How to Reinvent Your Job Description and Posting - Part 2

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Read part 1 of our series on job posting revention by clicking here. 

Job postings as we know them are a thing of the past. So much has changed in the way of job searches and what candidates care about, making the long-form, boring list of requirements and responsibilities an ineffective way of reaching candidates. It’s time for us to get creative, think like marketers and rethink what the job descriptions and postings mean.

In part one of this series, I mentioned that we need to start seeing job descriptions and postings as a tool for communicating our needs in a way that is entertaining, engaging and helpful for candidates in determining whether or not they would be a good fit. I also shared that the successful, modern job description caters to how candidates search, empowers them, highlights the employment brand and encourages them to take action.

But how exactly do you make that happen? It all centers around thinking about your candidates – they are your how, why and where. How they search shapes what form you use, such as catering to mobile searches. Why they’re looking influences the language you use and what benefits of the position you highlight. Where they’re looking dictates which job sites, boards and other resources you post on.

After you’ve used those considerations to determine the logistics, use these four tactics to reinvent your postings and attract the best candidates:

Get visual

Whether it is graphics or video, visual images tell a story that a 300-word job posting just can’t. People are so accustomed to seeing photos and video, and passing over text, that it’s much more effective to rely on visual communication. Video in particular works well to engage mobile job seekers.

Personalize your posting

Customize your message and job listing to attract a very small, unique audience instead of focusing on a broad reach. The idea is that by strategically targeting a small sector of candidates that you know would be a good fit, you will obtain the highest quality candidates.

Tell a story

Instead of focusing on a list of qualifications, tell candidates what makes the role unique. Stories help candidates picture themselves in a role and stand out amongst list after list in other job postings. Consider talking to your current employees to better understand the position and what makes the role, and working for the organization, unique.

Share via multiple channels

Consider sharing using many channels instead of one. With the rise of social media and the talent network technology available, like TalentCircles, you are only limited by your time and creativity when it comes to sharing and reaching candidates about your opening.

Check out part 1 of our series on job posting revention by clicking here. It's time for something new. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

How to Reinvent Your Job Description and Posting - Part 1

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

The job posting has long been a staple in recruiting. It’s what candidates read to find out whether or not they’re qualified or would be a good fit. It has helped us ensure we communicate what the hiring manager is looking for and also served as one of the very few resources a candidates had for understanding the position and the organization. So what has decades of using the same type of job posting shown us? With time to fill higher than ever and the market more competitive than we’ve seen it in years, it’s just not working. It’s not an effective means of engaging or building a relationship with a candidate. The job description as we know it is no more. It is time for something NEW. 

It’s time that we, as recruiters, reinvent the job posting and description to align with the consumer. The places and the ways in which candidates are searching for jobs is different than it has ever been, so it’s time to move away from a six-paragraph list of jargon and requirements and towards engaging resources and marketing-focused efforts that candidates will actually care about.

Rethinking job descriptions

The technical definition of a job description is “an orderly record of the essential activities involved in the performance of a task that is abstracted from a job analysis and used in classifying and evaluating jobs and in the selection and placement of employees.” This isn’t changing. What does need to change is the way in which we evaluate what is required to perform a job, how we present that to candidates and even how we expect them to respond to such a description. Taking that into account, we need to see them as a tool for communicating our needs in a way that is entertaining, engaging and helpful for candidates in determining whether or not they would be a good fit.

A job description today should do four things:

Meet candidates where they are

A modern job description caters to how and where candidates are searching for jobs. The days of candidates reading long job postings online when they get home from work are over. Today, the majority of candidates are searching on their phone whenever they have free time. This means that descriptions can’t be long-winded if we want candidates to make it through the entire thing and take action. Where are the kinds of people you’re looking for searching? That’s where you should be.

Empower job seekers

We know that candidate fit is one of the most important considerations when making a hiring decision, so your job description should empower a seeker to decide whether or not they are qualified and how they would fit with the company culture.

Let your employment brand shine

Job postings are so much more than a rundown of responsibilities. They’re actually one of your biggest marketing tools as an employer. Let your employment brand shine through and you’ll make a lasting impression on both applicants and those who decide the position isn’t quite right.

Encourage action

Your job postings, whether on your own career site, talent network, job aggregator or job board, should capture candidates’ attention and accurately articulate the job responsibilities, but they should also leave the candidate excited and wanting to know more. No matter how creative, interesting or branded a job posting is, if it doens’t encourage a call to action, it’s not effective.

