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.

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.

You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy! (Part 1)

 This will be a series of 10 posts focuses on social recruiting.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In May 2013, the Aberdeen Group reported that "social networking sites have jumped up to the second most effective source of hire," after employee referral. According to a study published by CareerArc, two out of three companies will implement social recruiting in 2014. Their June 2013 study surveyed 350 hiring employers and 2,117 job seekers and showed that:

• 72% of companies use social media to advertise their jobs;
• 59% of companies find they get more referrals and 50% get more applications by using social recruiting;
• 1 in 3 job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching;
• 50% of job seekers spend more than 6 hours per week using social media for their job search.

Today, social sourcing is a fact: 92 percent of U.S. companies are using social media networks to recruit talent. Are you able to make the most of it? Probably not: your "social" efforts likely hit a wall - because you drive "social" candidates to your career site and ask them to fill the same convoluted forms just as you did five years ago. So, despite significant investments in social sourcing, your company probably comes across just as antisocial as it did five years ago.

Can you stop relapsing into the old days? Yes, you can, and it's easy. You need to go beyond social sourcing and have a social recruiting strategy. You need:

• A destination within your corporate site that allows you to transform a follower or a connection into a contact and a link into a relationship. In short, you need to continue to engage.
• A network to scale engagement capabilities. You already know, based on your experience with social networks, that engagement can only happen if parties share a common space where they can interact. Follow-through must also happen on a network. It's not enough to store candidate information in a database.

TalentCircles is the talent engagement network that enables you to:

• Expand on your social sourcing efforts.
• Transform these efforts into a coherent and rewarding social recruiting strategy to offer an optimal social candidate experience. 

Social recruiting is the ability to better engage with candidates, engage with more of them, know them better, nurture a vibrant community and build up relevant talent pipelines for immediate or future positions in order to save time and money.

This series of posts will describe the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and leverage our Talent Engagement Index™ and our Candidate Engagement Index™ models to assess your progress and performance.

• C#1 Continuity — Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting
• C#2 Consistency  — Follow-through your branding strategy
• C#3 Culture — Your core values and your credibility
• C#4 Courtesy — Social recruiting means candidate centricity
• C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions
• C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires
• C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people
• C#8 Conversion — Social sourcing, social sharing and socializing past applicants
• C#9 Compute — Mastering Talent and Candidate Engagement Indexes

Why Job Descriptions Are Not Enough in Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The problem: job descriptions are legal (not marketing documents) created for the purposes of protecting not promoting the employer in the role described. Yet, employers must take a marketing and employment branding approach when developing job descriptions, job postings and employment information to attract and engage a candidate that they hope may become an employee.

For the job seeker there really hasn’t been a place where they can go and interact with recruiters in an organization. They used to submit a resume and cover letter based on the job description and then they were placed in a purgatory type environment and would rarely hear back because of the volume of applicants for a given position. However, as HR departments become more like skeleton crews it’s important that they better utilize their time when dealing with potential employees.

Relying on job postings to communicate to a job seeker the benefits of working for your company does not work any longer. The candidate experience is becoming increasingly important in the job seeker lifecycle and companies can’t ignore the fact that good talent comes from delivering a good experience. In order to hire the best candidates, you must focus the process around the job seeker. If developed properly, the candidate experience can be one of the best tools out there to attract and the best candidates.

If you’re company is struggling with finding ways to improve the candidate experience within your organization, here are a few things that you can easily do:

Create a Talent Community: Talent Communities not only benefit the recruiter but also they give the candidate a place to go after submitting an application. After applying for a job, the candidate doesn’t know where their application goes or if a recruiter is even paying attention to them. Talent communities create a sense of belonging. Whether they get the job they initially applied for or not, you’ll keep attracting good candidates.

Engage with the Job Seeker: Engaging with the job seeker doesn’t necessarily have to be through a Talent Community (although strongly encouraged). When an applicant submits a resume, don’t leave them hanging in the black hole of resumes, but take time to respond and give direction if they were selected for the job. This could prove difficult if you received hundreds of resumes, that’s why the best tool for the candidate experience is Talent Circle’s Talent Community platform.

