Category Archives: TA Technology

T3 – The 100 Hottest HR and TA Technologies on the Planet #

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My good friend William Tincup (@WilliamTincup) is probably the single smartest person I know in the HR and Talent Technology space, worldwide! That’s saying a lot because this space is filled with smart men and women.

At HR Tech Fest this year, William made a comment on stage that there is roughly 21,000 HR and Talent Technology companies in the world. Seems like a number I can’t even get my head around – I might know 250 or so!

To prove his point, William quickly puts together 100 of the hottest companies on the market and shared them on LinkedIn. Since most of you don’t visit LI but once or twice a month, I wanted to share them here as well.

My suggestion is to demo one of these companies each month. One hour of development per month, 12 hours total for the year. Any of us can do this. Pick out the ones that make the most sense to you, in your role. This will change you professionally. You’ll be smarter. You’ll see what your competition is doing. You’ll begin to think more strategically. Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

Yes, just be looking at, and better understanding the technology that is shaping your profession!

You can meet both William and me at The HR Technology Conference in October. Use the Promo code “SACKETT17” and receive $200 off your rate! Also, check out the HR Tech Insiders Blog for great content before, during and after the event!

This list is alphabetical. None of these organizations are paying me (yet). If you’re not on it, but want to be, connect with William on the Twitters and just ask.

T3 – @ZipRecruiter – They’re not what you expect!

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This week on T3 I review the upstart job board with 6+ million customers, ZipRecruiter! Okay, I have to admit, I wasn’t super excited to review ZipRecruiter. I had heard their commercials at least a million times and I thought I knew exactly what they were. Job board for the lower end paying jobs. I was wrong, and what I found, made me a fan!

ZipRecruiter is a job board with a lot of jobs and great marketing engine behind it. You can turn on the radio, TV, or Podcast without listening to one of their commercials. Their sweet spot is SMBs, the majority of their clients are in that space 2-100 employees, but they also are starting to go upstream as well into larger enterprise clients. Zip didn’t set out to cater to lower paying jobs, under $20/hr, but it is something they’re very good at. Zip is built for volume.

Zip is growing like crazy. Over 3 million jobs on their site, with over 60 million job seekers using their site, and over 40 million email subscribers for job alerts. They built a machine that drives applicant flow in a big way, and in a hurry. 48% of the jobs posted on Zip get a qualified candidate submitted in the first hour! 80% within 24 hours!

ZipRecruiter is also working extremely hard to increase the experience for the job seeker in a way that helps both the seeker and the employer with some of their new functionality that lets a job seeker know if when new jobs come on when employers are looking at their profile, etc. Job seekers are taking notice and coming to Zip by the millions.

Things I really like about ZipRecruiter:

– ZipRecruiter is super cheap to use, so you have to be crazy not to test them out and see if they’re right for you.

– Zip makes it super easy through machine learning to let them know if candidates are meeting the quality you expect or not, with a simple ‘thumbs’ up, thumbs down widget where the algorithm will continue to help flush out more candidates that closely fit your liking.

– In the SMB space, if you don’t have an ATS, you can use ZipRecruiter as your ATS pretty easily, and many do this. Zip now has a ton of jobs that are listed nowhere else on the planet because of all of these small employers only listing their openings on Zip.

– “Online Now” is a function within Zip that allows candidates and employers to know who’s currently active online in the system and employers can reach out and “Chat Now” live with candidates. Employers can even do an ‘Instant Interview’ via video with candidates at the moment if they desire using Zip. Also, candidates will see “application viewed” when an employer looks at their application, so candidates know they didn’t fall into a black hole. This helps make Zips users more active than many other sites.

– ZipRecruiter was one of the few original Google for Jobs integration partners so the jobs you post on Zip will show up high in Googles search results.

– Zip offers an exceptional mobile experience for candidates with one-click apply, text message alerts when new jobs are posted in their area, and skill sets.

I was expecting ‘same old job board’ type of stuff when I sat down to demo ZipRecruiter. What I got in return really surprised me! Zip does not want to be a job board of a decade ago, and they are constantly working to add functions for both candidates and employers to make the experience uniquely their own, and one that is extremely valuable to both parties.

