Social Recruiting & The Unexpected Benefits of Transparency

When it comes to social recruiting there are often unexpected benefits (and to be fair there are normally a few unexpected challenges), but hey, I’m focusing on the positives for this post.  Some of these benefits come from the additional transparency in the recruitment process that being social can generate.

Consider the extract below from a recent LinkedIn recruitment campaign we were working on. For this particular campaign the client was generating a large number of jobs abroad. In addition to attracting locals for the roles, they also wanted to encourage relevant industry professionals that were UK based to relocate.

Relocation is often a big decision for candidates and therefore a number of facebook and LinkedIn groups were set up, specifically to encourage potential candidates to voice any questions to recruiters that they may have (relocation assistance, what is it like living there etc) before actually applying for the roles.

The initial idea was simply to generate a bit of engagement, allow candidates more info and insight into working abroad and therefore improve the number of candidates actually completing applications.  As this extract is from a closed group, in the interests of privacy, certain details (names etc) have been omitted.

The candidate:

The recruiter response and candidate reply:

The internal recruiter followed up with the candidate who identified the recruitment agency and the specific consultant in question.  Needless to say, the agency swiftly received a phone call from a non-too happy client (possibly former client by now I would imagine). Unfortunately such practices may have been going on for some time, resulting in unnecessary fees for the client.

Before the groups had been set up, candidates had little chance of contacting any recruiters directly as the application process was purely via an ATS. As you can see from the example above (which is one of many I could mention) the transparency that being social provides means you are more likely to identify kinks in the recruitment process quickly.

So,  if you do decide to use social media to make the recruitment process more transparent and engaging; there are likely to be benefits you hadn’t even thought of.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Direct Sourcing, Employee Engagement, In-House Recruiting, Jean-Paul Smalls, Linkedin Recruiting, Online Recruitment, Social Media, Social Media Recruitment, social recruiting, Vonq, vonq uk

LinkedIn Job Listings – Some Useful Insights (maybe….)

Recently, I decided to add to my team and hire a senior business development manager into the mix.  As is always the case with most businesses, I wanted a great candidate who could start yesterday.  I took a dual approach; firstly I leveraged my own network via referrals and my personal social media presence.  Secondly I distributed the vacancy across a number of job boards combining niche sales sites, popular generalist boards, LinkedIn, and the Bullhorn Reach platform.

In this instance, the candidate who eventually got the job ended up coming from my own LinkedIn network.  They had simply noticed one of my LinkedIn status updates regarding the new position and got in touch.

After benchmarking the performance of the various platforms used for this recruitment campaign, I thought I’d share some insight  from my own experience into the performance of LinkedIn job listings.  When I refer to LinkedIn job listings, I’m talking about using the actual job posting functionality which tags the job to your LinkedIn company careers page as opposed to a status update, or posting a careers discussion within a group.  Also it’s worth noting, I’ve compiled this data from a reporting element of the LinkedIn recruiter suite which is still in Beta.

With standard job listings, most will agree that you are predominantly targeting active candidates.  What I find interesting about LinkedIn job listings however, is how passive candidates appear to be discovering them.

Take my BD job for example.  It received 140 apply clicks from 2838 views, however only 12% of the people viewing the job actually originated from active job searching within LinkedIn.  46% of views originated from the job being suggested to users based on their profiles and LinkedIn’s matching algorithm (so not necessarily active candidates).  The remaining 42% of views originated from social sharing, Google, Linkedin groups etc (I suspect part of the traffic from this 42% involves aggregator sites delivering active job seekers).  Either way there is good reason to believe that a decent number of passive candidates discovered my job.

Example 1 – BD Manager – London

After crunching some numbers on several other roles based not just in the UK, but elsewhere in Europe, a similar pattern emerges with the vast majority of the roles not being found via active searching.

Example 2 – Project Manager (Prince 2 Qualified) – London 

This particular project manager position benefited from a higher sharing rate than normal (it was forwarded 15 times and posted within the LinkedIn network an additional 15 times) but again the amount of views originating from active job searching appears to be quite low, only 20%, compared to 35% that had the job suggested to them.

Example 3 – HR Business Partner – London

This HR vacancy generated one of the highest volumes of active job seekers, although again over 6o% of the views originated elsewhere.

Looking at Holland & Belgium it was a similar story, indicating that a large proportion of the candidates viewing the roles were not actively searching for jobs.

Example 4 – Senior Project Manager – Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Example 5 – Online Marketing Specialist, Diegem, Belgium

These are just a small number of examples I’ve pulled out based on several hundred listings.  In each case though the pattern is similar with active job searching accounting for somewhere between 20-40% of overall job views.

In summary, based on my usage of the LinkedIn platform, there are more effective and engaging LinkedIn recruitment tactics for hiring that elusive passive candidate, however as an element in a wider strategy I’ve found the use of LinkedIn job listings  to be consistently useful, and the data insightful.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Direct Sourcing, In-House Recruiting, In-House Recruitment, Jean-Paul Smalls, Linkedin Recruiting, Linkedin Recruitment, LinkedIn Recruitment Case Study, Online Recruitment, Online Recruitment Case Study, Recruiting with LinkedIn, recruitment research, Social Media Recruitment, Vonq, vonq uk

Recruiting with Bullhorn Reach – Leveraging Your Social Network Connections

At the beginning of February I received an interesting email to test out the beta version of a recruiting application called Bullhorn Reach (from Bullhorn Inc., the US-based staffing & recruiting software company).  In their own words Bullhorn Reach “helps hiring managers, employees and recruiters leverage their social network connections and search engines to find great candidates.”  This was a timely email, as I just happened to be hiring for a bilingual marketing assistant, so decided to give it a try.

