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The Future of Applicant Tracking Systems: Executive Roundtable

Admin — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:29:37 +0000

by Kyle Lagunas

HR Market Analyst, Software Advice

With the emerging prominence of social media and cloud-based computing, sourcing and hiring strategies have no doubt changed in recent years. More and more hiring professionals and human resources (HR) departments are relying on applicant tracking systems (ATS) to automate, streamline and organize the complicated processes associated with bringing on new employees. In order to get a strong pulse of the market, I recently interviewed executives from three applicant tracking software vendors: Dresser & Associates, AcquireTM, and iCIMS. Who better to tell us where things stand and where they’re going than the leaders of the pack?

Before we jump in, though, let me introduce you to our roundtable participants.

Jason Barnett, CIO and co-founder of EON Applications, Inc.
As the Chief Information Officer and co-founder of EON Applications, Inc – creators of Acquire Talent Management – Jason is responsible for product and strategic technology planning. He brings over 15 years of software product development experience across several industries delivering enterprise software. Prior to founding EON, Jason worked as a consultant for several Fortune 500 companies.

Mark Dresser, President and CEO of Dresser & Associates
Dresser & Associates is the leading Sage Abra HRMS partner in the US. For over fifteen years Mark’s company has provided unique solutions for hundreds of businesses to boost productivity using human resources software. Providing the highest level of expertise in the HRMS applications, they deliver products and services that meet customers’ needs and surpass their expectations.

Susan Vitale, CSO at iCIMS
As Chief Strategic Officer for iCIMS Talent Platform, Susan directs business strategy to drive corporate growth. She works closely with linking iCIMS’ business vision to the product roadmap to help bring valuable new functionality to market through iCIMS’ Talent Platform. Prior to overseeing corporate strategy, Susan was iCIMS’ Director of Marketing, leading all strategic marketing initiatives.

Q: What trends do you see as having the largest impact on the ATS market?

Barnett: HR and hiring professionals, as well as third party recruiters are all focusing more on finding passive candidates. To accomplish this, they’re using social media to tweet jobs and share information via Facebook and LinkedIn. And while we all hear that social media is a great tool, how do we leverage it? From a product perspective, we have to dive in and provide deeper integration with Twitter, Faceboook, and LinkedIn. Using these platforms should be easy for someone who hasn’t been utilizing social networks before. Accordingly systems are becoming much easier to use, and the adoption rate is growing.

Dresser: With the recession and the tight financial market of the past few years, I think companies have realized that they needed to start doing more with less. What they used to do with 10 people, now they’re trying to do with 7 or 8 – and they they need to attract and retain the best quality people. These companies need a system that can automate the process – that helps them find ways to attract the best candidates. Where once it was only large companies using these systems, we’re now seeing more of the smaller companies tapping into ATS in order to improve their hiring processes and stay competitive.

Vitale: We’re seeing organizations becoming more progressive with their recruitment efforts by leveraging networks – social media sites, social networks, employee networks – to bring talent in. They’re sharing jobs through these mediums instead of relying on more traditional sites like job boards like Monster or Dice. I think social media is going to change the dynamic quite a bit. Certainly not overnight, but I absolutely see social media as the number one massive change that will be taking place in applicant tracking.

Q: How has the emergence of software as a service (SaaS) changed the way hiring professionals use ATS?

Barnett: SaaS has simplified the process of implementation. The complications with legacy systems – connecting remote users, determining whether the system is going to be able to work on a wide area network – those types of things all go away. Being able to log in via an internet browser and use the application drives it deeper into the organization. Also, keeping the application up to date is taken out of IT’s hands, and brought back to the vendor. We’re usually doing updates every other week. We have liaisons who work with our customers who bring this info back to our development team, and that’s how we develop our product. If it wasn’t for SaaS, we wouldn’t be able to make these changes and get them out to customers in a timely manner.

Dresser: With cloud computing, you have the flexibility to accommodate what employers need to get their information out to potential candidates. You can have as many requisitions as you want and have those requisitions have specific questions. Then you can have those requisitions followed up by specific hiring managers and recruiters. You don’t have a hiring manager who has to do everything. The ATS gives everyone involved the visibility to see where your requisitions stand. Where does this requisition stand right now? Why hasn’t it moved? Who is holding it up? What is going on? And this makes things faster for people.

Vitale: A ton of organizations are moving away from these licensed point solutions in favor of SaaS suites. SaaS solutions are far more flexible and scalable. You’re getting upgrades for free, so you have more competitive tech. As your organization grows, it’s very easy and cost-effective to add more users. If your org goes global or acquires another company, it’s easy to scale that out–and scaling is an option as well. At the lower level, about 60 percent of iCIMS’ SMB customers come to us having never used a solution whatsoever. And these smaller companies tend to reap really great benefits when it comes to SaaS.

