Last Thursday saw the first UK Talent Net Live event, brought to London by Craig Fisher followed on Friday by the 8th edition of the #TruLondon Recruitment Unconference, organised by Bill Boorman and Aki Kakko.
On the Friday especially I came across a few useful recruitment tools and strategies I thought I’d share. Anyone that’s been to a tru event will know they can sometimes be a little chaotic, but I’m pretty certain most of what I’ve remembered is accurate!
The Recruitment Reconnextions Strategy
This wasn’t actually covered by any of the tracks at tru, but while listening to Arie Ball, VP Talent Acquisition of Sodexo US explain their approach towards mobile recruiting, she briefly referred to their Alumni community called Sodexo Reconnextions. On the surface its easy to think it’s an Alumni network like any other, but after having a more in-depth discussion with Arie it was interesting to discover the effort that goes into maintaining this community for specific goals. One such goal is to keep engaged with high performers that leave the company with the longer term objective of attracting them back to Sodexo at some point in the the future.
When an employee leaves Sodexo US, they receive an invite both via email and snail mail to join the Sodexo Reconnextions group. A communication plan is in place for the group and members have access to regular webinars on a variety of topics from CV Tips and Interview Skills to Personal Financial Planning. Internally line managers are actively asked by the recruitment team to name at least 1 member of staff they wished had not left the company. These high performers form part of a sub group that the recruiters can target in the future. Often people leave thinking the grass is greener, but in the instance that down the line the reality is different, the Sodexo reconnextions strategy ensures that their brand is always at the forefront of persons mind career wise. By providing useful information and support Sodexo improve the chances of attracting back high performers. So far the programme seems pretty successful with around 10% of the people within the reconnextions group estimated to have been rehired.
Cool Recruitment Tools
Que Social –Another tool Arie demonstrated. This is a recruitment gamification platform that Sodexo uses to help leverage the social networks of their employees. Employees create a profile on the platform and link up their social media accounts and contact details. The platform supports content curation which the recruitment team use to schedule engaging messages about brand initiatives, company news, jobs etc that the employees with Que Social accounts receive by SMS and/or email. The messages have a headline and small description of the underlying story and a hyperlink that if clicked will instantly share the content to the users various social media accounts registered in their Que Social profile.
All the links are trackable and feed into a dashboard the recruitment team have access to. The dashboard illustrates metrics relating to any content sharing activity, which platforms are hooked up, frequency of shares etc. The data can be used to reward or provide incentives to users. It looks like a great tool, a simple way to turn your employees into brand ambassadors and introduce simple game mechanics into the recruitment process
Joberate Signal – If you’re looking for a tool that easily allows you to create talent pipelines, and monitors that pipeline to automatically inform you that an individual may be looking for a new job, then check out Joberate Signal. Once you’re logged into the platform you simply create a folder or folders which you then populate with bookmarked social profiles (like LinkedIn or Twitter) of the individuals you want to keep an eye on (you can also bulk import candidate data via a csv file). The tool monitors changes in the online behaviour of these candidates and then notifies you when they may be considering a move, thus allowing you to pro-actively approach them. It’s simple to use and because it’s linked to active social profiles your database will never be static and out of date.
Connect Cubed – This is a candidate assessment platform that uses gaming technology to determine a match between your roles and the personality and smarts of a candidate. Rather than being used after an application is made, or during the latter part of a recruitment process, the Connect Cubed platform delivers pre-application tests and simulations. In theory, armed with this data you’ll be able to determine more accurately who to invite or not to invite to an interview, saving both you and the candidate valuable time.
That’s a quick update of a some of the tools and tactics I picked up at #TruLondon. You can see a full list of what was discussed and find out about a host of other tools that were on show at the following address: http://www.globaltru.com/event/trulondon8/.
Good compliance professionals are in big demand these days in the World of finance and banking. If you didn’t know, compliance departments are tasked with ensuring their banks or financial institutions operate in line with regulations imposed on them. I happen to have quite a few close friends that work, or have worked in compliance or/and risk management within large multinational companies so am often privy to a bit of insight into their job seeking behaviour. Compliance as a career has developed a much bigger profile since the financial crisis. It’s a role that can carry huge accountability and requires constant up to date knowledge of financial products and the regulatory environment.
In one instance when one of my good friends was considering a move but not actively looking, I suggested that they simply flesh out their LinkedIn profile with a photo, a bit more work history and their key compliance skills & knowledge: Data Protection, Monitoring, Risk Management, AML etc. The result was an immediate and sustained high volume of inMails, connection requests and cold calls from recruitment agents and direct employers for the next 2 weeks (eventually they got a new job that originated from a corporate recruiter InMail approach)! Like I said, big demand.
At the same time my friend was being head hunted I was working on several recruitment advertising campaigns for a number of different compliance roles. I wanted to share a bit of info on one of them in terms of the channels you may consider using if you’re still mainly reliant on recruitment consultancies for your compliance staff.
Active & Passive Recruitment Channels
A lot of UK compliance roles are centred around the financial hubs of the City of London and Canary Wharf. Subsequently job sites like eFinancialCareers and City Jobs are heavily used by a lot of direct corporates and recruitment agencies to attract compliance professionals. Jobs in Risk is another active channel covering compliance as well as wider risk management related roles.
In terms of the more passive and senior candidates, LinkedIn as mentioned earlier, like many industries these days has proven to be a great source of compliance talent from a sourcing, brand awareness and advertising perspective. More specific to compliance is the Thompson Reuters Accelus platform. As a portal that compliance professionals access to help address compliance and risk management issues on a day to day basis, it also has a careers section ‘Complinet Recruitment’ catering purely for the niche. City AM the daily paper you’ll often see people on the tube reading while commuting to the financial districts has also developed a popular careers section ‘CityAM Jobs’ over the past 18 months, and it’s promoted quite heavily to readers in the non careers sections.
