In a recent study, only 14% of customer tweets sent to a brand received a response. That is like not picking up the phone when a customer calls, or worse, hanging up on them.
Brands everywhere are missing an opportunity to use the power of social in the way it was intended. This reality is underscored by another study that showed 50% of people would no longer consider buying a brand that didn’t respond to their feedback on social media. However, in a study published in 2011, 83% of people who did get a response from a brand after a complaint said they loved that the company responded.
What a missed opportunity. If you simply respond, you are likely to get a brand advocate. Not responding will cost you customers.
Knowing how to respond to a complaint is a challenge that most brands are not even addressing. They are using social media as they use all other media: as a megaphone, or as I referenced recently, one-to-many marketing. This is challenging to brands because they are very comfortable in one-to-many land. They understand it and know how to do it and know what result to expect. Except with social media, the audience has a megaphone too. In fact, each member of the audience (or the “many”) has a megaphone and when used, it can scare the daylights out of a brand.
It is very easy to come back from a stumble because the premise of social media is to have a dialogue. And the challenge with this is that the thought of having a dialogue with a brand is awkward. You tend to feel like you are talking to a bar of soap, and that’s weird. But this isn’t the case with an employer brand, because an employer brand should be about the people. Employer brands are all about the people who develop, make, design, and package a bar of soap. It should feel more personal and human. This is where employer brand has a big leg up on consumer brands in the social sphere. Yet, in many cases, employers are not taking advantage of this at all.
Today, employers are far too frequently using social media as another avenue to post jobs and perpetuate the post-and-pray mentality. keep reading…
Since the beginning, Twitter users, including me, have at times been stymied and frustrated by Twitter’s seemingly arbitrary character limit, which redefined social media.
Now Twitter aims to shift the paradigm for visual sharing as well with Vine, an app for sharing six-second videos. Is it the perfect balance between Instagram’s single images and YouTube’s long videos? Is it the best of both sites? The worst?
For me, the bigger question is: How much shorter can our content get? keep reading…
One time, at cheerleading camp in Texas, one of the camp counselors asked us, “What do you do if your football team is the worst in the district?” The answer was to cheer anyway, because that is your responsibility. In fact, you have to cheer louder and bigger to motivate the team, the spectators, the alumni, and the students.
A recruiter is a cheerleader for the company. You are looking for the best team, and encouraging them to join because you know that this position at this company is a possibility of a lifetime. So how do you recruit for a company that has the reputation of being as “The 11 Worst Companies to Work for in America!”
My suggestions and thoughts: keep reading…
IT career site Dice.com is unveiling a new talent aggregation search tool it calls Open Web.
Similar to TalentBin, Dice’s new service pulls together bits and bytes of information about candidates, summarizing the individual’s experience, skills, and interests in an easily scanned profile. Open Web searches the accessible parts of some 50 social and professional networks — including such tech hangouts as GitHub and Stack Overflow — and the open Web, indexing a candidate’s contributions and postings to build the profile. A series of icons tells searchers where the information was found; a mouse click takes you to the source.
The goal of Open Web, explained Chairman, President, and CEO Scot Melland, is to give Dice recruiters “as complete as possible a picture of the candidate in the geography they are searching.”
Provided for now to Dice recruiting customers at no charge, Open Web is searchable in multiple ways. Besides a typical Google-type search, you can put together a profile by name. That’s particularly useful if you have a candidate in mind who may not have an updated resume.
Melland will officially announce Open Web Wednesday morning, during the quarterly financial call with investors and analysts. Dice Holdings, Inc., which owns Dice.com, eFinancialCareers, is expected by analyst consensus to report earning 14 cents a share on revenue of $51.4 million for the fourth quarter of 2012. keep reading…
You’ve probably heard the hype about Facebook’s new search utility, which it calls Graph Search. Unveiled just a couples weeks ago, it’s already being described as everything from a LinkedIn killer to a privacy killer, and a recruiter’s new best friend. For every one of those you can find an article — or 100 — that says the opposite.
Except when it comes to recruiting. While calling it a best friend may be premature, it won’t be long before Graph Search becomes as valuable to recruiters as Google and LinkedIn.
As Stephane Le Viet, CEO of Work4 Labs, wrote in a post on Forbes, “Graph Search is about discovering people — their work history, their education, their interests and their motivations — and using that discovery to recruit better.”
