The Future of Recruitment is Retention - Part 1

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

This is part 1 of a two part series on retention. Click here for part 2. 

The basics of supply and demand were drilled into most of our brains back in our Econ 101 days. I distinctly remember discussing the topic and thinking that it was interesting but not necessarily something I’d need to know in my future career. Well as I’ve seen over the years, I was wrong on that one because supply and demand actually plays a big role in how recruiters do their jobs and job seekers find new positions. Of course, when there is increased demand, supply often diminishes. And during times when there is an increased supply, demand often decreases. This is why retention is key to good recruiting. The economy will bring high and low tides of open positions and job seekers, but a company that can retain its employees will not feel the affects of those tides nearly as much.

Putting theory to practice

We saw this theory clearly put into practice during the 2007 recession. Companies were feeling the pain of a weak economy and were making cuts to meet their own needs, which ironically, were affected by other aspects of the rules of supply and demand. Americans were clutching their wallets a little tighter, and companies had to adjust to stay financially stable during the downturn. It was a tough time for nearly everyone. One of the most common ways companies adjusted was by discontinuing some of the perks they offered employees, including significant things like generous paid vacation, 401(k) matching and tuition reimbursement, and even less valuable perks like free soda at work, holiday parties and gym memberships. Companies were cutting corners, and they saw this as a way to do so.

Even more importantly, many companies had to cut back on their workforce when cutting down on perks just wasn’t enough. This put job seekers in a tough position and furthered our economic situation as there were thousands upon thousands of unemployed people and just as many companies with no open positions. We had an increased supply of candidates with the demand for them diminishing. Not as many jobs were being created or filled, making the demand much lower. It was a recruiter’s market, but not in a way that any of us wanted.

What this recession caused was a situation where employers were offering less and expecting more. In the job market, the demand for open positions was high and the supply was low. Companies were not only taking away perks to make ends meet but quite honestly, they didn’t need to offer a lot of perks to attract candidates. This impacted salaries, benefits, workload and so much more.

Fast forward to 2015

The recession of 2007 may not be that far behind us, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the job market today. Companies have quickly increased their workforces, brought back perks like unlimited vacation, excellent training and some benefits that were unheard of even before the recession hit.

It’s also affected the supply and demand of positions and job seekers. In fact, it’s flipped it on its head. Job seekers now have their pick of jobs, and recruiters are working harder than ever to fill those positions. This flip also demonstrated why retention is so important in recruiting. As I mentioned above, companies that are able to retain employees will be impacted less by the high and low tides, and the way our job market is looking now is a perfect example of this. Companies who aren’t able to retain employees are in the constant race to recruit, but those that have retention on their side are able to focus on fewer open positions at any given time since they the best people work right under their roof.

Don't believe me? It's the reason in the last several weeks that companies like Facebook, Adobe, Netflix and others have announced improved and expanded parental leave policies. These tech giants are desperate to retain their current talent while also being better able to attract future talent to their companies.

This is part 1 of a two part series on retention. Click here for part 2. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.   

4 Inbound Recruitment Assets You Probably Forgot About Updating

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Many recruiters are using marketing techniques and tactics in their jobs, and as I talked about in a previous post, we can use inbound marketing just as much as traditional marketing. In fact, I’ve always thought it was an incredibly valuable tool for our industry since it’s typically cheaper and less time consuming than many traditional marketing tactics. From optimizing your website and giving candidates a reason to stay to simply using more visual cues, a little effort can go a long way.

Since much of what we do in recruiting centers around communication, a big part of maximizing inbound marketing potential is based on the way we communicate with those candidates. And like anything else, those communications should be revisited from time to time to ensure that they’re not just updated but are the best they can be.

Take a look at these four often-overlooked areas you could probably improve with a few simple tweaks:

Candidate application acknowledgement email

You probably don’t give much thought to this communication piece, but you should be. Candidates have made the buying decision to apply to your company, and you have an opportunity to make them feel good about that decision and leave them with positive thoughts of your organization, whether they wind up working there or not. Use this as an opportunity to quickly reiterate why your company is an employer or choice and don’t forget to direct them to certain sections of your career site, talent network or social networks. Lastly, consider using an actual company email address without the “do not contact the recruiter” message on all your recruiting emails for a higher open rate.

Turn down email

Even if a candidate isn’t a good fit, you still want to make a good impression, as they’re likely to tell friends and family about a negative experience. Furthermore, they may be a good fit at a later date or for a different position. A template for this type of communication is a great way to help standardize the candidate experience while also ensuring they feel they had a fair opportunity to present themselves and were heard.