The particular role I was working on was a Compliance Consultant position for a bank based in the West Midlands. Given the large number of banking & financial head offices based in London, recruiting senior compliance professionals outside of the Capital can sometimes prove extra challenging. In addition to the client doing their own sourcing via their LinkedIn Recruiter license (which normally is quite successful for them, just not in this case) I was tasked with attracting candidates externally via recruitment advertising. Taking into account all factors, budget available, location, role etc, I chose to use a relatively small and simple cost effective ‘compliance advertising package’ combining client branded advertising across eFinancialCareers and City Jobs in addition to a more passive candidate orientated targeted social media campaign. I’ve displayed the initial results in the table below.
The overall campaign generated 73 click throughs to the client ATS and resulted in a successful hire. Good going given the seniority of the role. In terms of the logic behind my choice I selected City Jobs (enhanced listing) as it also cross posts the job onto Jobsite.co.uk, local sites, plus the job will appear on aggregator networks (think the likes of indeed, jobrapido etc) to take advantage of a wider audience. I wanted to cast the net slightly wider than usual given the volume of searches for compliance roles on sites outside of the Capital are lower. The type of inventory I used also meant I was at the top of searches for the relevant keywords a candidate might use.
eFinancialCareers as explained is a well used hunting ground for compliance professionals; the social media campaign was to add a different attraction angle. Predominantly this involved the use of LinkedIn. As well as posting a LinkedIn job listing (which are also suggested to matching profiles not looking for jobs) the job was also promoted within a number of banking and risk specific LinkedIn groups.
It was a pretty simple campaign but it worked well in relatively short period of time. There was still plenty more we could have done such as targeted LinkedIn PPC adverts, extra advertising across channels like Complinet or behavioural display advertising to name a few options. But in this case there was no need to spend any extra budget. For a fraction of the cost of a recruitment fee the client had hired a quality candidate that typically would have cost £10K-15K via an agency.
If you have successfully used any specific niche online recruitment channels to recruit compliance staff and you would like to share them, feel free to add them to the comments section below.
Currently Recruiting Compliance Professionals?
If you’re interested in seeing an example of an online advertising package tailored to your specific compliance roles, you can email me at jean-paul@vonq.co.uk There are a number of options available to attract active but more importantly passive job seekers.
Trilogies seem quite popular at the moment, so following on from my previous posts ‘Most Innovative Recruitment Strategies Part 1 & Part 2, I’ve compiled another bunch of random recruitment tactics and methods I’ve come across over the last few months.
1) The Mobile Medic – Augmented Reality Mobile app from The Australian Defence Force
The first innovative recruitment method comes from the land down under and involved medically diagnosable outdoor posters! When the Australian Defence Force wanted to recruit the best medical students worthy of a scholarship, they placed a series of ‘mobile medic’ posters on University campuses across Australia. Via an augmented reality app, students point their smart phone or ipad at the posters and then use a variety of virtual tools such as stethoscope, ECG trace, X-ray and ultrasound to diagnose and treat various medical conditions afflicting the virtual patient. To see it in action view the video below:
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2) The Tattoo Ad QR code – Berrge Tattoo Parlour
When the Berrge Tattoo Parlour in Istanbul Turkey wanted to hire a skilled tattoo artist they decided to do something a bit different. To ensure their applicants had the steady hand required, they printed an ad in the paper of a QR code. Nothing innovative about a QR code, but this one needed to be filled in (see image below) to obtain the application details, requiring patience and a skilled hand.
3) Heineken – “The Candidate”
You’ve probably already seen this one, but it’s too good to leave out. Seeking an intern for their Event & Sponsorship department, Heineken received 1734 applications. After sifting through the applicants, rather than opt for standard interviews they chose to put interviewees in a variety of unusual situations while being filmed (secretly). Situations included needing to provide medical assistance to the interviewer after they collapsed, and helping to save a distressed employee during a fire evacuation! Watch the video below containing some of the interviews and find out how the successful candidate was rewarded.
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4) Pinterest – Recruiting pediatric therapists at PediaStaff
I came across this example a while back and it still remains one of the better campaigns I’ve seen with regards to using Pinterest for recruitment. PediaStaff is a recruitment firm specialising in placing pediatric therapists. In August 2011 they set up an account on Pinterest. They currently have 130+ boards and over 50,000 followers. It’s the biggest traffic driver to their website.
After looking around the Pinterest community and exploring the search function, Heidi Kay the company’s VP of brand management and interactive content, noticed that there was a large relevant audience that they could engage and share content with. Heidi then developed groups of boards focusing on various aspects of the pediatric therapy profession. The Pinterest boards have become a resource in their own right for pediatric professionals.
The end result is Pinterest has become a very successful recruiting and employer brand channel for Pediastaff. It’s worth noting that it took a lot of time and effort with engagement being the top priority to make this work. Such a commitment of time and resource may not be a cost effective approach for everyone. If you want to read a more in-depth explanation of this example you can do so here.
5) Custom Video Game – Wibidata Startup Recruitment
WibiData is a San Francisco based start up specialising in the development of big data applications. When it came to recruiting new software engineers they really wanted to emphasise just what a cool place WibiData is to work. They decided to create a custom version of Portal 2 – A spatial puzzle game that resembles a first person shooter that incorporates realistic physics. In the game players use a ‘portal gun’ to create portals allowing them to pass from one section of the game to another. The idea is to challenge the problem solving capability of applicants. If none of that made any sense to you, it’s probably easier just to watch the video of the game below!
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In their custom version of the game WibiData created a virtual version of it’s own offices. After visiting several conference rooms, players take a lift down to a test chamber where they begin solving a series of puzzles that allows them to progress to the next level (the underground test chamber doesn’t exist in the real office). If you fancy a shot you can play the game here.
