Video in Recruitment – Be an iPhone Video Hero

This blog post is aimed at corporate recruiters who are exploring cost effective ways to introduce video into their recruitment mix.

Yesterday I attended the  “London Bloggers Meet Up, Video Edition – Social Media Week Special hosted over at Unruly Media , as part of Social Media Week the worldwide event “exploring the social, cultural and economic impact of social media”.

Initially I was going along just to pick up some general tips on new ways to use video in blogs, however loads of the tips were great from a recruitment marketing perspective in general.

The presentation that sparked this post was by Jules Watkins – founder of iPhone Video Hero.

If you’re an in-house recruiter you might be thinking about creating video content such as a ‘day in the life’, ’employee video diary’, or ‘work environment’ video in order to help attract, engage and recruit candidates in a different way.  You’ve probably seen a range of recruitment videos from the low cost hand held camera vids, to the highly polished more expensive professional type.  Each has it’s own advantages in terms of the experience it creates, the authenticity it reflects etc, but if you’re wondering where do you begin and how can you make decent quality recruitment videos cost effectively?… then the tips below will illustrate how you can film, edit and publish great content all from your smart phone.

1) Why Use Your Smart Phone?

Jules stated that “the best camera in the world is the one you have with you” (this is not actually his quote, he did mention hearing it somewhere else) , in reference to your smart phone.  He’s a big iPhone fan but bear in mind a lot of the stuff you will read below exists for Android based phones too.  The obvious advantages of using your phone to shoot video is it’s with you all the time, has a camera built in that can easily be upgraded via apps, and you don’t need to spend additional cash on video recorders. (also many hand held cams like the Flip are not in production any more).

2) ‘The Grip’ 

Videos that look too shaky can be off putting.  Most people filming on a phone use a relatively unstable grip.  This basic tip from Jules on how to hold your phone while filming will help your videos look much smoother. As per the image to the right (I think I’ve done it correctly!), you want to grip your phone strongly with your whole hand, and support your gripping arm with your other hand.  This will add more stability and reduce shakiness as you pan the camera around.

Furthermore you can still move your fingers from your supporting hand to operate the camera.

3) Video Quality & Editing Apps

The iPhone app store contains a number of video apps which are superior to the standard camera app that comes with the phone.  They possess additional features that allow you to shoot in HD, share content, and add special effects such as music etc.  A couple of the key apps Jules mentioned include:

Blux Movie – A 1080p video app with features such as HD filters, split screens and HD sharing.  It has an improved zoom that captures close-ups more clearly than the default camera and instantly allows you to share to Facebook and YouTube straight from the app.  It’s also fully compatible with iMovie (more details below).  This app is easy to use and currently costs around  £1.99

iMovie – This app provides basic editing tools that allow you to add that finishing touch to the videos you’ve made.  You can easily trim the length of any video, share your HD videos straight to the web, edit the sound, even add titles and credits.  Costs about £2.99

iTimeLapsse – Unless you’re getting really creative this is perhaps not so relevant for making  a recruitment related video, I juts thought it was cool so included it.  As the name suggests, it allows you to easily create time lapsed video on your phone (I suppose you could do a time lapse video showing the hustle and bustle of your working environment?)

Another app that allows you to easily edit video straight from your phone is called Splice

4) Audio

Audio quality is extremely important when filming.  If the audio is rubbish then potential candidates will switch off after just a few seconds.  This is one of the biggest problems in my opinion with self made recruitment videos, although I prefer their authenticity over the high end expensive polished vids, poor audio annoys me.

Luckily a number of accessories (plus the aforementioned apps) exist to help improve audio quality.   iPhone audio adaptors can be easily purchased online that allow you to connect any microphone to your iphone, vastly improving it’s audio quality.  Wireless microphones (e.g the Sony AW3 pictured) can record high quality audio up to 50m from your phone/camera, particularly good for recording someone speaking.  Audio equipment can cost a bit so I would shop around.

It’s worth noting at this point, if you’re happy with ‘the Grip’ and basic apps which contain editing and some audio options, you’re ready to make some decent quality recruitment videos on your phone for the cost of about £5.

5) Accessories

If you want to add another layer of professionalism to videos shot with your smart phone.  Then check out these accessories:

Swivl – This clever piece of kit allows you to automatically motion track and film yourself (or someone else) giving a demo, a presentation, a speech etc.   You place your phone in the apparatus, turn the camera on, and via the handy wireless mic you wear, Swivl will track your movements with the camera/phone. Check out the video below.  It’s approximately £100-£150 (including the wireless mic)

Glif – If you’re not satisfied with ‘the Grip’ and prefer the added stability of a tripod or stand, then this accessory will allow you to mount your iphone and prop it at various angles (Picture below left).

Olloclip – This neat accessory clips over you iPhone instantly transforming it into a wide angle lens.  Perfect if you’re looking to create panoramic videos of your working environment (Picture below right).

Left: The Glif tripod mount. Right: The Olloclip wide angle lens

Summary

Those are some the basic and easy to use tips I took from yesterday’s London Bloggers Meet Up.  From a recruitment marketing perspective, using the right grip with the relevant camera/video apps allows you to produce decent quality video content at little cost.  If you want to really impress then you can fork out on some improved audio kit and accessories to add that extra polish to your creations. Either way introducing video into your direct recruitment strategy doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

If you want to find more tips from Jules Watkins  founder of iPhone Video Hero, you can visit his site by clicking here

Why is use of video in recruitment important?

