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Recent research indicates that there is now no such thing as a passive candidate. The vast majority of workers are open to new opportunities or actively searching for a new role. The rise of social media and smartphones has meant that it is much simpler for recruiters to find those looking to switch jobs. What does this mean for the regular jobseeker?
When I graduated and began seeking work my first ports of call were job boards and newspaper adverts (I’m showing my age here). I spent a great deal of time tailoring my CV in Word to upload to job boards or email to employers (bet you thought I was going to say post, I’m not that old) or completing lengthy online application forms. Being fairly well qualified (if I do say so myself), I believe I got a higher response rate than average, something like 20% of my applications resulted in invitations to interview or calls from recruitment agencies.
Some of the interviews I attended were assessment days including group activities and psychometric testing and some were straight interviews with either a single person or panel, but the overriding theme was that whilst my qualifications got me to that initial stage, to progress or be hired I had to demonstrate something more than could be gleaned from my CV – cultural fit, experience, problem-solving skills, etc. – all things that workers will find it easier to demonstrate than a jobseeker.
These days it’s almost impossible to become a successful recruiter if you aren’t a wiz at using your social media skills. Over 3 million people in the UK alone use LinkedIn and good recruiters use it as a tool to source candidates and clients. The majority though, don’t know what they don’t know and could be getting so much more from it than they realise.
Even if you are that social media ‘wiz kid’, that’s only half the story. If you don’t have credible, consultative headhunting skills, having the names of top talent is meaningless if you can’t confidently approach them to professionally present an opportunity.
Using these skills together is the key, so learning them together makes sense.
Lander Associates has teamed up with LinkedIn expert Mark Williams (Mr LinkedIn) to create a unique training programme that combines LinkedIn and traditional headhunting techniques.
LinkedIn skills from setting up that ‘killer’ profile to discovering applications that you should be taking advantage of to really extend your network, go hand in handwith using a headhunting structure that gives professional credibility, managing even the most senior candidates with confidence.
I attended the event Social Media in Recruitment at London and was dazzled about the whole bunch of information I got. In this first blog, I will write about the three most discussed social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I just bundled all the information I got and wrote down a conclusion of all three of them. See here we go...
LinkedIn is the professional network used to look for candidates. The two biggest groups represented on LinkedIn are white collars and young graduates so if that is your target group, get yourself a profile and start engaging! Not all people on LinkedIn are looking for a job, there are also professionals who are just using it as a tool to develop themselves professionally. But why not communicate with them also? One day they might be looking for a job and then you already have build up a relationship of trust with them. If you want to use it as a company, I would suggest to use Company Profile (customized version). Here you can adapt your content to your target group. A sales manager for example will see other content on the career pages as an IT-specialist.
Twitter is noise so this one is for keeping everyone up-to-date about anything you like. As a company you can choose to tweet about jobs or news or maybe both. What is suggested is to use feeds: One for the news and one for jobs. People who do not like to be spammed with jobs, can choose not to see them. One thing you really have to do before starting to post jobs on Twitter is making sure that you have a proper career page. People still have to be attracted to your company after they have left the safe & sexy Twitterpage.
Last but not least, Facebook. I personally always felt a bit withheld to use Facebook professionally but Thursday I was provided with some new insights. What most people do not know is that the Fan Pages of Facebook are indexed by Google. When you set-up a customized Fan page (not that difficult apparently), you optimize the branding of your company. The more fans you have, the higher you will appear in search results. I concluded that Facebook is not necessarily used to look for candidates but that it is best used to increase your brand reputation and make your company more popular. And maybe, who knows, your very cool customized fan page is going to attract lots of talent from Facebook.
So now you know: LinkedIn to look for talent, Twitter to keep everyone up-to-date and Facebook to increase brand reputation.
A few of the highlights from Lisa's presentation follow. Presentations will be available for the delegates via the event website.
Great beginning with Human Being 1.0. Social community was about survival in the Stone Age.
As we moved to the industrial age, business used to be social as business was local. Communication tools did not exist for business to work outside of local area.
But, business got big, went global and the local social element did not scale.
When new comms technologies evolved, business could have two way conversations with their customers. Currently, we have blurred lines between social and business, especially with Social Media sites.
Lisa then showed a nice little film developed to educate the A4E community of 58,000 (to bring people back to work) - on what are social media communities.
Good slide of examples of various communities and technology engines that you can use to build/support communities.
Are the commercial social networks really a community or only a collection of people?
Attracting Talent is not a new Concept
War for talent is still alive and kicking.
What is wrong with old style recruiting? Nothing. All the older media still exist and are being used. New Social Media channels are add-ons.
But what about current recruiting processes? They leave jobseekers cold.
Where do you start to develop a new and better process?
What is the objective?
Where is your Community?
What are you measruiring?
Sodexo - talent community Microsoft - We Still Serve, a US veterans attrraction community
PSA Healthcare
Unbranded community
XBox, reliability engineers needed after a recall, created a long term community of potential employees for Microsoft - experts all in one place on a LinkedIn group.
Good Do's and Don'ts to close
Top 2 tips:
Don't underestimate the time it will take
Be thorough in the selection of your community platform
Let's be honest with each other for a moment. We all know that's easier said than done, sometimes you just have to keep quiet. Sometimes, you have to bite your lip. It's just easier that way.
But then where does that really get you? In the short term it can make sense, even make life easier, but the reality is, without honesty, in the long term we never really improve.
