Digital Storytelling is Critical to an Effective Employment & Hiring Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Just like the consumer industry, our reliance on technology particularly in the field of HR and recruiting is growing every single day. We rely more on technology, tools and digital properties to help us accomplish more with what feels like less time every single day. For job seekers whether they are passive or active candidates , the challenge is accessing relevant information quickly, which for a job seeker, is information about a company they are considering as a future employer or immediately.

The solution requires a full recruitment marketing and employment branding strategy where HR technologies like Talent Circles provide a community focused on content marketing, access of information, resources and most importantly facilitates the art of digital storytelling.

Are you looking to build an employment brand because your job seekers are looking and listening? They are waiting for you to tell your company culture and workplace story. And yet, CareerBuilder’s recent October 2013 found that only 38 percent of recruiters and companies believe their company has a defined, concrete digital story tale and employment branding strategy.

The digital story of your organization provides candidates with resources, information and insights into what it’s like working at your company. It should be told through more than a 90 second recruitment video, but through multiple employment branding touches including recruiter interactions, articles, power point presentations, webinars and pictures showing the culture and real life stories of what it is in it for them to work at your company.

And differentiation in the world of recruitment and hiring is starts with your digital storytelling. These electronic resources created to share insights to a very specific job seeker audience can be a powerful ally in presenting your company to a qualified candidate long before they become fully engaged in their job search intentions and strategy.

This differentiation does more than just attract your most qualified job seekers based on targeted resources and information. Your stories create a reputation demonstrating to job seekers how you value the candidates you will eventually hire but more importantly, your stories send a message to the larger percentage of job seekers who will not work for your company. By providing your job seekers resources and information regardless of their employment status with your company, you are accomplishing something which 44 percent of your competitors don’t bother doing. And that is engaging, acknowledging or even receipt of the candidate’s employment application which provides a nearly intangible value of engaging your customers, candidates and shareholders on all fronts unifying and reinforcing your company’s business proposition and strategy which is a win-win for all parties.

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 Performance of Now: 4 Ways to Compete in Hiring and Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

On Sunday, my family and I hopped in the car to make our way to the pumpkin patch as part of our fall festivities. Using my GPS we planned our route to the pumpkin patch only to be alerted to traffic accident that kept me from this amazing family memory. Ryleigh, my daughter was visibly upset, and we quickly scrambled to rectify the situation immediately. With a simple smartphone in hand, the answer was upon me. Crisis averted and not a second too soon, we located a different pumpkin patch just five miles in the opposite direction from the congested highway road. I had the power of now to find a solution and trouble shoot my problem immediately.

We are living in the world of now where consumers, customers, stockholders, bosses and employees are expecting answers as well as results almost immediately. That’s a hard idea to swallow especially when you are dealing with traditional process like hiring and recruiting.

As the candidate experience and the importance of candidate engagement become more important in reaching top talent, we are faced with a dilemma: either change our tactics or stay the same. Except that staying the same doesn’t present a long-term reasonable solution when the world is moving forward and you are refusing to change.

Understand Your Audience. Before you say it, or write it, think about the listener and the reader. Understanding your audience is the most critical step in this process. Without knowing the needs and wants of your audience there is no sure way to compete in the hiring and recruiting field.

Provide them with NOW resources for the questions they aren’t asking. One of the major frustrations of the job seeker is not having accessible information when they need it. Creating a Talent Network that acts as a hub of information is a sure way to provide adequate resources and answer the questions that all job seekers might have about your company.

Offer up real time service NOW. According to a recent post by ERE.net, Microsoft has made it a priority to rid themselves of desktop applications and go straight the Apply-From-Your-Phone tool. Offering candidates a real-time NOW solution is the only way to compete with competitors in regards to your recruiting efforts.

Create a plan for engaging. Creating a formal candidate engagement process is necessary to plan out your strategy when engaging candidates. We wrote an article last week on How to Win at Candidate Engagement in Corporate Recruiting and Hiring and in essence, this is what you need to do when planning for engagement.

Hiring the right talent is the only way that companies survive in a changing and sensitive economic environment. Understanding your audience, providing them with NOW resources, offering real-time information, and having an overall engagement strategy is the key to the success of any hiring and recruiting 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. 