It’s free to test ZipRecruiter, and if it works for you it’s very low cost to use it going forward. It’s really a no-brainer to add this to your list of technology in talent acquisition you need to test. The number of employers using and coming back to use it again says all you need to know about the value ZipRecruiter is delivering.

 

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Recruitment Marketing Isn’t About Automation

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Look, I love everything Recruitment Marketing (RM). It takes two things I’m very passionate about Recruiting and Marketing and puts them both together. I love the creativity and science behind how do you get someone interested in some thing, more specifically how do we get a person interested in coming to work for us.

Recruitment Marketing technology is pretty freaking awesome! I love it as well. But, great RM isn’t about automation. Great RM is about what originally attracts us to anything.

Great RM boils down to only two things:

1. Do you want me?

2. You don’t want me.

I like to think about RM in dating terms. I’ve been married for twenty-five years so my dating references are a bit dated, but I now have sons who are dating so I get a new perspective.

When you like someone a couple of things could happen. One, they like you in return. This could be great for some, but a turn off for some as well. There are two specific things that happen when we date. We want to be wanted and we want to be pursued. So, the second is they don’t like you, and you don’t know why.

Let me give you an example from my own career. I always have wanted to work at Nike. I love their products. I love their brand. I would have been the best employee Nike ever hired! They didn’t want me. That made me want that job even more. Working at Nike is a tough gig to get, which is part of the reason I wanted it.

I did get offers from other organizations that were also great brands. Target was one who offered and pursued hard. Even tried to get me after I turned them down and went to work for Applebee’s. Sent a gift basket to my house before Christmas, 6 weeks after I already started working for Applebees. It felt really, really good to be pursued and wanted by another!

Most of us do the pursuing. If you’re extremely lucky in talent acquisition you have a brand that allows you to be pursued. There aren’t many of these organizations that are wildly pursued by almost everyone. Google, Facebook, Nike, etc. But, we all have a small group of folks who love our brand and organization for whatever reason.

We tend to discount these folks, especially if we have questionable employment brand, to begin with! Why would Charlie want to work here so bad!? Something must be wrong with him! That’s where most TA organizations fail.

If you have Nike’s brand you never question ‘why’ someone wants to work for Nike. It’s Nike! Everyone wants to work for us. If you’re ABC Manufacturing in Wildwood, NJ you question why anyone wants to work for you. It’s crazy, right!? It’s the exact same scenario, one positive, one negative.

All of this has nothing to do with the RM platform you choose. This is about the culture you allow on your TA team. You might not be Nike, but it doesn’t mean you’re not a great opportunity for someone. Leave that up to the person to decide, don’t decide for them!

 

2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference is October 25th in Detroit!

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That’s right gang! We’re back and better than ever!

The 2017 Michigan Recruiter’s Conference will take place on Wednesday, October 25th from 9 am to 4 pm in downtown Detroit onsite at our wonderful corporate host Quicken Loans!

Registration is now open – the cost of this event is $69 per person. This is a corporate talent acquisition event, no agency or third party recruiting pros will be allowed to register. It’s not that we don’t love you all, it’s that this is a development event, not a come pimp us with your services event.

Space will be limited, so please register early if you want a seat. You can transfer registration to another person on your team if plans change.

Who’s on the Agenda I hear you asking yourself! Oh, boy did I hit a few home runs this year!!!

SPEAKERS:

Carmen Hudson, Principle Consultant at Recruiting Toolbox, and Co-Founder of Talent42

Shaunda Zilich, Employment Brand Leader at GE

Will Maurer, Global Talent Acquisition, Sourcing Manager, General Motors

Holly Fawcett, Curriculum Development Manager at Social Talent

Margie Elsesser, VP of Talent Brand & Strategy at Quicken Loans 

Mike Bailen, VP of People at Lever and former Head of Talent for Zappos

Killed it, right?!?!

ERE, SHRM, and TEDx wished they had this line up coming to their events!

Thank you to our sponsors for making this happen – Lever and Quicken Loans.  We could not offer this at such a low price without their financial assistance and support! So, support them!

Can’t wait to see you all in Downtown Detroit! Bringing it to the D!

 

 

 

 

T3 – @HRMarketer Creating Awareness and Interest in Your Brand!

