In this competitive market for talent, it is imperative that employers be at the forefront of what job seekers find accessible. With today’s emerging technologies job seekers have come to expect a more interactive experience when it comes their job search. In order to meet the needs and desires of top talent, employers have to meet them halfway.  The smartest employers are taking advantage of today’s emerging media to connect with job candidates where they work and play, and deliver a more interactive and engaging job seeker experience.

Two forms of emerging media employers need to take advantage of right now are mobile and online video technology. Not only are mobile and video technologies surprisingly easy to implement into your overall recruitment efforts, but they are a must for any employer who hopes to remain competitive in the new recruitment landscape.

Mobile: The New Desktop
According to the latest findings from Pew Research Center, 83 percent of Americans currently own cell phones, nearly half of whom (44 percent) use their mobile devices to get access to the internet. This finding highlights the opportunity mobile devices offer employers to reach job seekers anywhere, at any time. The opportunities to use mobile technology for recruiting are vast, ranging from mobile-friendly websites that enable easy job searches on the go; to quick response (QR) codes that point smartphone users to job listings; to text alerts informing candidates about recruiting events and opportunities.

Regardless of size or industry, every company needs to take advantage of mobile recruiting opportunities. Increasingly, job seekers are using their mobile devices to receive job alerts, search jobs and research companies. It won’t be long until this behavior is commonplace, and those companies that do not embrace this technology are losing out on candidates every day.

Video: An Underutilized Advantage
For all of its power to influence and engage people, video is one of the most underutilized recruiting tools out there today. One thing CareerBuilder has seen consistently throughout our 15 years of research on job seekers is their desire to work for companies that care about their employees, work for the greater good and are at the forefront of innovation. Video enables companies to get this message across better than any other medium, because it enables candidates to really see and hear what the true employee experience is like. The evidence supports this finding, too: According to CareerBuilder internal data, job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than postings without video. On average, CareerBuilder customers receive a 34 percent greater application rate when they add video to their job postings. At the same time, only 10 percent of job postings include video, underscoring a major opportunity for employers to take advantage of this technology and differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Dispelling the Myths of Emerging Media
Change can be intimidating, but companies that fail to embrace these emerging media are only cheating themselves out of the opportunity to reach the growing number of qualified candidates who utilize this technology for their job searches. If what’s holding you back is the fear that implementing these technologies is too expensive or simply more trouble than they’re worth, consider the following popular misconceptions about emerging media.

Myth 1: It’s expensive. It’s surprisingly inexpensive to send text messages, create QR codes or create a mobile-friendly career site. Likewise, video is also inexpensive to produce, and it can be as easy as creating a video yourself and posting it (for free) on YouTube. It may not be the most polished video, but it’s a way to start the process and see how much feedback it generates.  From there, you might decide to invest in a more streamlined production process to get an even better return. Implementing mobile and video recruiting efforts can be an investment, but when you look at the return, cost should be an afterthought.

Myth 2: It’s too complicated. Mobile technology can feel like somewhat of a black hole for employers; however, integration with mobile devices is surprisingly simple, and the time it takes to build a mobile website is minimal. The same can be said for video. As mentioned above, uploading video onto any online platform – from a video-sharing site like YouTube to the company career site – is increasingly easy.  When in doubt, consult a third party expert to help you navigate these technologies for the best possible ROI. You won’t regret it.

Myth 3: It’s a trend. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it is that emerging media, such as mobile technologies, social networking and video, is not going away. Consider the following statistics:

• In 2010 alone, the worldwide mobile phone market grew by 18.5 percent.
• More than 5 billion text messages were sent on a daily basis in the U.S. in 2010
• In the last quarter of 2010, smartphone sales surpassed that of PCs, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
• During the course of 2010 CareerBuilder saw over 400 percent growth in job searches on our mobile career site, and the number of job seekers storing resumes on their phones using CB’s iPhone App increased by over 350 percent.
• Web pages with video are 53 times more likely than pages with just text to show up on the first page of Google results
• Internet video is now 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic, and will reach 62 percent by the end of 2015.

