C#9 of Social Recruiting: Compute — The Candidate Engagement Index™

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people

C#8 Conversion — Socializing applicants in corporate repositories

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Today, the qualitative ROI of being social is obvious to any company. In truth, if you are not social, the risks for your organization to come across as outdated are very high: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2015 millennials will overtake the majority representation of the workforce and by 2030 this hyper-connected, tech savvy generation will make up 75% of the workforce."

Active and passive job seekers are out on all the major public social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn and their number increases every year. It's not an option to avoid being social: Social sourcing is a must for companies because they need to engage with people where they are.

Now that social sourcing is just for everybody, how will you stand out? You will if you cultivate excellence in your social recruiting network.

Using TalentCircles, your social sourcing efforts become measurable social recruiting results and allow you to fine-tune your engagement strategy on social networks. It's critical for you to measure your Talent Engagement Index™, which is the percentage of active or passive candidates who join from public social networks into your private network.

Because TalentCircles tracks about 350 data points, you can measure how you execute on your social recruiting plan and establish guidelines as well as goals: This is your Candidate Engagement Index™.

How Lack of Candidate Engagement Can Affect Employer Branding

By Jessica Miller-Merrell
 

We talk a lot about candidate engagement and how important it is to connect with each candidate that siphons through your pipeline. But what happens when we don’t? What kinds of consequences will our actual employer brand face? We’re told that the candidate is most likely a customer... So let's keep this in mind!

Here are three consequences your employer brand might face if you lack the right candidate engagement strategy:

No more candidates. This one might seem a little extreme, but if you continue to put candidates into the “black hole” your reputation will be damaged and candidates will opt-out in applying for your open job requisitions. According to a recent survey 77% of candidates receive no communication from the organization after they’ve applied for a position. If this number is any reflection of your own company, something needs to change before your reputation is ruined.

How to Fix: Treat each candidate as if they were the front-runners for the position. Having a Talent Network within your company allows recruiters one-on-one communication with candidates. Just because a candidate might not be qualified for one position they might be overqualified for another. A Talent Network allows you to keep records on each candidate so you may find the best position possible for them at some point in time within your organization.

Loss of customers. If candidates are customers and the candidates are unhappy with their experience it’s only fitting that they’ll lose trust in your company and either shop less or altogether. Each part of your company should work together when it comes to delivering exceptional results across the board.

How to Fix: Same way you’d fix no more candidates. Treat everyone as if they were  the top candidate for the position, even if they aren’t, and give them a positive experience that they won’t forget. Remember how you act as a consumer: if a store treats you well, you come back to that store even if you do not find the goods you wanted to buy.

Damaged Employer Brand: In the age of employer brands it’s important that you’re above the competition. If you’re not, you won’t be able to recruit top leveled candidates into your company.

How to Fix: The same way you’ve fixed all your other problems. Engage the candidate whether they’re the best or not.

The morale of the story is treat each candidate like they’re number one — just the way you want to be treated yourself when you walk into a store. When you do so, no matter if they get the job or not, they’ll talk about how great of an experience it was to be apart of your company’s hiring process.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

C#8 of Social Recruiting: Conversion — Socializing applicants lost in corporate repositories

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Over the years, your company has accumulated a lot of information about potential candidates. Most of them have applied for a job you posted months or years ago — but they never heard back from your company, because for one reason or another, they were filtered out of the top of the pile.

Socialize this huge pool of untapped potential! Past candidates may have gained valuable experience since they originally applied and can be interesting candidates for today’s open positions or great connectors to other talent through their own networks. They sometimes represent huge investments.

TalentCircles enables you to leverage these valuable assets at a negligible cost by allowing you to:

• Mass import the candidates' records stored in a corporate repository (CRM, ATS, or any other database).
• Import electronic or paper resumes.

