Use of Social Media

Recruiting teams need access to all the popular online destinations, such as Twitter and Facebook. Give them the ability to comment, blog, share, and have real conversations with potential talent on the web. They’re grown-ups, aren’t they? You hired them because you trust they will represent your company well. Put a social media policy in place and get moving. Once up and running on social networks and in the blogosphere, learn to have more than just an account. Build a real presence. Build community. Build excitement and buzz that spreads and attracts talent. AT&T and Starbucks are examples of two companies using social media the right way to attract high-caliber talent. Check out Trust Agents and The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web to get a better picture of using social media the right way.

Push vs. Pull Marketing

Gone are the days of the post-and-pray mentalities for recruiting departments, dumping budgets into job boards and search firms. That is push marketing: pushing out job orders. Here now are thousands upon thousands of free resources, sites, and online communities at your disposal. Use them! Recruiters can go beyond job postings and place tailored PowerPoints on Slideshare, insightful pictures on Flickr, descriptive videos on YouTube, and select whitepapers on Scribd and Docstoc. Spread your content in key places online and make sure to provide good titles, tags, and keywords to be found. This is pull marketing, and will bring more traffic to your career site and ultimately produce a better applicant pool to work with.

Lack of a Sourcing Function

Recruiters are overworked today with paperwork, processes, and compliance laws, not to mention the fact that they need to find and source quality candidates for their positions. It’s nearly impossible without having a sourcing team or resources internally or externally. Outsourcing is an option. Training and shifting internal talent is an option too. Hewitt Associates is an example of a company that understands the importance of the sourcing function. It breaks its talent acquisition team into specific tasks, with dedicated sourcers being used on and offshore, finding and submitting talent to recruiters. Sourcers today need to be well-versed in the latest trends in social media and mobile recruiting, as well as a high proficiency in advanced Internet search techniques with Google. This will ensure the sourcing function covers good ground to find qualified talent.

The Application Process

Don’t make job seekers jump through hoops to apply to your positions. Some companies have more than 10 steps amounting to over 20 minutes to fill out. This is too long! Simplify the application process. Fewer steps equal more candidates, guaranteed! The best application processes require uploading your resume, verifying your information parsed by the ATS, and hitting the submit button. Done! Better yet: how about giving your email address and bypassing everything. For most, this just isn’t reality though. Recruiters need data to be successful, and an ATS helps to get this data in the form of extensive profiles and questionnaires. Recruiters also need to be more accessible, more visible during the application process. Think about providing a live person via instant message or video chat on your career site, or a dedicated job applicant support phone line to guide confused candidates and do light screening. Other options such as company Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, and YouTube channels that tie-in are a must.

Job Descriptions

Most employment ads online either have too little information or way too much. The information that is available usually has too much corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo and uses company acronyms and internal program names. Ads like these can be confusing and misleading. Sit down with the hiring manager and get all the facts out on the table. Uncover every detail possible. Develop a job description that really sells the job! Make it relevant to the job seeker. Make it interesting. Show some excitement. Talk like a real person. Tell people what the job will really do and the importance it plays with your company or client. Strike a good balance of information with an enticing sales pitch. Make me want to apply!

Many more talent barriers exist today. I’m interested to hear about the makeup of your recruiting team, how you find talent today, and what unique challenges you face.

Without sounding like an Apple sales representative, I discovered that the iPhone opens up a huge playing field specifically for recruiters and sourcers who frequently travel, work in the field, or who work virtually.

The iPhone acts like a mini-computer, where users can access work email, use the Internet, read and produce documents, take notes, and stay organized all while on the run away from an office setting. The iPhone offers a view of the Internet that is exactly the same one would see through a web browser on a desktop computer. With new 3G wireless speeds and advanced security features, the iPhone is now also a very safe product to allow mobile access to systems, programs, sensitive files, key company information, and important documents.

With this in mind, the iPhone can significantly boost recruiter productivity and help to shorten the time-to-fill cycle for open positions. When a recruiter is moving between appointments offsite, the iPhone can access an ATS to update candidate information, grab key files on a shared drive online, or produce a report and email in a timely fashion to various managers and team members.

Major companies, in addition to popular social and business networks, have taken notice of the power and usability of the iPhone by offering “mobile” and iPhone versions of their websites, as well as downloadable software applications. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, Google, Yahoo, FriendFeed, Pownce, Salesforce, Oracle, and Digg, which all have various uses and functionality for recruiters and sourcers.

CareerBuilder has jumped on board as well, and offers an “iPhone” friendly application, although the early version is more geared toward job seekers. There are even applications which help iPhone users “record” their voice and take recorded notes to access at a later time.

