Create a Facebook Fan Page for Recruiting: 

Check out the nice job done by The United States Marine Corps. They have combined up to date news content, stories, and links to their recruiting office, all from their fan page.

Try a Pinterest Page: 

What?!  That’s right.  One of the fastest growing online destinations, Pinterest now generates more than 1.7 billion page views per month, according to Business Insider.  If you want to be seen as a forward-thinking, cutting edge company,  inject your employer brand into this blossoming social media site.  You’ll be perceived as creative, relevant, and a company that is pushing boundaries.  Just google “recruiting on Pinterest” to get ideas on how to make your page sizzle.

Blog:

This really is a no-brainer, but we’d thought we’d remind you of the cheapest, most effective way to SEO your employer brand and your job openings.  Yes.  We know it is time-consuming.  But it is effective and it is free.  If you don’t have time, consider going to sites like ELance or ODesk to find overseas contractors who can do this for a few dollars per hour.

Share On LinkedIn:

Have your employees share your job openings to their networks.  Start conversations on LinkedIn discussion boards.  Both of these options are free.

Upload a YouTube Video:

In a previous blog post we mentioned that YouTube is the second most used search engine on the internet.  Not only is it a great way to SEO your employer brand, but its an inexpensive way to showcase your corporate culture, your company values, and bring to life your employer brand.

If your growing company is looking for inexpensive hiring solutions like Applicant Tracking Systems, social media recruiting, recruitment advertising, or online job board postings, please contact TalentWoo today.  Our hiring consultants can customize a solution that helps your organization scale quickly, without the high costs of headhunting or staffing agency fees.

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No one can argue the near-ubiquitous usage of social media sites like LinkedIn for finding qualified talent, nor would we ever dispute the quality and caliber of successful hires that can be made using these sites.  Indeed, 73% of recruiters have successfully hired a candidate who was identified or introduced through social media or a social network.  We’d simply like to point out an often-overlooked statistic that can help set your expectations when attempting to do social media recruiting on your own.  Below, presented in a table format, are some numbers found in Jobvite’s survey of 1000 global HR  and Recruiting Professionals.

The time it takes to hire a qualified applicant using social media stayed the same or increased in 52% of the cases.  In other words, half the time using social media won’t get you a hire any faster.  It does give you access to passive candidates that are not really in the job market and whom you might not otherwise find, but let’s remember that recruiting passive candidates is always a time-consuming practice.    Social media has not changed this fact. What was not mentioned, interestingly, were two more important statistics:

• how many more days did it take to make a hire using social media (ie how efficient is it)?
• how many more hours of a recruiter’s day is involved in making a hire using social media (ie how labor-intensive is it)?

In future blogs we discuss specific best practices when recruiting on LinkedIn, but suffice it to say that when using social media your goal is simply to create a back-and forth conversation that stimulates interest and ultimately leads to an interview, and ideally a hire.  This process is done in stages, consumes a lot of time, and will usually require at least one dedicated resource. Again, while the success rate of quality hires clearly makes social media recruiting a worthwhile endeavor, the hiring manager must understand that it is also a much more time- and labor-intensive proposition.  Most times, social media user information (ie phone number and email is private), so conversations about the job will go back and forth over e-mail through the specific social medium, until the prospect feels comfortable giving out a phone number.  Expect to wait a while:  for prospects to get around to the email about a job they weren’t considering in the first place; for them to forward the email to someone they think is qualified; for back-and-forth email conversations about pay, opportunity, job specifics, etc.  It is very common for people to take one to two weeks before responding to an invitation or conversation on LinkedIn.

Make no mistake about it, TalentWoo condones the use of social media for filling open job requisitions, but we advise that the task be given to someone in the organization, or outsourced to a professional organization that can focus specifically on all the duties that a well-done social media recruiting campaign requires:  searching, reviewing and selecting appropriate profiles; contacting interesting prospects about an employment opportunity; starting conversations on social media sites; responding to the plethora of questions that result; asking for referrals; networking and following up with referrals; encouraging passive candidates to apply; moving social media conversations to a phone line; and being available to address inquiries for weeks on end.  This is typically not something the hiring manager has the bandwidth to address.  So for entrepreneurs and start-up companies that do not have a dedicated recruiting department, a social media recruiting strategy can be a challenge.