How to Win at Candidate Engagement in Corporate Recruiting and Hiring

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

We all know that employment branding and candidate engagement are important in recruiting the best candidates, supporting the larger business brand and market initiatives as well as providing job seekers information and timely updates on where they stand in the hiring and recruitment process.

As social media continues to push companies to provide real time engagement and information to their customers, so is candidate engagement for prospective job seekers who increasingly are customers of your company’s product or service first.

Candidate engagement is more than just an automated email to a job seeker when they apply or if you don’t go forward with them in the hiring process. It’s a deliberate act where companies and recruiting teams work to reach the job seeker prior to them applying or expressing interest in the job opening as well as throughout the entire hiring, recruitment and candidate courting process.

Candidate engagement does more than provide job seekers and prospective employees with a warm and fuzzy feeling. A candidate engagement process creates a formal strategy that helps to define and outline the different engagement and relationship points with your prospective employee. While I’m a fan of informal conversations, having an information communication and engagement strategy in place creates not only a consistent flow but allows recruiters and hiring managers to create a standard engagement strategy that supports the over candidate experience which in turns sets the state for your company’s formal employee engagement strategy.

Companies with formalized and deliberate employee engagement strategies can link the success of these programs directly to employee productivity, lower turnover and success as an employee. In fact, Aberdeen’s September 2013 Employee Engagement study shows that 75%of best in class organizations are able to align changes in organizational profitability to employee engagement efforts compared to 31% of all other companies.

• Create a Formal Candidate Engagement Process. Map out your candidate engagement process. Document that engagement points and the responsibility of who will make contact or engagement with the prospective employee. Create a consistent flow of engagement allowing for candidates like customers to experience consistent and amazing service regardless of where they are in the candidate selection process.
• Leverage Technology. Aside from automated email messages and turndown letters, consider create ways to reach your job seekers using technology but with a custom touch. This could be in the form of creating custom recruiter template messages, text alerts directly to job seekers or live online chats or informational webinars between recruiters and candidates to field questions and give them insights into the culture of your company.
• Spice Up Your Delivery. Not every individual responds or prefers communication and engagement the same way. Different mediums and methods resonate with audiences depending on experience, age, geography and other factors. Use a variety of methods to delivery your communications like video, content marketing through blogs, social media or mobile messaging. Ask your recent hires their preferred ways to receive communications and prepare to change and customize your delivery methods frequently.
• Provide Resources and References for Job Search Success. A job seeker’s biggest frustration about the hiring process aside from receiving consistent communication from employers about the status of their application is feedback and how they, the job seeker can improve in marketing themselves as a potential employee. Companies are reluctant to give individual feedback so they opt for no feedback, resources or information leaving candidates feeling alone, upset and in the dark. A simple job search toolkit provided to every job seeker who isn’t offered a position is a great way to help job seeker’s understand the hiring process, ease frustration and leave feeling warm and fuzzy feelings about your company.

Candidate engagement doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective when building relationships with job seekers who are considering working at your company. A simple yet deliberate and planned approach is often best providing information about the hiring process, updates on the current status of application and available resources about your company and the overall hiring process sets the stage for the marketing, customer and employee engagement efforts at your company.

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 Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First, by Andrew Benett

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Authored by Andrew Benett, the global president of Havas Worldwide and two co-authors Ann O'Reilly and W. Barksdale Maynard, respectively Content Director and Researcher, also at Havas, The Talent Mandate: Why Smart Companies Put People First is an excellent book composed of two main sections:

• A Transformed Business Environment, which explains the need to start a Conversation on Talent. 
• Six Essential Strategies for Success: When people are the actual assets of most companies, hiring and nurturing top talent is the way to build up and sustain competitive advantage.

Look for "talent," and not simply for "workers"

The change in terminology mirrors a significant change in the business environment. Silicon Valley can be deemed to have a significant place in the "Talent Revolution." However business and sociological changes have compelled lots of organizations, regardless of their size and activity, to place a premium on "T-shaped employees," expression coined in 1991 by David Guest in 1991 to define employees who combine vertical expertise with the experience and ability to work across functions, as well as on millennials who will account for three out of every four workers globally by 2025.

