Candidate Retargeting Through Content Marketing (Part 1)

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Content marketing puts the power of storytelling through resources and information in the power of the individual recruiter and company. Capturing the attention of candidates through your employer brand isn’t easy. Developing a successful employer brand requires several pieces of a puzzle to be completed in a fluid manner.

According to various survey’s you only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention on your website before they move along. This is the same with an employer brand. When developing a marketing strategy it must be centered on capturing the candidate’s attention and ultimately having them fill out of a job application or join your talent network. If you fail to capture their attention there are other traditional marketing practices that employers are able to tap.

Using Content Marketing to Re-target Candidates

Retargeting is the practice of serving display ads based on prior engagement. While there is more than one form of this technology, the most frequently used is site-based retargeting. Retargeting allows employers to continuously target those who have visited their career site in hopes that they’ll return and fill out an application to ultimately be hired. Retargeting helps recruiters because it allows them to stay at the forefront of a passive candidate’s mind.

Retargeting candidates is a cost effective way to keep your brand at the forefront of a candidates mind. When working with retargeting you’ll want to create engaging ads and use witty content marketing to draw them back to your career site.

When developing a successful retargeting campaign it’s important to develop ads that create a compelling storyline so passive and active candidates will be encourages to click and return back to your site. From there you’ll create a specific landing page based on the ad that’s used to convert prospects into candidates. The goal of a strong retargeting campaign is to constantly remind job seekers about your brand, repetition works.

As a recruiter it’s your responsibility to attract candidates to your career site or talent network and by doing so you’re able to sell them on open positions and why your company is the best place to work. Using traditional marketing methods such as retargeting to keep your company in the back of candidate’s minds will allow you continuously develop a flow of both passive and active job seekers back to your site.

Has your company used retargeting on candidates? How successful did you find it?

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. 

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Women in HR should be thrilled about the appointment of Mary Barra as GM's CEO

http://www.gm.com/company/aboutGM/GM_Corporate_Officers/mary_barra.html

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

I was thrilled to hear that Mary Barra will be the new CEO of GM. The appointment of any woman at the head of a company is a victory for all women and the fact that she is the first woman to head a major automaker is just equally inspiring and worth celebrating. In an article about her, Jena McGregor of the Washington Post reminds us of still dismal numbers: "On average, women hold 16.9 percent of board seats and 14.6 percent of executive officer roles in large U.S. companies. But in the manufacturing-durable goods sector, which includes automakers, the percentage of female directors is 15.6 percent, and the percentage of female executives is just 11.2."

She started with a degree in Electrical Engineering in the early eighties when there were so few women at a time when the percentage of Electrical Engineering degrees awarded to women was at around 10%. Great for all the girls in this country!

Her history reminds us of something that has almost disappeared from the industrial world, a time when large organizations were deeply involved in the scientific training of the next generation. She studied at the General Motors Institute, which later became Kettering University in Flint, Michigan and ultimately worked at GM since she was 19. And according to an interview she gave to the LA Times, her father was a die maker for the Pontiac motor division for 39 years.

Here are some even greater takeaways for HR:

• The value of being able to keep talented interns.
• The power of internal mobility: Mary Barra was involved over the years with virtually every aspect of the business.
• The power of an being outstanding VP of GM’s human resources department, a position that she occupied between 2009 and 2011. She is credited with making the culture of the company evolve. 

In short, Mary Barra is living proof of the long-lasting value of talent and human capital management. There have been a lot of articles about her just recently in multiple newspapers. You can also check her bio.

The Importance of Fluidity in Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Recruiting, the process, headcount numbers and the changing processes and best practices we use are a fluid and flexible living thing. Recruitment and our strategies flow like water. Our recruitment strategies change much like the river as it digs into the river bend or weather alters its course.

Some things we can anticipate through seasonality, forecasting, compliance and big data but with the increase in technology adoption and use in our industry as a strategic competitive advance the real importance of fluid recruiting is remaining flexible and aware of the changing talent landscape. As technology in the human resources field continues to expand employers are shifting to a new way of thinking and in order to succeed you must be able to adapt.

Adapting to constant changes in HR technology should be a top priority for organizations. With a new workforce entering the market organizations need to be aware of techniques that work the best when recruiting this new type of employee. For years companies have been afraid to adopt new technology or ways of sourcing candidates. This has not only hurt them financially, but hiring

Want to know how to be more fluid in recruiting?