6) In-Game Recruitment Marketing – Finding Front End Developers, Uncle Grey
When international advertising agency Uncle Grey had exhausted all the usual avenues looking for a skilled front end developer, analysis of their target audience suggested they spent a lot of time playing online games. In particular, front end developers seemed to love playing ‘Team Fortress 2″. After coming up with a sponsorship deal with high ranking well known players in the Team Fortress universe, these players then progressed with an in-game marketing programme as ambassadors of Uncle Grey.
Their goal was to encourage developers playing the game to visit a specific web page to apply for the role. Tactics involved the leading players changing their name tags to the url of the web page, plus putting up ‘Coding Warriors Wanted’ posters with the url link in the virtual environment. The result? Over 50 applications in the first week and they successfully found their front-end developer. View the video below to see the campaign in action:
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That’s about it for part 3, if you’ve come across any recruitment campaigns you thought were pretty innovative, please share them in the comments section below.
A while back I ran an experiment to help a client increase the volume of qualified social workers they recruit using an integrated social media approach. It was a huge success leading to a 500%+ increase in social workers that they successfully attracted over previous methods. This post is going to explain how the campaign worked, and how you yourself can leverage the network that’s been built for your own recruitment needs.
The diagram below visualises the original idea I had, which was to create a bespoke community of social workers that would attract other social workers via cross posted and circulated content from the major social networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & You Tube.
In the centre of the diagram you’ll notice the big NING logo. NING is a platform that lets you create your own social networks. They can be as simple or as complicated as you like. The back end interface for creating a network is quite easy to use and once you have chosen a network template, you ‘drag and drop’ the functionality (photo upload, video, RSS feeds etc) you want in the network. I opted to use some basic images and content to create a network called UK Social Workers. I then mapped the network to the domain http://www.uksocialworkers.co.uk.
It’s a private network so members have to be approved to ensure as far as possible they are genuinely social workers. Members can create their own profiles, upload videos and photo’s to the network and create their own groups around social work topics.
Once the network was built it needed content to attract users and allow it to reach a critical mass where the content becomes majority user generated. To do this I put together a 3 month content plan to ensure there was enough interesting stuff to read about around industry news, events etc . I also made use of RSS feeds from major industry portals. If you’re interested in specific tools I used to aggregate, monitor and distribute content I used a combination of Hootsuite, SocialOomph and Netvibes.
Alongside the network that was built I created a UK Social Workers branded Facebook page, Twitter account and LinkedIn Group (never got round to You Tube in the end). Content that was generated in the central UK Social Workers Network was then cross posted around the other social media platforms. As more people joined and followed these groups across the networks, more social workers joined the core network.
To help grow the facebook page I initially used some limited facebook PPC campaigns to target social workers. Very quickly we noticed the facebook page become a popular forum, and most of the sign up’s to the core network came from facebook. Looking at the engagement across the various platforms it became obvious that facebook would be quite strong for attracting social workers and thus more of our efforts should be concentrated there.
So eventually we needed to actually recruit social workers, what did we do exactly?
Firstly I created a jobs tab on the UK Social Workers Network that had 5 sub tabs for different categories of social worker jobs: Children & Families, Hospital Teams, Adult, Mental Health and one for Administrative roles. Jobs would then be listed on the relevant page.
facebook ppc advert
We then seeded the content schedule with information about one of the jobs every now and then. Whether it was a tweet, Linkedin update or a facebook post, it would link back to the jobs page on UK Social Workers. Along side this we ran facebook PPC adverts that targeted specifically members of the UK Social Workers facebook page. This way we could make them and their network aware of social worker opportunities regardless of whether they happened to be using the facebook page at the time.
Results
Within 2 months of the campaign kicking off the client begun to see registrations of qualified social workers increase 500%+ over their previous attraction methods. This translated into more placements of social workers and ensured they had a constant pool of talent that could be tapped, thus reducing the time it took to find and place candidates as well.
In terms of the most successful platforms, facebook was the stand out performer, although we did track placements to twitter as well. Linkedin at the time did not seem to work so well for this particularly niche, although there has been a boost in the number of social workers joining the group recently suggesting it will become more useful.
Creating such a network isn’t without its problems. Social work is a sensitive issue and it was made clear from the beginning that the network is for Social workers to connect with other social workers. The facebook page especially attracts people who often use ‘colourful’ language and it’s important to monitor and ban if necessary those who aren’t using the group for its purpose. There are also quite a few people who attempt to spam it completely with jobs.
The best approach we found regrading attracting social workers via the network was the following approach:
1) Place the job on the jobs section of UK Social Workers.
2) Use a content distribution strategy across the Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and core network about non job related stuff. Highlight industry events, topical issues etc, and seed in an announcement about a job, or job opportunities. This draws additional social workers into the network who are then likely to come across the jobs. This really helps to attract passive candidates.
3) In conjunction with the above, use a facebook ppc campaign to target fans of the group and their network.
And that’s it really, nothing too complicated but it worked extremely successfully and proved to be far more cost effective than alternative methods.
If you liked this post, then please share it!
Are You Recruiting Social Workers?
If you are a Local Council or other organisation looking for additional channels to recruit social workers, then contact me on Linkedin or via info@uksocialworkers.co.uk to discover our simple packages that will let you leverage the network described, in a cost effective way to recruit social workers directly.
Job boards when used in the right way can be a great source of quality candidates. However it’s widely recognised that job boards tend to attract active candidates, who only make up around 20% of the market. But passive candidates that make up the larger 80% are perceived to be the stronger higher quality source of talent. So what simple methods can you tap into that passive audience?
This is a quick example to illustrate how you can vary the type of listings you use on job boards to help attract passive candidates.
A couple of months back I was working on a particularly tricky campaign to attract a ‘Client Director’ level candidate for a leading market research firm – Kantar Worldpanel. The combination of skills and experience required for these types of brand and category advisory roles is unique, and not easy to come by; we knew we needed to attract passive candidates.