Q. What are a few major factors that are driving the increased adoption of ATS in the SMB market?

Barnett: As job boards have become more prolific, so have the candidates using them. As such, HR departments are getting inundated with a flow of candidate information, and they know they need a better way to manage it. A SaaS-based ATS model is more accessible and easier to use. You can use it without getting involved in a long-term contract. Literally, you could sign up for two or three months, and if that was all you needed it for, then move on. A SaaS solution is an expense rather than an asset. You can just put it on a credit card and solve a problem.

Dresser: There is a lot of competition out there for top-quality candidates. As competition gets stronger, hiring professionals at small and mid-sized businesses want to make sure they have a system in place that can easily identify and tag talent for them. When you have an ATS in place, you can do keyword searches within your database and rate applicants so you’re always looking at the cream of the crop. A big part with the ATS experience is instant access to information, and knowing exactly where people stand. With SaaS-based systems, small and mid-sized businesses have access to this sophisticated functionality without a huge IT staff.

Vitale: The efficiency is tremendous. When you’re a small or medium company, you may have a handful of people in recruitment or HR. And when you’re going through a growth spurt, that kicks you in the butt to get a system. Recruiters are dealing with a million emails and are literally using Outlook and Excel to manage that information. If recruitment is not a good function within an organization, it literally can stifle growth. So there is a lot of buy-in from an executive level to say, “let’s get recruitment right,” and using an ATS is just a tremendous benefit to doing that more easily. ATS help ensure things get done better – from the candidates’ perspective as well as the recruitment and hiring manager perspective.

Q: How do you see social media effecting the future of ATS?

Barnett: I think it’s difficult to say right now because it’s so young. There are a lot of people talking about job boards falling away, speculation that everything is going shift to a social media environment – and people have been talking about that for a while. Although social media is certainly going to be an integral part of ATS, I don’t know that it is going to be the end-all solution when it comes to managing applicants. I see social media functionality becoming better and more deeply integrated into the ATS, as well as becoming more a part of how HR interacts with their applicants. But I don’t know how much further we’re going to see things go until the social media platform mellows out a little bit.

Dresser: Social media allows you to get your words out there to passive candidates. As such, I think any ATS is going to need to be able to adapt or evolve to be able to access all of the social media vehicles that are there now, as well as what comes up in the future. That’s what’s great about cloud systems: if you buy a system and you own it, and a new system or whatever takes place a year or two down the road, then you have to do an upgrade, etc. Whereas the SaaS models are going to have to be constantly evolving to meet what today’s needs are for them in order to stay competitive.

Vitale: It’s going to get more sophisticated. Hiring professionals are leveraging social networks to post their jobs and promote opportunities opportunities at a given organization. That’s the push mentality. What we’re really going to see, though, is the pull mentality. It’s not just “How do I post and advertise jobs?” but ” How do I get the appropriate social media content into my ATS so that it’s a better candidate experience?” We’ll see a better recruitment experience because we’ll rely on data that’s fresher, that’s more real-time using social content.

Mobile Recruiting App Lets You Create Jobs That Talk

Admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:32:48 +0000

TRUMBULL, Conn., June 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — The app revolution has finally hit the world of online recruiting. JobSpeek is a new application that re-imagines the traditional job listing and brings mobile recruiting to anyone with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad2. Employers, recruiters and small business owners can post a job from their device, add audio and pictures to it, then distribute it to the major job search engines for free.

JobSpeek’s inventor is Chris Russell, a veteran of the online recruiting space and widely considered by many in the industry to be the “mad scientist of online recruiting.” He wanted to create a new kind of job listing, one that uses the features of the device itself to make a better job description. “Recruiters can now create a compelling job ad that differentiates their company and syndicates the job in one click,” he says proudly.

The app also syncs with social media accounts on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. As more employers begin to adopt social media in their recruiting strategy, JobSpeek makes it easy to spread the word that “we are hiring.”

Features of the app include:

ability to record 60-second audio “hiring message” to describe the job
upload a picture of your business or office environment
free distribution to 10+ million job seekers through sites such as SimplyHired
ability to manage/edit/add listings quickly and easily
social media integration

How It Works

Enter a few basic details, add a picture and record your audio message. Each time you post a job through the JobSpeek app, it gets posted immediately to our website at http://jobspeek.com. The job is then syndicated to the job search engines within 24 hours. You tell the job seeker how to apply via email, URL, phone or fax.

JobSpeek is available for free in the iTunes app store today. Download it here: http://tinyurl.com/jobspeek2

Go to http://jobspeek.com to learn more and listen to the current job listings.

Contact:

Chris Russell
800-399-6651

This press release was issued through eReleases(R). For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at http://www.ereleases.com.

Job Boards Are Dead? Not So Fast, My Friend!

