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.

It is easy to come across the recommendations that pitch the same recipe to approaching Gen Y. Here is the gist:

First thing that you have to remember – Millennials will not read anything that exceeds the size of a tweet. That is why you recruiting message must fit into 140 characters or no one will bother. At the very least your message has to be split into small pieces (see above) and carefully sprinkled on top of a good deal of entertaining content. Suggestions include: sharing videos showcasing office gaming room, posting group photos of happily laughing employees, bragging about whose number of “Likes” is bigger, etc. Follow these rules and success is inevitable…

It would be funny if these ideas were not gaining momentum lately. Let’s take a moment to think about the implications.

First and foremost, this stereotype is quite unfair to many capable people of the Millennial generation. The popularity of social media simply cannot be used to define the entire social group. Gen Y is as diverse as any other generation and while it’s true that some Millennials are happy not to read anything longer than tweet, the question is: are you really after these people?

Are you really interested in people who made a choice not to make it beyond 140 characters?

I am not. For many obvious reasons, which I am not going to list here. But here’s the catch – because this idea is gaining momentum, Millennials who do not suffer from this new form of self-induced ADD can find themselves at a disadvantage competing in this framework, which will result in lower efficiency of the recruiting efforts. And Millennials will not be to blame for the low signal to noise ratio in your recruiting campaigns. You know, what goes around comes around.

I think this misconception stems from the fact that people fail to realize the difference between the marketing and recruiting environments. Don’t get me wrong: Twitter is a powerful information distribution tool that can be very useful. But let’s avoid “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” syndrome.

Effective marketing environment is not the same as effective recruiting environment.

Use the information distribution channels to bring people to the environment that is specifically designed to make your recruiting efforts more efficient, to give capable professionals more reasons to join your team, to interact, to collaborate, and to see beyond resume. The specific choice may depend on your hiring needs and your personal preferences. Just don’t do recruiting in a marketing channel – use each tool for what it was designed for.

With all the talk about social recruiting and how it’s going to change everything the simple truth is that social media were not designed to be a recruiting platform. And as soon as you accept it you will be able to use them much more effectively in your recruiting strategies rather than wasting your time trying to fit your recruiting message into 140 characters.

Vitaly Latush is a founder of BrightMesh – the knowledge network with naturally integrated recruiting tools creating a dynamic, collaborative hiring environment. Feel free to contact Vitaly if you are interested in innovations in this field.

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.

When we last off, UPS said that the candidates who were coming its way via Facebook and Twitter were more likely to convert to actual hires than were any old candidates. But the sample was small: in other words, social media recruiting seemed to pay off in terms of ROI, but not in any large volume.

Things are different now. 

As 2010 progressed, TMP’s Mike Vangel says that UPS wanted to know: “What was the ability to scale? Would we be able to continue at the same rate of growth? Would it plateau, or would it accelerate?” 

So far: no plateau. UPS attributes 955 hires in 2010 to the social media efforts, breaking down like this: 45 from Twitter (out of 681 people who arrived via Twitter and created applications); 226 from Facebook (out of 3,926 people who created applications); 84 from text-messaging (out of 1,004 who created applications); and 600 from people (out of 7,919 creating applications) going to UPS’s mobile-friendly careers page from a mobile device. That mobile-friendly site had about 510,000 page views in the last 4-5 months of 2010, with people averaging about a minute and a half each on the site. 

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

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

Several Mondays ago, I watched a National Geographic documentary called Restrepo. Restrepo is a feature-length documentary from National Geographic that chronicles the one-year deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the most dangerous and remote locations on earth, the Korengal Valley. Named “Restrepo” after PFC Juan Restrepo, who died on a hillside 7,000 miles from home on July 22, 2007 the Korengal Valley was a Taliban-infested death trap where nearly 50 U.S. soldiers lost their lives in five years of conflict, according to the Miami Herald.

This was one of the most gripping and moving war documentaries I have ever watched. The documentary followed the daily lives of the platoon members assigned to the valley outpost. By now, you are probably asking yourself what in the heck does this have to do with corporate recruiting? The answer is EVERYTHING. U.S. Military recruiters SELL.

Watching and analyzing Restrepo made me think back on my time in the military — perhaps I had gotten a little bit lucky during my tour as our country was not involved in any conflicts like we are now. The location, the lifestyle, the battles, the pure hell these soldiers were put through on a daily basis made the selfish side of me think “I’m glad that’s not me.” In the days that passed, I would reflect on my time in service and on the men I saw in the documentary, and a thought crossed my mind: “Who and why in their right mind would want to go to that place?”

The military may not be for everyone, I understand that, but it is a company nevertheless, an employer; one of the largest employers in the world in fact, with its own culture, mission, pain points, and recruiting and retention needs. Looking back and examining the U.S. Army’s recruiting numbers over the past couple of years, this is what we find (numbers provided by U.S. Army Recruiting Command):

FY10 Mission Accomplishments

FY09 Mission Accomplishments

In fact, going back and analyzing the recruiting numbers from FY03 Mission Recap to present, the U.S. Army had only fell short one year in its recruitment needs. We are not talking about an organization that needs to recruit 20 individuals or even a few hundred; this is an organization that year after year needs to recruit upward of 60,000 individuals for dangerous assignments. Reviewing the recruiting numbers with thoughts of the Korengal Valley fresh in my mind, the recruiting success of the military astonished me.

So the question persists: How can the U.S. Military sell an individual into giving up their regular lifestyle, travel halfway around the world, be gone for months at a time, and risk life and limb while working in a hostile environment? Easy: the military sells the benefits of its opportunities and lifestyle, pays bonuses, and is aggressive. As dangerous as it can be, there are benefits in every opportunity. In my experience, corporate recruiters and hiring managers seek out every reason why an individual IS NOT qualified for a position — while military recruiters look for every reason why the individual IS qualified for a position. Another important selling factor is pure opportunity; everyone regardless of their background can be eligible for career fields such as HR, Finance, Aviation, Communications, Logistics, Nuclear Power, Combat Arms, Healthcare and many more fields. Everyone is given the opportunity to succeed.

People want to join the military for various reasons, just as they would like to find an opportunity within your organization. It’s important to outline the benefits, to be aggressive, provide future growth and training, to sell the applicant on the company and as to why an individual would want to work at your company — an important application I call “employment branding.” Moreover, the military is smart — it partners with trusted organizations to help build, market, and deliver the respective employment brand — rather than trying to do it on its own. In speaking with several former military recruiters, the group consensus on what makes military recruiters successful is the following: meaningful and productive activity, being personable and friendly, ability to outline benefits and long term goals, ability to relate to the applicant, and provide constant and consistent communication.

Here is a challenge: next time you find yourself interviewing a candidate, take off your recruiter hat and put on your sales hat. Look for every reason on why the individual is qualified for the position, listen to the applicant’s goals and objectives and match them up accordingly, give them their due time, outline the organizations benefits, sell them on why they should want to work for your company, advise the hiring manager on why you are presenting the individual and most importantly provide consistent communication — even if the answer is no.

Rest in peace PFC Restrepo. 

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)