The client has their own direct recruiting team, working behind the scenes busy sourcing, but in addition to this we used a combination of job postings across three websites: Grocer Jobs, Marketing Week Jobs and Only Marketing Jobs. We chose these as our research indicated they were the appropriate channels to focus our efforts (we were looking for a combination of marketing, retail and FMCG experience). We did not use standard branded listings however.
The Grocer (http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/) is a popular magazine amongst retail FMCG professionals, like many trade publications it has a job board also Grocer Jobs. Rather than using a standard listing that only appears on the job board we opted to use an enhanced listing that features on the homepage of the main digital Grocer news portal. The result, far more people who aren’t actively looking for our role (but still operate within the FMCG niche we wanted to tap up) but consume the news of the Grocer became aware of the role. This led to a much higher than average (500% more) number of applications compared to using a standard branded listing.
Marketing Week’s job site also offers similar enhanced listing that target readers of the main digital news platform, rather than just the active job seekers visiting their job board.
With the third website we used, Only Marketing Jobs (OMJ) we chose to use ‘Targeted hand-picked search’ listings. Effectively what this means is that a human search is conducted to match up the vacancy with the candidates on the job boards database to improve relevancy. A certain number of candidates will then receive personalised emails designed to encourage them to apply OR pass it onto other relevant people. Powered by the UK’s largest network for marketing professionals The UK Marketing Network, and a large marketing focused LinkedIn group, the listings have a much greater chance of penetrating into passive audiences compared to a standard job board listing.
As we were attracting senior level passive candidates we needed to ensure the application process was simple so difficult to find candidates didn’t drop out of the process (a big problem with a lot of applicant tracking systems). To achieve this we set up a very simple micro-site (this didn’t cost anything, it’s a free app) to list and brand the jobs, with a few filter questions. Candidates could then apply via a simple CV upload or have the option of applying with their LinkedIn profile.
Kantar Worldpanel mini site
Results
188 click through’s from the various channels over 4 weeks
81 applications (43% conversion of clicks to applications, very high!)
2 successful hires
The 81 applicants had to complete the small number of filter questions before being invited to interview or not. So over a 4 week period this isn’t a massive number of applications (although quite high for this type of role) for the internal recruiter to deal with. Although we did use a combination of slightly more expensive passive targeting inventory, the cost of the whole campaign was equivalent to less than 20% of a single recruitment fee for such a role. Given there were two hires made at ‘Client Director’ level, the ROI was very good.
Further Information
If you would like to learn more or see tailored examples of how to use job boards and social media to attract passive candidates for your own positions, feel free to contact me at Jean-Paul@vonq.co.uk, or connect with me on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpaulsmalls
This year saw Enhance Media host their 11th Online Recruitment Conference at the Royal Geographic Society in London.
As usual there were a number of insightful presentations from the likes of Nestle, Telefonica, LinkedIn & Virgin Atlantic, the latter of which I’ve chosen to highlight a little, as I thought the underlying theme is something a lot of organisations big or small can leverage.
Alex Merrylees, Head of HR for Virgin Atlantic Airways took to the stage in the morning to share his insights into EVP vs Employer Brand, and how Virgin Atlantic connects its “Brand, People & Social Media”. There was quite a bit of content, so I’ve only summarised part (from notes and memory)
Alex described their EVP as what they say about themselves, while the Employer Brand is reflected by what their employees experience of work, actually is. Furthermore although they may try to determine their EVP, the Employer Brand is determined by the voting rights of the employee not by marketing or the employer.
Talking about Brand in general, Alex referred to a company’s ‘Brand DNA’ as a sense of belief, something that creates a sense of expectation, that generates ‘emotional resonance’ – the perception of how strongly a brand resonates with people, which is often larger than the reality of the company.
Now apply this same concept to Employer Brand and the emotional resonance it generates reflects the whole experience of an employees work, and how strongly the brand resonates/telegraphs to them compared to the actual reality of their individual job.
Essentially your brand or employer brand generates emotional value.
So, how do Virgin Atlantic differentiate and bring their brand and employer brand to life? Simple, it’s all about the people, so they use stories of actual employee experiences to help drive social media engagement.
In terms of their ‘storytelling’, they have 3 layers.
1) Consumer Marketing
This is reflected in external marketing aimed at creating/maintaining brand awareness such as their “Flying in the Face of Ordinary” TV advert, an entertaining short film emphasising the customer centric approach of their employees. You can watch the video below:
2) Stories From The Inside
These are stories relating to the actual people that inspired the ‘Flying in the Face of Ordinary’ advert. The recruitment team produced a series of videos with a number of different employees talking about their experiences working at Virgin Atlantic. I’ve embedded one example below, but you can find other examples at their careers site or You Tube channel
3) Everyday Stories
These are stories about the people who ‘deliver the brand every day’. They have employee stories for every type of position from apprentices to pilots. You can take a look at these by navigating through the bar on the left hand side of their career site
At each stage the stories help to promote the employer brand a little bit further and bring the consumer/potential employee closer to the reality of day to day working life at Virgin, and the mindset they expect from their employees. The content is also cross posted onto social networks, facebook, You Tube etc to drive engagement.
It’s easy to look at this example and think, well it’s Virgin, it’s a big brand with a big budget etc…but ultimately, you don’t need TV adverts, or flash videos; the important element here that’s driving and promoting the employment brand is stories. If you can leverage the stories of your staff authentically, and use social platforms to promote them in an effective way, you can help generate that engagement and emotional resonance between job seekers and your brand.
A while back I ran a survey across a number of websites to ask peoples opinions on what they thought were the most innovative recruitment strategies they had come across. I compiled the results in an article – Most Innovative Recruitment Strategies – Part 1.
I had initially anticipated I would write a part 2 much earlier, but er…..I got side tracked. Visitors to this post will range from novice to expert, so some of the things mentioned might not seem innovative to you, but hopefully you’ll see something you like, maybe something you can use as part of your own direct recruitment strategy.