Admin — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:00:38 +0000

by: Jason Lauritsen

How people find jobs and how jobs find people is certainly changing. As with most everything online, social media has become the great disruptor. It used to be that a recruiter could just post their ad in the newspaper and people would apply.

Then along came the job boards like Monster and others who moved the game online. And just when it seemed that maybe we started getting our arms around how the job boards worked, social media crashed the party. And we are still sorting out what has changed and what hasn’t.

Evidence of this chaos is all over the blogosphere this week. Laurie Ruettimann, our resident cynic, has opened up a discussion on her blog around the question of whether job boards work for either job seekers or recruiters. In addition, Eve Tahmincioglu, the Career Diva, also wrote a blog post this week for job seekers that advises them to stop the use of job boards and invest more time in LinkedIn. Eve points to a Wall Street Journal article that details how some recruiters are scaling back their use of job boards as a part of their recruiting strategies.

It is all interesting discussion. The use of job boards is certainly changing. I have not doubt that many companies have scaled back their use of job boards, but I’m not sure that might be more related to few jobs to recruit for and tighter budgets than it is about effectiveness. So, I’m not sure that it’s quite time to pull the plug on job boards in your search process whether you are looking for a new hire or for a job.

Job boards work, but they aren’t a silver bullet. There is no one silver bullet. Recruiting on job boards is no different than recruiting anywhere else. Without a well-executed strategy for how and why you are using that job board, you will likely fail. The same is true for LinkedIn or picking up the phone can making cold calls.

Here are some things to consider about your recruitment approach before you decide to abandon or rethink job boards:

Know where your hires are coming from. If you aren’t keeping good metrics on how you find the people you hire, then you can’t possibly make informed decisions about where you post your jobs or how you go about recruiting in general.
Know your target and advertise where they are looking for you. Some types of people still look in the newspaper for jobs. If you want to hire those people, you should probably advertise there. Other types of people live in social media. As a recruiter, you have to understand where your target audience might be looking and put your ad in front of them there. And you likely have lots of different types of people who you try to recruit, so that means you will need as many different approaches.
Learn to write great advertisements. If you are posting job descriptions on job boards, don’t blame the job board when it doesn’t produce what you are looking for. A well-designed job posting is compelling in that captures the attention and interest of those who you are interested in hiring. This is a skill and an art form that needs to be developed. Great advertising helps the right people opt in and the wrong people to opt out. If your postings are working, why not focus on some design first before you throw out the whole approach. It could be your execution that is lacking.
A good recruitment strategy involves blending a variety of approaches (job boards, social media, employee referral, etc.). But, until you measure and track what works for you and you invest in knowing your audience and writing effective postings, you are just playing a guessing game. It is this guessing game that ultimately creates the frustrations that lead to the discussions in the blogosphere this week.

If you are a job seeker, I think it’s dangerous to put your eggs in any one basket. To suggest, as Eve does in her post, that you should stop job boards and start doing LinkedIn isn’t the whole story. You must do both. And even more importantly, you need to spend time networking and reaching out to your friends and acquaintances to ask for referrals and leads.

Just as a recruiter must have a recruiting strategy that uses many different mediums to attract job seekers, so too does the job seeker need to use many mediums to find a next great job. But, understand that the job search process is going to be filled with frustrations.

You may have to apply for a lot of jobs and reach out to a lot of people in order to find the right job. Not everyone is going to get back to you and it’s likely that some recruiters will mistreat you along the way. Don’t let poor behavior stop you from finding a great job. Hang in there because it only takes one good response and one good interview to result in your next great job.

Using social media to promote your job site

Admin — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:57:30 +0000

A lot of the chatter about social media in our industry has been about how it may displace job boards as a core recruiting tool. Less has been said about how job sites can actually use social media to promote their services. It’s time to rectify this oversight!

Job boards must connect with two core audiences: job seekers and employers. Both audiences are using social media for a variety of reasons, such as personal or professional networking, research, and entertainment. Rather than rushing willy-nilly into social media, a job site should first understand the two audiences. Where do they live? What do they do? What do they watch, listen to, read, etc.? In other words, what does the target audience look like? Until you can answer this question, you simply can’t make a decision about which social media tools or channels you should use.

Example: your job site caters to mid-career professionals in accounting. LinkedIn may be a better choice than Facebook (if an accountant is on Facebook, most likely he/she is using it for entertainment and family). But an even better choice may be an accounting-specific networking site like HubStreet. Remember: the audience determines the channel!

Once you’ve analyzed your audience and identified the best channels (and I would probably include Twitter and LinkedIn for all job sites – they have the right general career demographics and size), you need to set up a map of the messages you’ll use and their frequency. No, I’m not talking about just setting your job listings to auto-Tweet (although that is useful and should be done). Instead, think about your audience (again): what do they want? what are they interested in?…and what can you offer them?

