How to Engage Your Target Candidate During The Work Day

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

 

One of the first obstacles we come across when we’re ready to reach out to a candidate is simply contacting them at a time and place where they’ll respond. It’s easy to forget that a recruiter’s call email or InMail may not be their first priority during the workday. After all, the types of candidates you aim to reach likely have very full days, so it’s essential to know how they’re spending this time and most importantly, how they want to be reached. 

Last year, Pew Research Center conducted an online survey about workers’ use of technology and revealed some surprising findings about what tools are essential. Email came in as the number one essential technology with 79 percent saying it was important at work. Next in line was Internet, followed by landline phone, cell phone and finally social networking sites, with only 18 percent saying these sites are important at work. 

How to Win at Candidate Communication & Engagement 

The reason this survey is so important to recruiters is because it shows where and how employees communicate, and allows us to factor that into developing recruiting and candidate engagement strategies. While I think these results aren’t necessarily representative of all candidates, it gives recruiters a place to start. I would recommend using these findings as a launching pad and discovering through experience how your candidates prefer to interact and engage with your recruiting and talent acquisition team. Talk with them to understand when, why and how they want to communicate.

No matter which method you use, ask yourself whether or not it’s a communication you would read/listen and respond to. Start these four categories to help guide your strategy.

Is Your Communication Welcomed?

Is your communication welcome in their email, voicemail or LinkedIn inbox? Is it something that will annoy them or peak their interest? Not all communication has to be solicited, but it should always be relevant and clear.

Customized

Many candidates, such as engineers in Silicon Valley, get multiple emails from recruiters each day. At the very least, all candidates likely deal with an enormous influx of communication day to day. Make sure yours are noticed with customized, unique messages that are targeted, focused and relevant.

Flexible

When communicating with a candidate, meet them where they are and avoid making demands or assumptions without their input. Plan phone calls around their schedule before considering your own and always be more accommodating than you are asking them to be. This is the reason I have been known to do phone and video interviews evenings, weekends and holidays. Sometimes the best way to engage them is to be flexible to their needs.

Responsive

Often the most welcome communication is one that comes after a door has already been opened, such as responding to a tweet or email, or asking them to engage while also discussing a mutual friend or a project you know they were involved in. One-way conversations between candidate and recruiter are so 2014. 

 Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

Photo Credit.  

How to Engage Your Best Job Seeker Candidates in Four Easy Steps

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In the world of job searching, it’s a buyer’s market. Job seekers are enjoying this period of time in which unemployment is the lowest it has been in years and while it’s still a competitive environment, the landscape has shifted for this crowd in the last few years. This is great news for job seekers and our economy, but it also means that recruiters and hiring managers are being challenged in ways they hadn’t been for several years.

To meet this challenge, recruiters are going to have to focus first and foremost on candidate engagement. You may find that some positions don’t require constant communication and relationship building, but when it comes to recruiting the best candidates and filling technical or highly-skilled positions in competitive industries, these things are a must. It’s time for recruiters to step out of the box and out from behind the job posting to uncover and attract exceptional passive job seekers. Catching the attention of these candidates all starts with communication.

Tell a story

When passive job seekers are searching for their next position they gather as much information as they can and evaluate their findings. Passive job seekers aren’t going to reach out early on to ask questions or find out more about your organization, so it’s essential that what you present tells a story. One of the most valuable things you can do within your recruitment strategy is to use digital storytelling to present your employment brand and company culture. There are many ways to do this but an HR technology, such as Talent Circles, can elevate your storytelling tremendously. Whatever the method, your story should be unique and personal, as well as convey that your company is more than just a brand.

Target your search

In this setting, engagement is defined by the small touch points that are specific and unique. In order to achieve these multiple touch points, you’ll have to target search efforts and prioritize quality over quantity. By identifying a handful of potential candidates to engage, you can personalize your message for maximum engagement.