So I signed up at www.bullhornreach.com and the first thing you are prompted to do is connect up to your main social network profiles, those being LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.

Once your social networks are integrated you have the option to flesh out your profile by adding some information about yourself, skills, experience etc.  So how does this application exactly leverage my social networks to help me recruit my marketing assistant?  Firstly I can post my job to the Bullhorn Reach (BHR) platform and simultaneously distribute the role to LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter.  I can also share the job with my LinkedIn connections and within LinkedIn groups.

Now there is nothing special about being able to simultaneously update multiple social media platforms with jobs, many existing applications have done that for a while now.  However BHR also makes use of SEO techniques to help jobs distributed within the system be found organically within external search engines such as Google, Bing etc.  I’m not sure of all the ways it does this, but I could see that jobs posted are picked up by aggregator sites such as Trovit.  Bill Boorman’s ‘Recruiting Gun’ blog article Just how social is Bullhorn Reach #socialrecruiting goes into a bit more detail via a video from Bullhorn.

The most intriguing aspect of BHR is the “Radar” section.  The radar helps you stay up to date with changes in your network.  Specifically The radar highlights people who have recently been promoted, made updates to their profiles, recently changed companies and, most significantly, those that are looking for a new job (It says “Looking for a Job” but really this is a suggestive determination).

I really like the concept of the radar and being able to see major changes across my networks at a glance.  I think it has several limitations though.  From what I could deduce It appears to use an algorithm that looks at the frequency  of updates someone in your network is making to their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles such as recommendations, work history etc, over a period of time to suggest they are looking for a job.  I did not find the latter list particularly accurate (I suppose only time will tell).  Many of the profiles in my list tended to be independent consultants or company directors that are constantly building referrals and keeping their profiles fresh. Also given I was working on a marketing position, it would have been really useful if there was an option to segment my network into different lists to monitor.  This way as a recruiter, I could specifically keep an eye on the profiles most relevant to the job I’m working on.

From a European perspective I think it would be great if I had the option to integrate other professional networks such as Viadeo and XING in addition to LinkedIn.  Being able to see my key network updates in one place across various professional networks (and being able to segment them) would be useful for EMEA recruiters who recruit across several countries and sometimes use more than one professional network.

Bearing in mind the above criticisms, this is a beta version and no doubt there is additional functionality in the pipeline.  Also I may be a hiring manager but I’m not a full time recruiter, so am not best placed to get the maximum long term benefits from the application.  There are other features such as being able to share articles with Bullhorn users and adding info on hiring projects you have completed to build up your credibility as a recruiter.  Overall I think it’s a slick looking and simple to use recruiting tool.  I like the radar idea and the ability to distribute your jobs with SEO incorporated (without having to understand the technicalities) will definitely provide value to recruiters.

Results

BHR was one of several channels I used to help attract candidates for my marketing assistant role, so how did it fair?

BHR automatically provides tracking data regarding the sources your jobs are viewed from.  Over the course of a week (the job was only advertised for a week) I received two applications via BHR.  Not many, but both were strong candidates and one was short-listed for interview.  Twitter & Trovit.com generated over 60% of the views between them for my job.  LinkedIn generated 18% of views, Facebook provided the lowest number of views with 1%, and 16% came from unidentifiable sources.

Taking into account all channels used, overall I received 405 applications in 7 days, a breakdown of the campaign is below:

Sources & Applications

• BHR – 2 applications (1 shortlisted for interview)
• VONQ website  – 6 applications  (1 shortlisted for interview)
• Reed – 122 applications – (1 shortlisted for interview)
• Top Language Jobs – 171 applications (4 shortlisted for interview)
• Totaljobs 104 applications (5 shortlisted for interview)

The candidate I eventually hired came from Totaljobs, a popular site for the type of bilingual  graduate position I was recruiting for.  I did not make the hire specifically from my BHR trial, but it still added value to the process and I would use it again.

Tags: Bullhorn Reach, Facebook Recruitment, Foursquare Recruitment, Linkedin Recruiting, Recruitment tools, social recruiting, Twitter Recruitment, Vonq

Musings on #TruLondon 2011 – Recruitment & Referrals

Bit of a belated post this one, but on Thursday the 17^th of February I attended the #TruLondon Recruiter Unconference, organised by Bill Boorman. For those who don’t know what an unconference is, it can be described as “a gathering of minds, experiences and opinions where the attendees (or active participants) lead the conversation”. There are no PowerPoint presentations, name badges or sales pitches (hope that makes some sense to you).

This is the second #TruLondon I’ve attended and I always find some case study, technology or new application that sparks my interest.  I could only make half the Thursday session but still managed to catch a couple of interesting discussions (or “tracks” as they call them at an unconference). One track in particular was hosted by Kevin Wheeler, founder of the San Francisco-based Future of Talent Institute, the topic of which was ‘referral schemes.’