Example: Going back to our fictional accounting folks, they no doubt would love to knowwhich metro areas pay the most for accountants. So gather up some data and get it out there! For example, you could Tweet about different cities and pay – and link back to the relevant part of your site. Then go to LinkedIn and start a Question about the same thing. Then run over to HubStreet and start a discussion. Notice what’s happening here? You are thinking like your audience, giving them information they want – and engaging them.

Last – but absolutely not least – measure what you are doing. There are numerous free and paid tools out there, such as SocialMention, Radian6, and SproutSocial. You can even use Google Analytics – just create a profile exclusively for social media. The bottom line, however, is that you must measure or you won’t know which social media channels are working – and which aren’t.

The bottom line? You’ll see more job seekers AND employers on your site – and that’s a good thing!

Source: www.check4jobs.com

Pharma Begins Using Social Media to Recruit New Talent

Admin — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:53:27 +0000

Over the past few years, life sciences companies have shed over 200,000 jobs. Unfortunately, downsizing at some of these companies may not be over yet. Nevertheless, companies are always looking to recruit new talent to keep up with normal job turnover rates or to replace highly specialized employees whose skills sets are essential to successfully running the business. Because many of these former life sciences employees possessed special or arcane talents and skill sets, advertising for their replacements using conventional methods like job boards and print ad advertising have historically met with limited success. The advent of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have prompted HR professionals and hiring managers at some life sciences companies to test social media as a recruitment tool.

While Facebook may come to mind as the most likely social media tool for this purpose, it isn’t! This is because Facebook is primarily a social, not a professional network like LinkedIn or BioCrowd. Further, despite Facebook’s gargantuan size, the lack of real time interaction coupled with the sheer volume of updates, ads, activities and games at the site render it largely ineffective as a job advertising or recruiting tool.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an ideal medium to advertise jobs and attract new talent. This is because information that is broadcasted on Twitter has the potential to reaches large numbers of persons very rapidly. Moreover, regular Twitter users pay attention to activity on their feeds and like to “retweet” information that they find useful or helpful to their followers. Finally, many Twitter users regularly cull their follower lists to more accurately reflect their interests which suggest that the quality/focus of most follower lists on Twitter far surpasses that of friend networks on Facebook. For example, I manage the @BioCrowd Twitter feed. To that end, I decide who BioCrowd follows and wants to follow. And, not surprisingly, I only follow or allow individuals to follow BioCrowd who are interested or work in the life sciences. Currently, BioCrowd has over 1,300 followers, all of whom work or are involved in some aspect of the life sciences industry. Because, I have intentionally created a highly specialized network of life sciences professionals, the likelihood of a prospective employer finding a “right fit” candidate by tweeting a job ad to the BioCrowd network greatly increases. Further, the ability of Twitter users to direct the job tweet to specific followers or retweet it preserves the longevity of the ad and improves its effectiveness. And, perhaps the best thing about using Twitter as a job announcement platform is that it is free!

The use of social media as a recruiting and retention tool by Fortune 500 companies like American Express, Best Buy and others is not new. However, its use as a recruitment platform by life sciences companies is very new to the life sciences companies. As many you may know, the life sciences industry has been slow to adopt the use of social media. Nevertheless, several companies like Merck (@merckcareers1) and AstraZeneca (@JoinAstraZeneca and @AstraZeneca Jobs) have decided to boldly go where no other pharmaceutical companies have gone before and are beginning to experiment with Twitter as a recruiting tool.

About a year ago, I wrote a post that suggested that social media would be an ideal recruitment and retention tool for most life sciences companies. The fact that a couple of companies are testing this idea suggests that my idea may be a good one!

If you know of other companies using Twitter to recruit new employees, please leave a comment or contact me.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (@BioCrowd)

Jobs2Web: Social Recruiting Technology of the Future

Admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:55:46 +0000

I had the distinct pleasure of attending a user conference last week in beautiful Minneapolis, MN. Jobs2Web, a rapidly expanding recruitment technology firm out of Minneapolis, hosted a user conference for their various clients to exchange ideas, attend thought-provoking sessions and, of course, experience networking at it’s best over great food and drinks.

If you have yet to hear about Jobs2Web, I would recommend you check out their website and/or watch the promotional video. It’s direct, to the point and will surely leave you thinking, “That makes sense!”

In fact, after having spent the past two years travelling, brainstorming and looking far and wide for the most progressive recruitment technologies, I can say for sure that Jobs2Web has made a fan out of me. They are the real deal and, simply put, THEY GET IT!

How Jobs2Web Will Change Recruiting

To everyone I’ve spoken with about the product and the many more I will speak with in the future; it’s my firm belief that Jobs2Web will change the way we recruit. With a very simple shift in the way we have always gathered candidate information, they are enabling their clients to build talent communities and engage through the use of social recruiting tools – something we have all been starving for!

