4 Untapped Talent Pools to Build Great Talent Pipelines Today

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

As I mentioned in my curation series, building those relationships and value is the key to a great employment brand as well as a great relationship with your current employee population and team.

Curating content is not just about job resources for the ideal candidate and the standard employment video you are posting on the company YouTube channel, customized and unique content is the key to tapping into those great talent pipelines to begin sourcing and filling those openings you have today.

Untapped talent pools are those pools that your competitors and yourself haven’t been actively engaging and build relationships to actively recruit for job openings. These talent pools don’t fit the standard mold and require custom content building, employment branding campaigns and a separate marketing strategy.

• Veterans. A great talent pool to begin building and engaging. These professionals are some of the most loyal and skilled workers. Their experiences vary so it takes a recruiting team familiar with the military culture and benefits packages to really engage and reach the best of the best of our former active military.
• Disabilities. Those who hire people with disabilities not only see the benefits in increased revenue by the way of access to newer markets, but the numbers of subsidies out there are limitless for employers who hire people with disabilities. Customers with disabilities and their families make up a 7 million dollar market segment. There is a strong business case for hiring this untapped market.
• Stay at Home Parents Re-entering the Workforce. When parents decide to quit their careers to raise their children, re-entering the workforce can be daunting, but for the employer it’s more of a risk. They’ve been out, untrained, and might not have the same skills they had prior to leaving the workforce. What they do have is a set of new and quite valuable skills. These include:
  1. Time Management: One of the most important traits while being a parent is managing the time before sports, etc. This is an important characteristic that most people have not mastered in their early 20s and even into their 30s.
  2. PR Experience: What do stay at home parents have to do with PR experience? They know how to market to other stay at home parents. They know what they need, how they work, and purchase habits. This is marketing gold for some organizations.
• Retired Professionals. The last untapped market is a retired professional. For the large majority of this market it’s generally a time to do work they’ve always wanted to do. No longer do most care about the size of the paycheck, but it’s about passion. Hiring retired professionals helps create a more engaged workforce because this population goes back to work not because they have to, but because they want to. They’re students of the world and wanting to learn and do things that excite them. One of the best examples of this is in the education industry. Those who go back to school after a long career or use their experience to teach today’s youth is exceptional. They don’t care about the size of the paycheck, but the work their doing.

Have you hired from one of these untapped pools? If so, what was your experience?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

How Candidate Access Has Transformed HR & Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In the old days, candidates went into the interview process blindly. The companies hiring were the keepers of the information. We blindly accepted their job offer. Took their word in most cases and used our friends, family and the grapevine to help us vet the company and the job opportunity.

The Internet particularly a job seeker’s use of mobile has transformed not just how we look for a job but absolutely everything. Using the performance of now candidates, job seekers and employees have real time access to information literally at their fingertips to make a decision on which job offer they will be accepting.

The job market has been fundamentally changed. We’ve shifted from a buyer’s market where candidates are educated through online and Internet resources either distributed by the company as part of their employment branding efforts but through candidate reviews and feedback using that same technology.

This candidate access has fundamentally transformed HR as well as recruiting. Companies must assume every aspect of their hiring process and company culture is being broadcasted, tweeted and blogged about for all prospective candidates, stockholders and employees to see.

The recruiting professional is no longer in charge. Sure, they make the ultimate decision, but the talent pool is diverse and strong. In most cases a candidates is being vetted by not only your company, but your company’s top five competitors. In order to attract these candidates’ these professionals need to understand every aspect of their brand because it’s now accessible across the web.

How transparent are you as a company? 

Candidates have access to information that you might not think.

Did you not put the salary portion in your job req? To the candidate, it’s better to be transparent so time isn’t wasted on both yourself and the company. Information like this is almost always accessible, more accessible if you’re a state employee, but with sites like Glassdoor and Payscale there is generally an acceptable range of pay that candidates are looking for and it’s backed by large amounts of data.

Did you try and push employee issues under the rug? If you did, you should rethink that strategy. The talented job seeker will know to go to places, again, like Glassdoor to see reviews of current and former employees about their company. When a company wrongs an employee it tends to go viral on the web as we’ve seen in so many cases involving firings via social media.