Job alert email

This is another piece that you may not consider because it’s so standard, but revisit it and evaluate whether or not it’s presented in the best way possible, ensure you’re taking advantage of employment branding opportunities and that it encourages job seekers to take action. This could mean applying for a position, or it could be that they join your talent network, ask a recruiter a question or download a resource through the email, such as a candidate job search guide that provides hints, tips and suggestions on how to best manage the job search.

Talent network welcome message

It’s important to take advantage of every email that your candidates receive, and your talent network welcome message is no exception. Step outside the box and set yourself apart from the competition with a video welcome message or a short video about the company. You can also include a photo of the recruiter they’ll be connecting with, both in this email and in other email communications.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.  

LinkedIn is Not a Dynamic Recruiting CRM. Stop Treating It Like One. - Part Two

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Check out part 1 in this blog series on the CRM. 

You’ve probably seen by now that LinkedIn shook the recruiting world momentarily when it changed its policy on downloading connections and contact information, requiring a waiting period of up to 72 hours. Previously, users could instantly download this information, which is obviously an important feature for recruiters and sourcers. After uproar from the media and the recruiting world, LinkedIn reversed this change and now once again offers an easy download.

While there’s no harm done in the long run since this decision was reversed, this occurrence provided a reminder to our industry that LinkedIn may be a frequently used tool for recruiters, but it is not a dynamic recruiting CRM. I mentioned in part one of this series that there are a number of obvious downfalls to using the social network as a CRM, but many recruiters are using it as such. If it’s not enough to know that integration with other candidate sources is a problem and that you don’t own the data you use of LinkedIn, then perhaps looking at how it stacks up against modern and future CRMs will shed a bit of light on how LinkedIn can complement, but not replace a CRM. 

There are four main areas of a modern CRM (candidate relationship manager) where LinkedIn and other social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram fall short:

Fostering communication and connections

While LinkedIn is a great place to make connections and initiate contact, it’s not a place that truly fosters and encourages communication and connections between passive candidates, active candidates, recruiters, hiring managers and employment brand ambassadors. A modern CRM absolutely must provide this capability, and LinkedIn just isn’t the best place for this.

The ability to handle many candidates

Recruiters are handling more open positions and candidates than ever before, and these candidates are likely coming from multiple sources. LinkedIn is an incredibly useful tool for sourcing but it just doesn’t provide the ability to handle and keep track of the many open positions and hundreds of candidates a recruiter could be juggling at any give time.

Compliance and record keeping

One of the biggest jobs an HR department must undertake is ensuring compliance in hiring and employment, making it a major problem to use a social network as a CRM. Since it doesn’t offer record-keeping capabilities like a modern CRM should, you’ll either be forced to keep records in a separate system and transfer to another system upon hiring, or worse, you may not be keeping great records during the hiring process, putting your company at risk for legal exposure. A modern CRM simplifies record keeping and if used correctly, helps ensure legal protection if a situation arises.

The best of both worlds

While the two of the categories above touched on engagement and organization, it’s important to note that what a recruiter needs is a system that offers a way to engage with candidates and tools to keep it all straight, all in one place. There are plenty of tools that do one or the other, with LinkedIn being one of them, but a modern CRM delivers on both fronts. And having a system that is capable of both streamlines processes, leads to better tracking and follow up and makes life as a recruiter easier. 

Data ownership

Most importantly, is that you own the network, it's systems and accessibility. Unlike resume mining or other recruiter specific products, you are not just renting space. You and your recruitment team have full control over the candidate experience, information being shared and the manner in which candidates and prospects are communicated with. There isn't a limited number of email messages or search strings. You have full access to the dynamic candidate community you've worked hard to build and can engage, search and access on your own terms and at your own pace. 

This is a two part series on the candidate relationship manager or CRM. Click here to access part 1. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.  

LinkedIn is Not a Dynamic Recruiting CRM. Stop Treating It Like One. - Part One

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

LinkedIn is one of the most valuable tools a recruiter has at his or her disposal today. There’s no better place to see so many professionals all in one place, essentially providing you with one convenient place to source and learn about candidates. However, for as much as we rely on the social network to do our jobs, there are limitations to the system. I have seen so many recruiters treat LinkedIn as if it were a dynamic recruiting CRM or candidate relationship management system and as we were all reminded last week when LinkedIn announced a change to a long-standing policy concerning the ability to export a user’s connections and contacts, it certainly is not.

Before this change, a recruiter could simply download a list of their connections. When LinkedIn made this change, they required that users request the information and then wait up to 72 hours for a list of their connections and contacts. Upon learning of the change, I immediately requested my profile copy, which was sent to me less than 24 hours later. While I’m certainly glad it didn’t take the full 72 hours, I think we can all agree that 24 hours is about 23.5 hours too long to have to wait for that information since most of us will access that information when we need it, not days in advance.

