Anticipate the User Experience in Corporate Recruiting & Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

When we think about the variety of players involved in the recruitment process, there are multiple stakeholders. Picture the “typical user” when I mention recruitment technology and you may imagine the job seeker.

There is no doubt that the job seeker’s user experience must be optimized to successfully attract and manage the candidate’s recruitment process, from the technology to the overall strategy. However, when it comes to the user experience of the actual recruiter, the interface is equally important.

After all, you, the recruiter, are ultimately the key person sitting in the driver’s seat. Your recruitment strategy is the road map and the technology you have deployed is like the dashboard that provides you all of the key components to move your hiring process forward.

Our tendency to consider the job seeker’s interface as the only user experience that matters can result in a technology platform that is difficult for recruitment team to use. Because the recruiter’s performance and experience directly impacts the job seeker’s, a great user experience for both sides of the hiring process is important.

TalentCircles has a great user experience for both. Visually, the interface is clean with a well organized layout. There are several great features that allow effective flow of communication and professional interaction between the recruiter and the job seeker such as the ability for recruiters to provide a welcome video.

Also, once candidates import their social profiles to the system, recruiters can have all of the necessary information on each candidate that is located in one place and is up to date.

The live online interview feature is robust. It provides the capability to interview one or more candidates at a time, access documents and take notes all from one screen. You can share the candidate videos and have the opportunity to get feedback from your colleagues. There is a brilliant scoring system and report function recruiters can benefit from as they make their selection.

Additional user interface features include calendars and social sharing buttons that allow recruiters to grow their talent network. For example, using calendars to organize webinars is one great way to increase an interest in your talent community. Also, the social sharing buttons that can be added throughout the process provide all users the ability to amplify new job opportunities or other announcements to their own social network.

Overall, the appearance is professional and clean and the use of buttons and tabs make the user interface intuitive. TalentCircles is one of the best technology platforms that provide recruiters with an optimal interface. This is true for the enterprise system used for the desktop as well as the mobile app, TalentCatch.

What I think is specifically amazing is the user-friendly capabilities to easily apply your company’s own brand elements to the app platform. Uploading the particular fields can be done in a snap and the outcome is great for both the recruiter and the job seeker as candidates enter their contact information in person from an iPad.

If you haven’t tried TalentCatch, the mobile app, I strongly recommend it! Here is a link to get you started using the free app for your next job fair or candidate meeting.

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. 

Business Talent Networks: The Coming-of-New-Economic-Age Story

By Kevin W. Grossman

In the quirky yet poignant coming-of-age movie Moonrise Kingdom, every single frame of film is like a lovely picture-box where the forced perspective of people and imagery is slanted outward toward the viewing audience, inviting you into every second of every scene. It’s fascinating really. Thousands of film frames, these celluloid picture-boxes, collaborating one after the other to deliver a unified story for all to experience and hopefully enjoy.

But today our intertwined personal and professional lives are fast-forward fragments of these forced perspective stills. We live in snapshots of jobless recoveries and economic downturns and employee dissatisfaction and too many unqualified applicants and business uncertainties and one size fits all no matter how much some blather on incessantly about adaptability and globalization...

These pictures aren’t quirky or poignant or pretty. They’re literal clichés from today’s world of work that doesn’t show much for tomorrow other than flat two-dimensional black and white stills. However, consider this from a recent BusinessWeek article:

From March 2011 to March 2012, [John Deere] customers ordered more than 7,800 different configurations of the 8R. On average, each configuration was built only 1.5 times. More than half the 8Rs were built just once, for a single customer. Thus, the global tractor: One size does not fit all, from Kansas to Kazakhstan.

Yes, John Deere. The riding mower and tractor company somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. The $32 billion dollar global riding mower and tractor company somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, that nowhere being somewhere my wife and her much of family are from. The Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa right smack dab on the banks of great Mississippi River, America’s heartland, where we’re going soon for a family vacation. Moline, Illinois, to be exactly where John Deere is headquartered. (The picture is my oldest daughter wearing a pink John Deere hat a few years ago.)

