Talent42, The National Tech Recruiting Conference, is being hosted in Seattle again this year.

June 27-28, 2013

250 or more tech recruiters, sourcers, recruiting leaders, and hiring managers will come together to share and learn the keys to attracting, sourcing, and recruiting world class tech talent.

By Ben Gotkin

Candidates hate your hiring experience.  Well, maybe not yours specifically, but overall, candidates are not happy campers.  Online applications are lengthy and cumbersome, interviews can be as well.  And the ‘resume black hole’… Don’t get me started…

The truth is that while active job seekers who need your job will jump through rings of fire and are willing to be battered and bruised to be considered for your job, top employed talent isn’t going to waste their time with a crummy experience.  Here’s a few facts:

• Average drop-off rate on corporate career sites between the time a candidate lands on the site and the time they complete an application is 85% or more.
• Customers/candidates who have a bad experience with your organization are 7 times more likely to tell their friends about it than those who had a good experience.
• Candidates are sharing these poor experiences today in significant numbers on sites like Glassdoor, Vault and Twitter.
• A poor candidate experience results in reduced access to top talent, reduced efficiency, increased costs and lowered quality (yes, this is impacting your bottom-line).
• YOU have control over your organization’s candidate experience.

Fortunately, there are a number of companies that are taking their candidate experience seriously, to the point that for the past 2 years, many of those organizations have been recognized for their efforts through The Candidate Experience Awards program.   This award program is open to any organization that wishes to participate, either to compete for an award or to simply benchmark their candidate experience as they search for opportunities to improve.

I’ve been a big fan of this awards program since its inception for a couple reasons.  First, it brings to light the best practices of organizations large and small that have made significant efforts to create the best experience possible for their candidates.  Second, the survey from this program, now going into its 3^rd year, is beginning to provide some very rich quantitative data, which is available for broad analysis across survey participants, and by the participants themselves.  Finally, it helps organizations understand, “How good or bad is my candidate experience?” and “What can I focus on short-term and long-term to improve”.

I was honored to be invited to join The Candidate Experience Awards Council, which is made up of many of the top minds in the Talent Acquisition profession, including my Recruiting Toolbox colleagues, John Vlastelica and Carmen Hudson.   Recruiting Toolbox consultants have had significant experience in their corporate careers, and working with their clients, to help those organizations optimize their technology, their overall process workflow, their strategy and their interviewing and selection techniques, in order to create the best candidate experience possible.

The 2013 Awards program is set to begin and I strongly encourage all organizations to participate in this worthwhile (and potentially rewarding) initiative.  To learn more and to participate, please visit http://www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org.

At 2PM ET/11AM PT on Wednesday, March 27, Recruiting Toolbox Principal Consultant Ben Gotkin will join iMomentous’ Ed Newman for the first of a series of webinars that will introduce you to what you need to know to get on board with mobile recruiting today.  Optimizing your career website for mobile devices is just the first step.  Ed and Ben will discuss not only the case for going mobile, but will also cover the various stages of adoption, the who’s who in the mobile recruitment technology market, and practical examples of what candidates want and what employers can deliver.

For more information on this webinar and to register, please visit:  http://www.imomentous.com/mobile-talent-strategy-workshop/

OR

Scan now to Register:

Date: Wednesday, February 27, 10am PT/1pm ET
Location: Webinar

The biggest buzz in recruitment technology today is how organizations are leveraging social media and mobile devices to attract and engage candidates more dynamically than ever before.  The widespread adoption of these tools in recruiting is well underway, but true success with these tools require more than just having a presence in social media or having a mobile career site or app.

Join Recruiting Toolbox’s Ben Gotkin, who along with Subha Shetty, Director of Product Marketing at Simply Hired, will explore the trends and best practices that mark not only how organizations are effectively using these technologies, but how candidates are looking to leverage these tools as well.

In addition, this webinar will spotlight two organizations that are building out strategies to make the most of these technologies.  NPRs Sr. Director of Talent Acquisition and Innovation, Lars Schmidt, will discuss how they are leveraging social media channels such as Twitter to create a highly interactive and engaging experience for their candidates.  Dolby Laboratories Director of Global Staffing, Craig Campbell will describe their initiatives to launch a full-end-to-end experience on their mobile career site, including a full application experience.

Details and Free Registration Info: Link to Recruiting Trends Webinar Registration Page

Matt brings more than 15 years of talent acquisition and talent management experience to Recruiting Toolbox, including a long tenure at KPMG – a Big Four consultancy with more than 150,000 employees. While at KPMG, he built and led the firm’s US dedicated sourcing function, which is now the model being implemented by other KPMG teams globally, and led full cycle recruitment teams as the US Director of Experienced Hire Recruiting for Tax.

Now, as a Principal Consultant with Recruiting Toolbox, he will help clients build and deploy the right recruitment strategies and processes, train sourcers, recruiters and interviewers, and bring his real-world, practitioner focus to make it all work well together – people + process + technology.