Be open to new technologies. In order to hire the best talent it’s important that human resource departments adapt and change their strategies. Frankly, can you expect better results if you use the same old stuff?

Get out of your comfort zone. Many reasons behind HR not adopting new ways to source is because they’re comfortable in what they’ve been doing for years even though they are not exactly proud of the results. HR professionals need to be able to source outside of their box in order to recruit and retain top talent.

Have a strategy. When your HR department doesn’t have a strategy in place for adopting obvious new technology trends, they are just applying old recipes that prove less effective every season. In order to recruit in a fluid manner it’s important to have some type of strategy in place so that all the pieces work together and are future-oriented instead on anchored in the past.

In recruiting just as in any other part of our lives, we can't create the future simply going for "business as usual."

How does your HR department flow? Do you recruit fluidly?

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. 

Why Your Social Recruiting Strategy Isn’t Working

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

We’ve all heard the term ‘social recruiting.’ Over the past six since the term has developed into more then just a buzzword, but a common practice in the recruiting and HR professions. According to a recent survey over 94% of recruiters surveyed have already used or planned to begin using social media this year. This is a 40% jump from those surveyed in 2011.

This shift in recruiting practices comes purely from the benefits of using social media to find and vet candidates. In the same survey there was a 33% improvement in time to hire and a 49% increase in the candidate quality.

So why is your social recruiting strategy failing? Because social sourcing is not social recruiting!

Candidates aren’t being engaged properly on these channels. The influx of mass-LinkedIn messages has turned candidates away because recruiters are casting a broad net without really qualifying candidates. As a marketer if you send me a job that’s in the IT field, you’re going to be removed instantly from my network. Everything recruiters do on social media should be centered on the candidate experience and building relationships. Without those crucial relationships you’ll spend wasted hours trying to vet talent.

According to another survey, 47% of job seekers have been targeted by recruiters using social media in the last twelve months. In order to maintain healthy relationships with these jobs seekers recruiters will need to develop a customized and personal approach to recruiting. Job seekers who feel more engaged with a specific recruiter are more likely to follow through with the entire process. Social recruiting is more then just a tweet or a Facebook update, it’s about real life encounters that are making your recruiting and engagement strategy truly unique.

Social recruiting requires tailoring communications and to do so, you need to have candidates first tell you who they are and if they are interested in you! It's about them them first. Not about you.

In order to succeed in the social recruiting arena recruiters will need to stop using mass-mailing tactics with candidates and start customizing each experience and respect the rules of social engagement. Taking the time to start a dialogue between each candidate whether it be InMail, Facebook, or Twitter, will go a long way in finding the brightest talent for your organization.

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. 

Talent Strategies Don’t Conform. They Create.

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Ants are habitual creatures that work together in every way as a team following the orders of their Queen. Ants have their own unique job and role within the colony. They serve her fully and completely no matter what their own fate may be. It’s a form of mindless conformity.

Army ants are blind and follow the trail and path by scent. Sometimes the scent loops itself causing an ant spiral or loop where ants go through the motions endlessly. Ultimately the ants meet their own demise because they’re conforming to a pattern that the ant in front has created.


I believe the industry is at an impasse and we’re circling our own ant spiral when it comes to adoption of new technology, recruiting strategies and old processes that are no longer benefiting our businesses or companies. In order to rise to the occasion and be successful companies must stop conforming and start creating their own unique talent strategy. If not, they’ll be running around in spiral loops just as the ants did until they meet their ultimate demise.

Companies are no longer able to skate by, but they must create a unique talent acquisition strategy that is unlike their competitors'. Ants break out of their spiral loops only when their physical environment is altered causing them through a disruption of reality. It’s time for recruiters, human capital experts and HR to break the cycle and create a new way of recruiting, sourcing and hiring. In order to do so they will be required to break traditional methods of conducting business, seek out, and incorporate new thought patterns.

Talent acquisition is key to meeting strategic business goals and strengthening your competitive advantage. Take a look at my post on the most viral recruit videos. These companies all thought outside the box and did something that caught a candidate’s attention. Not only is it important to capture a candidate, but deliver exceptional results through the entire candidate process.

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. 

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