Get personal

While it’s essential to have resources that speak to all job seekers, there are positions you’ll want to focus more time and effort on, which is where you have an opportunity to get personal. A great place to start is with something relatively small, such as throwing away the Tweet template you’ve been using for the last year and reaching out to candidates with a personal Tweet. You can also create personal videos, make phone calls rather than emailing, and even follow up with prospective candidates you’re vying for with a gift tailored to them. 

Be respectful

As recruiters, we sometimes start to see candidates as products that we’d like to acquire, losing sight of their value as a person. Make it a top priority to be respectful of their time, experience, knowledge and expertise throughout the process. Remember that there are many considerations for taking a new job, and most of them have nothing to do with you. A great recruiter knows that each candidate is different, but all deserve respect for what they do and who they are as a person. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.  

Jeff Lackey @Rolls-Royce: Creative People + Authentic Storytelling = The Right Hire

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

One of the best presentations at the December HCI Conference in San Francisco was the last one: Jeff Lackey's. The title says it all: "Creative People + Authentic Storytelling = The Right Hires." I love such straightforward and energizing assertiveness.

If you think you know everything about Rolls-Royce, think twice. This prestigious company produced its first aircraft engine a century ago and generated half of the aircraft engines used by the Allies in World War I; it is now the second-largest maker of aircraft engines and one of the top largest defense contractors in the world.  Rolls-Royce would have the perfect makeup to be somewhat conservative and unappealing to younger generations of employees. However, many consumer brands may have a hard time catching up with Roll-Royce's upbeat approach.

Jeff Lackey and his team addressed this potential perception problem in four short years and transformed the organization into an employer of choice addressing head-on what matters if you want to attract IQ and foster diversity. You must:

• Speak the language of your sociological target (the millennials who will compose the majority of the workforce in 2015),
• Offer a career path and not simply a job,
• Identify the candidates with a calling rather than those only looking for a position,
• Reflect our societal diversity, nurture thought-diversity, and proactively cultivate the interest of veterans, students and women in STEM.

As Jeff likes to put it, "World-class products start with world-class people." Of course, the number one requirement to attract world-class people is a world-class sourcing and recruiting team. Jeff raves about his game-changing squad: 

• Lindsey Gamble, Global Resourcing Manager for Engineering (yes, a woman!); 
• Tiffany Overton, Diversity Resourcing Leader; 
• Toby Barnes, now Group Head of Resourcing at Travis Perkins; and 
• The irresistible Daniel Perkins, Global Employment Brand Manager, whose contagious sense of fun ravished the HCI audience. 

Thought-leadership is not a solo endeavor: it's a shared mindset for a better workplace where people turn into storytellers and, by becoming the company's evangelists, attract new candidates.

Creativity is the motto of the talent acquisition department, so much so that when you watch the videos they produce, you want to be part of the Rolls-Royce's DNA adventure. Here is the video presentation of this philosophy they gave to university students across the UK earlier this year:

Employment branding doesn't start when you opportunistically need candidates. It's an overarching motivational message. Inspired by a young LEGO fan in Derby, U.K., Rolls-Royce made a replica of a jet engine from 152,455 LEGO bricks. Key to the team's outreach is to appeal to new generations and prompt interest in technology and science as a means for a more sustainable future.

Many venerable brands still stick with the self-centered and condescending approach that people should be grateful to be offered a job. Rolls-Royce has definitely given the cold shoulder to these paternalistic behaviors of the past and embraced our people-centric social world: stop waiting for candidates to come to you but, rather, proactively pave the way for them to become your fans whether or not you currently have a job for them.

The cultural change initiated by Jeff Lackey and his team is somewhat spectacular. Think that four year ago LinkedIn was not even allowed behind the firewall. Today, the Rolls-Royce group has a stimulating YouTube channel and has garnered over half a million fans on Facebook.

What about the discrimination against young people?