In all cases, TalentCircles automatically creates a profile for these candidates. Once these candidates are imported, you can send them an email offering them to opt into your talent network. While opting into your network, they can use their favorite Social login (which helps you keep their contact information up-to-date). At least a portion of these candidates will be telling you that they are still (or again) interested in your company — which means that you do not have to re-source them.

Socializing past candidates is interesting in two ways:

• First, you can save significant money through this "inside sourcing" strategy.
• Secondly, this gives you an idea of the actual value of your dormant assets, and enables you to assess your social footprint. If a lower percentage of past applicants respond to your call, you can ask yourself a few important questions:

o   Were these past candidates just looking for a job and not especially interested in joining your company?

o   Are these applicants upset at your company because you did not bother to connect with them at the time they applied?

Mixed results can be extremely useful: Most of the time, they will mean that you have to address a brand deficit and put special efforts into a more proactive social recruiting strategy. Even if you are very new in social sourcing, start now — because you are not late at all in social recruiting.

Continuous Candidate Engagement of your Contingent Workforce

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Last March, Jeremy Neuner, the author of The Rise of the Naked Economy: How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace indicated that we are becoming a nation of permanent freelancers and temps. "By 2020, more than 40% of the US workforce will be so-called contingent workers," he said, mentioning a study conducted by Intuit in 2010. "That’s more than 60 million people."

If you’re not concerned with how your contingent workforce views your company, it’s time to change that. Look at temporary workers as continuous candidates with whom you must keep in touch, whose moves as well as next availabilities you must know at all times. In other words, build a live network of your contingent workforce! Here are the two main reasons why:

Company's Knowledge: A temporary worker is a worker that your company ultimately trains and ends up building up precious knowledge that you may want to leverage down the road. You may not need this worker more than six months, but you may need her a year down the road. Repeat "seasonal workers" are always more efficient the second time than the first!

Company's Brand: Don’t sell your company short by making a bad impression on your temporary workers. Their work may be temporary but the stories they may tell about you may not. Even if your temporary workers never become a permanent part of your workforce, they will carry memories and experiences with them when they leave, and as is human nature, they’ll likely talk about it. It’s vital that as your contingent workforce flows in and out of your business, they don’t spread negative feedback about your company. While they may only seek temporary work, their friends, family and neighbors will hear what their experiences were like. Your employer brand should leave an impression that accelerates your company’s reputation as a great employer.

Temporary workers can be extraordinary evangelists. Treat them well at all times. Keep in touch with them. Provide them with valuable information. Keep them informed about the webinars you offer. If they are not available at a time you need them again, they will help you find people they trust!

Do you promote your employee brand within your contingent workforce and how efficient are you in maintaining a relationship with them? Let us know how you do so in the comments section below.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

C#7 of Social Recruiting: Content Marketing — Addressing real people

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed:

 C#1 Continuity,

C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding,

C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility,

C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity,

C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions and

C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Your network is not just an "audience." It's a group of individuals. You can't stick to a broad general marketing message. HR Marketing must be far more granular and personal: it must be context-driven content for the people you have attracted and whose interest you want to sustain. The quality of your content marketing strategy is what will make you stand out in the war for talent.

Understanding the mindset of a follower who morphs into a candidate

Your HR department or talent acquisition team must take advantage of the general branding and messaging that your marketing organization and social media group have created. However, that's not enough. For a simple reason: the very same person whom you attract as a brand changes mindset when she becomes a candidate. All of a sudden, this person is not a spectator of your company any more. She wants to be part of it. As a candidate, her reality check on your company gets deeper. She hears and reads your messaging differently.

As an example, let’s take one of the greatest slogans: Nike's "Just Do IT." This slogan is exceptionally energizing and makes you want to buy as a consumer. In a way, you identify as one of their athletes, no matter how much of an amateur you may be. When you are a job candidate, however, you don't simply want to imagine that you are going to be an athlete. You typically ask yourself "How Does it Do IT for me." You want to know more. You want specific information.

