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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On Thursday the 27th of January the Royal Geographical Society in Central London played host to the 9th 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?
Direct Recruiting 