A good referral scheme can do wonders as part of your direct recruiting strategy.   Kevin, speaking from his experience, suggested that state-of-the-art US firms are recruiting as much as 40% of their staff via referrals. After much debate in the room about what makes (or doesn’t) a good referral scheme, I noted the following points (some may seem obvious, but I thought I’d share them anyway):

1) Any referral programme needs to be bespoke to the business

2) A programme’s effectiveness will largely be dependent on the growth cycle of a company. The more rapid the growth, the more effective the scheme.

3) Long term effectiveness of programmes is an issue with many becoming significantly less useful after the first year or two (there are only so many times you can ask the same people for referrals)

4) It’s best to initiate any referral process/request only when the need/vacancy actually arises.

5) Flexible schemes targeted around specific skill sets related to the current business needs are more effective in the long term

6) Monetary rewards should not be the primary driver for referrals. Referrals should have a foundation in the company culture and be embedded into aspects of the recruitment process

7) Alumni programmes specifically tend to be a very effective source for referrals. Good schemes sign up candidates as part of the exit process

8 ) You should be able to go direct to your team for referrals rather than going through HR

9) If you’re not careful, your referral scheme can end up alienating your existing workforce (and potentially your consumers)

The above points emphasise some critical issues with referral programmes, and why they should also be embedded into the company culture to begin with. Employees that are leaving are no longer ‘black sheep’ as they are potentially ambassadors of your brand and a source of future referrals.

On the reward issue, I’ve personally referred staff at previous companies and received a monetary reward. However when quizzed on this during the track, I admitted that I would have been happy to refer good candidates I knew even if I didn’t receive a monetary reward. In this instance I only knew of the existence of the referral program in the first place because the monetary reward had been used to market the scheme internally.

The final point is an interesting one, and can occur when a scheme works too well in many ways. If a particular demographic or ethnic group becomes the dominant referring source, it can lead to lack of diversity amongst the workforce.

So to summarise my learning outcomes on a good referral programme (and no doubt it’s easier said than done) – ideally a good scheme needs to be bespoke to the business, embedded in the company culture and recruitment processes, and contain an alumni element. It should be flexible enough to target relevant skills on demand (so it doesn’t annoy people long term) to support current business growth.

I would also emphasise an element of creativity in any scheme to find ways to more fully engage current employees in the process. Kevin cited a great example from Yahoo in the US who have a ‘bring a friend to lunch’ scheme as one element of their referral programme. It’s a great way for employees to introduce people in their network to the company (Yahoo pays for the lunch).

You may agree or disagree with some of the points I gathered from the track; any suggestions as to what makes a successful referral scheme, or what has worked in your experience are welcome.

By Jean-Paul Smalls

Tags: #trulondon, Jean-Paul Smalls, Recruitment, recruitment referral schemes, Recruitment Unconference, referral recruitment, referral schemes, referrals, unconference, Vonq, vonq uk

Augmented Reality & Recruitment – Your Thoughts Please?

OK before I go on about recruitment, firstly let me just quickly outline exactly what augmented reality (AR) is if you don’t know already, given it sounds like something out of Star Trek.

AR is a way to use technology to enhance your view of the physical world.  It may for example involve using an application such as Layer (downloadable on your android or iphone hand set) to superimpose computer generated imagery (such as text or a photo) in live-video streams.  For instance, when using the camera on your phone and you point it at a restaurant, up pops an info box providing details of the restaurant and a link to related info such as possible reviews, a menu, a map, a contact number etc.

The video below illustrates how Layar works:

You can use AR to find nearby restaurants, bars, people tweeting, people looking to date, go on treasure hunts, explore a new City, cash machine, practically anything.  So can you use it to recruit, or let potential candidates know about your jobs?

I’ve played around with a few AR apps, and they can be fun even if you do look a bit strange standing around waving your phone.

So how is AR currently being used for recruitment?

Well from a candidate point of view, CW Jobs, in conjunction with David Wood (the co-founder of Symbian), put together the world’s first augmented reality CV last year.  It’s a novel idea, although probably a little sophisticated and expensive to go mainstream.

So what about employers and suppliers? Layar itself has a number of applications or ‘content layers’ that enable you to search for jobs around you.  MightBe.Me available in Sweden (Stockholm only) feeds in jobs from a couple of job search sites and allows you to see jobs superimposed on their office locations as you walk around.  Career Builder in the US also has a content layer that allows you to search for jobs around you.  Capgemini has a content layer for its global office locations under the employment section within the Layar platform, although it does not seem to display any locations, or jobs for that matter.

Company Spot in the Netherlands is a different AR application and I find this one a little more engaging.  Rather than just pointing your phone and seeing jobs around you, you can also see more in-depth company information such as the number of employees, as well as industry and salary information, etc.  You also have the option to click through to a full company profile (created by the employer, hosted on the Company Spot site), view company videos, and potentially contact the recruiter of the job you are seeing.

I think that at the moment, although a lot of this is quite innovative, there are quicker and easier ways to look for jobs.  People are increasingly using applications that bring information to them, and as far as geo-location goes, I would much rather set up my job search criteria once, and then receive some kind of push notification on my phone when I was within a certain radius of a matching opportunity. But hey that’s just me.