So where to begin?
1) 3D Careers site – De Nederlandse Tuinbouw (the Dutch Horticulture)
Horticulture is big business in the Netherlands, and to provide more in-depth insight into the many different careers paths available in the industry, De Nederlandse Tuinbouw came up with a 3D careers site!
Visually it’s very impressive, and as you click your way around the floating island and zoom into the various areas, you soon realise that it’s packed full of rich multimedia information about the different roles available.
You can watch videos of employees explaining their roles, view a diary breaking down a typical day, find out more on the skills & knowledge required for each role; the volume of info available to candidates is very impressive.
If you understand Dutch (or even if you don’t like me) then you can explore the site yourself at the following link: http://nederlandse.tuinbouw.nl
2) Bromford Group – #gottalovecake campaign
Now when it comes to using Twitter (or social media in general) for recruitment purposes, most companies still appear to be at the ‘pump out an endless stream of job tweets’ phase. What Bromford did is a great example of how a little thought can help you leverage social media in a much more effective way.
Needing to fill several comms roles, Bromford (a leading provider of affordable homes and specialist supported housing services) had already tried several general and niche job boards without success. Internally they were already big users of social media so the idea of using twitter popped up.
Firstly they asked their team what they liked about working for Bromford, as well as inspiring stories about changing lives, space hoppers and fancy dress, it was clear there was an abundance of cake at Bromford, they really really like cake, and hence #gottalovecake was born!
So…they created a dedicated landing page called ‘Gotta love cake campaign‘ that detailed the 5 vacant comms roles in addition to creating a flyer (image below) that they could push out on social media. Applicants were requested to express their interest in a creative way ‘wordpress, video, audio, infographics’ etc were all acceptable, so Bromford could get a feel for their personality and skills, rather than just going through a CV. Furthermore candidates were invited to a tweet off to discuss #gottalovecake!
Click to enlarge
Of course, now they needed to get the word out, colleagues from all over the business chipped in tweeting and posting LinkedIn updates with links back to the gottalovecake landing page. They also targeted influential sector relevant individuals (people with lots of followers) to help spread the word. After receiving various animations, infographics, songs, videos and much more, they hired 4 of the 5 roles successfully. the gottalovecakes webpage received around 140 visits a day directly from Twitter, with over 1900 total unique visits across all platforms.
What I really love about this campaign, is the leveraging of their own employee network to spread the word. Simple, effective, but all too often overlooked. Even if you are posting a LinkedIn job listing, sharing that job with key employees on LinkedIn can massively improve the quality of responses to the ad.
3) The Trojan Horse by Jung von Matt
You really need to watch the video below to get your head round this one from Jung von Matt, a creative marcomms agency who were looking for Art Directors.
So what did they do? Well 50,000 creatives from around the Globe use the website Lipsum each day to generate dummy text that they paste into their layout designs. However, for a short period, when these creatives copied their texts generated from Lipsum, a Jung von Matt job offer appeared on their layout instead with an application link! (note, the logo of JvM is a Trojan Horse, much like this campaign). The result: 220,000 users copied the job offer into their layouts, 14,000 clicked the link to the JvM website. I’m can’t verify if they hired anyone but hey, it was pretty innovative (and somehow involved Lipsum allowing JvM to add code into their website I think).
4) Pirate Recruitment from Ogilvy
Ogilvy Brussels were looking for a creating web designer. Expensive application suites are often required for web designers to create the things they do. As a result some designers are tempted to download such applications illegally from pirate websites (especially early on in their careers when they have less money some might argue).
So rather cleverly, Ogilvy decided they would upload a file to several pirate sharing websites, whose file name was named after an essential application web designers use. However once downloaded, rather than getting the application suite they expected, they were presented with a job offer instead. The result? ‘Talented Steve’ now works for Ogilvy, and gets to use all the applications he needs for free. The video below by Ogilvy provides a great explanation of the campaign
Recruiting candidates who are essentially engaging in criminal activities raises some moral questions. Surprisingly (well not really) this is a well-trodden path in specific sectors, Government Cyber Security teams being one of them. I covered this in the Most Innovative Recruitment Strategies Part 1.
5) Unilever UK – Facebook & Peer to Peer Networks
Facebook, like Twitter, is still massively underused and abused my many companies content with only posting a relentless stream of jobs onto their facebook timelines. There are some pretty good facebook recruitment apps on the market now like Work4Labs, JobandTalent and the recently launched Hire Rabbit that allow you to create branded facebook pages, job sites, and leverage your employee’s facebook networks for job referrals.
Of the numerous facebook recruiting examples I’ve seen, one of the best ones, because of it’s simplicity and engaging nature is the Unilever UK ‘By Grads, for Grads’ set up. Essentially every year Unilever recruit graduates for their ‘Unilever Future Leaders Programme’ (UFLP).
Grads are encouraged to post any queries on the Unilver Careers face book page (click here to view). As indicated on their facebook campus page any questions on the UFLP are answered by current grads working at Unilever from all over the business. They actually manage the page. This set up leads to a number of benefits.
Firstly prospective grads get to engage with current grads at Unilever, so gain a much better authentic view into the business. Secondly, it takes a lot of the management of the facebook page away from recruitment and further empowers grads who are happy to get involved in the process. This is one of the best ways to use social media within recruitment, not just posting jobs or sourcing from social networks, but actually creating engaging peer to peer networks that provide long term sustainable value and a pipeline of candidates.
It’s worth noting that the ‘By Grads, for Grads’ campaign is not just limited to facebook, there is also a Twitter account and Blog dedicated to the UFLP.