Instead, be upfront and honest about your company culture. It will cost you more in the long run to hire someone with a false sense of what your culture is like then it is being upfront with candidates. If you have a bad company culture…fix it.

Being up front and honest is the new normal for recruiting and HR professionals. In the beginning when the Internet wasn’t filled with employee/employer issues and the amount of information accessible to the job seeker wasn’t existent, sweeping issues and paying unfairly was easier. As the market evolves and candidates have unlimited access to almost everything at their fingertips it’s important to be honest first and build a culture that you’d be proud to work at. This is the key to hiring great, long-lasting candidates.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

The Power of Curation in Employment Branding (PART 2)

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In this two part series, we’ll talk about the importance of content curation and why doing it will make or break your content strategy. In part two we’ll talk about the strategy behind content curation for businesses. Before you read on, check out part one of this series to learn about the tools involved in this process and how to gain a solid foundation before building an extensive strategy.

In part two of this series we’re discussing content curation as a way to reach a targeted job seeker community. By sharing valuable resources and insights, employers can demonstrate their cultural and company values as well as what makes them a great place to work from their employees.

The idea of employment brand is fueled by the philosophy where company sees candidates as customers focusing on a long term relationship with a job seeker over a course of time versus driving them to apply for a job opening through a single job posting, career fair or interaction with a recruiter. In order to build this type of relationship with the job seeker it’s important to give the candidate the right resources and information to help their job search making your talent community a lucrative place to be.

In 2011, Beth Kanter, an expert on social media and nonprofits, outlined content curation steps and strategy for businesses. Three year later, her information is still as power and valuable today. Beth outlines three specific steps in creating a power content curation strategy that you can in return use to develop a stronger, more aligned employment brand. Before you get overwhelmed with the information go back and read our first post in this series and learn how you can manage a strategy like this in three easy steps.

Seek
Beth explains seeking as not only defining topics and organizing resources, but casting a wide net around topics you’ll want to curate for (in this instance) your talent community. She recommends spending about fifteen minutes a day, twice a week on finding high quality, useful content that’ll help your target audience, which in this case are the candidates in your talent community. Don’t waste your time on low quality content because it’ll end up hurting you more then helping.

Sense
Sensing information can be as simple as annotating the links you’re sharing with your target audience. She says to write blog posts or publish information with links that you’ve already sought out. Once you’ve either linked together or summarized in your content strategy, archive these links and pull them up at a later date when necessary. These links shouldn’t be copied and pasted when no value is added. Beth said this part should take 30-60 minutes a day. Now we all know the practitioner is already over worked so split this task between co-workers or do it every other day when possible. Having a strong strategy takes time and nurturing.

Share
Our favorite part! Credit sources when applicable and answer questions about the content you’ve decided to share. This means when summarizing information make sure you’re able to speak intelligently about it instead of just posting because you found it interesting. When job seekers as you specific questions, it’s better to understand the topic instead of having to do even more research to find out answers. Make to share high quality content and comment on information you find useful so that you make also increase your knowledge about the specific topic.

To find more about Beth’s Seek, Sense, and Share process, visit her website.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

The Power of Curation in Employment Branding (PART 1)

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

In this two part series, we’ll talk about the importance of content curation and why doing it will make or break your content strategy. This first post is more about tips on content curation and the benefits. In part two we’ll talk about the strategy behind content curation for businesses.

Engaging with job seekers on social media is a mix of engagement messages, content curation and customer service tweets. It’s difficult to rise above the level of noise on social media and really focus on the value that you bring the job seeker community. You’re more than just an employer. You are a valuable resource that provides news, insights and information to the entire job seeker community.

Content curation at its core is one of the most important functions of social media. You want your employer brand to be seen as valuable, insightful and a source of important information that your target audience needs. Content curation is more than just auto posting content and sharing insightful quotes, it involves understanding the information that your target job seeker community needs.