For help getting a social media recruiting strategy for your organization, and for an outsourced partner who can handle your social recruiting needs for you. contact TalentWoo today.

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The post 3 Reasons to Create a Company Recruiting Video first appeared on Talentwoo.

1.  Cost Per Hire is drastically reduced.  Think about the difference in cost between using a retained or contingency firm, online  job board postings, contract recruiters or any combination of the preceding vs. paying a referral fee to an existing employee.

2.   Quality of Hire is drastically increased.  Your employees will usually only put their name on something that won’t come back to bite them or tarnish their professional reputation.  Most employees are also personally invested in the success of their company or department, and are therefore more likely to bring aboard talent that helps the company move forward.  Lastly employee referrals will likely be more vetted, more closely aligned to the job responsibilities, and more likely a culture fit (as the employee has the benefit of knowing both your company culture and the  candidate’s persona).

3. Time to Hire is drastically shortened.  According to the Jobvite Index 2012 the time to hire was 29 days for referrals, 39 days for job boards, and 45 days for career sites.

4. Retention Rate of Hires is measurably improved, as employee retention rates increase by 25% when they are employee referrals, according to findings from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

5. Diversity of Hires come most frequently from employee referrals, rather than job boards or diversity career events, according to a CareerXRoads survey from 2011.

Social network recruiting is perhaps the easiest, and most efficient method of engaging employees in your company’s existing Employee Referral Program.  Your referral program should easily integrate social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into your existing applicant tracking system and online job marketing efforts.  To find out more about how TalentWoo can help your company double your employee referral rate by leveraging our best-in-class, online recruiting platform and digital marketing services, please contact us today.

The post Social Recruiting – Just Do It! first appeared on Talentwoo.

1.  It is illegal to discriminate against against someone based on age, race, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, etc.  Yet the first thing you will see on a job applicant’s Info Tab on Facebook is precisely:  gender, birth date, relationship status, religion, etc.  Employers must have safeguards in place to make sure that they can prove this information was not used in the hiring decision.

2.  Equal consideration for all job applicants means that all social media background investigations must be conducted  in the exact same manner.  A consistent process must first be defined, then documented, and finally enforced or employers risk being accused of discriminatory practices.

3.  Documentation, or lack of it, is usually what wins or loses discrimination law suits.  Can your organization legitimately document for every person rejected, the exact reason why?  If it documented that information on their private social media network was the reason for rejection, or even if NO reason is given (but it is known that social media networks were consulted), then the employer faces an uphill battle in court.

For more information on guidelines to social media background checks, please visit this blog written by Michael Nader of national labor and employment law firm Ogletree Deakin.

TalentWoo offers employers a fool-proof method of ranking and scoring applicants according to the core competencies most essential for the job.  The online applicant tracking system is OFCCP compliant, allows for 100% candidate follow-up, and provides objective decision-making tools and reporting that can save employers hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines from illegal hiring practices.  Contact us today to see how our solution can help you make the right hire, right now.

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Always Remember the Laws of “Supply & Demand”

Depending on the industry in which you do business, the specific occupation you are targeting, and even the required education level of the candidates you seek, the unemployment rate can vary drastically.  For example, according to the most recently published report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the unemployment rate for those who didn’t finish high school is 12.7%, but quickly drops with higher levels of education.  Unemployment is at 8.7% for those with a high school diploma, but no college; 7.1% unemployment for those with an associate degree or some college; and only 4.1%  for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  This can be problematic if you are attempting to hire someone with a college degree, considering that full employment is somewhere around 3%!  Stated another way, most college-educated people in America are already employed.

If you want to see what you’re up against based on your industry, you might like this report by BLS which gives you a decade’s worth of unemployment data by industry. If you are a Fortune 500 new home builder such as KB Home, Pulte, or DR Horton, recruiting construction superintendents might not be a challenge, since the unemployment rate nationally is 20.6%. If, however, you are in the utilities industry, or in the healthcare services industry, you would have a very difficult hiring situation on your hands, with only about 4% unemployment in your target audience.