In the past, the approach was as follows:

Establish job openings
Promote jobs through various channels
Have candidates go through the ATS application process
Pre-screen and interview candidates
Hire the best suitable candidate for the role

What Jobs2Web has done is, in essence, add a valuable step to the process and enable recruitment groups to capture data for both active and non-active members of the overall talent population.

The basic Jobs2Web process looks as follows:

Establish job openings
Promote jobs through various channels
Greet candidates with a short business card that they fill out
Have candidates go through the ATS application process
Pre-screen and interview candidates
Hire the best suitable candidate for the role

I know, I know… it doesn’t seem all that different. But, it’s what they’ve done with the business card that makes all the difference in the world.

You see, Jobs2Web has created more than a business card that candidates fill out before proceeding with the recruitment process. They have created an entire system around that information that allows recruiters to interact and measure results of the web traffic that visits their site.

Instead of simply hoping for candidates to make it through the process, the business card allows for recruitment organizations to capture the very basic data necessary to continue dialogue with talent of interest… and, used correctly, develop of a community.

Why Does This Matter?

Well, if you have spent much time reviewing your career site metrics, I’m sure you have already found out that many candidates apply for jobs during peak normal business hours. In the metrics I review on a normal basis, I can clearly see that the majority of candidates visit the career site between 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM from Monday through Wednesday.

While there is traffic on the other days of the week, it’s pretty obvious that parties of interest are out cruising for jobs during the workday.

So, what happens when they get interrupted? Do you still have a chance to capture their information and follow up with them? Probably not.

Jobs2Web, through the very simply insertion of a business card early on, captures the data necessary to continue the dialogue.

From the point of information collection forward, the candidate enters the normal process.

Building a Talent Community

What happens with this valuable information next is what makes Jobs2Web powerful!

While the business card is one way for candidates to enter the talent community, Jobs2Web has made it easy, with a variety of widgets for your career site and social media outlets, to allow talent to join your community and to be kept abreast of opportunities of interest.

Instead of spending money on job postings again and again to attract similar groups of people to your career site, the Jobs2Web technology enables recruiters to interact directly with the people who have been previously interested in opportunities.

The power of this method was affirmed by a number of clients during the conference – clients including Microsoft, Lifetime Fitness and HCR ManorCare, among others. One client reported that their talent community had grown to 350,000 people over the course of two years. Their recruitment advertising spend dropped by 50% and their number of applicants had increased by tens of thousands… per month! Pretty powerful testimonial!

Analytics That Transform

Beyond being a smart way of going to market with your recruitment spend, Jobs2Web offers insight into how your advertising dollars are being spent. Imagine being able to put a dollar figure behind every candidate recruited. Do you know how much you spend on recruiting candidates? Do you know what your exact ROI is from every source? Wouldn’t you like to?

A number of clients reported a change in their abilities to negotiate rates with job boards, job fairs and other recruitment sourcing avenues. Yes, you may be receiving clicks from job boards, but do you know how many of those candidates are converting to hires? Shouldn’t you?

The analytics dashboard that Jobs2Web offers is pretty amazing. From how many of your job related pages are ranking on Google to exactly where ALL of your traffic is coming from. A Recruiting Manager, armed with a tool like this, will be able to measure, respond and spend with powerful data to back them up. Gone are the days of “Post and Pray.” Welcome the era of intelligent social recruiting!

In Conclusion

While this may have seemed like a long affiliate post for Jobs2Web, I assure you, it’s not. I’m simply impressed. For the first time in a while, I find myself sitting back saying “Wow! – This makes total sense!” “Why didn’t something like this come out years ago?!?”

There are some great technologies out there for recruiting. I’m sure many of them provide value to the recruiting process in some way. However, Jobs2Web is, by far, the most progressive, intelligent and exciting technology I have seen for recruiting in a long time! It very well could change the way we approach social recruiting, community building and recruitment advertising spend – that’s a lot of impact.

I’ve just barely scraped the surface of what Jobs2Web is capable of. Seriously, check out their website and see what they have to offer. Or don’t… this would be a great secret to keep!

Special thanks to Jobs2Web for the invitation to their conference! You guys and gals are doing amazing work! Keep it up!

In the coming weeks, I will cover some of the interesting presentations and topics that were covered at the conference. Beyond the innovation that Jobs2Web has to offer, there was an amazing amount of brainstorming going on – all good stuff!

LinkUp introduces iPad App to Help Job Seekers Find “Hidden Jobs”

Admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:25:33 +0000

LinkUp, the job search engine that specialises in serving up “hidden” corporate jobs now has an iPad version of the site. The free app that launched last week is available on iTunes or via http://itunes.com/apps/jobsearchxl.