Focus on Employment Branding: Part of the candidate experience ties into how your company is branding itself. When companies are able to highlight the perks and benefits of working for their specific company, as well as its real culture, job seekers will be more interested in working for said company. Use employment branding to elevate your brand to the next level and engage candidates in a positive environment.

If your company is struggling with improving the candidate experience following these few guidelines will help your organization develop a stronger relationship with the job seeker and the overall process. What has your company done to position themselves as an employer of choice?

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. 

4 Ways Employers Leverage Video to Engage Candidates & Employees

Check out more recruiting video and employer branding tips by clicking here. 

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

With more than 86,000 hours of videos uploaded on YouTube, every day, video is an important and often overlooked part of marketing and engagement efforts.  For HR and recruiters who are looking to engage job seekers and employees, the market is wide open.  Companies can use video in a number of different ways to build relationships and help communicate with populations with a personal touch

As GenY enters the workplace companies are seeking out ways to capture the attention of this very engaged generation. No longer does pushing out job postings after job postings provide engagement or value, but this generation is looking to find jobs beyond the job board. In certain cases candidates will attempt to look for a void in your company and apply for a job that hasn’t been previously created.

Company Recruitment Video Tips 

I’ve come up with a list of helpful tricks to not only leverage video to engage potential job applicants, but to also increase the moral of current employees.

Use employee-generated videos. No one knows your company better than your employees. In order to capture the true feeling of your company’s culture have your employees participate in a recruitment video to engage potential employees. When you allow a few select employees to take part in your employment branding video it gives them a bigger sense of pride in the company. In turn their productivity and the productivity of their peers around them increases.  There is also something about employee-created videos that makes the viewer “believe” that the message is coming directly from employees.

Don’t Come Across as Being Fake. It’s the goal of every Public Relations department to paint the perfect picture of their company. Candidates and employees both know that when a company sounds too good to be true it usually is too good to be true. When creating a recruitment video you want to showcase every possible benefit to your company and none of the downfalls. Your video must show a well-thought out balance keeping in mind you want to come across as a real company, not the most perfect company ever.

Feature Company Events & Perks. As new startups arise in the technology sector, potential candidates are looking for not only the best company to work for, but they are looking for the company with the best-added perks. From startup companies like Netflix who created the unlimited vacation policy to technology giants who utilize onsite catering to cut costs with employees and create more productivity in the office. These perks should be featured in your video because it captures the attention of type of talent that companies are seeking.

Put Excitement Back Into Your Industry. Work for a boring industry? If it’s hard to attract talent because of the industry you work for, make it interesting with video recruiting. The biggest tip when taking something generally boring to interesting is to humanize the video. Put yourself in the video using pop culture references, industry standard clichés, or using clean sarcasm. Easy things that humanized your video and make the one boring industry, exciting, will go along way to recruit talent.

How to Promote Your Employer Branding Video

Once you have shot and created your video, it is time to leverage the power of video.  Here are some ways to get creative in the approach to sharing your employment and careers video:

• Pin Your Video on Pinterest.  Encourage your employees and recruiting team to share your video on their professional networks and Pinterest boards.  

• Integrate Video Into Your Job Posting and Social Profiles.  Talent networks like Talent Circles allow for landing pages within their talent network to show case your current position.  Adding video to your talent network is a great  way to personalize the process. 

• Add Video to Position Specific Landing Pages.  For those specialty and evergreen positions you always are looking to fill, add a video to give prospective job seekers further insights into your organization. 

• Leverage Video on Job Board Postings.  Job boards remain a viable candidate source. Consider adding your position specific or specialty careers video to individual job postings to improve candidate quality and keep job seekers on your posting versus the competition.  

Whether your increasing company morale by including employees in company recruitment videos or trying to attract new clients, leveraging video is perfect to obtain desired results. In the next decade recruiting with video will become one of the most optimal ways to source creative talent. If you haven’t started, you’re already behind the game. What is your company doing to leverage video recruiting to either increase employee moral or leverage potential candidates?

Check out more recruiting video and employer branding tips by clicking here. 

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.