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The DirectEmployers Association conference (DEAM14) last week was just amazing, attracting the right attention on new regulations to improve the employment of veterans as well as people with disabilities — this is summarized by the OFCCP news release last August. Yet, there is something just as bad happening right now, The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults, as described by a report from the Brookings/ Brookings/Metropolitan Policy Program.

The takeaway is this: "Employment prospects for teens and young adults in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas plummeted between 2000 and 2011."

Key findings

The report segments its findings into two major age categories: teens aged 16-19 and Young adults aged 20-24

• For teens aged 16-19: Employment rates declined drastically, from 44 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2011.
• For young adults aged 20-24: The employment rate among young adults fell from 72 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2011.

The problem affects all young people and the report provides multiple graphs on the effect of education, previous employment and sometimes, geographic differences. If you are a teen, it's better to live in Utah than in Silicon Valley. This is also true if you are an educated young adult even if the contrast is not so big.

Traditional divides — or call them discriminatory factors — are still very much in place. Regardless of the criteria and the models, non-Hispanic whites have a better chance of getting a job. One of the models for young adults shows how age, race/ethnicity, marital status, and education are in play for males and females. While being older was associated with increased employment chances for both genders, race/ethnicity play differently for males and females:

• Being African/American was associated with reduced employment among men, but not women;
• Being Asian was associated with reduced employment among both men and women;
• Being Hispanic was associated with increased employment among men but not women;
• And... marital status has an impact! It is positively associated with employment for men and negatively associated for women. Read: employers are wary about employing young women who could become pregnant.

The report lists important measures and initiatives designed to reduce youth joblessness and labor force underutilization, incorporate work-based learning into education, adjust to regional labor market needs, and encourage employers to facilitate the transition of young people into the labor market.

This survey should be a wake-up call to just anybody who has children or simply cares about young people as well as diversity in the workplace. The solutions are compelling and most of the organizations named in the report are doing an amazing job attracting the attention of a fundamental problem: where can a country go when so much of its youth is unemployed or underemployed?

Open questions

The underlying assumption of the report is that youth unemployment and underemployment are primarily caused by a discrepancy between available skills and the needs of the labor market. This may be true to some extent, but not entirely.

Is it really all about our current education system? Do we have data showing that people who were 20 in 1970, in 1980, in 1990 or in 2000 were better prepared and was more employable? These are questions for researchers such as Peter Cappelli. I suggest that you read Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It , which I discussed in an earlier post or Why Employers Aren't Filling Their Open Jobs, recently published by the Harvard Business Review: "Jobs have not changed over the last couple of years in any way that changed skill requirements substantially. The “failing schools” notion, even if it was true, couldn’t explain the continued unemployment of the majority of job seekers, who graduated years ago and had jobs just before the recession," Cappelli notes.

Do recruiting budget cuts make it more difficult to spot the right skills? It's unclear. I agree with Peter Cappelli that unemployment/underemployment may "come from the ways in which contemporary practices have made hiring more difficult," and that a higher scrutiny on profit-and-loss and "cost-cutting took out recruiters." Yet, the latter should also be further investigated. The Talent Management market continues to grow at an impressive rate. So if more money is spent, is it spent efficiently? What if the systems and methodologies that have controlled the recruiting industry for the last 25 years were showing their inability to identify modern days talent?

My personal take on the discrimination against young people

We all look for the "right" skills. Yet, what exactly are these right skills? People who have existing skills or people with a potential to do a good job? If the right skills are out there, are we even able to capture them?

Trying to evaluate and manage 20 year-old candidates using 20 year-old or even a 10-year transactional systems may be a huge problem. Look at it this way: it's like prospecting the world with a 28.8k Modem in 1994 or a 56k Modem in 2000. So traditional approaches may work for 22 year-old candidates with a boilerplate education for boilerplate job requisitions and boilerplate skills that are themselves defined via the prism of these transactional systems filtering out candidates... Yet, can such hiring practices capture new behaviors derived from a decade-old social world and be fair to the new generation? Probably not. The entire process might discriminate against young people, a trend that's likely to worsen if it's true, as Cathy N. Davidson, a professor at Duke University, claims, that "65 percent of children entering grade school this year [2012] will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet."