This is where your HR content marketing strategy must take it a step further. Your "Just Do IT" follower has surreptitiously morphed into a "How Does it Do IT for me" candidate. Understanding and addressing this change is a critical dimension of social recruiting: this is why you must develop a content marketing strategy.

Powering your content marketing strategy 

Content marketing is the ability to create targeted messaging to individuals or groups of people who share a common interest (communities). Content marketing demonstrates your expertise, enables you to share information and respond to questions that people may have. Developing an HR Content Marketing strategy using TalentCircles is easy, leveraging our mass email, blog, document posting or webinar capabilities.

Targeted blog posts in circles/communities

Segment your network into circles. You can have public circles (to which candidates subscribe based on their type of interest) or private circles (that candidates can join only if they have been invited). In all cases, a circle is an entity where you maintain a targeted pipeline of people who have something in common and will be addressed in the context of that circle.  Your circles can reflect functional areas, as well as diversity initiatives.

Once you have set up your circles, you can adopt a focused communication via blog posts or webinars. Posts can be written by anyone you allow: your team, employees, candidates, luminaries, etc.

Candidates have the ability to comment and share these posts (in order to read these posts, people must first sign into your network).

Webinars

You can also pursue this content marketing strategy using Webinars, within or across circles — or by inviting a selection of members of your talent network based on any criteria of your choice. These webinars can be "Invite only," but also can be shared by the members of your network, which enables you to grow your candidate network organically.

The value of your network is predicated on your ability to develop a relevant content marketing approach. Passive candidates will maintain interest in you if you become an industry resource through insight and leadership, provide solutions and advice to people in the real world and strengthen their trust in what you can offer.

In short, social recruiting is the art of making the human person of the brand live and breathe inside your talent network, not about sales pitches disseminated around public networks.

The purpose of content marketing is to showcase what it is for real people to work in your organization, and give them a real reason to come and work for you, or share with their friends what you offer.

C#6 of Social Recruiting: Curation: Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed "C#1" Continuity, C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding, C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility, C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity, and C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Pre-recorded interviews provide enormous advantages when they are integrated within a fully-fledged talent engagement platform.

The traditional approach is to post a job and ask people to apply. By moving candidates directly from social sources to an ATS, you know that most of the people you have attracted will drop off because they do not want to deal with the hoops and loops of of your career site or your job application forms... and you’re skipping the crucial part of social recruiting, the ability to actually engage with candidates.

If you want to attract more people in your talent network, you may want to leverage the power of pre-recorded questionnaires. They are:

• A powerful way to drive candidates from your social pages directly into your talent network.
• The best mechanism to assess and qualify candidates for a job opening before they apply.

Here are a few simple steps:

Create a questionnaire

• You can attach a questionnaire to each of your job postings inside or outside TalentCircles.
• When you create a questionnaire, record a video description of the position for candidates to better understand the opportunity, and be able to see by themselves if they might be a fit or not.
• Add a few questions of your choice for the candidates to answer.
• Assign a value to score the responses (candidates do not see the scoring).

Attach a questionnaire to a job opening

• You can attach the questionnaire to any job posting, anywhere.
• You can share your job openings and your questionnaires on any public social network directly from TalentCircles.

The candidate's experience

• To access the job description, candidates register into your network. They have no form to fill. They simply login with one of their social logins, and their profiles are automatically created.
• They can immediately listen to the video description of the job and see the text description of the job (if you have included it).
• Then they respond to your questions.

Curate 

Lots of followers may respond. TalentCircles generates a report that you can sort by score. If 500 candidates responded, you are not swamped. You can identify the top performers easily.

Then, you can video interview the top performers, and send a message to the other responders to let them know that they are not being considered at this time.

This pre-applicant engagement strategy offers obvious benefits:

• Not all candidates need to be applicants.
• You can scale your engagement capabilities by an order of magnitude without being swamped.
• Candidates are not sent into an "Apply" dark hole. Even if you reject them for the job, you can still make candidates feel like they’re being treated as people:

1. They are in your network and will see other opportunities.
2. You may source them for another position leveraging our job matching capability.
3. They can become champions and ambassadors by sharing your events, jobs and blog posts to their friends.