LinkUp’s iPad website says the app has the following features:

Search job listings found only on company websites

Basic and advanced search functionality

Search jobs by keyword, location, company, or category

Save jobs to Favorites and access Favorites via browser or feed reader

View and reuse previous searches

Receive email alerts when Favorite jobs are closed by the employer

Create email alerts and get notifications when new jobs are posted

Apply to job openings straight through the iPad

Instantly email relevant jobs to yourself or friends

Fluid interface that’s optimized for both portrait and landscape modes

For those not familiar with LinkUp, the site provides a search platform for jobs posted on company’s career pages, that may not neccessarily available on the big, generalist job boards.

Why Social Networking Will Not Replace Job Boards

Admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:29:53 +0000

Many individuals who have turned to online job boards as a recruiting method for their businesses or companies are fearful that social networking will soon overrun and eventually completely negate the need for these boards. This, however, is not the case at all. While social networking is a popular happening in today’s internet dependent world, it is rarely truly useful in finding potential employees.

Social networking, for those who are unaware, is the practice of meeting and networking with individuals through the computer. Common social networking sites include Facebook and Myspace, though there are much more professional sites such as LinkedIn.com. These professional sites are designed to bring together employees or owners of similar businesses and companies. Additionally, those seeking employment may post their resumes to the site in the hopes of securing a job, or members of one company may recommend potential employees to members of another. In some ways, these sites serve as a “who knows who” kind of environment, but in others, they are simply a shot in the dark as to what kind of people one will meet and interact with.

As you can see, however, this is a long process that takes a great deal of work, both for the job seeker and for the potential employer. Job seekers will not want to waste all the time and effort required to post their resumes and cover letters on a wide variety of websites that may or may not be useful. And why should they, when they can simply log onto Craigslist or another “help wanted” site and answer a few ads that pertain to work they know they would enjoy doing. The same is true for employers as well. Employers simply do not wish to wade through tons of resumes and information on applicants who might potentially be qualified when they can post an ad and hear from hundreds of applicants who most definitely are.

It must also be noted that the best candidates – the candidates an employer really wants – will be too busy with work, school, or other important activities to have the time to waste on social networking. If an employer wants a good, hardworking employee, then he or she should not turn to social networking sites. Most of the people on these sites are desperate for work and have exhausted all other options. This means, sadly, that they will take any position or maybe even fudge a resume to get a job.

Obviously, these are not the candidates one wants to deal with. Employers will want to use online job boards to be sure that they are getting those individuals who are fast, who can work efficiently, and who know the most direct route to finding employment. For these reasons then, there are really no worries about social networking taking over online recruiting. It’s just not going to happen.

About the Author:
Eric operates OnlineRecruitingNews.com a social network managed by an alliance of job sites serving specific recruiting niches. Our monthly newsletter brings you news, information and connections in online recruitment.

Top 10 in ’10: Trends in Social Media

Admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:20:50 +0000

By: Matt Charney, Monster Social Media Engagement Manager

While January traditionally is one of the busiest hiring months of the year, 2010 is likely not going to be business as usual. While few are likely to miss the recessionary ravages, record unemployment and stagnant job market of 2009, the impact of last year’s events on the hiring function continues.

Most prominent among these is the rise of social networks. In 2009, social media became as indispensible to many employment professionals’ tool kits as reviewing resumes or interviewing.

When creating long-term recruitment strategies, incorporating social media can prove difficult. One year ago, few could predict Twitter would achieve its current omnipresence, or would have thought to incorporate a Facebook fan page into a posting strategy.

2010 offers similar challenges. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of top trends in social recruiting to watch in the year to come. While some may prove less than prescient, one thing appears certain: how well employers leverage and engage social media in the coming year will largely define the efficacy of their hiring efforts.

Here are our top trends in social recruiting in 2010:

1. Search firms’ social pipeline increases pressure on employers

The predicted increase in hiring activity for the second half of 2010 should result in a significant uptick in business for agencies and search firms. Third-party recruiters’ have been quick to adopt and integrate social recruiting into their strategies and many have capitalized on the slowdown in hiring activity for pipeline building.

Employers just now adopting social recruiting strategies are likely to be beaten to the punch by their agency partners, particularly for top candidates, many of whom may already be represented. In response to this trend, social recruiting should become the most in demand HR specialty within companies by year end.

2. Online brand management shifts to hiring function

As social media evolves, we may see priorities of internal human resource and recruitment functions shift towards brand management and public relations. Just as employers embrace social media as a tool to discover damaging information about candidates during the pre-offer due diligence process, it’s important to remember candidates are often returning the favor.

Now that companies are investing significant resources in online employment branding and outreach, employers should find themselves tasked with protecting that investment through proactive engagement, outreach and careful messaging.

3. Information visibility leads to compliance nightmares

As powerful as social networks are for sourcing candidates, they also create a litany of potential compliance nightmares, particularly for OFCCP-regulated organizations. Such sites allow employers visibility to much more than standard profile pictures, including information about date of birth, religious affiliation and sexual preference. This information remains protected, by law, during the hiring process.