The semantic difference between workers and talent is critical: "workers" are supposed to do things the way they were always done. Talent makes things happen in "The Rise of the ideas economy," where it's not enough to fill a position, and where creativity and agility matter.

The mandate is to ultimately "turn your company as a talent magnet" and address new expectations, ranging from a new emphasis on paychecks with a purpose, to the desire of a more sustainable work-life integration, an uninterrupted digital life as well as more eclectic career paths: "Top recruits are unwilling to sacrifice their own brands to prop up companies that are unlikely to take them where they want to go."

The six essential strategies to success

This is the heart of the book in six recommendations: 1) Cultivate Your Culture, 2) Attend to Your DNA, 3) Live What’s Next, 4) Create a Sense of Dynamism, 5) Be People-Centric, 6) Make It Mean Something.

These six essential strategies are illustrated through multiple studies of "talent centric" organizations such as Zappos, DreamWorks, Hall Capital Partners, Whirlpool, Unilever, Nestle or Dow Chemical to name a few. Mike Bailen summarizes quite eloquently what Zappos is looking for: “We need our employees to be versatile and adaptable because Zappos embraces and drives change (this is a core value, after all). If employees are too specialized and  compartmentalized, it limits our ability to evolve. However, we do need our new hires to fully understand and deliver on the job they are brought in for.”

The days of "the 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and a stifling kind of hyper-conformity," are gone, and an astonishing 84% of senior business leaders surveyed agree with this statement: “I am most interested in hiring people who are smart and passionate, even if they do not yet possess the skills we need," again validating the findings and advice of George Anders.

The talent mandate starts at the top. Talent is not just the focus of HR and the recruiting departments. It's the business of every single stakeholder, starting with executives capable of commissioning new best practices and entrusting business leaders to follow suit. Now how can the mandate actually be carried out? "To create a company that is relentlessly creative and entrepreneurial, you have to start at the beginning— with hiring," Andrew Benett rightfully notes.

Yet, what about the "how" of the implementation? It's clear that the mandate entails rethinking the entire talent acquisition function and requires a whole new generation of technology capable of engaging with talent and supporting novel HR content marketing strategies — an additional dimension to the what Andrew Benett call the "we space.". You can't reach the moon without a spacecraft!

Employers Pressured to Adopt Candidate Experience & Engagement Programs

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Engagement, relationships and sentiment are important topics for most business leaders and marketers today. Our increased connectedness and use of technology for information are driving businesses to an unprecedented level of engagement-focused marketing. It’s a trend that’s shifting into employees and candidates. The expectation and relationship between employers, employees and job seekers is forever changing.

September 2013 research by Aberdeen supports the growing importance and use of marketing and engagement campaigns targeting job seekers, candidates and employees. Only 55% of companies are satisfied with their organization’s workplace engagement efforts while 2013 Gallup study finds that 70% of employees admit to being disengaged at work. Clearly, there is a disconnect somewhere.

Candidate experience and employee engagement programs are the answer. Engagement, information and connectedness are the key to a healthy candidate and employee base. One of the easiest ways to gain a competitive advantage is creating an experience for not only your employees, but future candidates that’s unmatched. This will not only help create an engaging and more productive workplace, but it’ll allow you to recruit better candidates that’ll turn into even better employees.

Each company that is successful in any type of candidate or employee engagement programs is creating programs that focus solely on the actual experience. They all treat their candidates with respect no matter if they’re currently qualified for a job and they treat their employees more like partners instead of worker bees that quickly become disengaged with mundane tasks.

In order to be successful at adopting a candidate experience and engagement programs companies have to have clear objectives and follow-through with their program. The 2012 Candidate Experience Survey data validated the fact that a company’s willingness to communicate and be available left a greater impression on the candidate and was greatly appreciated. With this type of information out there it’s important to be ahead of the curve and start adopting programs that highlight the candidate and your employees. Without it, you’ll lose top talent that impacts your company’s customer traffic and sales as well.

What are your hesitations about implementing programs like the ones discussed? Have you noticed exceptional results after implementing programs like these? Let us know.

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.