By ensuring your job descriptions and postings cover these four essential factors, you’ll see a higher-quality candidate pool, increased brand reputation and recognition and ultimately, time saved in the hiring process.

Be sure to check out part 2 of our Job Posting series by clicking here. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Recruiter Relationships are Everything – Part 2

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Recruiters have a challenging job in our day and age as they work to find a way to stand out in a sea of LinkedIn InMail messages and emails. As I mentioned in part one of this series, we as an industry have put ourselves in a position where candidates are no longer impressed by our half-baked efforts. These types of messages tend to be a dime a dozen and fall short of creating any real connection with those who could be future employees. Many recruiters rely on casting a wide net with minimal personalization and maximum coverage, which often yields bad results and perpetuates that image in candidates’ minds that every InMail message and email is basically career-focused telemarketing.

If recruiters want to see true sourcing success, there’s only one way and that is through relationships. Relationships are essential to creating a connection with candidates, keeping that LinkedIn response rate above 13 and making a real impact. All of that leads to candidates that don’t delete your message but instead develop a desire to know more and be on your team.

Making it happen 

We can talk about relationships all day long but the truth is that they’re harder to build than one might think, especially when dealing with an industry that’s saturated with recruiters, such as tech, or when recruiters are juggling a couple dozen or so openings at once. Without a doubt, it starts with being genuine and making time for relationship building. Those are just a starting point though. It takes more than time and good intentions to make it happen.

Take a look at these four ways you can best position yourself to create real, lasting connections with candidates:

Know where to automate and where not to

In a perfect world, we’d have time to highly personalize every message we send and would be able to focus on each individual candidate like there’s no one else in the world. However, being on call to answer their questions at any time and spending an hour getting to know them online before ever messaging just isn’t feasible. That’s where opportunities for automation come in. Have message templates ready to go (but be sure to always spend at least a few minutes getting to know them and personalize beyond just the name), provide a Q&A section on your careers page to answer questions without having to be there and set up automatic emails so that candidates know where they are in the hiring process without you having to track down 15 applications a day.

Be consistent

Just like in relationships with friends or a significant other, consistency is the only way to establish a real connection. Spending 20 minutes talking to a candidate means nothing if they don’t hear from you again for a month. The saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” has no place in recruiting. Be there, be consistent and you’ll see a difference.

Keep your word

Keeping your word goes hand in hand with being consistent. Unfortunately, it’s an accepted practice for recruiters to promise a call or throw out a date when an email can be expected, and then not follow through on that promise. Candidates understand that things come up and sometimes the hiring process gets stalled, but taking five minutes to send an email letting them know this can be the difference between an engaged candidate and one that moves on to pursue another opportunity.

Make technology work for you

Recruiters are just regular people who have typical busy workdays and a limited number of hours they can spend on any one candidate or task. One thing they do have on their side, however, is technology that can help them make the most of their efforts. A perfect example of this is a system like TalentCircles that can help create a highly customized and personalized environment that is unique to the candidate and focuses on not only building a relationship but also providing resources, value and a platform. The key is allowing access when the candidate needs it, not just when the recruiter has time.

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Recruiter Relationships are Everything – Part 1

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

As you scour the Internet doing everything from sourcing candidates to shopping for shoes to your checking up on your ex, you’re leaving a digital footprint everywhere you go. But as you know, the Internet is a just a machine, and as much as we feel it knows us, all it’s doing is aggregating data about us, and replacing true familiarity and personalization with an automatic response tailored to us based on what our digital trail shows. Technology has completely changed our lives, the way we interact with each other and of course, the way we recruit.

The truth is, the Internet makes it so simple to source that we can find a candidate as easily as Facebook can advertise the same purse we were looking at on another website just hours before. The struggle is getting that candidate to respond to your messages and eventually choose to work for your company, which is less likely to happen following this pattern than you going ahead and buying that purse.

We’ve done this to ourselves

Recruiters have been sourcing and wooing candidates for ages, there’s nothing new there. But what has changed over the last decade or so is the monumental shift in where and how we recruit. If you’ve been in the industry for some time, think back to the way you used to recruit, before LinkedIn messages were ever an option. Chances are you had to put in more work to find candidates, and it usually involved getting to know them personally and talking to them – sometimes not just through email but on an actual phone!