As you probably know by now, this change did not go over well. LinkedIn users, as well as the media, responded to the change with a firestorm of articles and posts via social media, forcing the company to reconsider their position and allow users immediate access.

The unexpected, inconvenient change and subsequent backtrack by LinkedIn highlighted something that many of us needed reminded of. As I said above, LinkedIn is a wonderful tool, but a dynamic CRM it is not. We want access to our contacts, relationships and community in real time. We don’t like waiting, but unfortunately only a true CRM can provide us with that kind of uninhibited and unlimited access. As long as we see and use LinkedIn for what it’s not intended to be and doesn’t have the capability to act as, we’re going to continue to be disappointed when things beyond our control occur.

Candidate Relationship Management: The Breakdown

A CRM offers functionality that LinkedIn doesn’t offer to the average user, or even those in the recruiter seat. There are many obvious flaws to using LinkedIn as your CRM, but there are essentially two main areas where things really break down. Most importantly, you can’t upload your own engagements, profiles and contacts of candidates you are engaging outside the network or community. This creates a major inconvenience, as you’ll most certainly have candidates you need to track outside of LinkedIn. If this isn’t the case, it should be! A CRM provides one central location for all those profiles to live, which LinkedIn doesn’t.

Secondly, LinkedIn has demonstrated that we don’t own our user information or data. We don't own our profiles, contacts, group members and status updates. We can request access to it, but it is in the hands of and at the mercy of LinkedIn. We can use it, but they are in charge of who has access to it, which isn’t true of a dynamic recruiting CRM. 

Aside from these two main areas, it’s also important for us to look at whether or not the social network will be able to meet our CRM needs in the future, even if it can’t now. Watch for part two of this series to see how LinkedIn fits in with the future of the CRM in HR and recruiting.

Be on the look out for part two in our CRM series. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.  

5 Things You Can Learn From Inbound Marketing in Your Recruiting & Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

As a marketing strategist who earned her stripes working in HR and recruiting, much of what I do centers around engagement, community and relationships. When I made this transition, it was a major shift in my career but it wasn’t a 180-degree turn around because what I quickly found out is that marketing has striking similarities to recruitment and hiring. And what I’ve seen through the years is that the recruitment function is becoming more and more like marketing every day.

Marketing is all about promoting, reinforcing our brand, fostering connections and creating channels through which customers can engage. Recruiting leans on those activities heavily to find, engage and hire the best candidates by focusing on building an employment brand, developing an employee value proposition that is in line with an employee's needs and wants, shaping the public’s view of the company through a number of ways using multi-channel messaging and creating unique campaigns that reach a very targeted and niche candidate community.

You may not know it, but you’re probably already using inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is one of the most significant ways we achieve customer or candidate reach and response goals, in both marketing and recruiting. Inbound marketing focuses on creating channels for customer traffic to occur and engaging community members by using specific messaging and materials. Essentially, inbound marketing happens when we promote and engage with the hopes of customers, or in our case, candidates, circling back around and engaging us or making a buying decision. In recruiting, these efforts could mean providing a downloadable resource or job seeker template, or providing a salary negotiation guide video series for technical candidates.

Whatever the platform, messaging or method you use to engage as well as attract candidates, inbound marketing in recruiting focuses on these five things:

Your website or career site as a foundation

Your website or career site is the force holding all your efforts together. It should be where candidates know to go first anytime they have a question, are interested in your company or are ready to make the buying decision of applying for a job. It should be easy to navigate, optimized for high listings in search results, feature content people want, and most of all should help candidates engage and take that next step in the decision making process.

Creating candidate landing pages that convert

Creating landing pages that relate to what candidates are searching for, from “cover letter templates” to “tech jobs in California,” is simple and it works. The key to move them along in the buying decision once they’re there is the language you use.

Speak to your candidates as well as employees

In marketing, research is the first step and guides most of the decisions marketers make. Take a lesson from the profession and talk to candidates and employees about what’s working, what’s not, where and how they’re looking for jobs, what the company has to offer, where you’re lacking and more. Not only does it help you make the best inbound marketing recruitment decisions but it also provides a good baseline if you choose to measure your efforts. (Which you definitely should.)

Go visual

We are visual people living in a visual world, so as important as the words you use are, an image or video can sometimes say more than an entire page of copy could. Use visual channels and use pictures and video in your communications and channels that you wouldn’t necessarily consider visual as well.

Make your website sticky

Your inbound marketing will likely send candidates to your website or careers page, but what’s going to make them want to stay there?  Make your website sticky, that is, make them want to stay, with free resources, great content, ways to engage and more. Give them a reason to hang out a while and you’ll make an impression on them.  

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.