The most innovative use of AR as a recruitment tool I’ve read about so far has been that of the US Air Force Command Centre Alpha AR marketing tour initiative.

The Command Centre Alpha Hangar - Source: http://www.af.mil

Prospective candidates are initially asked to complete a survey to guage their enthusiasm for joining the service.  They are then handed a tablet computer and a wristband containing a radio tag.  Participants then walk around a kind of exhibition/hangar area where the walls and ceiling are lined with screens displaying images and live video fields.

Image Source: www.af.mil

By pointing the tablet computer at specific points the live video is ‘augmented’ with 3D graphics and images.  The participants are able to witness a number of different scenarios/experiences including a full-size F-16 Thunderbird display, and a search & rescue mission involving a sky diver from the ceiling! (there’s about 20 different scenarios/experiences).

Although not so practical from a technological or financial perspective for most companies (not sure what the US Air Force’s recruitment budget is but it’s probably larger than the GDP of a small country) I think it’s a really engaging example of the use of AR in the wider recruitment process, that goes beyond the obvious ‘point and see job’ approach of most applications.

If you have any ideas on how AR could be used in any aspect of the recruitment process I would like to hear them.

By Jean-Paul Smalls

Tags: Augmented Reality, Augmented reality and recruitment, In-House Recruiting, innovative recruitment, Layar, Mightbe.me, Mobile Recruiting, Mobile Recruitment, recruiting, Recruiting in Holland, Recruiting in the Netherlands, Recruitment, Recruitment Netherlands, US Air force recruitment, Vonq

Research, Research, Research….A brief insight into Online Recruiting with Boots

On Thursday the 27th of January the Royal Geographical Society in Central London played host to the 9^th Annual Online Recruitment conference (the biggest in Europe, apparently).  There was the usual combination of job boards, consultants, technology vendors and in-house recruiters, and a variety of speakers explaining their approach to online recruitment.

The stand-out performance of the day, and the one I felt that in-house recruiters could pick up some really useful tips from, was delivered by Liz Dougal, Head of E-Recruitment for Boots, the pharmacy-led health and beauty group.  Boots have a comprehensive recruitment strategy combining the full range of the media spectrum from press, job boards and radio to social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. 

They also make use of technologies such as Bluetooth and third party advertising agencies, creative specialists and headhunters in addition to building their own talent pools.  In short, they pretty much leave no stone unturned when it comes to finding the right talent.  However the focus of this post is actually going to be on the data and research that Boots carried out to really maximise the ROI of their recruitment strategy.

Just to put things into perspective here are some quick stats on Boots:

• Head Quartered  in Nottingham
• Over 2500 stores nationwide
• Approx 115,000 employees
• Diverse recruitment need spanning  thousands of pharmacist & Christmas  temps to hundreds of support office staff, graduates and niche positions such as optometrists.

The central hub for all of Boots’s recruitment activity is the Boots.jobs careers site.  Every candidate is driven to Boots.jobs and everything is tracked from ‘collateral to hire’.

One of the first things Liz touched on, and something more and more companies are realising is that the line between their customers and candidates is becoming blurred “as we move into the same online space”.  What Boots are acknowledging here is the candidate experience is of vital importance, and that especially includes rejected candidates as they are potential consumers of Boots products, and therefore should have a positive view of Boots.  I personally boycotted a large high street retailer for about 8 years after having such a dull work experience placement back in my early teens.

In order to maximise the effectiveness of their online recruitment strategy, Boots carried out several online surveys to understand the needs of candidates, their job seeking behaviour, and ultimately how they arrived at boots.jobs.  Furthermore they also performed extensive usability testing of their careers site to optimise the candidate’s experience. The results were used to tweak and adjust aspects of their recruitment strategy if necessary.

The Surveys

A few of the questions and a summary of the results are listed below.

1) What do candidates want from a Careers Site:

• Almost half of respondents (43%) indicated that an easy to use / navigate site was the most important thing.
• 35% indicated useful/current information, which was followed closely clear presentation with 28%.
• Things like video were not massively important with only 4% of votes,
• Whilst some form of interaction was highlighted with 15% (which is a significant portion)

2) How did you arrive at Boots.jobs today? (2 waves of research)

• The majority of candidates in both waves of research (42% and 38%) indicated they directly typed the URL.  This is a positive indication that quite a substantial number of candidates who want to discover jobs at Boots, will literally go straight to their website (so brand recognition is high).
• 29% in both waves arrived via a search engine looking for Boots
• 9-11% arrived via a job board
• 4% via a search engine looking for a particular jobs
• 4-5% via another website (Boots identified this as an opportunity to use social media)

3) Other than a job site or an employer’s own site where would you look for job information? (2 waves of research)

• 12%-14% – Facebook or similar
• 12-14% – Recruitment blog or forum
• 3-5% – LinkedIn or similar
• 1% YouTube or similar
• 1% Twitter or similar
• 1% Podcast or similar

Interestingly the latest NORAS online recruitment survey (an online survey of 315,000 job seekers) suggests that the majority of candidates look to social media during the first week of their job search.