Again, that’s 7,800 different configurations on big hardware where each configuration was built only 1.5 times. A true America icon still shining brightly after 175 years, adaptable and global and growing and hiring. This is not the hip and fresh gig from Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and the startup capital of the world, San Francisco. But it’s just as important to the U.S. economy as well as the entire world.

If a large historic business institution can create lovely picture-boxes of innovation and growth, then so can other companies. We don’t have to be stuck with fragmented and bland world-of-work imagery. We can actually create business talent networks of executive management, employees, alumni and applicants who can come together and collaborate, sharing a dizzying array of configurations that give forced perspective a whole new, well, perspective. These vibrant images becoming one fascinating coming-of-new-economic-age story for all to experience, enjoy and thrive in, from the Heartland to hereafter.

Three Types of Rest Stops to Consider Along Your Talent Network System

By Kevin W. Grossman

The U.S. Interstate Highway System construction was authorized in 1956 by the Federal Aid Highway Act. Over 55 years later its network extends nearly 50,000 miles of highway and about one-quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the country use this system. Add to that thousands and thousands of miles of other byways and bad roads and you’ve got a lot of driving going on.

Along the way there are a myriad of rest stops, fast food restaurants, gas stations, hotels and motels, run of the mill and eclectic points of interest – you name it. Along most major thoroughfares you’ll find plenty of places to stop and “refuel,” but there are times where there’s a whole bunch of nothing and you better be sure you’ve got enough fuel in “all tanks.” Add to that extreme hot and cold weather, accidents and commute gridlock and you’re along for one helluva ride.

I took a road trip this week to see my best friend in Chico, CA. I know the route well, as a collective group of friends and I from high school have made the journey every year since my friend moved here in 1989. Not so much in the past few years with all of us getting older and life getting more complicated, which is why my trip was overdue.

The highways and byways are a means to an end; we’re not driving them for the journey, just the destination. Most of the time at least, unless it’s a first-time vacation road trip experience – like your first true job hunt. Or even the next one, or the next one…

Like an Escher maze, the social networking pages to job boards to career sites to applicant tracking systems are as endless as the miles and mils of roads we travel everyday. Most career search drivers just want to get on and off, and yet we don’t really help them do that; we don’t provide them with a Zen-like GPS so they can get to where they’re going to and apply for that dream job. You know, the one advertised on the big, religiously gaudy billboards along the highway – “Jesus is really sorry about the candidate experience. Have some fries and a Coke. Or a Pepsi.”

I recommend that employers really think about the experiences they’re creating for job candidates, that they should travel the same roads themselves to experience them first hand.

Did you get lost? Get a flat tire? Engine catch fire? Stuck in gridlock? Did you get a ticket? Did you get flipped off by someone you cut off? Did you flip someone off who cut you off? Did you find a rest stop along the way? Did you ever get to where you’re going to?

Once you’ve done that, then consider these three types of rest stops along your talent network systems:

1. You don’t need rainbows and unicorns along the side of the road while they apply, but you do need to give those candidates wanting to apply easily and efficiently the courtesy of the path of least resistance. Reduce the number of clicks; these folks just want to apply for your jobs. Don’t make them do road work along the way. 
2. But oh, do have periodic rest stops for those who need to pause for whatever reason – and give them glimpses of your company culture in between. Meaning, if I apply and then take a break before I complete an online assessment, keep selling me as to why I want you to apply in the first place and why you should be working here. Give me a reason to come back and finish, entice me, don’t make it a chore just because I have to stop and go pee. 
3. And lastly, for the smaller percentage of candidates who want to take more time to get to know you and others, both outside your company and your current employees, give them fun-land rest stops complete with collaborative refueling stations, gaming options, testing centers, white boards to share insights, virtual face-time communications across networks and whatever else you can think of to have them get to know you and vice-versa. Give them the opportunity to shine when they want to make the time and stop.

That is all. Happy driving!