These are just a few of the findings that underscore both the reach and power of emerging media, as well as the need for employers to adapt their recruiting efforts to keep up with mobile usage trends. As these technologies become the norm for candidates as they search for jobs and research companies, employers need to adjust their recruiting efforts accordingly to remain competitive. In other words, you might not be taking advantage of emerging media, but your competitors are. Don’t get left behind.

Andrew Streiter is an Area Vice President at CareerBuilder, LLC, where he is responsible for developing human capital strategies for organizations ranging from Fortune 1,000 companies to mid-sized businesses throughout the US.

More from Matt at – http://recruitingfuture.com/2011/01/21/by-grads-for-grads-social-recruiting-from-unilever/

Assessing Your Social Media Initiatives

Corporations can’t control what people post on social media sites, even though they may try! Many companies today use social media profiles, much like they use their corporate website: just another place to blast generic corporate messages using one-way communications! They turn off the ability of profile visitors to comment, and in many cases, even limit the ability to submit messages to the profile administrator. These practices are so anti-authentic that if your organization is guilty of them, you should start this assessment with a negative 20 points.

Examine your social media initiatives using the following checklist. Tally your points to determine how authentic your efforts are.

1. Corporate profile page (4 points) — your organization should have a profile page on each of the major social networking sites that service your target audience, including but not limited to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Qzone, and MySpace. If you set up such profiles, award yourself one point. If you do not restrict comments and wall posts, award yourself another point. If non-recruiting related employees, managers, and page visitors routinely comment on profile wall postings, award one point. If you assess your profile page using the checklist in part one of this article and score 16 or better, award yourself another point.
2. Function/Group profiles (2 points) — if your organization has set up profile pages for each of the major functions/groups within the organization to “dialogue” with customers, applicants, and other stakeholders, award your effort one point. If you have dedicated individuals throughout the organization who post and respond to posts daily on each of the function/group pages, award your effort another point.
3. Employee profiles (2 points) — if your organization actively encourages employees to establish profiles on social media sites and identify their company affiliation, award yourself one point. If you actively author social media posts designed for your employees to voluntarily share, add another point.
4. Blog development (2 points) — if your organization actively encourages decision makers, managers, and employees to blog about their work experience and learning, award yourself one point. If your organization actively publicizes employee blogs by linking to them via social media posts, award an additional point.
5. Driving visibility of social media (2 points) — does your organization drive visibility of social media efforts by linking to them from corporate maintained websites? If yes, award your efforts one point. If your organization also links to social media efforts in print via business cards, brochures, etc., award an additional point.
6. Using groups to engage (2 point) — Even a Facebook page established for the finance function of an organization can become overwhelming if too many conversations occur at once. To ensure adequate focus and better interaction, add two points if your organization uses social media groups in addition to profiles to support specific audiences.
7. Employee referral content/application (1 point) — if your organization has established content to support employee referral via social media or installed one of the applications available to support employee referral, award yourself one point.
8. Use of video (1 point) — more videos are viewed online each day than searches conducted on Google. If your organization acknowledges the popularity of video and makes non-scripted communication available via video hosted externally on sites like YouTube, award yourself one point.
9. Twitter (1 point) — while twitter can be a distraction, research shows that users sharing links among friends to other web-based content results in a significant increase in traffic to said content. If your organization uses Twitter (preferably via multiple accounts targeting specific audiences) to drive visibility of content, award yourself one point. If your organization uses Twitter as a market research tool to discover what people are chatting about, and actively seeks out talent to follow, award yourself two bonus points.
10. LinkedIn (1 point) — having employees visible on LinkedIn can be a curse, as LinkedIn has become the defacto phonebook for recruiters, but it also provides individuals interested in learning more about the organization with opportunities to dialogue directly with those individuals most likely to be able to answer questions share stories about life at your organization. If your organization routinely supports individuals publishing and maintaining their LinkedIn profiles award yourself one point.

How authentic are your social media initiatives? If you scored:

14-18 You are a social media best practice firm, congrats!

9-13 You’ve got a solid foundation, but probably need more focus on supporting specific populations.

1-8 You are not there yet, chances are those profiles you have created are rather dusty!

How did you do?