Be Aware of Your Local Job Market

There are many tools available to employers today that can provide current (up-to-the-minute) employment data about specific job titles within your specific metropolitan area.  This is usually more accurate data than that from BLS, which can be six months to two years of hind-sight wisdom.  Two of our favorite tools, Wanted Analytics and the Talent Intelligence Portal by Careerbuilder, can help you make timely, intelligent decisions about recruiting strategies and compensation for a new hire.  If, for example you are in Scottsdale, AZ and you are looking to hire a Senior Systems Administrator who is well-versed in Unix, and intend to pay $80,000, this type of market data would be extremely informative.  Just by looking at the report below, a hiring manager could adjust his expectations in terms of how long it will take to find a qualified candidate, how much he should expect to pay, how difficult a time he might have, and which other markets might be viable options for relocating talent, based on supply and compensation.  Have a look and see how you might be able to use the data from this WANTED Analytics Report, run on August 15, 2012.

Consider your Employer Brand

What is your company’s reputation in the market?  Do you know?  As a hiring manager or HR manager, it is your job to not only know, but  to ensure that your brand is protected and seen as attractive in the market place.  This is beyond the scope of even the best recruiters, though they may certainly be invaluable in collecting research and feedback on your reputation.  Only you, the senior executive, hiring manager or HR manager can change this.  Often times the challenge in hiring new employees may be a poor work environment, under-market pay, uninspired leadership, lack of career growth or training, sparse benefits, high turnover, or other issues that make your organization unattractive to highly qualified candidates who might otherwise be motivated to do your job.  Consider asking your recruiters to get feedback from candidates on why they are not interested in a job with your company.  You might also do your own research on The GlassDoor website , and see what employees and job applicants are saying about your organization.

If you are interested in learning more about how TalentWoo leverages cutting edge job market intelligence tools to create effective job marketing campaigns that result in hires, please contact us today!

The post The ABCs of Job Market Intelligence first appeared on Talentwoo.

Two of the major players in the business of aggregating job postings from across the web to a single web property are SimplyHired and Indeed.com.  According to SimplyHired’s website, “SimplyHired.com is a vertical job search engine that pulls listings from thousands of sites across the Web including the leading job boards, company career sites, newspapers, non-profits, government sites, and more. Simply Hired allows job seekers to search all of the jobs on the Web in one place for free.”  Not to be outdone by the competition, according to Indeed.com’s website, “Indeed is the #1 job site worldwide, with over 70 million unique visitors and 1.5 billion job searches per month. Indeed is available in more than 50 countries and 26 languages, covering 94% of global GDP.”

So how does this help you, the hiring manager with your online job marketing?  First, you must understand that the goal of these employment search engine companies is to have the most number of job seekers using their site for free.  Their sites are rightly positioned and sold as an easy way to find jobs without the hassle of searching multiple job boards at once.  Think, “Hotels.com for the job market, or even “Expedia.com for the unemployed.”  As such, it is no surprise that in October of 2010 Indeed.com surpassed Monster.com to become the largest job site in the US; Monster.com currently sits 3rd behind SimplyHired in terms of unique  monthly visitors.  See Chart Below:

So does it make more sense to pay to have your jobs on aggregator sites like Indeed.com or SimplyHired, as opposed to Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com?  Simply put: No! Remember your jobs are fed to the aggregator sites FROM job boards as well as from your company website.  This means that your job will show up on Indeed.com automatically anyway.  Why pay for this service?   Are you recruiting overseas?  If not, the 70 million unique viewers is not of much interest, is it?   Aggregate job engines may try to sell you on premium listings (meaning candidates will find your jobs “at the top of the pile”), but the truth is that these meta site have sophisticated filtering features built in, allowing job seekers to refine job search results by market, salary range, title, keyword, or even company size.   In other words, the candidates can find your job on the site very easily.  Premium listings are for generating website revenue, but offer very little in terms of increased applicant flow.   We recommend companies save money for recruiting solutions that have a higher rate of return.

To learn about how your company can leverage more sophisticated and effective job marketing solutions to drive qualified applicants to your hard-to-fill job openings, please contact TalentWoo today!

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