The rise in social recruiting opens the door to potential discriminatory hiring practices and/or lawsuits. With the OFCCP previously announcing more frequent and detailed audits in 2010, compliance issues could potentially impact many companies, particularly as many company websites currently have limited tracking capabilities as mandated by Federal hiring regulations.

4. Social priority migrates from pre-hire to post-hire

The ease of communications and scalability provided by Web 2.0 platforms offers unprecedented opportunities for employers to proactively engage employee populations and increase visibility within their organizations.

By properly leveraging social networks to create a dialogue, HR will have increased exposure to employees’ ongoing work-related concerns and feedback.This additional exposure into professional backgrounds, experience and career objectives of employee populations outside the formal planning process should trigger a rise in internal promotions and lateral moves between function and department.

5. Boomerangs finally come back

While hesitant to embrace emerging social networks, many corporations have been building online alumni networks over the past decade. Features like searchable directories, messaging capabilities and event planning allow online alumni groups to essentially serve as proprietary social networks that are ideally suited to employer outreach. With limited resources and cutbacks still a factor, 2010 should continue the increasing prevalence of alumni boomerang hires.

These candidates offer many potential advantages, including familiarity with company policies, culture, systems and hierarchy, enabling them to hit the ground running and add immediate value. Their performance histories and internal references are also easily accessible, allowing more informed decisions and increasing the quality of hire.

6. Shift in employer usage from prospective to current employees

Social recruiting should disappear from being primarily a sourcing tool and transform into an employee engagement/development tool, with HR utilizing it to keep track of employees’ complaints, issues and work-related content via social media. This will give visibility into people in the organization whose talents and skills align with open roles or potential internal possibilities as a way to target internal promotion.

7. Market fragmentation leads a return to the boards

A plethora of “next generation” (read: alternative revenue model) job posting sites popped up in 2009. Few of these sites, however, have screening processes for either employers or candidates, and lack demonstrative ROI, original content, enhanced services and capabilities that go beyond job posting and resume submission.

When hiring does pick up, many industry watchers predict candidates and recruiters will abandon these upstart boards in favor of more proven, heavily resourced sites, which themselves have evolved to meet the changing recruitment landscape, such as the recent launch of Monster Communities.

These social networks are designed around professional specialties, such as Information Technology and HealthCare.These user-driven, career-focused sites may spell trouble for more traditional, fee-based niche boards, which have already suffered a steep drop in revenues and posting activity.

8. The slow demise of the employee referral

Social recruiting will lead to an increase in volume for internal referrals, particularly for employers with referral fees. This easy access to candidates will diffuse recruitment from an HR activity to active employee solicitation. But the lack of training for line management and employees will lead to a diminished percentage of quality referrals with emphasis on volume. Consequently, referrals should drop out from their reign as the top source of hiring for many companies who will respond by severely limiting or deemphasizing referral programs.

9. Recruitment’s social network of choice: applicant tracking systems

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are increasingly going to become integrated with social networks, allowing candidate profiles to include not only resumes, but also consolidated social networking information. This will essentially remake ATS capabilities as integrated background check, sourcing and resume disposition solutions.

10. Niche job boards begin slide to obsolescence

Niche job boards will significantly diminish in scope and effectiveness as social recruiting allows for much easier engagement with targeted candidate pools through professional communities, lowering costs while decreasing time to fill.This will also help with employment branding and awareness as specialty recruiters will become increasingly active.

Q&A with Facebook’s Recruiting Lead Richard Cho: Social Media for Demand Generation versus Demand Fulfillment

Admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:10:57 +0000

By: Michael O’Dell

This week at ERE’s #SocialRecruiting Summit in Minneapolis, Facebook.com’s recruiting lead, Richard Cho, lead a break-out session about using social media tools for demand generation (DemandGen) versus for demand fulfillment (DemandFul). His session was intriguing and sparked quite a bit of interest in the audience. I caught up with Richard this week to drill down a little deeper into the subject.

Many recruiters interested in social recruitment want the practice to become the sole source of making hires for their organizations. There is a big group of recruiters who want to make the whole recruitment process free too. They profess that social media could become the means to their end. But can it really happen? I don’t think so, neither does Richard Cho. Cho takes a very pragmatic and realistic view of how companies can use social media tools (like his own Facebook) as a recruitment demand generation tool. However, his is just as practical about getting job seekers over the hump from seekers to applicants. Here are his thoughts:

Social media is great for recruitment demand generation

To explain what he means Cho uses the example of consumer brand demand generation for Adidas with the decision funnel. The decision funnel is a well known B-school tool to show how people make decisions; whether it is a purchase decision or career decision.

Brand Discovery – Brands like Adidas use all sorts of advertising and marketing mediums to expose consumers to the Adidas brand. When a consumer sees the Adidas brand, they immediately form an opinion or have some idea of what that brand represents based on previous exposure. When Richard mentioned the Adidas brand, I immediately thought of Glee’s Cheerios coach Sue Sylvester’s unending parade of Adidas track suits (honest).