Fast forward to 2015 and you’ll find recruiters doing what I call sourcing light, where they sort of source candidates but mostly just do a keyword search, message anyone who seems to fit on first glance and hope for the best. I’ve seen countless examples of recruiters being confused about the industry a candidate is actually in, sending terribly impersonal and horribly worded messages and just making a terrible impression overall. There is a reason that LinkedIn changed their recruiting solution expectation last year to suspend recruiter product accounts for 14 days if their response rates dip below 13 percent. Our industry has created a candidate pool that is simply not impressed by our half-baked efforts. They’re hip to the fact that many recruiters are phoning in their social sourcing, and they’re tired of wasting their time reading messages from people they don’t know. 

Let’s talk relationships

But let’s imagine just for a moment that every message sent is personalized in some way, is well written and is relevant for the candidate. It’s still the equivalent of a telemarketing cold call where the person on the other end of the phone happens to know your name. The best candidates, especially those in highly sought after industries, aren’t just getting your “personalized” cold call LinkedIn message or email. You’re likely one of many.

Sourcing is easy, and yields the results you would assume you’d get from something that’s easy. Engagement – the kind of engagement that fosters relationships – is the real challenge and it’s what brings real results. Relationships are what will get candidates to respond to you and eventually want to be a part of the team. It’s more difficult and strategic than throwing it all against the wall and hoping something sticks but it also leads to the kind of results you would expect from focused, strategic efforts. Relationships are the only way to really be effective in social sourcing.

Watch for part two of this series to see how you can build the kind of relationships that lead to job acceptance.

  

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.

Who Owns the Social Recruiting Channels on Your Recruiting Team?

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Social media is essential in today’s recruiting. In many organizations, a lot of time and effort goes into managing the channels, which can include everything from Facebook to LinkedIn to YouTube to Periscope. These networks connect us with candidates in an immediate and approachable way and are an important part of our job distribution, candidate engagement and employment branding strategies. They’re no longer just a luxury or something we can boast about because no one else is doing them. They’re a vital part of recruiting that deserve and require the attention that any other marketing channel demands.

Even though the majority of companies use social media, that doesn’t mean that every company has it figured out. In fact in many organizations, teams are still fumbling over how to manage it on top of everything else that they handle on a daily basis. It’s tough enough for a dedicated social media manager to ensure that voice, messaging and engagement is consistent, ongoing and effective, so it’s understandable why recruiting teams would experience trial and error before they find a rhythm and method that works for them.

So what’s the best practice for managing these social networks? Well, the answer is that it really depends on the team, its individuals and how much time each person can devote to it. There are essentially four ways to approach social media in recruiting:

1. Subject matter expert – Each recruiter manages a different social network, with it ideally being one they’re familiar and successful with. 

2. A single recruiter - One recruiter manages and engages on all the channels. This has its obvious advantages and disadvantages. 

3. Regional social recruiting - Some organizations assign social media accounts and activities based on locations or regions, often with the local recruiter or general manager overseeing the accounts.

4. Social recruiting shifts - Recruiters take turns managing networks during assigned shifts and time frames.

The approach that will work for you will depend on your people, organization size, expectations of your efforts and the time and resources you can dedicate. No matter what method you choose, remember that the key to social recruiting is that you ensure these four area of social success are being achieved:

Consistency

Your employment brand has a voice. Find it and use it consistently across all channels. Consistency also means that your channels are consistently active and updated.

Ongoing engagement

Social media is more about engagement than information sharing, so if all you’re doing is pushing out job openings, you’re missing out on an opportunity to build relationships and source candidates.

Response and follow up

In our day and age, candidates know they can reach a recruiter through social even when they can’t reach them through email or phone. They also expect quick response, so don’t let this area, one of the easiest ways to be successful in social, be something that leaves a lot to be desired.

Channel management based on the candidate community

Your efforts should be tailored and focused on those in your social network. That means that you’ll need to understand your candidate base, as well as understand the uniqueness of each network and who hangs out there. For instance, the expectations and demographics of a LinkedIn audience is probably going to differ from that of your Snapchat following, so tailor your approach accordingly. 

TalentCircles is the most comprehensive candidate engagement platform on the market. Take a product tour or request a live demo today. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology anthropologist specializing in HR and recruiting. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs and author of The HR Technology Field Guide. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.