How to Capture the Power of Passive Recruiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The best candidates have options. They also research for their next career opportunity long before applying for a single job posting. These candidates aren’t looking to make a lateral move in their career and will search high and low before accepting their next job offer. To recruit the best of the passive job seekers it’s important to build a strong funnel of passive candidates and help them throughout their “buying” decision.

Passive recruiting is important for multiple reasons. First, when a job seeker is passively looking at other opportunities it means that they’re not happy with something that’s going on in the workplace. It may be they’re not being compensated fairly, they’re not being challenged enough, or there might not be room for career growth. Secondly, they’re generally looking at one of their competitors for their next job. They already know the market and they want a place to grow, what better then for them to look for a competitor. Same industry, same type of work, but a better work environment!

Having a talent community for these passive job seekers to go and learn will make their buying decision that much easier when they’re ready to make the leap. The key is to make sure candidates receive the right information and data to make the buying decision to apply with your company when the passive candidate becomes an active one. By utilizing a talent community you’re able to nurture the candidate.

The Talent Pipeline and Recruiting Funnel featured above is like marketing and sales in that it is focused on relationships and qualifying the funnel of candidates through resources, interactions, and information. When dealing with passive candidates it’s important to hit all three points of engagement. Utilizing a talent community like Talent Circles allows you to see all your candidates in one place and put out specific information about your company, basically wooing them and helping the overall buying decision of the passive candidate.

In order for one to have a successful talent community they must do the following:

Provide resources
For a talent community to work you must start providing a reason for the job seeker to stay and be active. Providing resources and information on what makes a great hire for your company will allow these job seekers real knowledge on how to gain employment at your company.

Give access to recruiters
Recruiters are no longer the veiled wizard. Put your recruiters on the front lines in your talent community. Having a few recruiters available to answer questions will allow keep them around longer. Talent communities should at all costs avoid terrible communication issues between a candidate and the recruiting team.

Passive recruiting takes an entirely new approach because these job seekers aren’t necessarily ready to make the move. In order to capture the best of the best it’s important that you invite and interact with these job seekers just as much as the active ones. Keeping the lines of communication open will give your recruiters the one up on a candidate when they turn from a passive job seeker to an active one. Using a talent community is the perfect tool to do just that.

Looking for the perfect talent community? Request a demo of TalentCircles.

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 Data is Driving the Optimization of Your Recruiting Strategies

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Smart hiring is the key to optimizing your recruiting strategies. Less is more, but in candidate targeting instances, more custom engagements is best. Using surveys and focus groups either with recent new hires or current candidates, we can better understand what appeals to our job seekers and how many “touches” they must have before they apply for our job posting or join our talent network community.

I strongly recommend surveying and meeting with these candidates in addition to using reports, metrics and analytics to further support or shed light on your recent findings. In order to be a successful HR department a practitioner must understand the necessity of optimizing practices. With the amount of data available for most business practices, it’s important for the practitioner to be on top of how different recruiting strategies are performing.

On a very basic level practitioners look at how many hires they’ve had as a direct result to a certain campaign or strategy. However, we’re not living in the early 2000s anymore. Not only should practitioners be concerned about how many hires they’ve received from a specific campaign, but how long that hire has stayed at the company, how well their performing, the cost to hire that candidate, and many more data points. Even in the past five years data has become a strong driver in how practitioners optimize their recruiting strategies.

With the type of information available they’re able to see which strategies perform the best overall, no longer just looking at how the amount of direct hires that had resulted throughout the campaigns lifespan. When coming up with your next big push in recruiting it’s important to follow these few steps to get the most out of the data that’s made available to you.

Have specific goals in mind
It’s important for a recruiter to start thinking from a strategic or ROI-based perspective and see what they can be doing to increase their effectiveness. Before you start recruiting via job boards, social media, or any other avenue it’s important to think strategically and know your specific goals for picking different mediums. Post and pray was the archaic method of recruiting and it no longer works because of things like competition, candidate experience, and employer branding.

