Understanding the Employee Life Cycle and How It Impacts Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Like most things in life there is a beginning and an end. We begin new journeys in work and life leaving old experiences, friends and places behind. This is the employee cycle of life. Except that the cycle has changed as a direct result of social recruiting and employment branding strategies. The majority of job seekers are testing the waters and gathering information before they become an active candidate submitting applications and interviewing.

Because the recruiting and candidate courting process has changed, so has the life cycle. In the past there were 6 phases of the employee life cycle 1) Recruitment 2) Selection 3) Performance 4) Succession 5) Development 6) Transition. I’m proposing the addition of a seventh stage of Pre-Recruitment which takes place prior to the first stage of Recruiting.

Pre-recruiting is the stage when the candidate is passively looking for work. They are testing the waters, joining your talent network and researching companies. In this stage of the employee cycle of life it’s important to automatically engage them. Whether they’re actively or passively looking for a job – this is your chance to make a good first impression. After all when recruiting high talent the candidates are taking inventory of the company culture, hiring process, recruiters, and anything that affects their ‘purchase power’ which in this case relates to them applying for a job.

In the pre-recruiting stage candidates are going to be on the lookout for jobs that may or may not interest them and it’s your job as a recruiter to make them interested. Whether you dish out the secrets of your company culture or wow them with your overall employer brand – this is important. Use this seventh stage to start planting ideas into a passive candidates head that if they’re ever looking for a job your company is the place to apply.

Before you even start looking to recruit someone, pre-recruit them. It’ll not only make your job easier, but it’ll give candidates more information as to what your company does, who they are, and why it’s the best company to work for. If they already know all of this, recruiting them will be that much easier.

Recruiters need to start developing a new mindset when it comes to recruitment. Headhunters go out and look for candidates who may be a perfect fit for a certain job whether the candidate is looking or not, they’ll attack when they find the best candidate. Recruiters in this sense need to act like headhunters during this stage of the employer life cycle. If you can wow a passive candidate enough they might be willing to leave their job for new and exciting opportunities. This aspect of sourcing can be just as important as working with candidates already in your pipeline or talent network.

If you aren’t pre-recruiting it’s a good practice to start today. The time that you invest in pre-recruiting candidates will pay off in the long run because you’re able to specifically target the candidates you want especially if you’re recruiting from a competitor.

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. 

The nine "Cs" of social recruiting: C#1 Continuity

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!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The engagement gap today

Today, the "social" aspect of the candidate experience is virtually nonexistent! You have invested time and money to source candidates across various social media channels. You’ve started to come across as an engaging brand. However, the minute a candidate is impressed enough to want to work for you, your social capital plunges: You ask them to fill forms and go through the hoops and loops of your career site or your job application forms. You go from a friendly approach and a compelling message to a cumbersome and robotic interface that yields terrible results: 

• Up to 90% of the people you have attracted to your career site may drop off and lose the opportunity to increase your talent pools.
• Most of the people who have filled a form or left you an email will never hear back from you, which will destroy any brand capital you have built and damage your company's reputation.

Your social recruiting efforts will be disappointing because you break the first and most compelling rule of social networking: the ability to connect and make people feel connected.

The traditional candidate experience today is mediocre at best. The experience of socially sourced candidates is just the same, and may even come across as worse because of the canyon between how candidates see you on social networks and how they’re treated once they try to apply for a job.

Experiential Continuity: Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting

Continuity is the absolute first requirement to leverage your social sourcing efforts into a powerful social recruiting strategy. You must offer candidates a smooth transition between public social networks and your corporate precincts.

Social login
Make it easy for candidates to respond to your call. Joining your talent network must be easy – it should leverage the identity candidates feel comfortable disclosing. For social candidates, their ID is typically a social login. Instead of asking candidates to fill a lengthy form, let them import their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+. Candidates must be able to join from anywhere via a link or a button.

Live social profile

Being social is more than enabling candidates to connect via a social login. Your private talent network is a live engagement platform designed to enable interactions between the candidates and your company — not a passive repository where you store candidates whose data will be stale after just a few months.

When candidates join your network using their social login, their profile is auto-populated with their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Plus. Even more importantly, candidates have the ability to access their profiles and add supplemental information, such as a video resume, which gives you an immediate insight into their personality. In the social world, we hire for attitude just as much as for aptitude[1].

Continuity requires: a network and candidate opt-in

Again, social recruiting is not just about scouting public networks for talent (that’s only sourcing through social networks). The power of your public social channels is the fact that people opt into these networks and voluntarily provide the information they deem relevant to share.

The strength of your candidate network must be predicated on exactly the same principle: By opting into your network, candidates indicate that they are interested in being and staying connected with you. In other words, your talent pipelines include real followers, instead of just names you’ve scraped from the web.

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[1] In his book Hire for Attitude, Mark Murphy explains, "Our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament."