I think that the article misses the most important point though.  Unisys’s use of social media as a recruiting tool has led to stronger positioning in the minds of cloud computing specialists.  Not only was Unisys able to recruit strong employees, it has made itself a social media beacon to people interested in the new technology.  Cloud computing is a relatively new idea in IT.  Many companies claim to be leading the way in this endeavor…but it’s usually via their own websites.  That’s the exact opposite of cloud computing. 

The cloud is a place where companies can store information outside of their own websites for consumption.  Talking about how great you are on your own website doesn’t lend a lot of credibility to that claim.  On the other hand, Unisys shares its enthusiasm for cloud computing all over the web.  Probably the best place to see this is the company’s YouTube channel.

By matching recruitment activities and corporate messaging together on a various platforms has made the recruitment efforts a business strategy.  When people interested in cloud computing watch videos on YouTube about what Unisys is doing in the arena, they are also exposed to ways they can join this cutting edge corporation.  I say the two should always go hand-in-hand.  So why don’t more organizations do this more?  Could Ford lure “car guys” to a Facebook page about an upcoming Mustang model and then ask them to work for the company?  Could Chili’s showcase its new menu on YouTube and place a video about how great their foodservice careers are right next to it?  Sure they could.  I wonder why more companies haven’t made this connection yet.

Check out Unisys on:

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

YouTube

Unisys using social networking to recruit

http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/blogs/technology/2010/03/unisys_using_social_networking_to_recruit.html

Another one of the things I didn’t have room to mention in my story about Unisys Corp. last week is how the Blue Bell information-technology company has bolstered its social media presence since Ed Coleman became its CEO in October 2008.

Unisys is on Facebook, has a channel on YouTube!, and has a large presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.

“There are conversations going on about the company all across the social Web,” said Unisys spokesman Jim Kerr. “If you’re not in there, you’re not aware of the conversations, not participating in them, not shaping them and not seen by influencers as being relevant.”

The company developed guidelines for its employees to follow on social media that it put in place last spring. Among other things, they are meant to make sure that the workers project a consistent image of Unisys and know what regulations governing public companies prevent them from saying. The guidelines also take into account the fact that once something makes its way into cyberspace, it tends to stay there a very long time.

“On the Web, anything can be traced,” Kerr said.

Ellyn Raftery, Unisys’ chief marketing officer, said the company uses social media to try to enhance its overall reputation and its reputation as a leader in specific areas of technology.

Taking part in social media conversations about various IT issues has “given us a way to build our reputation with the industry analysts,” Raftery said.

Unisys also uses Twitter and LinkedIn for recruiting and has been so successful at doing that, Raftery said, that it has nearly eliminated its use of outside recruiters.

For example, Raftery said that when Unisys got into cloud computing last June, it started to use social media to follow people considered credible in the space. That led it to John Treadway, whom it hired last September to direct its cloud computing portfolio.

For the first time in the report’s nine year history, social media gets more than a passing glance.  Last year respondents were asked if their company had a Facebook page.  This year, the survey actually asked for the number of hires attributed to social media tools.  The number that CareerXRoads reports is small, just 500 hires.  The survey speaks with a statistically small sample size that is not representative of the entire social media recruitment movement, but relative the other numbers in the report social media represents something shy of 1% of total hires.  When put in perspective this is a number to remember.  This one percent number is the first data point in a growing trend we will certainly see in the coming years.  CareerXRoads states that in 1997, internet hires made up 2.1% of hires and that newspaper ads were king.  Well we all know the end of that story.  Newspaper recruitment is almost extinct and internet recruiting is now a $10 billion a year business.

As we’ve said before, social media recruiting is here to stay.  It will continue to grow and become a more powerful force in shaping how organizations hire.  These tools are true and viable sources of hires.  In the coming years, recruiters must develop better ways to track hires made from social media  to really understand its ROI.

Selected quotes from the report:

• Social Media, while rapidly expanding as a strategy, is still in its early stages vis-à-vis attributed hires. Only about 500 hires can be attributed to Social Media. Direct Sourcing activities are increasingly adopting social media tools and tactics but 2009 also saw a decrease in “sourcers” (who are the most specialized at using social media to track prospects). This suggests that socialmedia has not been leveraged as much as was intended. Corporate staffing is poised to expand social media initiatives rapidly in 2010 as the recession ends.