I’ve no doubt that we’ll hear a lot more about gamification in recruitment during 2013. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Gamification is about the use of game mechanics/thinking in a non-game context (like recruitment). This is not to be confused with ‘serious games’ which relates to using/playing an actual game (like Farmville or Angry Birds). Appropriate use of gamification methods can help increase engagement within a given process. Having said all that, I’m going to highlight a couple of companies who created a ‘serious game’ for recruitment purposes, just because I think they are really innovative and pretty cool.
In September 2012 Boehringer Ingelheim, the global biopharmaceutical firm developed a facebook game called ‘Syrum’. Players are tasked with running their own pharma company to develop drugs to prevent a range of diseases.
I had a play myself and while you plod about the lab solving problems you also learn some history regarding epidemics and outbreaks that have plagued mankind over the centuries. As Boehringer’s director of digital mentioned to PM Live’s Digital Intelligence Blog, creating the game “was all about engagement, reputation management, market research and recruiting talent”.
This isn’t the first time a facebook game has been developed to improve brand awareness and bolster recruitment. In 2011 Marriott International, the worldwide hotel chain launched the ‘My Marriott Hotel’ facebook game in 5 languages to help enhance their international recruitment efforts.
You can learn more about the My Marriott game by watching this short video:
You begin by managing a virtual hotel restaurant kitchen, buying and selling supplies on a budget, managing employees etc, and can move on to other hotel operations if you are successful. For the emerging markets where Marriott are introducing their brand for the first time it’s a great way to generate brand awareness and ultimately teach candidates about their employment opportunities.
7) Augmented Reality & Recruitment
Augmented Reality (AR) is a way to use technology to enhance your view of the physical world. If you’re not familiar with AR you can quickly get your head around it if you read the first paragraph of an earlier post I did Augmented Reality & Recruitment.
So how are companies using AR for recruitment? It’s very early days at the moment and some companies like Layar (who develop an AR app) have done a bit of experimenting, but the most sophisticated example I’ve seen is the US Air Force’s Command Centre Alpha AR marketing tour initiative. Candidates walk around a hangar area carrying a tablet. When they point the tablet at one of the walls or ceilings that are lined with various screens displaying images and video, they become augmented with additional 3D graphics and images.
AR is used to provide participants with around 20 different mission scenarios. You can read more about this experiment by clicking here
8) The Big Fat Sweepstake! Transport America
In the states, finding qualified drivers in a shrinking talent pool is proving a challenge. The solution for Transport America was the ‘Big Fat Sweepstake’.
With a round trip air fare, two nights accommodation and spending money at an exciting destination on offer, the Transport America sweepstake differs to others sweepstakes in that anyone outside the company with a Commercial Drivers License can enter. This has helped generate significant industry buzz and goodwill towards the company which now enjoys a retention rate considerably better than the industry average. “This promotion continues the message of a driver-friendly company” says Betsy Waldrop, the Transport America recruiting director.
9) Infographics & Viral Job Distribution
There’s an infographic for just about everything these days, and some companies have begun using them to make their job adverts more visually appealing to potential candidates. There are quite a few about so I’ve included just the one example below. It’s by Kite Consultants who were looking for ‘Change & Innovation Consultants’. As you can see in addition to the requirements of the role, Kite have also tried to present visually, aspects of their culture and why working there is so exciting.
The great things about infographics is they are easily shared around social networks and can generate a lot of inbound traffic. They may not be a viable to create for every role but it’s an option to think about using from time to time.
Jobgram is a creative recruitment advertising platform/service founded in New Zealand, that specifically develops job infographics that tap into referral networks. Check out their website http://getajobgram.com to see examples of visual ads from the likes of Pizza Hut, BOC, Fronterra and many others.
So……………that’s my round up for Most Innovative Recruitment Strategies Part 2. I think moving forward I might just break things down to monthly articles on innovative recruitment stuff I come across. There are still a few things such as talent search engines, alternative direct recruiting models and new social platforms that I never got round too!
Any comments or feedback are welcome. If you find this post interesting, feel free to share it.
A few weeks back I attended the end of year recruitment conference hosted by Louise Triance of UK Recruiter
The topic of mobile recruiting was high on the agenda, as it has been for much of this year and Matt Alder of Metashift gave a few examples and some pointers for recruiters to think about on the subject. For those in-house recruiters looking to get up to speed quickly on mobile recruitment, trends, strategies & tips, then I would recommend you have a browse through the following 2 papers/reports:
The MoRecNews blog is also a good source of mobile recruiting info: http://morecnews.com
The purpose of this article is to simply show a few examples of mobile career sites from companies that seem to be on the right track with their mobile recruitment strategies. This isn’t about illustrating a perfect end to end mobile recruitment process as no one seems to have nailed it yet. Essentially these are sites that provide a good mobile user experience that allow you to learn more about the companies as a candidate and to search for jobs. I’m not looking at actually applying for a job on my phone.
The fundamental difference in the user experience between a desktop and a mobile optimised site is how you navigate around. When I get bored on the commute to work I often play games on my mobile to pass the time (Like Temple Run – my current high score is 1,633,302, just shy of 9,000m….that’s pretty good!).
As I escape from rabid apes, jump chasms and slide under trees, I do so while holding my phone with one hand and using my thumb to navigate the obstacles – simple. You use your thumb a lot when navigating around and using apps on your smart phone, so you can expect candidates to want a similarly easy experience when exploring a mobile careers site. If you’re looking into a mobile recruitment for the first time, then rather than view the subsequent screen shots, I encourage you to actually explore these sites on your own smart phone.
AT&T (US)
The first mobile careers site I checked out was that of AT&T (US). Matt had shown some screen shots during his presentation (you can view Matt’s mobile recruitment slides here) so I thought I’d take a look for myself.
As soon as you land on their mobile career site, you can see it’s has nice big, clear thumb friendly icons.
As you continue to explore the site there are some brief explanations of each function and it’s very easy to navigate around, learn about the various departments, and to perform a job search.