Today youth unemployment may cost $25 billion annually in net losses to federal and state governments according to the Young Invincibles. This does not include the image and opportunity costs for corporations who ignore these young people... Companies reluctant to take a chance on people young people and eventually spend money training them could reconsider their position after examining the costs of all their recent bad hires (often people whom they believed had the right skills and "good resumes). The problem affects seven in ten businesses and costs U.S. businesses an estimated $300 billion in 2009. Remember, even Tony Hsieh, the CEO of a notoriously great company, said in 2010 that his own bad hires had cost Zappos "well over $100 million." Doesn't this mean that the way to evaluate skills is a real problem? So why not change?

Chances are that hiring young people and training them may be a better economic bet than only looking at "vetted" people, provided of course, that you use a recruiting methodology and infrastructure that enable you to connect and engage with them!

Veterans Series: An army recruiter changed my life forever: Conversation with Caleb Fullhart

Learn more about best practices in recruiting veteran and military job seekers by joining a Talent Circles sponsored webinar on 2/13/14 at 9:00 PM PST. Click here to register & learn more. 

Conversation with  Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Caleb Fullhart has been in recruiting for 14 years and specializes in candidate generation, social media and advanced sourcing techniques. He loves everything about HR, especially technologies that power the intrinsic human dimension of HR. He went into our industry on almost day one of his career and was inspired to do so thanks to an Army recruiter.

How did an Army recruiter ended up defining your career path?

I joined the army when an army recruiter came to my high school, Fridley in Minnesota. I was interested in hearing what he had to say. I was 17 and I didn't really have huge plans at the time. I said to myself "Sure, why not?" First what I had to do was to take an ASVAB, which stands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and is basically a test that tells you what you are good at. From there I had a couple of options for my MOS (Military Occupational Specialties). Initially I was to be going to be an 11 BRAVO, which was Infantry but after the ASVAB, I ended up going as a 35 Foxtrot, which was an intelligence analyst. I did not stay in the Army and moved to College to study International Business and Political Sciences, but this Army recruiter did influence my life forever. Basically, he taught me what recruiting was about, or better, I showed to me what recruiting done right looks like and that I will never forget that. If I look at how the army recruiter interacted with me when I initially expressed interest, I am still impressed. He called my parents and built a very personal relationship with me until he handed me off. I would say that that approach was a logical approach and still is in my eyes. To this day, I like his interpersonal skills.  I didn't know what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. But he trusted me, helped me to grow and built my confidence. In many ways, the best part of sourcing and recruiting is to help people discover who they really want to become.

Now, how do you give back to the Army?

Each time I come across a Veteran, I listen. Veterans do not like the civilian transactional logic — or maybe, I should say transactional habits. They like to build relationships and they are all about the best way to create and consolidate relationships. I am very excited to be part of the Bazaarvoice's program for Veterans. The company is passionate about putting a solid plan, with relevant metrics and targets.

There is a lot of room for growth when transitioning from military to civilian but we need to help Veterans translate their skill set into civilian terms. In the old days, Veterans represented a significant part of the population and when they wanted to move into civilian life, they could often find a Veteran in the hiring process capable of translating their skills into lay people words. Today, the Veteran population is much smaller. So it's important to implement MOS translators showing how the code signs that Veterans had during their service translates into civilian jobs. It's not rocket science. But it must be done. This helps both recruiters and Veterans better and faster assess how a resume matches a job opening and it's obvious that this improves the ability of recruiters and Veterans to relate. We are very excited to be implementing a MOS translator within our TalentCircles network. Our hope is that this tool will help bridge the communication gap between veterans and recruiters.  