“I’ve been helping teams recruit better for over 15 years,” says Grove. “Now, as part of the Recruiting Toolbox team, I’ll be working with clients to help them design the right sourcing model and strategies, improve their processes, and train up their teams so that they can hire world class global talent.”

John Vlastelica, Founder and Managing Director, adds, “We’ve been helping companies recruit better since 2002. With Matt’s expertise, we’ll bring our clients even more value, with an even stronger set of capabilities around sourcing strategy, recruitment process, and training. Matt is a fantastic addition to our team. His track record of success inside a massive global professional services org – where you have to make a business case for every investment, and respond quickly when new client deals are won – will be well leveraged by our clients. He’s a smart, generous, high-expectations sourcing and recruitment leader who just gets it. We are thrilled to welcome Matt to the team.”

Matt began his professional life as a classically trained singer, actor and teacher, a background which has proven surprisingly valuable in the business arena. Leveraging both his performance and business experience, he is in demand as a sourcing and recruiting trainer and has led trainings for teams throughout the US and Europe, as well as India and South Africa. Matt has been a speaker and panelist for the Thought Leadership Institute and SourceCon, has taught members of the International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment, and was an Expert Advisor for the Human Capital Institute. Matt holds the Senior Professional in HR certification, graduated cum laude from Southwestern University and earned his Master’s from Texas Tech University.

Learn More:
• Matt Grove’s Bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattgrove
• How we help companies recruit better: http://www.recruitingtoolbox.com

About Recruiting Toolbox, Inc.
We are consulting company made up of experienced consultants and trainers (all former corporate recruiting leaders) who are 100% focused on helping companies recruit better. We’re not a search firm or contract recruiters. Instead, we help companies with recruiting and sourcing strategy, process improvement, systems selection and implementation, tool development and deployment, and custom-built recruiter and hiring manager training. Our work is leveraged by companies around the world, including Nike, Groupon, World Bank, Expedia, Eddie Bauer, Zumiez, REI, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, Concur, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, M&M Mars, Philips Electronics, T-Mobile, Coldwell Banker, Electronic Arts, Rhapsody, CH2M Hill, PNC Bank, Hitachi, and Talisman Energy. Learn more at: www.RecruitingToolbox.com.

I DON’T LIKE SPAM!!!

Nobody does.  But the spam I am referring to is what has become the endless, pointless, directionless supply of job spam that has taken over social media.  I see it constantly on Facebook, Twitter, and especially on LinkedIn, and honestly, I’ve just about had enough.

Why do I let this bother me?  Because to me it is a clear representation of one of the key things that is wrong with recruiting today, recruiting without a plan or a strategy.  It used to be that ‘Post and Pray’ applied to use of job boards, as in “I’m going to post this poorly written, rather generic job description on {insert job board name here} and pray that the perfect candidate that I want to hire happens to search that job board around the time that the job was posted, finds my job, and is compelled enough to actually apply.”  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not slamming job boards as much as how they are utilized (usually without a plan or strategy).  Job boards, when used correctly, can be very effective in filling certain types of roles.

For a while now, we have seen this behavior replicated in social media in the same fashion, typically without any rhyme or reason.  Why?  I believe that this occurs for three reasons:

1)      Social media is HOT!  Everyone is doing it.  Even though source-of-hire surveys still have yet to broadly demonstrate that social media channels are actually a top source of hires, too many recruiters have been convinced that they must use social media as a source, even if they don’t know how to effectively leverage social media as a source.  Since they don’t know, what do they do?  They post their jobs indiscriminately.

2)      A one-size-fits-all recruitment strategy.  How often are position-specific sourcing strategies developed for each specific job to be filled within an organization?  Not very often I’m afraid, so we post all of our jobs to the job boards, and by extension now, we post all of our jobs through our social media channels.

3)      Technology has made it easy.  So if social media is the ‘IT’ thing in recruiting now (everybody’s doing it!), and since we treat all our jobs the same when it comes to sourcing, when technology is available to automate these jobs to be posted across a variety of social media channels, groups, etc., then why not take advantage of that?

Nowhere has this become more apparent than on LinkedIn, where job spam has rendered numerous groups practically useless.  How many ‘Recruiter’ groups do you belong to that have been taken over by large volumes of job postings?  If I’m going to participate in a LinkedIn Recruiter Group, I’m going there because I want to engage in recruiting-related discussion topics, or maybe even to be exposed to job postings for Recruiting Managers/Directors, Sourcers, etc.  I could give a hoot about your project manager or help desk job.

I manage a large LinkedIn Group that is closed to Recruiters ONLY.  That’s right, about 1,400 Recruiters in the DC Area ONLY.   This group was created to generate community and conversation about topics that are relevant to the local recruiting community, and it is encouraged that local Recruiting jobs be posted there.  If I’m a Recruiting Leader in the DC area, it would be one of the first places that I would go to post a job that would end up in front of a highly relevant audience, oh, and I’d search the group too to proactively source members of the group.  So, we get a few local Recruiting jobs posted there, I’d certainly like to see more.  But what happens instead on a daily basis is the posting of Project Manager and Help Desk and Administrative Assistant jobs.  I have posted in the group on multiple occasions that they won’t find those types of candidates in this group, at all, ever!  I delete these job postings immediately and have made it clear that I will do so.  Honestly, I’m not sure that the folks that post these jobs even know that I’ve deleted them as I never hear back about why their job was deleted, and I have strong suspicion that most of these postings are posted here in an automated fashion.