I wasn’t expecting to be able to apply for a job on my phone (often once you are searching through jobs, you’re in the ATS environment, and if your ATS is not mobile optimised, it ruins the experience) but you do have the option to email a link of the job to yourself to complete your application at a later time. Overall it’s a very simple, easy to navigate site. Note the home page button is in the top right corner, again thumb friendly.
Given I was randomly searching while on a train on the way home, finding other mobile optimised career sites was difficult. Finding any UK sites proved fruitless so I took a look at some of the big US brands.
Starbucks (US)
Another easy to navigate site that incorporates multimedia action as well. An icon displayed in the top right of the screen provides a drop down if you want to learn more about the corporate side of the business. Candidates like consumers want a nice mobile experience too.
Scrolling down from the home screen you can click on various functions to learn more. It’s full of additional videos and short employee testimonials.
When I wanted to view and search individual jobs I was faced with the issue of being directed within a non-mobile optimised ATS environment, a challenge many companies are facing. The mobile careers site itself, is good, and just to compare how it looks compared to a non mobile optimised site, have a glance at the UK version of the same company’s careers site on a smart phone.
I know which one I would prefer (and spend more time exploring) if I was a candidate.
Sodexo
Sodexo have won numerous awards and praise for their overall mobile recruitment strategy (click here to learn more about that).
Again the site is easy to navigate on your phone (perhaps a little less thumb friendly than the earlier sites, but when you consider this mobile careers site has been around for 2 years or so, it’s still way ahead of the game compared to most). There’s a whole bunch of easy to access information on different career paths and short snip-its from what employees have to say about working for Sodexo.
These are just a few examples to illustrate what some companies are currently doing regarding mobile recruitment, and to stimulate you to think about your own site.
Another useful thing you can do to help get your head around mobile – if your business has a corporate mobile optimised site already, ask marketing or the web team to show you the mobile CMS (Content Management System) assuming you have one. You might be pleasantly surprised (if built right) at how easy amending and changing the content of a mobile site can be.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2012 LinkedIn Talent Connect conference hosted in London. In addition to some great food, stacks of sweets, music, and all round entertainment, I also had the opportunity to network with recruiters from all over Europe and listen to some great presentations covering topics from the latest LinkedIn innovations to employer branding, passive candidate recruitment and what Recruitment 5.0 might look like.
Of the many presentations I attended there was one which particularly stood out for me that demonstrated great examples of forward thinking, commercially focused strategic sourcing models.
The presentation was called “Passive Candidate Recruiting Success with Betfair & Centrica” and was presented by Rachel Riddlington – Research & Sourcing consultant from Betfair, and James Dowling – Group Executive Talent Manager at Centrica.
Betfair – Moving to a Strategic Sourcing Recruitment Function
Betfair is one of the world’s largest international online sports betting providers with three million registered customers around the world.
With 80% of candidates estimated to be passive, combined with the need to recruit within difficult niche markets such as IT Security, Betfair identified that to ensure they could recruit the best talent available, they needed to evolve their in-house recruitment model from a reactive one, to a strategic sourcing one.
In terms of what that model looks like visually, consider the diagram below (this is based on my memory and some hastily scribbled notes).
click image to enlarge
The recruitment of passive candidates has been made central to their in-house recruitment structure. Talent Acquisition Managers have a business partner role while the Research & Sourcing Team are made up of highly skilled sourcers and recruiters responsible for end to end recruitment. The Executive Search team is broken down into two groups, Project Work such as succession planning, and Executive Search, who actively map talent at competitor organisations. This type of structure and focus on passive candidates accounts for the recruitment of approximately 70% of their roles. That’s a huge amount of passive talent!
In terms of the actual day to day recruiting activities and sources of hires, the team get involved with a variety of tasks including:
Market mapping across skill sets
Creating talent pools & pipelines
Head Hunting
Hosting Events
Referrals
Special Ops (reacting quickly to talent intelligence)
External advertising
External advertising such as the use of job boards is one of the few activities pulling in active candidates, and Rachel mentioned that it’s still a useful medium for some roles, although of course not central to the overall recruiting strategy.
Examples of Strategic Sourcing
Within the difficult to fill areas, Betfair host their own events such as drinks evenings and one to one coffees with the talent they have identified. This further helps to build relationships with candidates who might not be actively looking for jobs.
I’ve personally referred to one of their methods as ‘Special Ops’, in reference to how they execute opportunistic recruitment projects in reaction to specific intelligence in the market. When they learned that a competitor was relocating/closing a London office, they knew that some great talent might not want to relocate and pro-actively approached these candidates.
In terms of building pipelines and talent pools, they do this within various niche skill sets where they identify and approach candidates. To improve the monitoring and communication with candidates they have begun using LinkedIn Pipeline as a CRM tool.
Centrica – Connecting your business and resourcing plans
James Dowling from Centrica also provided some useful insights into their strategic resourcing function. Centrica creates 3 year resourcing plans as per the following simple steps (I say simple, there’s obviously a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes):
Connect the future business plan with resourcing needs
Build a talent intelligence plan
Translate research into recruitment action
Although it seems an obvious and logical step to plan a resourcing strategy around future business plans, I would be interested to know what percentage of companies actually do this? Quite a low amount I anticipate. Such a strategy requires a recruitment team structure that ensures a close relationship between the recruiting function and the business, so that the resourcing plan can be frequently updated to reflect fresh business intelligence.
Strategic Sourcing Within Renewable Energy
Recruiting within the niche Wind Farm area of the renewable energy sector had historically provided Centrica with significant challenges. To deal with this they studied their business plan to identify future dates that they were due to be engaged in new wind farm projects. Ahead of time they mapped out internationally the talent of Wind Energy professionals amongst their competitors. Armed with this knowledge they could then go to market and approach relevant candidates to ensure the right staff were in place in time to deliver on the business’s wind farm projects.