How to Align Your Employment Brand with Your Company Brand? Part 3 of 3

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

So far we’ve discussed the power of the employment brand, how to align your brand with marketing efforts for the best results, and in the final part of the series we’re going to discuss how to focus on target and meaningful conversations and messaging directed at the candidates that is consistent with your marketing messages.

Being involved in the overall brand strategy for your company is important when it comes to creating clean and consistent messaging. Your employment brand is just as important as your company’s overall brand, if not more important. Without being able to hire smart and effectively your company will be gone before you get started.  

If you want creative employees to apply for your company you have to be creative in your employment brand messaging. Look at the 12 Best & Most Ridiculous Employer Brand & Recruiting Videos list that we compiled and take note on how these companies weren’t afraid to be different in their messaging.

Attracting an entirely new base of candidates through recruitment videos has paid off for several companies. Not only in recruiting better talent, but their actual brand image is increased. There are several lessons you can learn from employer brand and recruiting videos about messaging and creating meaningful conversations. These lessons can transcend from any form of marketing your employer brand. Here are just a few lessons:

Don’t be afraid to be different. As a company part of your goal is to be the best and brightest in your industry. If you’re like all your competitors you will never be #1. Take a look at Apple and how they transformed the cell phone and computer market.  They weren’t afraid to go up against one of the biggest tech giants of all time. They were different. Create brand messaging that exemplifies how your company is different then the rest. This will not only allow you to attract the best talent, but create a legacy brand.

Use your employees to tell the message. When you’re using employees who are truly passionate about your brand – customers and candidates will flock to you. As a candidate looking to find a new job I want to know what your cashier thinks about their job. If they hate it, it tells me that the company doesn’t put a lot of effort into company culture throughout all levels of the business. One big obstacle of your employment brand is not only external marketing, but also marketing internally as well.

Play on emotions. This one might seem a little out there, but who doesn’t cry when they watch Sarah Mclachlan support the SPCA? Great marketing pieces catch the candidate’s emotions and plays on it. Take a look at Reba McEntire in a Whirlpool video and an AT&T recruitment video.

These pieces of advice can be used across your entire brand and aren’t limited to video recruitment. In every piece of your employment brand you shouldn’t be afraid to be different, you should let you employees tell the story, and if you are able to play on the heart – do it. It works. Candidates and customers are drawn to emphatic companies.  So while you’re working on aligning both brands, be clear in your message and work at attracting not only good talent, but the best talent through several efforts. Utilize your HR department and let them be apart of the conversation when it comes to building an overall brand strategy. 

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. 

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

How to Align Your Employment Brand with Your Company Brand? Part 2 of 3

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In part one of the series, How to Align Your Employment Brand with Your Company Brand, we focused on the power behind employment branding and why it’s necessary to brand your company through all efforts made by recruiters and your human resources department.

In part two we’ll be discussing how the human resources department has shifted its main job function from obtaining talent to an overall strategy based on amplifying the customer facing marketing brand through marketing. The ability to attract candidates has become increasingly difficult due to the competitive nature of highly in-demand talent. Companies have started using unconventional methods to recruit or even in some cases steal the best talent in the market.

If you’re watching the news you’ll see that this executive from Facebook went to Twitter or that executive left for Microsoft -- and the most notable was Marissa Meyer’s transition from Google to search giant Yahoo. Companies are doing everything in their toolbox to hire and steal the most noteworthy talent in the industry to make sure they’re producing products and services unmatched by competitors.

So how does HR show this talent pool that they’re the best and you should come work for their company? Through marketing. Human resources have started working on not only recruiting the best, but also marketing their company in a way that’ll recruit talent without as many loopholes and obstacles to jump through. Here are three areas that your human resources department can start with in order to maximize brand exposure for candidates:

Talent Communities. Most companies don’t have the right systems in place to attract and retain candidates interested in their company. If a position isn’t open a candidate will simply come to your career site, see nothing available and go apply for 100 other jobs that match what they’re looking for.

With a talent community you’re able to have them sign up and keep in contact until a specific job is open. Talent communities are great because it allows the recruiter to become invested in each candidate that joins. No longer will your name just be a dataset, but you’ll have a profile and a real way to interact with recruiters.

Blogs. I read hundreds of blogs each month and while I’m not in the job market, your blog is how you get found and how candidates are able to interact with your brand. Creating a blog and sharing interesting information will help your company search-wise as well as culture wise. Take a look at the Nuts about Southwest blog. They’re creating an amazing representation of their company and the culture they have within the company. Use a blog to do the same – look at Southwest for inspiration. They’re doing things right.

Consumer site. Have you ever heard me say that your customers are your future candidates? You’ve probably heard it a hundred times because it’s so true. Use your consumer site to help your employment brand. Build a strong presence on your consumer site that’ll tell customers about how great it is to work for you and send them to resources to help them find more. People who shop are those who are the most passionate about your brand. Use it to your advantage.

Whether your building a talent community, starting a corporate blog, or using your consumer site to build employment awareness, your HR department must start developing a strategy based around marketing to your customer. It’s one of the best ways to attract those who are passionate about your brand.

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.