Content curation is more than just tweeting and RTing insightful blog posts from Forbes and other media outlets. It serves as a great source of content development for your YouTube channel, TalentCircles talent network, and the blog posts you may select for your talent network. Learning to curate appropriate content and share with your community is just as important as writing relevant, insightful blogs. We’ve come up with three ways to share and curate content with your community below:

Don’t try and do it manually
The most important piece of information is to not curate content manually. On Wordpress alone, over 41 million blogs are being published daily. If you take that, plus the amount of news articles, both online and offline, we’re looking at over 70 to 80 million articles, blogs, and news stories that go live each day. Finding the best and most relevant on your own makes for a hundred hour week alone.

Use tools like Scoop.it and Storyfy to not only find relevant content, but to share it across your personal and professional networks. After you’ve found these stories, go back and share your favorite with job seekers in your talent community.

Focus your content sharing
It’s likely that within your talent community you’re going to have several candidates with different skill sets and types of jobs in mind. Since your audience is job seekers, focus on that aspect and share content within that area. The content shared needs to be clickable content and focusing on either too broad or too specific will not get you the desired results.

Nielsen put out a report in 2011 stating that 70% of people will only ever click on one topical category, so it’s important to choose your topic carefully based on your audience.

Be consistent
Consistency in all branding and marketing efforts is important. Sharing regularly and frequently gives you visibility and strengthens your brand. Consistency in the version of how frequent you post, but the quality of content is also extremely important. Make sure you don’t post super high-end quality one week and then lower the next. Start strong and stay consistent throughout the entire process. It takes time, but it’s necessary.

Content curation is a practice that has been used since content marketing became popular, but most people aren’t consistent nor do they focus on the right type of content to share to get the most out of their content curation strategy. These first three aspects will help jumpstart your strategy so that you may focus on providing relevant information to your job seekers within your talent community.

Do you curate content on a regular basis? What’s your best tip to give beginners?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

The Power of Employment Branding Starts with Perspective

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

I believe that the key to developing a great community and conversation with your intended audience starts with understanding the information and resources that your community truly needs. This understanding is called perspective and is the key to a successful long term employment branding and recruiting strategy.

At the heart of every good marketing campaign, it starts with research. Research can be accomplished a number of different ways through surveys, in person meetings and focus groups to understand the information and value that your intended candidate audience really needs.

Employment branding is more than just surveying prospective and past job seekers. More importantly, it is about understanding how your employees view your company’s brand. What value or benefit of the organization is most important to them? This is where the real power of your employment brand is. Defining what aspects of your brand you should be communicating with potential job seekers and candidates takes effort and time. Here are a few steps that you need to follow in order to start off on the right foot.

It first starts with your employees. In order to deliver exceptional quality and content that truly defines your brand, it’s important to understand how your employees feel about the brand and what they think are the strengths and weaknesses. With sites out there like Glassdoor it’s important to understand and communicate internally the benefits of your brand and to keep your employees happy and engaged or they’ll make your job as a practitioner or recruiter more difficult. Ask what they feel like the company needs to work on from an employer branding point of view and conduct routine employee engagement surveys in order to maintain a high level of engagement and happiness in the workplace.

Secondly, you need to put your results in action. Doing research is just research without a plan or action to improve the shortcomings of your employer brand. If you start with new job seekers and candidates you’ll be able to set the bar high for these candidates while improving conditions with current employees. Most of the time a candidate will reach out to anyone they can at a company to understand the company and how they function a little more before accepting a job offer. This is why it’s important to listen to your current employees and start making the effort to improve conditions within the workplace.

Lastly, what’s you surveyed your employees and put your research into action, it’s time to starting branding yourself outside your internal culture. Show your brand to potential job seekers and candidates within a talent community. In order to attract the right candidate it’s important that you’re not only proud of your brand, but you’re able to put it into words.

Blindly improving your brand gives you so many chances to miss the mark and waste not only time, but money while risking your employee’s happiness if investing in the wrong ideas. Employment branding is powerful with the right perspective because it allows you to build upon your existing characteristics and strengths within your own company.

How are you using your existing employees to strengthen your brand?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.