TalentCatch: Increase your leads by 300% versus a vanity URL!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

At NACE, Jenn Terry, the Director-Staffing Strategic Initiatives at AT&T and Becky Parson, Sr. Project Manager University Relations discussed Mobile Career Fair Engagement, responding to an interesting question: How do we recruit at an event if we can’t collect paper resumes to ensure full OFCCP compliance? Should you spend fortunes in brochures? Yet, money will never be enough to respond to this question: How do we make the most of our face-to-face events while staying compliant?

High efficiency at your fingertips

AT&T has adopted a proactive mobile approach with TalentCatch, an iPad app created by TalentCircles. TalentCatch allows AT&T to sign up candidates on the fly.

Carrie Corbin, the Associate Director - Strategic Staffing & Talent Attraction at AT&T used it at SXSW on the AT&T booth to attract candidates. At NACE, Jenn and Becky invited the attendees of the room where they were speaking to sign up. Instant success of their engagement offer: nearly one hundred names within the hour. That simple! Subsequently, nobody was to be surprised to hear about their results over time:

It's no wonder that the AT&T approach has been hailed so frequently over the last few months. Productivity pays off! The best buzz always comes from tangible results. Productivity pays off!

Why not you?

A fully branded TalentCatch app with custom fields can be yours in one day. No learning curve. So you can be up and running overnight.

You start an event. New applicants enter standard fields (First name, Last name, Email, ZIP, Phone, Mobile) as well as any custom fields that you decide to include (job category, desired position, availability, etc.). We are speaking of less than one minute per applicant here.

TalentCircles stores the applicants locally and syncs the data with the Talent Network server (and TalentCircles). But you can also operate offline and send all the data later. If you don’t have a Talent Network, you can export your applicant data as a simple Excel spreadsheet, and continue the conversation with applicants by email.

Relationship-based hiring starts here! No business card. No resumes. Just an in-person contact stored in a friendly and easy-to-use iPad app that bears your colors!

For more information, you can contact Sean Sheppard! sean@talentcircles.com

Catching talent! We should expect more of portable and flexible in the world of work

By Kevin W. Grossman

That’s why I downloaded it. So at some point I could join a online meeting or webinar remotely, from the comfort of my own iPad.  

And that’s all I wanted to do the first morning of the Recruiting Innovation Summit this week, to join and run an important online meeting from the comfort of an armchair in a hallway adjacent to the event. This is a popular virtual meeting product that I assumed wouldn’t have failed – but it did. I tried five times to join that friggin’ meeting, and each time it failed.

I’ve seen a lot of apps – both native and browser-based – and I’m still amazed at the seemingly lack of effective user interface (UI) testing. I’m sure you’ve heard various iterations on the phrase, “If you don’t use it, you’re gonna lose it.” And if your users don’t use it…well?

To be fair, lots of technology companies, including those in HR and recruiting, have some level of UI proficiency on their product development teams. But again, all I wanted to do was join and run a virtual meeting, and I couldn’t.

Just as busy, progressive professionals want to take their online profiles with them wherever they go, the same folk want to (and do) take their virtual offices with them wherever they go – that’s the kind of world we live in now. It’s an evolution of sorts, the world of work pushing us to be “on” at any time, dialing it up and down as needed, and us pushing back, dialing it up and down as needed. This includes seeking out and exploring new job opportunities.

A growing contingent of professionals expect portable, expect flexible, expect a more diverse world of “easy buttons” that actually work. Here’s a juxtaposition though – when asked at the summit whether or not the attendees have a mobile-optimized career site, only about 2 of 200 raised their hands. 

Make it easy for talent to signup at talent fairs using Talent Catch!

Add to that the fact that according to Gerry Crispin and the Candidate Experience Awards research, only a little over 50 percent of companies have applied for their own jobs online.

What if I wanted to hit a hallway adjacent to an event I was attending and have a quick interview with a recruiter? Or even just simply finishing applying for a new role via a social referral I received? Or join a talent network via simply clicking on “Connect with Facebook” or “Connect with LinkedIn”?

What if indeed. We’ve only just begun.