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This week on T3 I take a look at brand awareness solution HR Marketer. I became aware of HR Marketer through their tireless Vice President, Ronda Taylor. If you haven’t met Ronda and you’re in the HR and Talent Technology industry, and you’re in marketing, you’re doing it wrong. Reach out to her! Tell her I sent you (she loves that!). Also, tell her I said to give you a discount (she hates that)!

HR Marketer is a software database platform that does a ton of stuff. It’s part automated content distribution and part research into what’s hot in the industry and how and who is interacting with your brand. As a technology company looking to sell to an HR and TA audience, it’s a tool you must have at your disposal.

HR and TA Technology companies use HR Marketer to help them make better decisions about where they should be selling and who they should be selling to, but also it’s an easy button to automate and keep your content marketing in front of your audience. Do you know what content is getting the most bump for your team? Do you know which analyst and influencers are sharing your stuff the most? Can you give your executives specific metrics on all of this?

HR Marketer delivers all of that and more.

What I like about HR Marketer: 

– You can build ‘schedules’ for various kinds of content you want to be shared on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Then, just drop in the link, add some hashtags and schedule this content to be shared as many times as you want, on the days and times you want for weeks on end. One action delivers the entire schedule.

– Want to know what conferences you should be attending, or you need to get your executives on stage at? HR Marketer tracks over 900 HR and TA conferences world wide, gives you reminders when speaking submissions are due and lets you filter by the factors most important to you.

– Want to get more involved with getting your content shared via media outlets, analyst, and influencers? HR Marketer tracks this group as well and gives you the research of what each specializes in, how to connect with them, and lets you send out announcements to them from the dashboard in bulk.

– Want to know how your brand stacks up against your competition? HR Marketer’s Insights allows you to see how your own brand stacks up but also allows you to compare your brand against others of your choosing. The data is all real time and you can save and send data to your team.

– HR Marketer also has a main dashboard that is configurable to the stuff you want to see about your brand and the part of the industry you want to follow, so each time you login you get a quick snapshot of what’s going on with you and the industry at that moment.

If you’re in HR and TA Technology, HR Marketer is a must demo. The actual cost is a really good value for everything you get. For me, just being able to schedule and track content is worth the price of admission, but there is so much other stuff they have that is super valuable to marketing and sales pros of tech companies within our industry.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

We’re Like the Venmo of Recruiting

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So, for the Gen-X and older folks reading this I first probably need to explain what Venmo is. Venmo is a digital payment system, like PayPal (Venmo is actually owned by PayPal) but different. It’s a mobile app that allows you to make payments between friends and socialize the exchange. Out to dinner, want to easily split the check, one person pays, the others “Venmo” them their share and you get this cool friend feed to see what everyone is doing.

I’ve got three GenZ sons and they Venmo. They don’t carry cash anymore, so when they need to exchange funds with friends, it’s all done on their smartphones.

So, we constantly see talent acquisition and HR technology call themselves the “Tinder” of recruitment, or the “Uber of HR”, or some other stupid comparison to make themselves sound way cooler than they really are. I figured no one is saying they’re the “Venmo” of Recruitment, so what the hell, I’m stealing it before anyone else can!

Here’s my Venmo for Recruiting product. It’s a mobile, crowd-sourced app that shows your network where everyone is interviewing and allows you to share information, contacts, questions, reactions, etc. of your interview experience. Candidates can crowd source positions with each other, ask for help in making connections with companies they’re interviewing with, and share how a certain hiring manager might be to work for.

I’m going to start there. Only candidates, no employers, to build traction. Completely free, I’ll live off my angel funding for the first three years on our way to 50 million users. Then, we turn on the employer portion, ala Glassdoor but better, that will allow employers to see what networks are saying about them and their jobs, but not allow any responses or interactions.

You get to see this new voyeuristic kind of experience that is hidden camera in nature to know what candidates truly think about your organization, your hiring managers, your interview experience, your jobs, etc. Then, it’s up to you to make some decisions on how to change what you don’t like, highlight what’s going well, and basically find ways to use the data from our “Venmo of Recruiting” (it’s trademarked!).

If I know anything, I know TA leaders will pay for inside information to what candidates truly think about them. They’ll pay a lot! Also, they’ll continue to pay to see how that data changes with the changes they make. How cool would it be to have this kind of lab environment and be able to test out pieces of your candidate experience and see real-time feedback?

