.

3. Share feature. Ratedly easily allows you to share reviews from the app with hiring managers, executives, etc. Some organizations have the leader responsible respond, some have one department like TA respond, regardless of your process, Ratedly allows you to share with whoever you want, immediately.

4. Ratedly puts the monitoring of all of these review sites in one simple easy to use app. No longer does your employment branding team need to check into all of these sites on a daily basis. Or, like most organizations, you’re lucky to check in once or twice per month, and see some bad review that’s been sitting there for weeks!

5. It’s really inexpensive for the service that it offers! $149 per month, is peanuts for when it comes to protecting your employment brand. Most organizations have so much invested in their brand, and Ratedly becomes an inexpensive way to ensure that investment doesn’t blow up overnight!

Ratedly seems to be a technology that larger to enterprise level organizations would definitely have an interest in. If I was running employment branding for a multi-national I would definitely have it in my tool chest. The price point, though, really allows SMBs to come and play as well, especially those smaller startups who are in highly competitive environments and their brand is everything to getting talent. Well worth taking a look!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

2016’s Newest Benefit – Baby Sign-on Bonuses!

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According to this USA Today article, the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here are probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons one might be concerned that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees today. Imagine if you now have millions of fewer workers to even choose from, and by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them as well.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be

That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment but this will be an HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent, Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically, my advice remains the same as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself.  But as we look at countries with low birthrates the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now. We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest

I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the toughest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We already do it for college students! I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kid’s marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

In Recruiting, Content Is NOT King!

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Something happened over the past five years. Content marketing, which is a brilliant way to connect with a customer base and build sales, became very fashionable in the recruiting space.  So much so, that I constantly read vendors telling in the trenches Talent Acquisition pros and leaders:

“In Recruiting, content is king!”

No. No, it is not! In recruiting, activity is king.  I think the confusion comes into play with people treating employment branding and recruiting as the same thing. They’re not the same thing. One build’s awareness of who you are and what kind of employer you might be, possibly you can stretch employment branding into awareness of your job openings as well.

Content in employment branding is important if you’re doing content recruitment marketing. Again, you don’t have to do this to do employment branding. Many organizations build their brand without content. If you have a great consumer brand, you are less likely to need content to build your employment brand.

I’m not against producing great content to build your brand, believe me! It can be super helpful, especially if you don’t have a larger consumer brand behind you.

The point is you can be awesome in recruiting and never produce a single piece of content. I see so many TA shops missing this right now. The question is why? Why are TA shops believing that the only way to recruit is to build content and build an audience?

Employer Branding is a huge business right now! Organizations are spending millions of dollars per year to build, maintain and grow their employment brand. For huge organizations, or organizations in highly competitive environments, this is very important. For many organizations, this is a complete waste of time and resources!

The noise in the employment branding space is so loud right now, most organizations are not going to be heard. In that case, why are you spending the resources? You’re doing this because it’s easier than picking up a phone and calling a candidate! That’s recruiting.

Recruiting are the activities you do to hire people for the jobs you have open. Included in those activities are not only candidate attraction but candidate interaction. Candidate interaction, the function of a recruiter interacting with a candidate, might be the most forgotten skill in all of Talent Acquisition.

The skill of interacting with a live person is lost on most talent acquisition shops. Sure you can connect with candidates via email, messaging, text, twitter, Snapchat, etc. Eventually, though, someone has to speak to a live person. Someone has to close this person on coming to work for you. We, the talent acquisition industry, continue to spend less and less time on this side of our business, and it’s showing.

Great recruiting organizations are activity focused and activity driven. Sales funnel. Candidates come in the top, and hires come out the bottom. It’s not difficult. It’s not art. It’s a process. It’s metrics. Teach your recruiters to be able to engage live people on the front side, and you will see a great return on that investment in more hires. No content needed.

 

 

5 Instagram Filters That Will Make HR Better at Recruiting!

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You know it’s true—you’re a great HR Pro, but you don’t really like to recruit. That’s okay, because you’re good at a million other things your company values.

But here’s the thing: A recent Deloitte report outlined the need for HR Pros to grow their skills beyond what our functional area is traditionally known for. CEOs and division heads are expecting different things from HR, and one of those areas of need is… you guessed it… Talent Acquisition/Recruiting.

(Cue the lighting, adjust the crop and apply the filter—BAM. Insta-recruiter. There’s nothing that an Instagram filter can’t transform!)

The Fistful of Talent crew is back with the following webinar, “Instagramming HR: 5 Filters HR Pros Can Use To Transform Into Better Recruiters“ (sponsored by the good folks at Jobvite). Join Dawn Burke and Kris Dunn on June 29th at 2pm EST, and they’ll hit you with the following goodies:

–A review of why leaders report the need for HR re-skilling and why recruiting rises to the top of the list for HR pros and generalists at all levels.

–Data on how talent acquisition is a key component to achieving results in the modern workforce—including areas that HR Pros love to talk about (employee engagement, retention, etc).

–A breakdown of how recruiting has become more challenging in the last 5-10 years, and why the methods HR Pros have traditionally used to recruit aren’t as effective today.

–5 key strategies that HR Pros can embrace to modernize their approach to recruiting, get better results for their organizations and be viewed as high potential by the leaders they serve. We’ll go over those strategies and tell you how to get started with each of them.

The HR Pros at FOT know you work hard and are good at what you do. You don’t have to love recruiting as an HR Pro; you just have to be good enough at it to ensure it doesn’t hurt your career. With a little editing and the perfect lighting (Nashville, amIright?) you can bring out your inner recruiter in no time.

Click here to join us for “Instagramming HR: 5 Filters HR Pros Can Use To Transform Into Better Recruiters“ on June 29th at 2pm EST, and we’ll show how to ramp up your recruiting game without giving up the things you love to do as an HR Pro!!

REGISTER TODAY!