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:

1. Establish job openings
2. Promote jobs through various channels
3. Have candidates go through the ATS application process
4. Pre-screen and interview candidates
5. 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:

1. Establish job openings
2. Promote jobs through various channels
3. Greet candidates with a short business card that they fill out
4. Have candidates go through the ATS application process
5. Pre-screen and interview candidates
6. 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!

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.

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.

I did a quick hash tag search for #jobs and #careers.  As of today, none of the trial advertisers are promoting thier career opportunities with the platform.  I’m sure that will change soon enough.  About a month or so ago, I posted a blog around the rumors of the impending Twitter ad platform.  With the announcement, we see that the promoted tweets are very different from what many industry analysts expected to hear from Twitter. 

Regardless of what we thought the Twitter Ad Platform would be, the tool will still be very useful for recruiters.  When asked how many “searches” are done on Twitter, COO Dick Costolo said, “a lot of people use Twitter for search; the volume is huge.”  So today, recruiters won’t be able to determine the search volume for says –  #jobs #Chicago #sales.  I would imagine as this tool grows, so will the advertiser resources as we saw with the growth of Google Ads.  There is talk that a Twitter pro account will also be available soon where professional users can manage a handful of Twitter handles from one platform and manage their promoted tweets account for a small fee.

How will recruiters use this new promoted tweets tool?  Say you have a call center in Phoenix that you need to staff up.  You can bid on #jobs searches coming from the Phoenix area to show up as the top tweet on the search results page.  What’s great about these promoted tweets is that they are social too.   Twitter users who come across one of these promoted tweets will be able to retweet the ad to let their network of friends know of your open job opportunities. 

This tool is sure to grow rapidly once it is released to the rest of us.  Stay tuned to SocialMediaRecruitment.com for updates.

It makes sense that this is a popular option.  Anyone can play.  All you need is a credit card and an e-mail address.  What recruiters haven’t yet understood is that job seekers are not only looking for jobs on Google.  Also, job seekers on Google are almost exclusively active job seekers.  It’s very difficult to reach the reclusive passive job seeker with Google search.

There are other cost-per-click options for recruitment.  Indeed and SimplyHired give advertisers an option to sponsor their jobs on the site (preferential search treatment) or to buy keywords.  But these options are still expensive and still miss the passive job seekers.

Let’s talk about expense.  The beauty (for Google) of the Google model is that it is a purely market driven process.  You get what you pay for.  If you want to advertise to pharmacists, you can.  It will cost you an average of $1.89 per click.  Google tells you that you can expect about 56 clicks per day at that bid.  Using a little math, this tells me that there are approximately 4308 daily searches on Google for the keywords “pharmacist jobs.”  The more searches/clicks for this keyword on Google, the more inventory.  Simple supply vs. demand will tell you that the more inventory of searches/clicks, the cheaper these clicks will be.  But the bid rates are still so expensive.  Why does it cost $1.89 per click for pharmacists?

Today, there is another option for recruiters…Facebook ads.  If you just read that last sentence followed by a guffaw, I ask you keep reading to see why Facebook ads are a great alternative to Google ads.  Did you know that for the past month or so Facebook has been the most visited site in the U.S.?  That means even more people visit Facebook on a daily basis than visit Google.  Facebook also gets more pageviews.  This means more ad inventory. 

Also, Facebook ads let recruiters get their message in front of both active and passive job seekers.  How is that?  Facebook ads are delivered to pages based on the “interests” of the user logged-in.  Users don’t have to go and actively search for jobs on Facebook.  Based on the user’s profile information, Facebook has a pretty good idea of what kind of job you might be interested in.  My profile says that I work in government sales (in my day job).  So I very often see ads for federal sales conferences or veteran’s employment resources. 

Another great thing going for Facebook ads is the inventory itself.  On Google, recruiters have maybe a week’s worth of time to get their message in front of job seekers looking for their kind of career.  To take it one step further, once the message is delivered to relevant job seekers, the seeker has to see the sponsored link and be motivated to click it.  This is not the case with Facebook ads.  Let’s go back to our pharmacist example.  Google gets 4308 daily pharmacist jobs searches. 

