HR ideas…from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob.com
Today’s companies find themselves in one of the most challenging times to build sustainable and strong organizations. Between automation and software, it’s never been easier to start a company. But it’s the employees that ultimately make the company, and true talent in today’s marketplace is scarce and fickle. Finding and keeping those employees has become a company priority, which has demanded a shift in how recruiters approach their jobs.
It used to be that changing jobs was a momentous decision that only occurred every 5-10 years, like buying a home or a new car. These days, it’s common practice for professionals to shop for jobs on a continuous basis. There is an ongoing battle for talent and it has become a much more competitive environment for jobs across all industries.
Much like marketers have to market constantly, recruiters must now recruit constantly. For years, sales and marketing professionals have successfully used “the funnel” as a means of finding, engaging, and closing prospects. I’ve found that the most successful recruiters use many of the same tactics as they source, vet, and ultimately hire candidates. There are some general best practices I believe recruiters must adopt and use to ensure your company attains top talent.
Market the Opportunity
First define who is your candidate target audience. Research where this audience is hanging out online. Then the more you market an opening, the more — and higher-quality — candidate options you’ll ultimately have. Be proactive about filling the position: think beyond the online job board and activate your current employees’ and company’s social networks. Make a compelling hiring video or a unique career site. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you’ll find the ideal candidate. With more options, you naturally build a spectrum of candidates and can pick and choose based on their qualifications and fit with the company. Building your Talent Community is the first step toward connecting your company with top talent.
Keep Track of Your Candidates
Use a centralized database to build, manage, and mine a lasting Talent Community. Don’t believe your Applicant Tracking Solution is the sole answer here. It has proven to be very weak in this area. Why because most of the Top 8 ATS vendors do little with candidate engagement or analytic measurement to know how candidates are tracking against candidate experience. You need to think like marketers do and work with Candidate Management Solutions. With an organized system to manage candidate prospect information, you’ll know exactly how to engage candidates through social, email, mobile text and targeted digital campaigns. A database with everything in one place and accessible by those who need it is the most efficient way of filtering through prospects. It gives you the perspective and efficiency to sift through large numbers of people, tag and properly filter the data until you’ve reached a manageable pool of candidates.
Additionally, a centralized Talent Community that you own (meaning you own the data) will prove to be a long-term asset towards future hiring campaigns. Again Career Builder and TalentBin do not provide you with these optimized solutions. You’ll often find candidates who apply for a position not because of the role, but because of the company brand. Even if they’re ultimately not the right fit for the job, you can still have that candidate’s information for when you are hiring for that position.
Stay Top of Mind
Staying relevant is a priority for marketers, and equally as important in filling your open role. Marketers use powerful digital campaigns to stay top of mind in e-commerce, and now recruiters must do the same. They use frequency of contact and change content offers with each contact. Just think about what it takes you to shop with your favorite eTailer. With a well-organized database of prospect information, recruiters can execute highly specialized campaigns that target skill sets, job titles, geographical locations, or even interests and friend groups. Knowing your Talent Community and strategically reaching out to them with targeted, consistent, creative and relevant information is the best way to turn a prospect into a candidate and eventually, a hire. If you are resource tight outsource this function.
Analyze, Learn, Improve, and Repeat
Successful salespeople and marketers analyze where their sales come from and how they can improve their process. Recruiters must implement the same process. Use your best employees and past hires to educate yourself on what is and is not working in your HR Campaigns to strengthen your entire recruiting process. Where do most of your applications come from? How much are you spending per candidate? Are your social accounts or website driving traffic to the career page? How much time are candidates spending on your career site? What pages are they defecting from? How long is your average time-to-hire? How can you make the timeframe shorter? Where is your defection? Is it somewhere in your ATS. How easy it for you to you’re your ATS defection. You must stop throwing your hands up in the air and demand that your ATS vendor tell you your Apply and Hire metrics. There is always room for improvement, lessons to be learned, and inefficiencies to be weeded out. With modern software and analytics, recruiters can measure their performance and efficiency, and improve their quality of hire. Talk to your Marketing Team and learn how much time they spend on analytics.
Attracting top talent in today’s market is more difficult than ever before, and demands a change in the way recruiters do their job. A serious pivot: to thinking like “how a marketer would prospect to their customers”. However, with a “funnel-driven” approach and the tools to find, engage, and close prospects, recruiting is best understood through the lens of HR Marketing.
By the way, how much does it cost your organization to recruit and hire one candidate? Do you even know your metrics? I guarantee that the cost of the SourceMob.com #RecruitingRocket BootCamp will provide you a 10 times+ Return On Investment. In fact, I guarantee it.
Click Here to learn more www.sourcemob.com/events
ABOUT SOURCEMOB: SourceMob integrates Internet, social, talent community, HR Analytics, social listening solutions, HR Marketing Services and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob’s solutions seamlessly integrate and distribute conversations, engagement and job content, all done on autopilot, providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, plus all of the major search engines. We help you engage with your candidates and capture niche passive candidates. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create more efficiency and lower recruiting costs. You won’t need your IT Team or HR Department to implement them. That is the beauty and ease of the SourceMob platform.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
jeff@sourcemob.com
952-417-6955
Twitter: @thegies
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener
Post by Dan Finnigan appended for HCM audience by Jeffery Giesener