Brand Affinity – After repeated exposure to the Adidas brand, consumers start thinking of it as a viable option for their sporting goods needs. When a consumer finally has a need, brand affinity makes that consumer ask the question, “Where is that brand sold?”

Brand Decision – Later in the process, the buyer knows about the brand, knows where to get it and finally has made the decision to make a purchase. At this point, the funnel takes its turn from DemandGen to DemandFul and that’s where social media won’t best serve recruiters.

So what does this all mean? Let’s put the decision funnel into social recruitment terms. A company’s presence and exposure in any variety of social platforms helps (or hurts) in the brand discovery process. This may take the form of a Corporate Careers page of Facebook, a recruiting Twitter handle, or a company page on LinkedIn. From these culture brand outposts, many job seekers get their first exposure to the career opportunities available to them.

A job seeker may also know someone who works for your organization and form decisions about the company that way. Cho points out that, “How you affiliate yourself with a job often happens to be through a person you know and respect.” In other words, my group of Facebook friends may have had their entire opinion of the company I work for shaped by what I do and say about it in my status updates, tweets, and blog posts. This is brand affinity.

In the Adidas example Cho says that one of his friends might see that he bought a pair on Adidas golf shoes on Facebook. That friend knows that Richard is a good golfer and may respect his opinion of footwear. So out of the hundreds of options in golf shoes, Richard’s friend now has at least one (positive or negative) data point to make a buying decision on in the future.

Finally we come to brand decision. At some time or another in any passive or active job seeker’s job search a do-or-die moment is reached. The job seeker determines whether or not to apply for a job with company X. This is the decision. Has your organization’s presence in social media positively affected that job seekers opinion of your company or have you left them lacking?

At this point we go from the generation part of the funnel to fulfillment. How can social media help in demand fulfillment? Well it really can’t. Much to the chagrin of many pro-social media recruiters, social tools cannot take the place of your ATS, the application process or the vacancy announcement. These tools are requisite in the employment process. As much as some would desire, social tools can’t take the place of job announcements. Even a 1200 employee company like Facebook who has a good cadre of recruiters (at 75) for its size cannot hope to replace the traditional tools for DemandFul. Facebook has some 40 opening in sales and marketing alone today. The company can’t expect its team of recruiters to have so many solid prospect relationships that they can just reach out to individual job seekers when a job comes available. They need their careers site to help facilitate the move from interest to action.

Social media can help with this transition piece. Food services company Sodexo does a good job with this. Sodexo has one of industry’s best online talent communities to keep would be job seekers engaged when both actively and passively seeking employment. But what they do to bridge the gap between applying and not applying is genius. Richard Cho says, “They get it.” Job seekers who view one of the company’s job postings on job boards like CareerBuilder.com get two apply options…Apply Now and Not Ready Yet. As Cho relates, the recruitment process is like getting married. He says, “Popping the question at the right time is key.” Sodexo gets this too. By directing job seekers who are not quite ready to commit from traditional recruitment media to their social talent community, Sodexo is able to maintain that courting relationship. They don’t pose an ultimatum for the would-be employee. Instead, Sodexo says let’s get to know each other a little better. According to Cho, that’s what social media should do.

Cho also offers a couple of nuggets as best practices:

1. Let job seekers test the waters.

The use of a Company Careers Facebook page may not be the best way to attract passive candidate (or those unhappy in their current employment). Since many Facebook users are friends with their bosses and colleagues, most will be uncomfortable telling their professional circles that they “Like” your company’s careers. Instead Cho suggests an alternative. Give them the option to “Like” your company’s culture brand page. Cho points out the “Life at Google” Facebook page. Ostensibly, this page is nothing more than a careers page. However, the title won’t scare users from liking it. Google Careers screams “Hey I want to work at Google.” This culture page merely says you are interested in what this company is all about.

2. Use Twitter for courtship unless your job seeker base already wants to get married.

Use your corporate Twitter handle to dispense culture gems to job seekers. Don’t just ask them to apply, apply, apply. He notes one big example, again via Google. Google has done such a good job of espousing the power of their brand, that once job seekers find @GoogleJobs on Twitter, they are ready to take the plunge.

3. Think Tiger Woods.

Before his sex scandal what did consumers think of when they applied a brand image of Nike to Tiger Woods? Performance, endurance, perfection, style. Does your social media representation of your employment brand produce good connotations like this?

4. Empower an army of employees that can act as social advocates for your brand.

Don’t just rely on the recruitment department to be the social media voice of your employment brand. Teach your employees the best way to interact online for the benefit of your referral program. Social connections are probably used to seeing someone complain about their boss online, but how often do they see an employee rave about your company’s mission statement, technical achievements, etc.?