 Facebook doesn’t really get pharmacist job searches, but there are 37,520 people who list that they are pharmacists on Facebook (in the U.S., who are 18 years old and older and have a college degree).  Recruiters can use this base of existing pharmacists who daily use Facebook as a lifestyle and communications tool to target ads to them.  These pharmacists may be actively looking for a new career path, but most likely they will be the passive job seeker.  And what about cost?  To serve ads to this group will cost recruiters an average of $0.63 per click.  If we extrapolate these numbers we get a lot of ads served for a very low cost.  Let’s say that each of these pharmacists visits Facebook every day.  Each day they have 10 page views.  If you can serve an ad every 10 page views to this group for a month, you would get some 1.1 million impressions to qualified pharmacists over a 30 day span.  If these ads have an average click through rate, you will end up spending about $775 on this campaign and north of 1100 clicks.  This same campaign on Google would cost you $3,175.20 and yield 1680 clicks.  You get almost the same number of clicks for 1/5 the price.

If you take it a little further, you see that Facebook ads are not only more cost effective, they are more highly targeted too.  On Google I can say I want to serve ads to folks looking for pharmacist jobs.  I did this search and was served ads (that I didn’t click on) and I am completely unqualified to ever be a pharmacist.  On Facebook, everyone who sees my pharmacist job ads will be qualified.  How do I know that’s true?  Users typically don’t lie on Facebook about profession etc.  If I state on my profile that I am a pharmacist, my wife will call me out on it in about 5 minutes.   

To sum up, here is a very short list of a handful of professions and the cost disparity between Google and Facebook advertising.  Based on this very incomplete list, you be the judge at which tools is better.  The next time you go to a search engine to bid on some recruitment keywords, keep this chart in mind.

Keyword                                              Google bid range (per click)                   Facebook bid range (per click)

Nurse jobs                                          $2.05 – $2.82                                                 $0.60 – $0.71

Sales jobs                                            $1.99 – $2.72                                                 $0.57 – $0.68

Customer Services Jobs               $1.44 – $1.87                                                 $0.56 – $0.67

IT networking jobs                          $1.87 – $2.81                                                 $0.63 – $0.73

CPA jobs                                              $2.30 – $3.44                                                 $0.50 – $0.69

So, for those of you who do not currently use a Twitter job posting utility (like TweetMyJobs, TweetaJob, or TweetThisJob) or a HR / recruiting software solutions (like eQuest, Taleo, Jobvite, or Jobs2Web), here is a quick primer on how to best write your job tweets for maximum job seeker attention.

With only 140 characters to play with, you might think this should be a pretty easy task. But when you get down to it, 140 characters gives you a lot of room to communicate to the Twitterverse. Here I will offer eight easy tips to make the best use of your tweet’s real estate.

1. Use a URL shortening tool for the job posting link. Okay, I feel like I really shouldn’t need to address this but some job tweets actually have full length apply URLs still. How this gets past Twitter, I don’t know. Most tweeters use bit.ly for all their links. If you type a full length URL into Twitter, it will automatically reformat it in to a bit.ly URL.

To get the best results from your short URLs, the best thing to do is go to bit.ly and sign up for a free account. Having an account let’s you track number of clicks on the link and see all sorts of analytics like the geography of where the clicks are coming for.
There are options though other than bit.ly. Some Tweeters like ow.ly or tr.im. These offer the same service as bit.ly but your link may stand out from the crowd simply because it looks different. There is also a new recruitment specific URL shortening site. Emp.ly was created so that job seekers who see the emp.ly would instantly recognize the short URL as a job opportunity.

2. Use the #jobs or #career hash tags. Hash tags are the way that the Twitter search engine knows the subject of a tweet. If you type jobs in a tweet without the # in front of it, your tweet will most likely get lumped in with tweets about Steve Jobs from Apple. The #tag insures that your tweet will get categorized correctly with the rest of the job announcements put out.

I mention using #jobs or #careers above. What’s the difference? In theory both #tags can be uses interchangeably. #jobs is by far the more popular of the two with well over 8,000 tweets per day referencing it. #careers gets a good 2000 daily tweets, but it serves the same purpose. There is a growing use of the two tags for different kinds of job opportunities. A cursory glance at #careers tweets show a more professional, higher paying job than a typical #jobs tweet. #career tweets often advertise jobs like “medical writer,” “financial analyst,” or “network engineer” whereas #jobs also encompasses retail or hourly jobs.

3. Use #tags sparingly. Some tweets have so many #tags in them that you can’t hardly make out what they are saying. Use you hash tags sparingly and strategically. Always use the #jobs and/or #careers, then if you have room use one and maybe two more methodically. You might want to add a vertical #tag to go along with your #jobs tag. For instance, you are tweeting an IT job. Use the hash tags #jobs and #IT. Lastly, you can also add a location #tag. These are popular for large metro areas like #Chicago.