Usability Testing

Back in 2009 Boots invited candidates to participate in a research trial to explore the Boots.jobs site while being monitored by specialist software to track both their eye, and mouse cursor movements.  Liz actually played a video demonstrating some of the sessions and admittedly mentioned it originally made for uncomfortable viewing.   It was clear that certain aspects of the site were a bit confusing for candidates or certain areas were not clear.  Test subjects are asked to rank their experience afterwards and initially the site didn’t fair too well.  However taking into account what they had learned from the first round of testing, a series of changes were introduced from September 2009 leading to a marked increase in the usability scores.

Even if you do a basic exercise yourself, and navigate around your careers site.  You’ll probably be surprised at the number of times you unexpectedly leave the site or just simply get confused.

Liz later shared some of the Google Analytics results for the Boots.Jobs site between Aug 2010 & Dec 2010 to illustrate the success they have achieved as a result of all the above efforts.

Google Analytics Dashboard Example (Not Boots)

Boots.jobs received 3,500,000 visits to their site (over 50% of which were new visitors) with over 52 million page views during this period.    The most impressive aspect of the stats however was the low bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave without viewing additional pages) which was less than 12%.  The average visitor visited almost 15 pages and spent and spent over 10 minutes on the site! Impressive stuff.

In summary, the research Boots have done has allowed them to refine their online recruitment strategy, resulting in higher quality candidates entering their recruitment process, higher traffic numbers visiting their site, and a more positive employer brand image.  In terms of ROI they have seen a 30% saving on recruitment spend, 20% reduction in time to hire and approximately 80% of their support staff are recruited directly.

Leveraging your own candidate and careers site data is something I think a lot of direct employers could do better.  The insight you can gain from simple candidate surveys, career site visitor surveys, and Google analytics can really help to maximise where and how you spend your recruitment budget.  Putting this data together does not have to be massively expensive either.  The usability testing initiated by Boots was quite advanced stuff, however even if you carried out some basic usability testing in-house, you’re likely to find ways to improve the experience, after all, when was the last time you searched and applied for a job on your own careers site?

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Boots, Boots Recruitment, Boots.jobs, Direct Sourcing, Enhance Media, Eye Tracking, Google analytics, In-House Recruiting, In-House Recruitment, NORAS, Online Recruitment, Online Recruitment Case Study, Recruitment, Recruitment Conference, recruitment research, Recruitment Survey, Vonq

My Foursquare Recruitment Experiment

Towards the end of 2010 I was asked to put together a campaign to hire a large volume of IT professionals in the Surrey and Essex area for a large gaming company.

One of the challenges faced by the client was simply to increase local knowledge that they have ongoing IT opportunities in the area.  Specifically they wanted IT professionals to think twice about commuting into London.  After all, if you enjoy IT and all things tech, then perhaps doing what you love within a company that creates online games is more enjoyable than say, working in the IT department of a bank (after 2 hours of commute on a sweaty overcrowded train/tube).

The campaign was heavily centred around the use of leading technology job boards, and boards that were specifically strong in relevant locations.  These have worked very well placing a number of promising candidates even for the very tricky niche and senior positions.  However I also decided, just for the crack, to see what else we could do to target local candidates.

As an avid foursquare fan (finally got that free miso soup from the local Itsu yesterday), I wanted to test if people would actually respond to simple tips relating to job opportunities.

So here was the theory.

I would create a local twitter account (IT Jobs in Surrey for example) which I would then populate with several jobs.  I would then use a bunch of Twitter apps such as twellow, twiends, twibes, formulists etc (to name just a few) in order to identify and build a relevant following of IT people.

Next I would create a foursquare account of the same name and leave tips (something along the lines of “Tired of the commute? Are you an IT professional living in the area, check out IT Jobs in Surrey (with a link to the Twitter account listing the jobs).

Why use a Twitter account in the first place? Well (in theory) I’ve built up a following of IT people in the Twitter account.  By linking the foursquare account to the Twitter account I can see if any of the Twitter followers are on foursquare.  I can then invite them as friends.  I wasn’t expecting many to accept the foursquare friend request but If lets say, 5 out of 100 did, then I could assume that those 5 would actually be interested in IT Jobs in the area.  I could then do the odd shout out to these followers regarding new jobs in the future.

The recent updates to foursquare over the xmas period meant popular tips at a location are more prominent when you check in.  I was gambling on this to increase the chances that an IT professional might see the tip and click through, explore the list of local jobs, and perhaps eventually even apply for one.

So what was the result in practice.

Well firstly I only ran this experiment over a 2 week period (you’ll read why in a minute); secondly the twitter apps for identifying relevant profiles (and I went through a lot) were not quite as accurate as I needed.  Quite simply there was not enough info in the twitter bios to create sufficient lists, so inviting them as foursqaure friends wasn’t really fruitful.  Also bear in mind this was a very short term experiment, over a 2 week period, and to really get the most from this type of project (or any social recruiting strategy, you really need to invest months).  But as I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to know if people would actually take a look.

The tips I scripted were left at approximatley 25 stations along the commuter route in and around the location I was targeting.  I used tracking url’s to measure click throughs to the the IT Jobs Surrey Twitter account.