James indicated this proactive sourcing approach has delivered great results, successfully alleviating any potential ‘bottle necks in the supply chain’ relating to Wind Energy projects.
Saving £163,000 on a single hire, the power of talent mapping.
Another achievement James was particularly proud of (with good reason) as a result of their strategic resourcing function, was an example relating to an Executive hire. For a specific very senior executive position it was apparent they may need to cast their net further afield from the energy sector. They therefore built talent maps external to their sector, that could potentially identify the right candidate.
Having identified the right person(s) who indeed happened to be operating outside of the energy sector, the sensitivity of the role still dictated that they needed to use a third party to establish contact and make an initial approach. Ultimately they successfully recruited the candidate they had identified at an approximate cost of £12,000. Compare this against the estimated £163,000 that the use of a third party head hunter was expected to cost for facilitating the whole process, and you can see why James was so happy.
Conclusion
These were just a couple of examples of how two companies operating in very different sectors have used commercially driven strategic sourcing models to consistently identify and recruit passive talent. At the end of the presentation both Rachel and James were asked what their top tips would be for other recruiters embarking on such strategies. They mentioned the below respectively:
“Really understand your candidate” & “Practice what you preach, hire the best recruiters and don’t compromise”
A week ago on Monday the 22nd of October I attended #TruLondon 6 – the Recruiting Unconference. As usual a host of international professionals from across the recruitment spectrum had gathered to discuss, network and learn about all things recruitment.
Of the various tracks (tracks are like open group discussions around a topic) I participated in it was Gerry Crispin’s “The Candidate Experience” that sparked my interest the most given many companies are increasingly realising that the line between the candidate and the consumer is increasingly blurred.
Gerry is the Principle and Co-Founder of CareerXroads, a consulting practice that “facilitates peer-to-peer meetings between corporate staffing leaders to share, compare and innovate hiring practices”. Aside from this Gerry is also heavily involved in the Candidate Experience Awards (or CandE’s).
In a nutshell the CandE’s exist ‘to enable any company to benchmark and improve their candidate experience’. Part of this benchmarking process involves detailed surveys completed by actual candidates who have applied to corporate vacancies (regardless of whether they successfully got the job).
Gerry had some interesting knowledge to share regarding some of the research the CandE’s have generated. A couple of the main points that stood out were:
Very few companies manage candidate expectations by explaining what to expect in the recruitment process up front.
“50% of candidates surveyed, believed that once they made an application online they had a personal relationship with that company”
Now when you combine the latter statement with the results of other candidate surveys such as that from MysteryApplicant.com, which indicated that 38% of their surveyed applicants “were less likely to buy from or use the company’s products or services after their job seeking experience”, it’s clear that there is a pretty sound business case for improving the candidate experience.
Previous CandE reports can be downloaded on their website here. I’ve had a read through myself and unfortunately it was not surprising to see the “Black Hole Effect” being mentioned. Statistics highlighted that 30-40% of those candidates surveyed did not receive any status updates on their applications. It was also worth noting in the summary of the report that an “auto message receipt of submission does not count as a communication/response”
So what are other companies doing to improve the candidate experience? Well there were some simple ideas Gerry mentioned that a few had adopted. A simple one being generating an automated email to all applicants after a set time (20 days in the example he mentioned) asking candidates for feedback about their application experience. The point of this was that it built into the internal recruitment process a system that would result in invariable negative feedback if applicants were particularly frustrated. The internal team know this, and are motivated to provide a positive candidate experience.
If you are an in-house recruiter looking to learn more about the CandE’s or for ways to improve the candidate experience, then I would check out their website http://www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org . Although the CandE’s originated in the US there is a UK survey also, and you may find some of the research and insights beneficial to your organisation.
When an employee leaves Sodexo US, they receive an invite both via email and snail mail to join the Sodexo Reconnextions group. A communication plan is in place for the group and members have access to regular webinars on a variety of topics from CV Tips and Interview Skills to Personal Financial Planning. Internally line managers are actively asked by the recruitment team to name at least 1 member of staff they wished had not left the company. These high performers form part of a sub group that the recruiters can target in the future. Often people leave thinking the grass is greener, but in the instance that down the line the reality is different, the Sodexo reconnextions strategy ensures that their brand is always at the forefront of persons mind career wise. By providing useful information and support Sodexo improve the chances of attracting back high performers. So far the programme seems pretty successful with around 10% of the people within the reconnextions group estimated to have been rehired.
Que Social –Another tool Arie demonstrated. This is a recruitment gamification platform that Sodexo uses to help leverage the social networks of their employees. Employees create a profile on the platform and link up their social media accounts and contact details. The platform supports content curation which the recruitment team use to schedule engaging messages about brand initiatives, company news, jobs etc that the employees with Que Social accounts receive by SMS and/or email. The messages have a headline and small description of the underlying story and a hyperlink that if clicked will instantly share the content to the users various social media accounts registered in their Que Social profile.
Joberate Signal – If you’re looking for a tool that easily allows you to create talent pipelines, and monitors that pipeline to automatically inform you that an individual may be looking for a new job, then check out Joberate Signal. Once you’re logged into the platform you simply create a folder or folders which you then populate with bookmarked social profiles (like LinkedIn or Twitter) of the individuals you want to keep an eye on (you can also bulk import candidate data via a csv file). The tool monitors changes in the online behaviour of these candidates and then notifies you when they may be considering a move, thus allowing you to pro-actively approach them. It’s simple to use and because it’s linked to active social profiles your database will never be static and out of date.
Connect Cubed – This is a candidate assessment platform that uses gaming technology to determine a match between your roles and the personality and smarts of a candidate. Rather than being used after an application is made, or during the latter part of a recruitment process, the Connect Cubed platform delivers pre-application tests and simulations. In theory, armed with this data you’ll be able to determine more accurately who to invite or not to invite to an interview, saving both you and the candidate valuable time.
Direct Recruiting 