Lean In: How to Do It All - Hire Recruit, Retain & Train

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Having met with HR and recruiting leaders at an organization last week discussing how technology particularly social media is important in the future success in their roles at their organizations and in the war for talent, the inevitable question surfaced, “How do I keep up with the latest technology and find time to do it all especially when I’m a 12 person team managing the HR of a global brand?”

All I could think of was, “Lean In.”

No one said taking your HR team to the next level at your organization was easy. There will be roadblocks, wrong ways and barriers to your success along the way. In fact, your business leaders probably think you don’t have the gumption to actually do it. Get in there. Research and formulate a plan. Then, Lean In.

Being transformational at an organization is not easy but it can be done. Lean In with me and learn how to be successful in your endeavors:

Research. This is one of the most critical stages with any project. Understand your goals, reasons for doing whatever you’re doing, competitors, etc. is extremely vital in being successful.

Have support. Just like your own cheer team when it comes to building a network of muses, etc it’s important to have support for your organization. Without it you won’t have the appropriate resources to deliver results. Support also helps you fine-tune your product or service. Two heads are better than one…always.

Build a team. Focus on what types of people you want and need to be successful. Don’t always go the traditional route because sometimes the best results are yield taking an alternative approach. For instance, in marketing hiring a sociology major works well because they understand behaviors and people.

Be metrics focused. This is one of the most important points because without being able to prove ROI your department will fail and your supervisors won’t be able to funnel important resources that help make you successful.

Build a network of muses, mentors and supporters. One of the most vital pieces of my success comes from my network of muses, mentors, and supporters. Everyone needs their own cheer team and without it, it’ll be hard to stay focused and motivated.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

C#5 of Social Recruiting: Conversation — Live video screening and discussions

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed "C#1" Continuity, C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding, C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility, and C#4 Courtesy and Candidate Centricity.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For very good reasons, video interviews and video interactions now have a place on the corporate agenda. You can make the most of video interviews because TalentCircles is not just a digital interviewing tool, but a complete platform to fully manage relationships with candidates.

Our white paper TalentCircles: The Ultimate Screening and Interviewing Solution describes the extensive and state-of-the-art capabilities of TalentCircles for video screening and interviewing. Our purpose here is to tie the natural power of video interviewing and conversation with the specific purpose of social recruiting, i.e.:

• To fill jobs expeditiously.
• To build up a relevant pipeline to serve your company's workforce plan.  

The TalentCircles' live interviewing environment is similar to what candidates have become accustomed to on social networks — an environment that is fully Web-based, requires no download, is accessible via a click, and provides information effortlessly. During the conversation, participants can view and discuss documents together, or review a featured job in real time, as well as chat and send files in any language. Recruiters can view the profile of each participant and take notes.

TalentCircles supports as many interactions with the same candidate(s) of whatever length. These interactions can be recorded, be part of profile of the candidate (s) and can be shared equally effortlessly with hiring managers.

A powerful way to get to know several candidates at once is to organize live group meetings. A joint research study by the Harvard Business School & Harvard Kennedy School has established the benefits of group evaluation/discussions:  "New research suggests that organizations wishing to avoid gender stereotyping in the hiring or promotion process--and employ the most productive person instead—should evaluate job candidates as a group, rather than one at a time."

You may be able to identify a great person, somebody who may have a "jagged resume" that you would never found via the traditional acquisition process, but is what George Anders calls the "rare find," the candidate that will not only get the job done, but also advance your company.

A proactive social recruiting methodology enables you to identify not only people with the right skills, but those who also show some sort of personal leadership and adaptability — and then you can recommend that they apply. In fact, in many cases, the ideal approach is to interact with candidates before they apply.