In turns out that 14 users clicked my tips (the majority from Woking station).  It says 16 above but a couple were my test clicks.  This is not an amazing number of click throughs although it did outperform several postings on a a relatively large local job site! It appears that most of the click throughs occured during the first week back to work in January, perhaps those were people feeling depressed about another day in their current job?  It’s too early yet to tell if any interviews or placements resulted from the experiment and I’m confident the click through rate would have been higher had I been a bit cleverer with the tips.  Because I entered 20 odd tips in a relatively short space of time, foursquare identified them as spam and despite “appreciating my enthusiasm” deleted them (hence the reason the experiment only lasted 2 weeks).

I’m fairly confident that with some new tools I’ve discovered recently and a longer time span, the original plan to build a targeted foursquare following could have been more successful (and indeed this experiment is being revisited) and the click through rate would have been closer to 30 over a month.

There are other ways to use foursquare for recruitment.  A far simpler way for head hunters is to look for the major of a competitor company and cross reference them via other social media.  Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting blogged about this a while back, see here.

I could have also resorted to guerilla marketing and literally left tips at releavant IT companies in the area, however this was likely to be frowned upon by the client.  Also I personally don’t think it would be sustainable, as potentially you end up in a ‘tip war’, which would probably result in the location owner just deleting your tips.

Another example I heard of recenlty at the Smart 2011 Social Media in Business Conference, was a company in Texas who targeted senior execs.  The way they did this was to leave tips at high end designer retail stores.  They were actually targeting the wives of rich execs to encourage them to notify their husbands of new job opportunites.  Apparently they did this with some success!

So to summarise the experiment, it seems even by leaving simple tips targeted to a particular audience in a particualar location, people will actually check out jobs you promote via foursquare.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Direct Sourcing, foursquare recruiting, Foursquare Recruitment, In-House Recruiting, Mobile Recruiting, Online Recruitment, smart 2011, Social Media Recruitment, social recruiting

Social Recruiting Case Studies from Smart, the Social Media for Business Conference 2011

Smart, the Social Media for Business Conference held in London on the 20^th of January provided a number of interesting presentations and workshops covering social recruiting.  One of the earliest of the day was delivered by Steven Fogarty – Snr Manager Strategic Programs at Adidas Group (also known as the ‘Recruiting Captain’).

We all know the brand adidas, a global leader in the sporting goods industry – it employs 40,000 employees across North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific and has approximately 16 in-house recruiters.  They have an innovative, multifaceted recruitment strategy based around 4 key pillars:  E-recruiting, Metrics, Sourcing (which encompasses all tools and training) & Brand.  The candidate experience is at the centre of everything and they are very clear and focused when it comes to their EVP, summed up by the slogan “Shape the future of sport”

On top of the 4 pillars their recruitment strategy has a number of layers:

1)      Attracting top talent by delivering authentic, targeted dialogue across the web

2)      Reaching passive candidates

3)      Increasing authentic dialogue within talent networks

4)      Integrating all the above smartly

To achieve the above they combine the use of some traditional forms of recruitment marketing such as job boards, with SEO & SEM techniques, deep mining of networks such as LinkedIn (Steve refers to this kind of deep mining as ‘6 degrees’), and community building.  Their jobs are widely distributed across other social platforms such as twitter (via twitjobsearch).

adidas jobs on twitter

adidas LinkedIn groups

The community aspect was a really interesting case which highlighted both the innovative use of social media, but also some of the pitfalls.  Adidas managed to create a very successful (albeit short-lived) adidas branded NING network (NING is an application that lets you easily build your own social network), the idea being to build a community of engaged followers of the adidas brand.  It grew to approximately 5000 members within weeks! Unfortunately being such an open platform/application it did not have the sufficient safeguards to protect company risk and reputation.  An example Steve used to reflect this would be what if a member uploaded their own trainer design, who would own the rights?  These are some of the more complex questions surrounding the use of social media for recruitment that are not immediately obvious.  So despite its popularity the network had to be taken off line.

Adidas have built a number of other networks however, especially within LinkedIn, where they have several alumni, careers and geographically focused groups that have over 3500 members between them.

The afternoon session at Smart kicked off with David Mason, International Talent Acquisition Director for CH2M Hill, who provided a workshop on the Global race to find talent.  CH2M Hill is a full service design, consulting and construction company.  Some of their current projects include expanding the Panama canal and significant involvement in the design and construction of the Masdar ‘Green City’ in the UAE.

CH2M Hill have approximately 23,000 employees worldwide and around 70 internal recruiters.  98% of hires in the US are directly sourced, and approximately 95% of all hires outside of the US are also the result of direct recruitment activities. Impressive stuff!  And in case you wondering, it took a sustained strategic effort spanning around 4 years to get the volume of direct hires to such a high proportion.

David broke their strategy down into 3 groups:

1)      Ways to harness social media to attract candidates

2)      Targeting candidates effectively

3)      Using social media to attract new geographical audiences

CH2M Hill operates across a number of social platforms including the usual suspects, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  One of the primary reasons CH2M Hill begun to explore social recruiting was due to the high numbers of unsuitable candidates entering their ATS system.  Although they find some job boards useful, when advertising on job boards in the Middle East, the nature of the market means their ads were generating literally thousands of applications.  They needed to change their strategy to be much more targeted, less volume, more quality.

David pointed out that Facebook & twitter have not been particularly successful for them as a direct recruiting tool.  They have however, had significant success with LinkedIn.  It has both helped to reduce their cost per hire and time to hire.  The following is an example David himself provided.