Also read: Veterans are social and connected: Conversation with Chris Norton

Veterans Series: Veterans are social and connected: Conversation with Chris Norton

Learn more about best practices in recruiting veteran and military job seekers by joining a Talent Circles sponsored webinar on 2/13/14 at 9:00 PM PST. Click here to register & learn more. 

Conversation with  Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

It's customary to pay tribute to Veterans and thank them for their services. There is far more for civilians to learn, though, from recruiters hiring Veterans. Many of them lead the way in our industry because of their deep understanding of what "candidate experience," "candidate engagement," or "candidate interaction" actually mean — and this because Veterans are just like millennials: they are fundamentally hyper-social and hyper-connected. Here is a my conversation with Chris Norton, a Logistics officer in the Army Reserve (18^th year) with five years of actual duty time accrued since 9/11, formerly known as the AT&T's "Military Guy," who is now Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Defense Mobile Corporation.

A recent report shows that for service members after 9/11, entering the civilian workforce has been somewhat harder than for previous generations.

Chris Norton: That's not an untrue statement at all. It's a numbers game. Historically when you had a large standing military as a representative part of the population, odds were pretty good that you would run into somebody along the way in the hiring process who had also served. You didn't need to jump through the hoops you do now to describe your service. The 9/11 service members account for about one half of one percent of the population. In terms of a minority population, you can't get much smaller than that... So you've got a population out there that has a whole different language, an entirely different culture and has some hurdles when it comes to the transition as a result. So recognizing that factor and also recognizing that the last decade has stretched service members to the point where they have all these capabilities and skills and attributes, employers would be nuts not to want them! For example, AT&T had hired 3,600 veterans as of the end of October and they announced that their goal is 10,000 over the next five years.

So, how do you get Veterans?

Chris Norton: If you are going to launch or grow your Veterans' program, you need to get somebody visible and make it personal and social. Service members do not understand transactional logic, but they understand interaction. The transactional nature of recruiting and staffing won't work, particularly so for the military, because we have a mentor and relationship driven environment. The Military is kind of a bubble society, very close-knit. We all look out for each other. It's our culture.

Chris Norton mentioned to me to a remarkable article written by Mike Stajura for Business Insider: What Vets Miss Most Is What Most Civilians Fear: A Regimented, Cohesive Network That Always Checks On You. In essence, what Veterans need is "a new mission, a new purpose, and a strong, supportive social network in which people [are] actually invested in one another’s well-being and success."

Chris Norton: So if you can inject into the process the ability to connect people on an interactive level even if it's not directly tied to the ATS side of the house, and allow people to develop some sort of relationship, that's a real good thing when it comes to recruiting veterans. When you come across as a robot or won't put your name down on it, then it gets discounted.

You go back to the Greeks and Romans about soldiering and the Military: the same stuff comes up. It's amazing. I am reading a book by Bill Mauldin who was a cartoonist during the WWII. Every other page my arm hair is raising up because something is resonating with me 70 years later: observations about service members interacting with each other.

Where we really made inroads at AT&T is that we had personalized the program. I was just using the office-hour component of TalentCircles because that's all I functionally needed. I would bring about 5 people and tell them what I do. "Dudes, loose the tie, loose the jacket. Just relax. We are going to talk here." I set the playing field. We are like a couple of Joes sitting around a beer. "Let's talk about you... What are the kinds of things you want to do.... What's your background... " And we have a honest talk ... I literally go first in first out and tell them "You can drop when you are done or you can hang out and listen to the other conversations."

And the result of engaging with candidates is committed employees....

Chris Norton: Veterans are great employees especially for the type of work that happens to be the growing part of AT&T's business. They are building the network out like gangbusters. They have entry point positions but people move pretty fast through the food chain. Veterans work independently, can learn new processes, new languages, new cultures, new systems — things that are all part of the basic training in the military. These are people who have already proven they can do it. Retention beyond two years for veterans is considerably higher — high enough to turn heads within any business.

Next post on hiring Veterans: An army recruiter changed my life forever: Conversation with Caleb Fullhart