4. Make sure to include the location. There are a plethora of job tweets on Twitter that don’t list the city where the tops takes place. These tweets are essentially a waste in my view and constitute Twitter Spam. A simple addition of a city and state will help make sure you get the attention of job seekers who are actively looking for jobs where yours is available.

5. Avoid Abbreviations. Even with the 140 character limit, most of the time you can get the full, unabbreviated job title and location. If you have a job title that’s so long that it doesn’t fit, you are probably recruiting for a job that is so hard to fill anyway that it will be tough to find them anywhere, let alone on Twitter.

6. Don’t put #tags in job titles or tweet text. This one is pretty self-explanatory…it’s important of course to use the hash tags so your jobs show in search, but put them at the end. Having #tags in the body of the tweet is just disruptive and makes them hard to read.

7. Make sure the hiring company’s name is in the tweet. Again, should be a no-brainer but job seekers don’t like going into a job posting blind. This is a great way to brand your company alongside the openings. If you are posting these jobs manually (i.e. not using a utility) the best practice is to have the company name and log as the Twitter account name and user icon. If you can’t do that, put the company name as the first thing in the tweet. Some high profile direct Twitter recruiters are @ATTjobs, @KPMG, and @HyattCareers.

Lastly, let me touch on two job tweeting strategies. If you are a smaller recruiting organization and intend to tweet just a handful of jobs, feel free to go out and amass as many relevant followers as you can. You have to be careful to not send too many tweets a day as your followers might get annoyed at you for clogging up their Twitter feed with irrelevant job tweets.
If you are a larger recruiting agency, feel free to post as many job tweets as you’d like, just don’t be surprised if your followers drop you. Some of the biggest Twitter recruiters turn to a TweetMyJobs or TweetaJob so that they can put out as many tweets as they want, but also foster a Twitter follower community to whom they can share direct messages too, not just send job tweets.
Well, there you go. I hope that helps you tweek your tweets for maximum Twitter recruitment exposure.

Big Twitter users don’t seem to be too worried about the new ads crowding their list of tweets.  Twitter says ads will only be served on searches, so users following their normal twit-friends will not see ads unless they perform a keyword or #tag search.

So, what does this mean for recruiters?  Simple…quick, convenient, and comfortable access to the multitude of Twitter users searching for #jobs.  The #jobs hashtag is one of the most prevelant tags on all of Twitter.  Several million tweets every month contain the tag.  I assume that the majority of these #jobs tweets are seen via search…not by normal every day following.

Here’s how it will work…you will build your ad (140 characters or less) and bid on the keywords or hashtags to advertise against.  When a user searches #jobs (or whatever you choose), they will be served relevant ads on the right side of the page most likely.  Being that #jobs is one of the most popular hashtags, the bidding will likely get expensive quickly.  Recruiters will be able to narrow down their bids by adding criteria…add an additional hashtag or geo targeting.  For instance if you are looking for a nurse in Seattle you would bid on #jobs #nurse #seattle.  Or possibly the tool will allow geo targeting by IP address. 

I feel like this new option is going to be welcomed by recruiters.  Today, in order to be listed on page one of a Google search for nursing jobs, the lowest bid is just north of $2.50.  If markets truely do regulate themselves, I wonder if Google and Twitter bid rates will eventually equalize.  More information is expected to be shared later in the month at Twitter’s SXSW meeting.

Google’s creation of this product is to help its largest consumer marketers be able to give mobile search patrons a quick and easy mobile call to action. One of mobile’s weaknesses is that if a user sees a sponsored/paid link, the URL that they are directed to could unfriendly to the mobile web experience. This option of giving searchers a one-touch action is both good for advertisers (drives more consumers to get more info) and Google (more clicks-to-call equals more mobile search revenue).

This new technology has wonderful recruitment implications as well. Click-to-Call will eventually trickle down to local recruiting, but for now it’s a great option for nation-wide organizations with high volume staffing needs. This tools could be a great edition to big box retailers, nation-wide banks, or other large scale companies. You can imagine a job seekers seeing a paid link for jobs at say Target. Then using the Click-to-Call feature, the job seeker can easily be connected with a pre-recorded recruitment message or a call center number staffed with recruiters ready to career inquiries. I bet it will one day also be linked to location-based search services.

As mobile internet becomes the number one way people connect to the web, we will continue to see better features being built into traditional internet tools (like search engines) as well as new, never thought of applications.