Described simply, Graph Search indexes and quickly accesses all the information each Facebook user has made available. This includes their profiles, photos, comments, likes, friends, and whatever else is out there. Theoretically, what Graph Search does was always possible. In practice, sifting through the thousands of pieces of data was such a huge, time-consuming task, it was all but impossible. keep reading…
A few years ago, I might not have written this article. In fact, a few years ago, we were still debating whether “social” should be used for business at all. Now there are entire companies out there whose marketing and sales cycle depends heavily on social selling, social service, and social media marketing.
It’s fair to say that we’ve arrived. Now, before I get hammered in the comments, I do not believe that social media is the cure for all business ills, nor do I think that some business isn’t best conducted face-to-face or over the phone. However, as the owner of a company which not only takes advantage of social recruiting but also uses social advertising and selling to inform and educate customers, I’m ready to give some heads up about what not to do. keep reading…
Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. –Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
As we emerge from the strains and exertions of 2012 and look to manage our recruiting efforts in the New Year, we are all sure to suffer one ongoing problem: distractions that will eat away at our time and our productivity. Too many things both online and off scream for our attention and too many people want a piece of our day. This is not good.
I believe that the time to clear off your desk and start afresh is now, and even more then the physical aspects of cleaning house are the mental aspects of knowing that if you have a job of any significant responsibility, the watchword for renewed success will be productivity. One’s ability to get their recruiting done despite the madness and the noise that puts us in the zone Stephen Covey referred to as “the thick of thin things” is an ongoing effort with which we all struggle. (If you have not read Covey’s seminal book the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People yet, I can’t imagine a better way to kickstart the year off in your favor.)
With this in mind, I offer 10 insights that will surely contribute to enhanced success as a recruiter in the year all of us are about to enter. keep reading…
When job boards first launched, they were supposed to be like stock exchanges — a clearinghouse matching jobs with candidates. This was the future: efficient, fast, and simple. Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way.
Job boards are not in the business of filling jobs. They exist to serve up job ads and get paid for that. One can only speculate but things might have been different had the job board model been similar to that of eBay, where a good part of the site’s revenue depends on the successful completion of a transaction. But frustration with job boards is one reason why recruiters so eagerly jumped on the social media bandwagon, despite much evidence or reason to believe that social networks would let them succeed in filling jobs where job boards had not.
There’s not a lot of definitive data on the effectiveness of social networks, but what’s there suggests that social media hasn’t been quite the silver bullet solution that many were expecting. keep reading…
We’re always looking for new ways to engage with candidates; we want to be first, and get there faster and more effectively. This year, we saw three key shifts in how job seekers consume career information that we foresee carrying over into the New Year.
Trend #1: It’s All About Mobile keep reading…
Just weeks after I wrote a piece for ERE.net about talent communities, something happened on the Internet that excited much of the tech blogs and was acknowledged by many traditional press outlets; President Barack Obama held a 30-minute “ask-me-anything” session on the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” reddit.com. There is an important take away here for professional recruiters.
First things first.
Closer to the election, a day before in fact, the President took some time to once again drop in on redditors to ask for their votes. Contender Mitt Romney’s reddit.com appearances? Exactly two less than Mr. Obama’s.
The President invested some of his campaign time into a site like reddit because of its demographics. Google’s Double Click Ad Planner reports that reddit traffic is overwhelmingly dominated by people under the age of 35. In addition to reddit, Team Obama also spent a lot of effort on getting content broadcast on Tumblr, another social site that hosts far more under-thirty-somethings than overs. And while it is not possible to determine specifically whether or not Mr. Obama’s reddit.com investment paid off, election results sure do look like the strategy of going where the youth vote was more than likely paid off.
Not only did the President dominate the youth vote nationally (see the graphic below, click to enlarge), more importantly in critical swing states he actually improved upon his 2008 performance in the youth vote (also see the figure below), something he was unable to do nationally. 
The evidence suggests that the President’s investment to meet the key youth demographic where they were digitally clearly paid off.
Now to what it means to you. keep reading…
Conversations around talent communities have been steadily increasing in the U.S. in the last 12 months. Brands are looking to engage above and beyond existing social media platforms by creating professional candidate communities. Driven by particular segments of talent that are becoming increasingly hard to find, the need to have a pipeline or a pool of potential employees is now, for many, an imperative.