Knowing the right questions to ask
Most companies will start hiring and not know the basics of what they want to get out of each recruiting campaign. It’s no longer enough to say, “I want 5 hires as a result of this campaign.” The type of information available to practitioners allows the conversation to switch to “this is how much it’s going to cost me to hire a candidate this way, can we hire for cheaper?” The HR department serves an important function, but they aren’t given the credit they’re due. Having cost-per-hire information allows them to tie their department directly to the bottom-line of the company essentially allowing them to get their foot in the door when it comes to having a seat at the table.

Learning to use specific data to project future business outcomes
Not every recruiting strategy is going to be a winner. Learning to use past mistakes and data from previous campaigns will allow recruiters to avoid the same mistakes twice. For instance, if there is a trend of employees who were recruited from job boards having an extremely high turnover rate, it could be for several reasons. Using the data to justify spending money elsewhere or fixing an internal problem will go along way when developing strong employees and an even stronger candidate pipeline.

Data will tell you almost everything you want to know when it comes to recruiting. Using data to optimize your specific recruiting strategies will save your company money and show your C-suite executives the importance behind the HR department. With all the new tools and information out there it’s important to invest in what will give you your best return on investment.

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 Inbound Marketing in Employment Branding

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Earlier this week we talked about the power of inbound marketing for your employment and recruiting strategy. Most companies don’t understand where to start and if they are to start who should spearhead the efforts. If you’re a smaller company it’s most likely true that your HR department is already a department of just a few individuals, if not just one. The importance of

an Employment Brand Manger not only helps you recruiter faster and smarter, but the ROI is prevalent.

What is an Employment Brand Manager?
The Employment Brand Manager is someone who is in charge of creating a unified brand and message across all different employment channels. Larger companies will generally have a team of employment brand ambassadors, but for smaller companies it’s important to have at least one person who is focused on unifying the message. An employment brand manager’s main function is to establish a clear message that allows recruiters to basically be on the same page when recruiting.

What tools should an employment brand manager use?
When an employment brand manager is in a department of one or a team is looking to unify their message in one central location, using a product like TalentCircles allows them to do just that. TalentCircles can help serve as a centralized career website and talent network that helps drives candidates to a central point. This talent network will be owned by your recruiting team and helps them quantify their efforts when implementing concrete employment branding solutions for your company.

When your company is able to invest in products that help centralize your recruiting efforts it makes it easier for your employment brand managers to manage the brand more effectively. When building out your employment brand ask yourself a few questions to get things started:

• What are the most attractive attributes of your organization that could potentially lead candidates to your organization?
• What roles are the most critical to your success as an organization?
• What types of characteristics are you looking for in a future employee?
• What are the current perceptions that you as an organization are working with? How does it affect your company and what steps have you taken to remediate the situation?

These questions will help you get started in telling your story through your organization. It’s critical that as a company you paint a picture that attracts not only the best candidates for your open positions, but retains your current employees so turnover numbers are low. Take ownership of how those perceive your company and formulate a plan in order to highlight or rectify problems that exist.

Inbound marketing plays a crucial role in building a storyline that tells candidates who you are and what your company stands for. Use this information as a jumping off point to figure out how your newly appointed employment brand manager can start working at creating a positive brand environment.

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 Future of Recruiting is with Inbound Marketing

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Inbound marketing and digital storytelling is the future of recruiting and hiring strategies. The key with inbound marketing often referred to as recruitment marketing or employment branding in recruiting and HR circles, is that relevant content and information is king. It’s the best way to establish a relationship with the candidate and job seeker creating an experience of your community of job seekers providing them with resources, information and news to help them learn more about your organization, be better in their own careers or grow with your own company.

Inbound marketing in the recruitment industry serves several purposes and when you combine them all together you’re able to make a stronger case when sourcing more competitive candidates. However, inbound marketing is more than writing a blog post or putting out a whitepaper every quarter. It takes a consistent, focused approach on content building and sharing within the recruitment industry. Done right, inbound marketing will allow you to attract, convert, close, and satisfy your candidates and employees.