Video consumption continues to increase year on year, especially on mobile devices.  From You Tube career/recruitment channels to specific applications such as Sonru’s impressive automated online video interview solution, corporate recruiters now have a number of ways to leverage video content as part of their direct recruitment strategy.  If you’re not convinced yet of the importance of video (and mobile!), the following stats from You Tube help illustrate it’s growing influence:

• You Tube is the Worlds second largest search engine after Google (good for SEO)
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• More than 20% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices
• 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube from mobile devices

5 Funny Recruitment Videos

Bit of a light hearted blog post this one.  Below are five funny (at least I found them funny) recruitment videos I’ve either come across by chance or been sent at some time or another.

1) Interview Faux Pas

A particular favourite, this cartoon was scripted by Elkie Hollad of Prospectus IT recruitment, and reflects real questions and answers from interview situations reported from HR professionals and recruitment consultants.

“Any other questions” “Yes, what is your drug testing policy”

2) Henry & Aaron – IT’S A SNAP!

Not for the squeamish, you may have seen this doing the rounds recently, this short ad from down under was created to help promote and recruit students for the Central Institute of Technology in Western Australia.  Unique to say the least, if you like stories with a twist (or horror films) you’ll love this.

theSocialCV – A Test Drive In Social Recruiting

Recently I took up a free trial on an innovative recruiter product called theSocialCV which has been in development for over 4 years.

theSocialCV is a global internet search tool that builds profiles of candidates based on attributes and information that has been mentioned on various social networks, blogs and other publicly available data sources.  It uses semantic filters and constant monitoring of status updates from over 30 social media sites to build individual profiles in real time.   In their own words, they are “organizing the world’s largest real-time global talent pool”

Please bear in mind theSocialCV is still in Beta, so although some aspects of its functionality are not perfected yet, keep an open mind in terms of the innovative ways it could be used as part of an integrated online recruitment strategy.

When you log in to theSocialCV, you are presented with a simple, easy to navigate interface as illustrated below with a number of search fields to populate based on your target candidate.

In this example I want to recruit SaaS or Software sales people in the London region. I’ve populated the relevant fields, job title, city, country and the key skills I’m looking for.  Once you hit the search button a list of social profiles aggregated from the various social platforms and information sources is generated.

On the left you can see individual profiles, to the right you can see detailed information on each candidate profile you click on and in the middle, below the portrait image are icons for the various social platforms and data sources the info has been aggregated from.  If you click on these icons, you’ll be taken to the individual’s profile on those platforms

Having gone through a lot of the profiles for the skills I was looking for, it was very accurate and each of the individuals had a history of SaaS or Software sales.  You also have the option to segment the profiles further by filtering by country, company and job title.

Other useful search features include the ability to save your searches, which easily enables you to keep an eye on new matching profiles each day/week.  Furthermore you also have the ability to create folders to add your target profiles to for later engagement.  From within the folders you can easily export the profile data into an excel sheet.

theSocialCV is an extremely ambitious piece of kit, and still a work in progress.  For example, to check how up to date the indexing was, I did a quick search for past and present employees at my own company.  There were several employees whose profiles did not appear in the search results and with those that did appear, the home page link was not necessarily their most recent company. Currently theSocialCV has indexed around 106 million social profiles and continues to add thousands more each day.

One of the most interesting features of theSocialCV is the ‘Watch’ button.  Whenever a profile is generated you have a number of options on the top right hand side.  The ‘Save to ATS’ button is a function in development right now but by hitting the watch button you will be notified of any changes to that profile (company, skills etc).  Again I did a bit of a test with this, by adding several of my own employees onto a watch list and asking them to change details on their LinkedIn profiles such as their job title.  Apparently it takes at least 24 hours for theSocialCV to pick up a change (not bad considering the 100+ million profiles it’s indexed) and you will then be notified of any changes via the email address linked to your account.   Unfortunately during my trial it did not pick up on any of the changes so I can only assume this is another aspect of the system being improved.

Earlier I said that although it’s not perfect yet, you should  think about how theSocialCV could be used as part of your recruitment strategy.  The ability to search your competitors and organise key staff that are not active candidates into folders and watch lists, could provide a method for in-house recruiters to talent map their industry and build pipelines in a relatively cost effective and time efficient way.

If you have a wider social media strategy you could then look at ways to engage your talent maps, e.g. encourage them to join your LinkedIn groups, talent communities etc in order to build some brand awareness  before approaching them formally with an employment offer in the future.

Connecting up your social networks

theSocialCV allows you to integrate your facebook and twitter accounts making your network searchable and contactable without leaving theSocialCV environment.

When you want to contact candidates you have saved within lists etc, it’s unlikely you will have their direct email address.   theSocialCV will recognise from their social profile whether you can contact them through a social network like Twitter and give you the ability to tweet them from theSocialCV interface.

Personally I think theSocialCV is an amazing tool, there’s still a lot of ‘indexing’ to be done, and there is a whole host of developments and improvements to come.  As a way to identify, track and engage with passive candidates I think it’s great.  From a UK perspective, a lot of the information on the profiles being returned seemed very much based on LinkedIn or Google profiles.  This made me wonder whether I would pay to use the tool if I had already paid for a  LinkedIn recruiter licence.  This is less of a question though if I was in an EMEA or Global recruiting role, this is where you can really see the power of theSocialCV above other tools.

Running several searches across Germany and France for example, I was able to see the data extracted from the Viadeo and XING profiles (the largest professional networks in France and Germany respectively) of potential candidates.  With the likes of Google+ also adding members globally, the ability to search across all the major professional and social networks and easily organise those profiles into lists for later engagement, really makes theSocialCV a potentially powerful weapon in your recruitment arsenal.

Source: http://thesocialcv.com

More information on theSocialCV is available at http://thesocialcv.com/, there are some interesting infographics on their blog which will give you an idea of currently particularly strong within.

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

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

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.

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

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: http://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

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

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