For instance, there is an ongoing requirement in the FMCG industry in North America for sales and marketing talent — making it a vibrant, fast-paced and ultimately competitive recruitment market. Organizations are battling with the fact that they know they will need talent at a point in the future, but in today’s economic climate they don’t have the luxury to hire them when they first encounter them.
It is against this backdrop that talent and recruitment professionals are exploring the role that talent communities can play in adopting a more strategic approach to recruitment. keep reading…
The worst-kept secret in the recruiting field, looked at by some as a LinkedIn killer and by others with deep skepticism, is now officially out.
Andrew Noyes, a Facebook manager in Washington, D.C., who handles lobbying-related communications, told me yesterday that Facebook is launching a new feature on its site for job-hunters and employers, focused initially on the U.S.
If you’ve been waiting for a “Facebook job board” where you’d send Facebook $300 and a description of a job — well, this isn’t exactly it. keep reading…
Here’s a riddle for everyone looking to make a hire or get a date for Saturday night: How is Sadie Hawkins Day like recruiting?
Give up? Really?? This is an easy one! Both of you get to court the object of your desire.
Sadie Hawkins Day is “celebrated” on the first Saturday after November 9, which of course, is tomorrow. According to tradition — a tradition that evolved from a comic strip back in 1937 — Sadie Hawkins is the day when girls could ask boys out on a date and they pretty much had to accept. Back in pre-war America, that sort of thing just didn’t happen. But it caught on fast, after cartoonist Al Capp inked the first Sadie Hawkins Day race in his L’il Abner strip.
keep reading…
Exactly three years ago employment-branding expert Dr. John Sullivan published the insightful: “Your Employer Brand is No Longer Owned by Your Firm” and challenged practitioners to recast themselves as influencers, rather than controllers, of employment brands.
No doubt this wisdom extends to brands of all types, but for most people employment is their most frequent “transaction.” Courtesy of new media, brand control is now firmly within the hands of consumers. Current, former, and prospective employees have multiple online means to share opinions and experiences, which combine to form a collective perception about “What it’s really like to work there.” Employer/employee review has been for some time a reciprocal aspect of the recruitment process.
Since Dr. Sullivan’s article, Facebook and Twitter have each cemented their place as the dominant players in the social media and micro-blogging spheres respectively. However it is the rise of websites (in full disclosure, mine is of course one of those sites) providing anonymous and authentic workplace reviews and freely advertised jobs that is the strongest emerging trend.
Pioneered by San Francisco’s Glassdoor in 2008, North America has seen a steady stream of new entrants to this social media space welcomed by active and passive job seekers determined to “look inside,” to research a prospective employer, before making a critical career move.
So does this trend pose an opportunity or a threat to recruiters and employment branding devotees? keep reading…
(This article was co-authored with Amy McKee, Sr. Director, Global Talent Acquisition, at Autodesk.)
Mobile …finally! DNA footprints in the cloud; recruiting back to basics: getting to know the candidate; the end of the traditional ATS; emerging markets dominate; augmented reality; disruptive marketing and stunt PR; the end of social media; candidate cloning and the end of recruiters as we know it!
The impact and level of debate created by Recruitment 3.0 & 4.0, certainly took us by surprise. Based on feedback, it is clear that there has been healthy discussion and many companies have re-appraised/reviewed their recruiting strategies.
Recruitment 5.0 is the final paper in the trilogy.
3.0 was all about building.
4.0 all about driving value.
5.0 is all about … Personalization, self-sufficiency, predictability, big data, and back to basics.
The defining features of Recruitment 5.0:
- Mobile recruiting finally takes off and becomes the dominant channel.
- Recruiting gets back to basics and focuses on building relationships. Included in this is a focus on personalization/humanization and dominating/driving communications.
- Footprints in the cloud. Companies obsessively get to know their customers/consumers, and recruiters do the same with their “corporate” talent pools
- Data DNA: Companies draw data to profile candidates based on online habits and trends.
- Technological developments bring an end to the traditional ATS.
- Emerging markets emerge and dominate.
- Augmented reality and disruptive marketing dominate recruiting marketing.