• Nearly all respondents described their 2010 plans in detail. Most mentions were to build or emphasize social media; build or rebuild sourcing teams; employ more SEO (search engine optimization)/SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns and initiatives; expand referrals; use more niche boards where necessary; and reduce overall use of job boards in general – major boards particularly. There were also frequent mentions of training (cold calling), branding and improvement of career sites.

The ebook is available now for free download from: http://www.careerbuildercommunications.com/pdf/socialmedia.pdf

But before we begin, let’s take a step back. What’s the difference between search and attraction? In this case search is the purposeful use of social media platforms to look for possible job candidates as if one was using a resume database search. Attraction is the opposite. It’s the use of social media tools as a portal to attract jobseekers to an organization or opportunity.

Candidate Search

Alright, let’s talk search. For years, the only tools a recruiter had for search were their own personal network, industry Blue Books or resume databases offered by job boards. Now, there is no shortage of options from mailing lists, to licensure lists, industry organization memberships, etc. Oh yeah and about 100 different social media platforms. But not all social media sites are beneficial for search. It’s not likely that a recruiter would have much luck looking through a list of tweets if they are searching for CPAs.

In lieu of using Twitter for search, I recommend a handful of other sites. Hands down the best social media platform for talent search is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the most extensive number of professional profiles on the net (barring major job board resume databases). Along with its large scale, it offers many of the web 2.0 tools that encourage trust and authenticity. LinkedIn does have some short falls though. Recruiters looking for hourly workers or more blue collar type workers will not find many qualified prospects on the site.

There are a couple of other sites that similar, but smaller versions of LinkedIn where recruiters might have some luck. Due to the size differences, the talent pool on these sites may be less picked over giving employers more of the candidate’s attention. These site include BrightFuse.com, Xing.com, and for the less experienced white collar jobseeker Koda.us.

Facebook and MySpace are also good tools to turn to for search. Maybe not search like you would use LinkedIn for…more like candidate screening. Today almost half of America’s recruiters use Facebook and MySpace to prescreen candidates they get from other, more traditional recruiting means. If you have 25 strong candidates for one vacancy, checking out a potential employees Facebook profile can tell you a lot about the person’s interests and maybe even work ethic.

Candidate Attraction

The other side of the coin is candidate attraction. Before the popularity of social media, an organization had to depend solely on their own career site and presence on various job boards to get their recruitment brand out to the job seeking masses. Today, several social media platforms offer a recruitment portal experience almost equal to that of a careers page. I saw almost equal because a company can do essentially what they want with their careers page, but have to work within the confines of a social site’s terms & conditions and design parameters.

The best social media tool to use in attraction has got to be Facebook. Facebook has three things that set it apart from other platforms when dealing with candidate attraction. Facebook is very trusted, it allows two-way conversations, and it gives employers a great medium to extend their recruitment brand. Some of the best examples of Facebook recruitment portals are the Ernst & Young, City Year, the US Department of State and Select Staffing.

To a lessor extent, MySpace can be used for candidate attraction. There are far fewer organizations using the site for attraction portals. Several branches of the U.S. Armed Forces successfully exploit the tool to reach out to future soldiers. Other organizations cite the less professional tone of the site as reasons to not source from within its membership.

LinkedIn is another platform that works well for candidate attraction. This site gives companies the chance to set up a corporate profile page where the companies to use an RSS feed to list all the current openings. You can also post openings for free in any number of user group pages.

Next, Twitter is a great source to find both passive and active candidates. Using any number of hash tags and lists, a recruiter can get a job opening out to a large audience very quickly. Twitter also has several third party vendors that offer Twitter posting (both for free and for fee) services that go out to a larger pool of Twitter followers who have opted in to get tweets about jobs in a certain geography, industry or keyword.

Lastly, there’s YouTube. I put YouTube at the end of the list because I feel like it is the hardest platform to use for candidate attraction if you want to do it right. Having said that, when it is done right YouTube is a fantastic medium upon which to build or extend a recruitment brand. With the right amount of time and budget, an organization can use YouTube as both an attraction space and as an onboarding tool. Take the U.S. Coast Guard’s YouTube channel. This channel has 50 videos aimed at attracting possible recruits, sharing job details this group and giving them a real-life view of what joining the service really entails.

