Career sites will be windows of the marketing and sales soul

By Kevin W. Grossman

And there were those who said the internet would kill business (then with a capital “I”). Crazy, don’t you think? We certainly know better now.

I worked in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s where companies scrambled over another like ants to sugar to get a website up, any website up, in order to have a website up. Fast forward to today and we’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization (SEO), lead capture, call-to-action and the fact that according a recent The Economist article there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world’s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.

One to two billion people use the internet. Research survey after research survey validates that the first place more and more of the growing internet user world goes in online, so it makes sense that the primary business website (and mobile-friendly website) are the eyes to the window of the marketing and sales soul.

Consumer product companies get that and B2B companies are getting it. But what is still lagging is the parallel (and the parable) of the company career sites, portals, pages, whatever you want to call them.

We treat (we can only hope) our prospects and customers like kings and queens because they’re the livelihood of our businesses. However, so are our employees and managers, because they’re the ones who make and deliver the things that are the livelihood of our businesses.

Just as we profile our customers we profile our candidates (or should be), but unlike our core buyers, we should give our future employees the opportunity to profile themselves, to create a “universal profile” that’s portable and includes a 360-view of all interests and skills and experience, housed anywhere they want – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, other networks – to then be able to move among the online crowd whether they apply for a job or not. Yet.

Granted, talent acquisition technologies including applicant tracking systems (ATS) have been slow to adapt to the online profile – there’s still the “click here” to upload your resume. That’s changing for the better as the candidate experience improves allowing for easy integration of the online profile to the employer of choice, not to mention the benefits of a search optimized professional profile. Kind of like the way we’ve moved into the product and service marketing realm.

And that means that the company career portals will continue to evolve as the final destination – all employment brand fodder and job opportunities will lead to them like sugar trails of Web lore.

Career sites will become windows of the marketing and sales soul. Amen.

Talent network evangelists unite!

By Kevin W. Grossman

With all the talk of the online job boards dying and the resume dying, you’d think they were dying.

They’re not. In fact, according to an article on ERE.net:

For being so out of fashion, so yesterday, job boards manage to come out on top or top-adjacent on nearly every source of hire study. In a Bersin & Associates survey this fall job boards tied for first with internal transfers as the leading source of all hires. CareerXroads says job boards produced 24.9 percent of all external hires in 2010, second only to employee referrals (27.5 percent).

Resumes are uploaded to job boards continuously every day. So, the reality is that the models are evolving – meaning, resumes are becoming online profiles and job boards are becoming talent networks.

Well, the former more than the latter (fact is, talent networks are evolving into interactive job boards and then some). Remember when you used to painstakingly format your resume, or pay someone to do so, in one of multiple standard formats, and then mail it to employers you wanted to work for?

Some of you older kids do, like me. And even when we evolved and moved to electronic formats in our resumes, they were in multiple formats that didn’t include what we now include when it comes to our growing online footprint.

Think about these stats:

• Facebook is nearing one billion users globally – and growing.
• LinkedIn is over 135 million professionals around the world – and growing.

LinkedIn is a no-brainer. It’s become the new standard by which the online resume, or better known as the online profile, is managed by the above millions and millions of professionals around the world. And it’s become the first choice of recruiters and hiring managers worldwide to source and recruit candidates.

Facebook is right about the corner. Still primarily known for a media-rich playground where friends and family play, it’s becoming fast a new playground for recruiters and hiring managers seeking candidates in Facebook users who are updating their profiles to include their careers, skills and experience.

Consider this: Facebook, the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), DirectEmployers Association (DE), and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) created the Social Jobs Partnership. The partnership’s goal will be to facilitate employment for America’s jobless through the use of social networks, including job postings delivered through Facebook at no charge. That is very cool.

I’ve written about this before, but for those of you already have an online career profile you manage, as well as you employers that source and recruit online and value the online profile over the resume, please evangelize to accelerate the rest of the world, because this is where it’s going.

In fact, the career management industry can help too by sharing some of the same best practices applied to the resume that can and should be applied to the online profile:

• A consistent standard layout for portability
• A concise professional summary
• Accomplishment highlights that are relevant to the bottom line
• A clear timeline of professional activities that account for any gaps
• Search-optimized profile with the keywords you want to be found for
• Request multiple online recommendations as well as giving them
• Update regularly whether you’re looking for a job or not

Let’s get everyone to know the power of the online profile! Talent network evangelists unite!