- As companies seek to attract the best talent in a candidate short market, they set up their own courses, universities/academies, and “clone” future employees.
- As talent becomes more scarce, talent becomes more contract by nature and more flexible.
- It’s the end of recruiters as we know it … the death of the recruiting profession?
Some meaty stuff.
Reviewing these bullet points, some companies are already experimenting and executing on elements, but as time passes, these will become dominant in our thoughts, plans and strategies.
Let’s explore in more detail. keep reading…
Just out this morning: Jobvite’s annual Social Job Seeker Survey and this third edition says fewer working Americans are actively looking for a job, even as the survey found that most of us are open to opportunity should it come knocking.
Of the 1,029 employed workers taking part in the survey, 9 percent said they were actively looking for a job. Last year, 16 percent said they were looking.
Yet even as the active seekers declined, more employed workers moved into the “active” passive category this year. Jobvite says 69 percent of the employed are either seeking a new job or would be open to hearing about one. Last year, 61 percent were in that category.
Add in the unemployed respondents, and it turns out 75 percent of the workforce — employed and unemployed alike — are open to opportunities. Last year, that percentage was 69 percent. keep reading…
NASA artist - black hole
There is probably no more misleading statement in corporate recruiting than “we will keep your application on file for six months.” While such a statement may be factually true, the reality is that at most corporations, hell will likely freeze over before anyone will review that application again.
Not only is this misstatement damaging to the candidate experience, but it may also mean that the corporation is missing out on a great opportunity. And that opportunity is to rapidly share exceptional “not hired” finalists with hiring managers located in other areas of the corporation so that a higher percentage of these highly qualified candidates can be hired. The best solution to this problem is a “top 100 candidates sharing list” based on a social media model.
It’s a sad but common corporate occurrence in recruiting. Your employer brand and recruiting process have worked wonderfully and you get an abundance of highly qualified applicants for a key opening. However, after you make your selection, even though the remaining finalists are outstanding and are interested in your firm, nothing happens to them and they disappear into your “ATS black hole” database.
Instead, what should happen is that these top candidates should be marked as “recruiting opportunities” and then proactively shared with other managers from one end of the corporation to the other. This candidate-sharing problem is so frustrating but pervasive that it consistently appears on my list of “major talent management problems without a workable solution.” Nearly every corporate talent manager is aware of this lack of top candidate sharing, but almost no one has found an effective solution. But fortunately, now that we have learned about the tremendous effectiveness of using social media approaches for sharing information, it now makes sense to revisit this problem and to design a proactive social-media-based candidate sharing process to finally solve the problem.
Examples of the Candidate Sharing Problem keep reading…
“Free” is the new “paid” in recruiting technology, and Work4Labs is joining that party, offering some of its product at no cost for smaller companies.
Work4Labs, which also announced it got $11 million in new funding, helps companies (like Intel, described briefly here) use Facebook to set up career pages, advertise to candidates, track results, and — as I mentioned last fall — get referrals.
The free version of its product, for small and medium size companies, allows companies to launch Facebook career sites and post jobs on the site, as well as generate referrals. It’ll cost extra to integrate the Facebook data with a company’s applicant tracking system, or to do certain customizations of the Facebook pages. keep reading…
Monetize, optimize, reciprocity, and even, yes, engagement. Ever come out of a social media marketing planning session with your head spinning? This new frontier has created all kinds of vague buzzwords.
Surely posting 140 characters isn’t as complicated as all those words imply?
Don’t let the jargon throw you. Marketing, branding, and selling on social media boils down to three basic questions:
iCIMS, a SaaS provider of recruiting technology, bought its social media partner Jobmagic, according to an announcement today.
Jobmagic had been an iCIMS partner, providing its customers access to social media sites where they could post their openings, as well as enabling them to build networks and attract candidates through social media job matching.
One of the key strengths of the platform is its versatility. It allows recruiters and employment marketers to integrate video links and blogs with the postings, and to include a direct link to recruiters should a potential candidate have questions. Besides posting to the big three — Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter — Jobmagic has some 300 other social sites to which jobs can be posted automatically. keep reading…
In a recent study, only 14% of customer tweets sent to a brand received a response. That is like not picking up the phone when a customer calls, or worse, hanging up on them.