CH2M Hill customised LinkedIn profile

Using the LinkedIn Corporate recruiter license CH2M Hill have visibility of every profile within LinkedIn.  On one particular occasion they needed to hire a HR Manager in Korea with knowledge of the industry and experience working for western European companies.  Within 30 minutes they were able to identify 100 LinkedIn profiles relating to HR managers in Korea.  They were able to filter these down to 10 with relevant industry industry experience, and eventually made the hire they needed in 2 weeks.

One of the reasons CH2M Hill believe they have had so much success with LinkedIn compared to the other social networks  is due to the demographic of the user base that’s in tune with the current type of professionals they target.  However they also employ a number of other tactics to help convert applicants within LinkedIn.   They have a fully customised company profile page that not only displays current jobs, but also information of various career paths, current projects they are delivering, video content and featured jobs.   They also have a widget integrated with their careers site that allows searching of their ATS for jobs within LinkedIn.

Another feature of CH2M Hills recruitment strategy, and one that is often overlooked by employers is to have bespoke landing pages on your careers site for each category of role.  This helps to maximise the candidate experience and ensure they can easily find all the information they need, and apply for relevant jobs quickly.

Examples of CH2M Hill customised landing pages

That’s my take on a couple of the day’s social recruiting case studies.  Two very different companies who apply their social recruiting tactics in slightly different ways but with the same result, an increase in the proportion of direct hires.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Direct Sourcing, Employee Engagement, Facebook Recruitment, In-House Recruiting, Linkedin Recruiting, Online Recruitment, Recruitment, Recruitment Conference, Social Media, Social Media Recruitment, Talent Community, Twitter Recruitment

Smart – Social Media for Business 2011, A Brief Insight

The Smart Social Media for Business Conference (#smart_2011) made for a refreshing change to many of the conferences I’ve attended recently.  Providing a number of demonstrations, speakers and workshops, divided into 3 ‘streams:’ Talent Management, Business Strategy and  Tools & Techniques, it attracted a diverse group of people from various backgrounds, the majority of whom were from outside the recruitment world.

Many of the basic principles being discussed relating to developing a social media strategy for business in general could easily be applied to recruitment.  There was a lot covered during the day so I’ve written a separate blog post to cover specifically a couple of the recruitment case studies.  See Social Recruiting Case Studies from Smart

The conference was kicked off by Charlie Osmond, MD of Fresh Networks discussing Social media optimisation and maximising the business benefits whilst managing risk.  To summarize a lot of what Charlie covered he indicated that you need to focus on 3 main things when it comes to a successful social media strategy.

1)      Have a strategic Social Media Plan

2)      Manageable risks

3)      Measurable Returns

When it comes to measurable returns, the ROI of social media is always a hot topic in recruitment; indeed Andy Headworth of Sirona Consulting who gave a presentation later in the day relating to ROI and Social media, argues it’s too early to be discussing ROI. Social media has not been around long enough and it requires a long term investment.  To paraphrase both Andy and Charlie, social media is about engagement, it’s an ongoing conversation.  The early adopters of social media recruitment such as Microsoft, Vodaphone and T.G.I’s are already seeing the fruits of their labour.  EA (Electronic Arts) explained at a recruitment conference I attended during 2010, that they now recruit 65% of their staff purely via social media.

Going back to Charlie’s presentation, there were a couple of aspects I thought  were specifically interesting for recruiters to think about.  Firstly was to look closely at the meaning behind the numbers/targets you are striving for.  It’s easy to become obsessed with building twitter followers, facebook fans etc but are you actually driving behaviour that has no ROI?

The second point was some benchmarking research Fresh Networks had done into social media monitoring tools.  Tools such as  Alterian, Brandwatch, Buzzmetrics and  Radian6 are used by some companies to measure sentiment.  What this means is they are tying to determine the broad attitude of people towards their brand, whether it is positive or negative for example.  After independently comparing 7 of the best tools in the market they found automated sentiment analysis to be less than 50% accurate.  Charlie still felt these tools were very good, but in this particular aspect you can’t take the results on face value.  Something for recruiters to think about should they be using such techniques as part of their ROI statistics.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: monitoring tools, Recruitment, Recruitment Conference, smart 2011, social media monitoring, Social Media Recruitment, social recruiting

Do you have a Mobile Recruitment Strategy for 2011?

Various sources estimate that by 2014 the number of people accessing the internet via a mobile device such as a smart phone will surpass those accessing the internet via a desktop computer.  In fact, more people in the UK already access social networking sites via mobile than desktop (Source: Jobsite and Allthetopbananas.com whitepaper: Future of Mobile Recruitment Report – well worth a read!).

Source: Morgan Stanley - The Mobile Internet Report

The rapid adoption of smart phones means we can access email, watch videos, share information and use social networks anytime, anywhere.  A variety of apps allows us to organise our professional and social lives, reducing the time we actually need to spend browsing the net.  The information we want is increasingly coming to us via our phones, and this will include job seeking.  This shift in internet behaviour away from the desktop to the mobile is already having an impact when if comes to attracting candidates.