What if you could ask any question you like and get an honest answer? How much easier would that be when it came to making the right decisions?
If that were the case organisations could create even more authentic and transparent employer brands, based on honest employee feedback and opinions.
Recruiters could manage candidate expectations from the offset, delivering the right candidates for the right reasons.
Sitting in the back of the room of about 400 delegates for the Enhance Media annual conference looking at the future of recruitment. Excellent speaker line up as we move into the afternoon sessions.
Intersting that this year there are probably about 50+ twitterers on the stream: #emconf2010. Last year there were 6 of us.
We will cover the individual presentations in more detail over the next few days.
Workforce Management a US magazine ran an article which has raises an interesting issue for those who have a passion for using social media to recruit and check candidates.
The driving force of the article is the potential discriminatory nature in networking sites and the fact that this may leave the recruiter at peril.
The article comments "According to the latest data from Quantcast, only 5 percent of LinkedIn users are black and only 2 percent are Hispanic" the article goes on to say "Sourcing from professional network sites such as LinkedIn carries a risk that the method could be challenged on discrimination grounds. It represents a hiring pool that is not open to the general population. Using a limited network may have a disparate impact. If hiring through these networks can be challenged, it will be."
Now in an ever legislative UK recruitment sector which is mirrored in Europe and the whole debate over "diversity" are we likely to see our own first case for discrimination by an organisation using a social media channel and what are the implications for our huge spending (on recruitment) public sector?
The first of the case studies on employer branding. Sabine Josch of the Otto Group, assisted by Milch & Zucker on the brand slides
Again in German, so my apologies for interpretation in advance.
Goal for 2012 to be top three trade employer. Developing new HR campaigns, with Employer Value Proposition, as basis for external communication
This is good structured presentation, on the steps they have taken from Marketing to creative concepts, based on real stories and real experiences and using 'uncommon images', such as the wrinkles around eyes and belly button to hold the text messages. Getting a good laugh - I like these two as presenters, very audience centric.
Next images showing the traveller sitting on suitcases - these are good marketing driven approach, not the common recruitment style images. Will be interested to get the presentation later.
So, after testing campaigns against the EVP, how do you make that concrete approach to advertising? Style, colours, Tag lines, and establish set campaign elements for implementation.
Key points to underpin the approach Personalise: employee as ambassador Be seen as authentic: use real stories which are believable Consistency of brand and image across media and campaigns
Tangible Results are emerging 2007, first improvements in brand ranking in Trendence Make the list of Tope Employers
Relaunched their own career site Fall 2007, Reflect the new branding and add more Web 2.0 features Moved up from 52nd in 2007 to 15th in 2009 in the Potential Park rankings Similar improvements in other rankings
Other initiatives include co-operations with various university and business associations
Now showing video applications - for candidate interviews, need to talk with her about this later
Twitter page is up: Receiving positive feedback from the pages. 895 followers today
Mobile recruiting, sees as necessary to embrace new technologies
Facebook Have a profile page
Video campaigns on YouTube for the company, neat as shows a fun and different approach to overall company branding.
Attending a breakfast seminar today in London, hosted by Totaljobs , featuring Totaljobs marketing research and International Labour market research by the Intelligence Group for The Network
Paul Smith, Group Marketing Director of Totaljobs Group , led off the presentations, after the introductions by John Salt. We will write about the Intelligence Group presentation (which is very impressive) later.
General economic challenges have impacted the job market
Decline in jobs
Increase in jobseeker activity
Google - recruitment query searches up 55% year on year
Advertising spend drops from £1.2 billion to £600 million
Offline decline 50%
Online decrease 30%
Paul projects a modest increase end 2011, early 2012 and online recruitment ad spend will pass offline in 2012
Wow, interesting series of blogs/articles out there on this topic.
I would love to see our blogging and social network experts like An de Jonghe, Ricardo Risamasu, Peter Gold, Bas van de Haterd all leap into this fray.
Check out: Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watch , who started this off this week relative to a PR 'expert' who advised on the use of Twitter and Facebook.
Then Jason Gorham has picked it up and run with it as it relates to an 'expert' in digital recruitment advertising.
This topic stream could be related to any type of 'expert consulting' in our and other industries. How many of us who do have the expertise from actually using the products/services/strategies have been pushed aside by a client/prospect because we do not come from one of the 'big name' companies?
Please take 2 - 5 mins to complete the following confidential survey on the impact of the global credit crunch - the basis of which will be used by a trusted colleague of mine to establish a non-profit consultancy in the U.K., which will assist those impacted by the global credit crunch in their search for work.
I have just created a poll on my LinkedIn profile page. Trying out another one of their application inserts to see what kind of response I might get from my 3800 connections.
The questions and answers are limited in number of characters, which is good for this kind of application.
Will be interested to see how many answers I get directly. If you happen to not be in my LinkedIn network, use the link to take the poll, and while you are there, go ahead and LinkIn with me.
Technology is moving at pace. LinkedIn has announced a variety of embedded widgets and applications, along with new search functionality.
One of the apps is SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net)
So, here goes, I have opened a SlideShare account, uploaded a presentation I made earlier this year at the Recruitment Consultant conferencek added the app to my LinkedIn profile, hey presto, shows up in both places.
But, how do people find in on my profile? Only seems to those in my network
The Blog app has a 'by me' tab and a "my network' tab.
These days it’s almost impossible to become a successful recruiter if you aren’t a wiz at using your social media skills. Over
One of the morning's headlne speakers at the 