Also, how cool would it be to have a network sharing real information about interviewing, jobs, organizations, etc., on a mobile platform within your trusted network if you’re a candidate? Venmo for Recruiting. I’m calling it “FeedMo.us” – Feedback and More.

Feedmo.us is now taking meetings with angel investors. Just send me a note if you’re interested in being a part of Venmo for Recruiting!

Midwest Recruiter’s Bootcamp! Minneapolis July 31st-Aug 1 (LAST CALL!)

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My good friend and recruiting guru, Paul DeBettignies, is hosting the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp in Minneapolis next week, and he asked me to come and speak at it. He also asked some of the top recruiting minds in the business as well! The camp is next week July 31st and August 1st in Minneapolis, and you can still register and be apart of this!

Check out this list:

  • Maren Hogan – Create Winning Employer Brand for Knockout Recruitment
  • Jim Durbin – 8 Mistakes You’re Making: The New Rules Of LinkedIn
  • Shannon Pritchett – In OR out? Creative Sourcing Techniques to Find Your Candidates OUTside the box
  • Caroline Karanja – 10 ways to build diversity, practice inclusion and increase engagement within your organization
  • Paul himself – Create and Grow Your Recruiter Brand
  • Nick Roseth – Selling Minnesota: Strategies And Tools to Improve Recruiting To The Region
  • And me – hugging mostly! Okay, not really, I’m going to be sharing the 10 Truths Of Recruiting And Why You Are Failing At Them! And, how you can not fail at them!

When Paul first talked to me about the concept of the Midwest Recruiting Bootcamp I knew instantly it would be a hit and something I wanted to be apart of! Why? This is real Recruiting development for recruiting teams! It’s what I wanted to bring to Michigan with the Michigan Recruiter’s Conference.

National level development and speakers, in our own backyard! 

Paul let me know today he still has some space open for any recruiter’s or recruiting managers who want to join us. We’ll be onsite at the University of Minnesota. It’s two days that are packed with great material. If you can’t make both days – come one day, then send someone else on your team the other day! Or just come one day – you’ll still get a ton out of it!

REGISTER FOR MIDWEST RECRUITING BOOTCAMP! 

This might be the biggest bang for the buck in recruiter training budget history!

Here’s Paul telling us a little more:

The 7 Forgotten Tools of Recruiting

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Join me on Wednesday, July 26, 11 am PT / 2 pm ET to talk Forgotten Recruiting Tools! 

These days, recruiting moves so fast and is filled with so much technology that it can be difficult to remember what works best and what’s a passing shiny object.
In this free webinar, I’ll dig into some tried and true ways that have been forgotten by most organizations when it comes to attracting and recruiting great talent, and some newer techniques that people will probably want to go back and take a second look at!
  • Simple ways to discover untapped talent pools
  • Connect with more candidates 100% of the time
  • The single most valuable tool in recruiting that you already have, but probably aren’t using!
  • Along with some new tools to add to your toolbox

 

Plus, much, much more!

 

Old school, new school, just plain old good school, my hope is you’ll leave this webinar with some new ideas on using some old tools you already have at your disposal but just stop using and never really used, to begin with. This webinar is a great presentation for recruiting leaders and recruiting pros alike.

 

This webinar is sponsored by the great folks over at Jobvite, but all the content is 100% my own! Also, I’m leaving some time at the end for some open Q & A – so bring all those questions you’ve been dying to ask! See you on Wednesday!

 

REGISTER TODAY! 

T3 – @Ongig Transform Your Job Descriptions

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This week on T3 I review the video job description platform Ongig. I first ran into Ongig when their co-founder and CEO, Rob Kelly, started posting some great content around the ATS market and which ATS systems were being used most. I’ve used Rob’s data at least half a dozen times for posts of my own! (Top 70 ATSs on the Market) 

So, I knew of Rob before I knew of Ongig. Because I liked the great content Rob was putting out and I wanted to know more about him and his company and what I found was really impressive! Ongig takes your boring, static job descriptions and turns them into dynamic digital job ads that match your employment brand and drive more candidates to your organization.