In my experience speaking to a number of in-house recruiters, when you mention the term mobile recruitment there is tendency to assume we are only thinking about candidates actually applying for a job (actually uploading a CV and cover letter) on a mobile phone.  This is just one small part (and not the most important) of what mobile recruitment is about.  And although I’ve personally received CV applications sent via an iPhone, I don’t think this is particular practical for the vast majority of people (at least for now).

Mobile Recruitment – Considerations for In-House Recruiters.

Below of listed a few things to highlight the impacts that the increase in mobile internet usage is currently having on job seekers and employers?

1)     A significant volume of candidates are already looking for jobs on their mobile phones

The above mentioned whitepaper already mentioned that between January 2009 & April 2010 Jobsite saw a 390% increase in mobile traffic to its site.  5% of all visitors to jobsite are via mobile.  This is just one example but as one of the UK’s largest generalist job boards, it implies that a significant volume of candidates will search for a job on their phone.

2) Is Your Career Site Mobile Friendly?

Have you ever visited your own career site on a mobile to see what it looks like from a candidate’s perspective?  Many recruiters may think that candidates would not naturally visit their career sites on their mobile.  But consider the following common scenario.  When searching for a job online many candidates will make use of job alerts from job sites, aggregators etc to aid job matching and the speed at which they are notified of jobs relevant to them.  Many people check their personal or business emails on their phones.  When you receive such an alert, (it could be an SMS, or via your email) you are likely to click on a link which takes your through to the full job spec on a subscribing job site.

 

Left: Sodexo US careers site viewed on a desktop – Right: Sodexo US careers site viewed on a mobile

If it’s an interesting job you may choose to be directed to the career site of the company advertising the role.  When this occurs, do you have to mess around zooming in, out, scrolling up and down on your phone to view the job properly?  Is it as easy to browse and search for similar jobs on your mobile compared to accessing it via a desktop?  Is there an easy option to email a job link to myself?  It may not be practical to apply for the job at the time of browsing, but I may want to be reminded to apply for the job when I get home where I have more time to perhaps do some research and draft a cover letter.

3) The 5 Peaks – Desktop vs Mobile Internet Browsing Times

Another interesting aspect highlighted by Jobsite, and one I think is significant for firms to take advantage of, is the difference in peak mobile internet usage times.

Internet browsing behaviour has quite a well established pattern.  Its peak traffic times are 0830-0930, lunchtime, and between 16:30-1800l.  Mobile internet browsing peaks between 06:00-08:00 (the commute to work?), and shows significant use throughout the evening till 23:00.

Source: Jobsite UK

From a recruitment perspective, combined with traditional online recruitment methods you can broaden the time frames that candidates are searching for your jobs from 0600 till 2300 (inclusive of all 5 peak internet access times).  And don’t forget, many candidates search for jobs while in a current job, and mobile browsing cannot be blocked by IT.

4) Mobile Apps

The majority of the leading job sites now have mobile apps that can easily be downloaded by job seekers.

A number of corporates such as Transport for London, adidas & London Victoria have mobile career apps already. Unlike a job site app, corporate career apps require a bit more customisation to reflect your brand.

adidas Graduate Careers iPhone App

As well as being able to view company information and search through jobs , you can Integrate your company social media pages, facebook, YouTube etc.  This can help to enhance a candidates experience and learn more about your company.

adidas Graduate Careers iPhone App

One feature which I think provides one of the biggest advantages of using an app, is the push notification functionality.  Essentially this means candidates can choose to receive notifications on their phone when a job that matched specific criteria is uploaded onto the app.  The great thing about push notifications via an app is they don’t cost anything, and can also be used to push news/announcements etc.  Having an app built is not massively expensive; costs tend to vary between £5000-£10000 depending on the sophistication and functionality required.  It’s important to remember that apps are not just all about the iPhone or iPad which use Apple operating systems.   Alternative operating systems like Android as used by Motorola or HTC are used by a significant proportion of the smart phone market and therefore you really need to have apps both in the iTunes/App Store & Android market places.

Finally, if you are thinking about creating an app, bear in mind that once built, candidates need to be able to find it.  Marketing your app is an essential part of a mobile recruitment strategy.

5) Location based Gaming & Services

Location based games and services on mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular.  The likes of Foursquare has over 5 million users worldwide and allows you to push out real time messages to nearby phones.  Facebook places also allows users to check in to locations and the application of recruitment within augmented reality apps is already being experimented with via Layer. Such gaming and location based mobile services, and how you would apply them to recruitment, may not be an immediately obvious route for in-house recruitment (yet) but it’s worth keeping an eye on them as they are potentially another mobile environment to recruit from.

So just to summarise, above are just some of the mobile considerations I think in-house recruiters should be thinking about, both in terms of potential new methods to attract staff directly, or simply as a catalyst to enhance existing online recruitment approaches.  How could you take advantage of:

1)     Candidates that are already looking for jobs on their phones

2)     Having a mobile friendly careers site

3)     Differences in peak mobile internet job browsing times

4)     Mobile recruitment apps, including social media integration and push notifications

5)     Location based applications and services

There’s a lot more to mobile recruiting, if you think I’ve missed anything obvious or would like to contribute some additional mobile methods and approaches, feel free to comment.

By Jean-Paul Smalls of VONQ UK

Tags: Augmented Reality, In-House Recruiting, Mobile Recruiting, Mobile Recruitment, Online Recruitment, Recruitment, Recruitment Apps