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 In truth, if you are not social, the risks for your organization to come across as outdated are very high: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2015 millennials will overtake the majority representation of the workforce and by 2030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™.

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.

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.

C#4 of Social Recruiting: Courtesy and Candidate Centricity

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, and C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Even if social networks allow you to broadcast information to a lot of people, one of the key assumptions of all social networks is that you are not simply addressing an "audience." You address individuals who voluntarily start a connection with you by becoming "friends" and "followers". Your attitude counts — and we all know that disgruntled friends and followers un-follow in a click.

However, today, when candidates respond to your call, they are treated like an anonymous bunch of people. Recruiting isn’t “personal” anymore. Worse, at the very moment when a candidate is considering a personal and professional commitment to your company because you’ve convinced her to try to work for you, your traditional ATS solutions bury them in unnecessary paperwork. The functional purpose of finding the right candidate destroys the humanity of your brand. TalentCircles helps you to pace yourself and offer a positive face to your company.

Welcome candidates

Give a face to your company: When candidates join your talent network, welcome them. A video is the best tool - this is when your brand must show its human dimension. As a recruiter, you are the bridge between your brand and the people: you represent your company and its personality.

Acknowledge your guests

Acknowledge your new candidates by sending them a customized email.

Let candidate access information at all times

You can send branded personal email notifications and digests (when you post jobs on your network, create blog posts or organize a video event or a webinar) to your talent community.

You have lots of opportunities to invite candidates to visit your network regularly. They have their own dashboard, providing them with the latest news and opportunities. They can also join the circles that are of interest to them, as well as invite friends.

The benefits of a candidate-centric process are obvious:

• In a business environment where close to 80% of employed people are open to considering another position, it's key to offer both active and passive candidates a friendly entry point into your company’s talent pipeline, and give them reasons to regularly frequent your network.
• Instead of being discouraged by a process imposed by a company, candidates are happy to opt into your company network. This is critical: Realize that, just as customers, if candidates do not feel welcome, they may knock at your competitor's door!
• The more active you are on your talent network, the more likely they are to be interested in your brand and share your content (jobs, information, events or blog posts). 

C#3 of Social Recruiting: Culture — your Core Values and Credibility

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!

This week, we have discussed "C#1" Continuity and C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

As most social media gurus like to say, social media is about speaking with, not "at" people. It's not about pushing generic and bland statements that would define just any company. It's about telling people what's unique and exciting about you.

The primary purpose of your home page in your talent network is to offer a personal connection with your core values, to create the desire of being part of your world and or interacting with you.

The flexibility of TalentCircles allows you to upload videos or create new content about your company as often as you want. If it is compelling, your creativity may be a reason for your candidates to follow you more closely inside your talent network and invite their friends to show them how awesome you are.

You probably do not have a team of artists creating a new Google doodle every day, but you may have great employees who would love to share their story and speak about your company’s core values. The credibility of your talent network is dependent on the trust you instill. If your company really is a great place to work, your best spokespeople will be your employees!

Storytelling videos showcasing real people are an essential dimension of HR marketing. This is also what will entice the candidates in your network to share your jobs, speak about your events, or re-post your blog entries on their personal social networks.