The iPhone is the only product for recruiters and sourcers that offers such a unique and wide-ranging combination of tools in a small handheld device. Think about it. A recruiter can sit in the back of a taxi cab, flip through profiles on LinkedIn, check those potential candidates against an ATS, double-check these names in recruiting reports, call and screen the candidates, type, voice record, and update notes, and finally email resumes and a candidate presentation to a hiring manager. All this from one device.

Recruiters and sourcers have a wealth of options at their fingertips to find, reach out, and connect with active and passive talent. Every recruiter and sourcer has a different set of sites, tools, and communities that they use to find their talent. This is what I like to refer to as the “recruiting portfolio.”

A recruiting portfolio can be comprised of countless sites and tools.

Job boards include Monster, Careerbuilder, and Dice. Classifieds include Craigslist and Kijiji. Social networks include Facebook and MySpace. Business networks include LinkedIn, Doostang, and XING. Major search engines include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, while niche search engines include exaLead, Clusty, and Technorati. Microblogs include Twitter and FriendFeed. Niche career sites include DiversityJobs and TheLadders. Free job boards include Google AdBase and Lee Hecht Harrison. Listservs include TheRuthieList. Online groups include Yahoo Groups, CollectiveX, and Ning. Video sites include YouTube and 5min. Name search sites such as Jigsaw, Hoovers, Pipl, and even Spoke. Tools to use including Talenthook, Infogist, and Broadlook. Podcast sites such as Talkshoe and Podcast.com.

The list of options goes further into Digg, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, LiveJournal, Scribd, universities, news sites, state employment sites, virtual reality sites, associations, technology councils, training sites, blogs, and countless more.

How can a recruiter or sourcer manage their recruiting portfolio? Here are some helpful suggestions:

1. Stay organized. Make sure you are up to date on the talent you currently have access to in an internal company database, or in electronic folders and emails on your desktop.
2. Get internal referrals. If your current company has a referral program in place, great. If not, pull out the phone directory and start introducing yourself.
3. Get to know the ins and outs of each site or tool you currently have access to. Build up a solid understanding of each one so you know what you already have available at your fingertips.
4. Build a presence in social and business networks. Set up profiles on dozens of these sites and invest an adequate amount of time on each. The more time put in will help to develop a solid network and get well-connected on each one.
5. Diversify. Each site or community has its own unique audience. Discover what works for your needs and what doesn’t. The best way to do this is by trial and error.
6. Join groups. Engage people in discussions on Yahoo and Google Groups. Check out Ning, and RecruitingBlogs. Follow people out on Twitter.
7. Stay ahead of new sites and tools. Do this by paying close attention to blogs such as TechCrunch, and one of its sites, Crunchbase. TechCrunch is a blog dedicated to reporting about new technologies and new companies in the technology space. The site brings a ton of information on new products, services, and tools that anyone in recruiting can use. It’s almost as if the site was designed for the recruiting and human resources communities.

Per its site, FriendFeed “offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” I have been using the site for the past few months; it’s a new craze among the technically savvy and Web 2.0 crowd. If you are looking for a way to connect with passive technical talent and the young Gen-Y crowd, this is a site you want to invest some time on.

With FriendFeed, users setup a free account and customize a “feed” of content they share from other sites online. Everything then funnels into FriendFeed for people to see. The content shared can be from sites you have accounts with and use already to include news, bookmarking, status, video, photos, blogging, music, and more. These sites can include Twitter, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn, Google, Blogs, and up to 30+ others. My feed allows others to see status updates and comments I posted out on Twitter, in addition to updates to my LinkedIn profile and articles and posts from several blogs. If you don’t use a lot of sites for sharing content, you can simply post and share anything directly on FriendFeed. It’s dead simple to use.

Users of FriendFeed have the option to subscribe to “feeds” of other users and in turn they can discover yours. When a user shares something in one of their feeds, they are telling the rest of the site and users who subscribe to them what they are doing currently, what they are interested in, and what they want to talk about.

What makes FriendFeed stand out is that it is a very interactive community. Anyone can jump in and make a comment on a post at any time, and watch as these comments build up into full-fledged conversations quickly. See the example below:

FriendFeed also has rooms, which is a “mini FriendFeed” for a subject or group of people. Think of these rooms as groups out on Yahoo or Google. I am currently subscribed to “Web 2.0 Jobs” and “Sourcing and Recruiting.” These two rooms specifically share posts about open positions, people looking for employment, and users swapping sourcing and recruiting tips.

The site opens up a lot of possibilities for recruiters and sourcers, namely networking and making new connections, free advertising of open positions looking to be filled, in addition to staying on top of the latest trends online. Reading other feeds on the site can open many doors to new technologies and trends to pursue.