Attracting job seekers
In order to attract the most competitive candidates your company needs to have an extremely strong employment brand. With a strong employment brand passive job seekers are able to track and see what is happening with a company even before they decide to apply. The most active and attract brands are those who are engaging candidates and job seekers with their specific resources and information.

Converting job seekers into candidates
Once you’ve attracted the job seeker into an actual candidate it’s important to keep them active within your community. Using tools like TalentCircles recruiters are able to take the candidate experience once step further and provide resources and real-time updates on statuses of applications. The last thing a job seeker wants is to throw their name in a hat and never hear back from recruiters. Feedback in the form of what they’re doing right with the job process etc. is a crucial and will attract the best job seekers.

Closing the candidate
You’ve attracted them as job seekers, converted them into candidates, now you’re looking at using inbound marketing to close the candidate and show why your company is the best using inbound marketing. To do so, you’ll want to paint a picture and sell the candidate on the benefits of working with you. All of this is done through inbound marketing.

Satisfying your candidates and employees
The use of inbound marketing doesn’t stop when you’ve hired the candidate as an employee of the company. You’ll still want to put out resources and information to employees to keep them engaged with the company. The key to low turnover and productivity is making sure each employee is happy and satisfied with their employment.

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. 

5 Ways to Optimize Your Recruiting and Hiring Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Learning to optimize your recruiting and hiring strategy can not only save your recruiters and marketing teams time, but they will be able to increase their ROI in a shorter amount of time. Take these five easy and affordable solutions to your recruiting and hiring problems.

Great, relevant and timely content
Content is king. No one will deny it and no one will dare to say otherwise. In the world of content marketing, blogs, podcasts, webinars, and everything else under the sun, relevant and timely content will help optimize your recruiting and hiring strategy over and over. Five years ago no one was blogging. You had news sites and the occasion opinion articles popping up, but this platform and idea of content was still fairly new.

The number one content management system, Wordpress, states that in July of 2009 there were only 4 million posts published per day. Today they publish over 36 million. That’s a 900% increase in blogs on Wordpress alone. The trend is here and if you aren’t producing content on a consistent basis you’re about five years behind.

Leveraging SEO, circles and tags to engage a targeted audience with job postings, blogging and social media.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important factors when dealing with blogging, job postings, and social media. Being able to accurately leverage SEO to produce quality, high-focused content will help boost your efforts tenfold. Researching popular keywords through different tools will allow recruiters to find searchable terms and market a job posting to a larger audience. Understanding the trends will allow recruiters to stay ahead of the curve and allow them to spend less money and reach more job seekers.

Create moments of engagement.
Whether through a webinar, video interview or document sharing like TalentCircles offers, these engagements are important to building relationships with your talent network and community. The worst thing a company can do is have candidates apply for a job and forgetting about engaging them. Make sure recruiters are able to create moments of engagement with each candidate, no matter how small these moments are. Utilizing talent communities, like TalentCircles, gives recruiters a strong tool to engage each candidate that funnels through their pipeline.

Leverage multiple mediums that matter with your community.
Ask your job seekers what channels matter to them most and focus your recruiting and marketing efforts. The “post and pray” recruiting strategy is outdated and irrelevant. Survey job seekers as they apply and see which mediums they’ve used to follow, engage, and ultimately the reason they decided to apply. Knowing this information will allow you to spend less time in marketing, but also increase your ROI.

Create an experience.
This is the most important out of all five. Great candidates have options. Create a dynamic resource and community that lifts your brand head and shoulders above the competition. If you’ve found a few candidates whom you’d like to work for you keep them engaged throughout the entire process by having a spot where they’re able to interact with recruiters and get a better look into your company. In a competitive market it’s important for job seekers to feel welcomed and wanted. Creating an all-star experience will allow your recruiters to do just that.

What are some of the ways you’ve optimized and strengthen your recruiting efforts?

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.