These eight or so tools should offer plenty of options to use. As new social media tools hit the web, this question of searching versus attracting will come up again. Until that happens, this primer on using the sites for both should come in handy. When you are able to reach a broad audience in your recruitment activities, you have to look at quality as quantity refined. Using these tools should help you refine your talent pools to find that gem of a candidate you are looking for.

I recently ran across the Coast Guard’s YouTube recruitment channel.  The channel made its debut in March of 2009 and has already garnered almost 164,000 video views.  It boasts a catalog of some 50 videos made up of recruit interviews, reposts of TV commercials, and day-in-the-life narratives.  What I find interesting is that no video has less than 1,000 views.  Those are pretty strong numbers for a channel that has been live now just almost one year.

Looking through the list of available vignettes, I noticed one interesting thing.  One particular video had 23,000+ views, which is 7,000 more views than the next closest most popular video.  The #1 video is called Coast Guard Rating Video AST.  An AST is a Coast Guard enlisted position made famous by the movie Guardian in which actor Ashton Kutcher plays the role of a newbie rescue swimmer, or Aviation Survival Mate.  Interest in this job rating must have soared when the movie was released as is evidenced by its popularity on the YouTube channel.  The number two and three most popular videos were similar rating videos about the Boatswain’s Mate and Gunner’s Mate respectively. 

So, what are the best practices here?

1. The Coast Guard uses YouTube to not only store their TV commercials online.  Many YouTube “recruiting” channels seem to just be a place where an organization can store it commercials so users can share them on Facebook etc.  The Coast Guard does a really good job of sharing videos that show recruits what to expect in the career fields they may choose.  They also use the channel to showcase a handful of new recruits as they make their way through Coast Guard boot camp.  Kudos to USCG for not making it look easy and rosy.  One of the first things you hear from recruit Annie Nguyen is that the first week was one of the toughest weeks of her life.  There is no beating around the bush on this series of videos.  This is not only a positive aspect for a recruiting video, but also a strong tool to use as an onboarding tool.  Now new recruits can see what they are getting into.  They will also understand that they will live through this tough process and there is light at the end of the eight week tunnel.
2. The career field videos give recruits a look at their future employment opportunities in the civilian world.  When you are dealing with armed forces type recruitment, I find it powerful when the recruiting message gives candidates a look at what their life will look like after their service is over.  Everyone know that you can be an airline pilot after you leave the Air Force, but what does the future hold for a Boatswain’s Mate?  Well, the skills learned as a Boatswain’s Mate are readily transferable to fields as varied as law enforcement, heavy equipment operator to tugboat captain.  I know that now thanks to the video about becoming a Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate.
3. Lastly, the Coast Guard YouTube channel is a two-way street of communication.  Although there are only 5 comments on the page, you can see that there is an actual person, familiar with the recruiting process, that is monitoring and managing the channel.  One user, fiend1111, writes to say, “I’m very interested in joining the Coast Guard. But, I have a G.E.D.  Would that stop me from joining?”  Acceptance to the Coast Guard is very selective and this possible Guardian wonders if he has the right credentials to even take the first step.  Without this open communication channel, fiend1111 may have never found out that, “The Coast Guard does accept people with G.E.D’s on a case by case basis. I’d call your local recruiter to find out more: 877.NOW.USCG.”  The recruiter monitoring the site was able to quickly reach out to this job seeker and encourage him to take the next step.  When you look at the videos outside of the actual channel (on YouTube search), you’ll see that the channel moderator has answered many similar questions.

YouTube proves to be a powerful Web 2.0 recruiting tool in the case of the USCG Recruiting channel.  I give the USCG high marks for showing real-life examples of becoming a Coastie…not just Hollywood stereotypes of over produced commercials in HD.  On the channel, future Guardians get a very true idea of what it takes to be in the Coast Guard, an understanding of the future benefits of serving, and an open forum to get last minute pieces of information needed to encourage that trip to the Coast Guard recruiting office.