Ongig isn’t the only company on the market that can do this and I’ve highlighted others on T3, but the Ongig has taken a few more steps others haven’t. They’ve figured out how to integrate these within your ATS environment, not outside it, thus capturing and driving all this traffic back into your one system and process. That’s huge. It’s great to have great looking digital job descriptions, but it doesn’t do me a ton of good if they’re just sitting there outside my current process.

What I like about Ongig:

– Every ATS has the same issue, the job description pages are usually boring and plain. Ongig shows you and lets you build great job description pages for each job that are multimedia enabled with video and much more.

– The platform is easy to use and intuitive. Simply drag and drop your own pictures and media within the platform to control your own media management.

– ATS integration is paramount. It’s not enough to just have great digital job descriptions with video. You also need to be able to drive all those applicants into your current process to capture. Too many clicks and all that great looking video and branding is meaningless. Ongig is currently working with Taleo, Brassring, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc. The more open the API of the ATS the easier it is to pull off this integration.

– “App Store” type experience. Want to add a “Join our Talent Community” to your career site, JDs, etc. Ongig can support third-party talent community widgets or embed their Talent Community widget. Work Testimonials built into your JDs and career site? Sure, if that’s what you want. Glassdoor comment stream on your career site? Yep. Purpose driven mission statements on every JD? Not a problem. Pick and choose which features you want with rather ease. Chatbots, social sign-in, maps, walkscore, etc.

– Have an ATS that forces each applicant to register and you just want single-click to apply? Ongig can build that out for you as well.

Too often I run into TA executives who have their tech stack fairly determined for a number of reasons (long contract, limited budget, etc.), but they still have a need and a desire to add a bunch of stuff that candidates expect. Ongig has the ability to prop up these kinds of processes through their job description platform.

Clearly, the ability to add video to job descriptions and make them dynamic is Ongig’s bread and butter, but really Rob and the team can do so much more. If you have god awful boring job descriptions, need more functionality than you have with your career site and JDs, Ongig is worth 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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

T3 – @Teamableme – Recruit the Best Talent from your Employees Networks

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This week on T3 I review the employee referral technology Teamable. I’ve been a big fan of employee referral technology for a few years now, so I thought I already knew what Teamable was before I demoed. What I found was Employee Referral Automation 2.0!

Jobvite kind of created the industry of employee referral automation and leveraging your employee’s social media networks. For the money and the ROI, employee referral automation is still the most underutilized technology in talent acquisition. Almost every TA leader will tell you employee referrals are their highest quality hires and one of their top sources, but the spend almost zero dollars on technology to better these stats! It’s completely insane!

So, Teamable takes employee referral automation and says, how do we make it better? What do current users of employee referral automation like, and what do they wish they had that they don’t with this tech, and what is no one doing with this tech? This is what I think will ultimately set Teamable apart from other players in the space of employee referral automation is their innovation and ability to show organizations new ways to leverage this technology.

Teamable also found a game changer when it comes to using their technology to potentially increase your organization’s diversity hiring. That’s huge!

What I like about Teamable:

– Employees in your organization have the ability to see both the referrals they’ve made and what’s going on with them, but also those they’ve requested and where those are at as well. It’s one of the major gripes employees have after making a referral, that they don’t know what going on with it.

– Gamification is integrated very well into the dashboard showing a leaderboard of most referrals, which employees are most active, which employees have the most connected network, etc.

– The ability to segment out within your organization which employees you want to send specific job postings to. Why is that important? Diversity hires more diversity. Let’s say you had an opening for a Sales Rep. Your team was top heavy with dudes and you wanted more females. Instead of sending out this posting to all the sales reps you only sent it to your other female sales reps. What would happen? More than likely the referrals that came back with other female referrals. It’s not a guarantee, but the percentages are pretty good. BTW – works with any segment of your employees!

– ATS integrations already built for Jobvite, iCims, Lever, Greenhouse, etc. and Teamable will give you a visual cue if the person being referred is already in your current ATS, which is super helpful in letting those who referred know as soon as possible.

– Great UI/UX with their dashboard and ability to pull metrics and see the full funnel.

If you don’t have employee referral automation this is a must demo. I don’t know how to make that any clearer, this technology is a game changer for hiring more employees for less money and higher quality. I’m shocked that it’s not used by 100% of organizations who rely on and desire more referrals.

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 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net