I’ve seen too many other groups taken over by irrelevant content and job postings, I rarely even visit or pay attention to those groups any longer.  Many others on LinkedIn have become fed up with the reckless or automated behaviors or actions and have abandoned the site for more ‘safe’ and relevant online niche communities.  Companies have also limited their social media strategy to automated job postings on their Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, offering little to no engaging content, just a constant list of jobs (which people can find just about anywhere BTW).

Just like job boards, social media when used correctly, can be a highly successful way to source and engage talent in a highly targeted manner.  But this only happens when organizations and recruiters take the time and effort to think critically about their job openings, what type(s) of candidates would be a good fit for those roles, and where those candidates are most likely to be found.  In the Fast-Good-Cheap Continuum, we need to stop sacrificing Good for Fast.  It’s important to have an efficient sourcing process, but speed can kill (if not leveraged correctly).  Post-and-pray, whether with job boards or with social media, is NOT a recruiting strategy.

Look, all I’m asking for is for recruiters to take a step back, have a meaningful conversation with their hiring managers to develop a realistic plan to source highly relevant talent for their job openings.  For some jobs, it may be a combination of focusing on proactively seeking employee referrals and searching and reaching out to candidates found on LinkedIn.  In some cases it may be posting on job boards and posting jobs in highly relevant social media groups and channels.  Be critical of any technology vendor that advises you that they can make job posting easy and efficient for you, even on social media.  I had a conversation with a friend towards the end of last week, one of the top recruiting leaders in corporate America, and he stated emphatically that effective sourcing efforts rarely occur without a plan.  Our training at Recruiting Toolbox reinforces this concept as well.

Reactive, ‘inbox’ recruiting is not a value-added function, especially when little-to-no critical thought is applied.  If the corporate recruiting function wants to reposition itself as a true strategic partner, then it’s time for recruiters to apply actual strategy through a highly-targeted sourcing plan that will optimize the ability of an organization to hire the best talent for the job, not just candidates who happen to apply because they ran across the job randomly on LinkedIn, Twitter, a Job Board, etc.

Had enough job spam yourself?  Well, here’s a spammity-good Monty Python sketch to take your mind off of it for a while:

If you can’t see the video, click here Spam to watch it on YouTube

The corporate recruiting function as we know it today has matured rapidly over the past two decades.  Now is the time to question and discuss the purpose and value of corporate recruiters, and how we want to grow and develop corporate recruiters going forward.  To read more and join the discussion, click here.

Happy New Year!

We’re very happy that the Mayan’s were wrong.  And that we didn’t fall off the fiscal cliff.  And that we get to do work we LOVE to do.

The Recruiting Toolbox team is busy this winter.  We’re in the middle of some really interesting consulting and training projects, focused on…

• Custom competency development and interview guides
• Global hiring manager training
• ATS configuration
• Sourcing training
• Recruitment process assessment and improvement
• Candidate experience improvement
• Employer branding and EVP development
• Interim recruiting leadership

We get to talk to HR and recruitment leaders almost every day, and it sounds like almost everyone has a ton on their plates this year.  What kind of projects are on your to do list for 2013?

Conferences: Sourcing, Mobile, Social, Leadership, and more…

We’re also excited to get to hang out with folks like you this winter.  Here’s some of our speaking engagements for Q1.

• In January, Carmen will be in Chicago speaking on Social Media
• In February, John will be in Atlanta speaking to sourcers about marketing personas, and in London doing a session on recruiting leadership.  Ben is also doing a webinar on mobile and social in February.
• In March, John will be leading a recruiting leader roundtable with global recruiting managers in the UK, and Carmen will be doing something similar here in Seattle for local recruiting managers.

Learn more on our events calendar page: recruitingtoolbox.com/events/speaking/calendar/ 

Please shoot us an email if you plan to attend any of the big recruiting events this year.  We’d love to say Hello in person.

Thanks!

John

Many blog posts and articles have been written over the years about the “Future of Recruiting”, and those articles typically focus on technology.  This is not one of those articles.  This is about the future of our profession.

Almost 20 years ago, I graduated from college and started my Recruiting career.  Looking back, it was a very much of a transitional period for our profession, particularly for the corporate recruiting function.  Corporate Recruiting was beginning the transition from being a highly transactional, relatively unsophisticated function to one that over the next two decades would start to embrace new technology, sourcing, assessment and selection tools and methodologies.  Corporate Recruiting became more and more specialized, adding in new roles focused on sourcing, employment branding, in-house executive recruiting, social media and more.  One thing that did not change much however in that time is how people entered the recruiting profession and how they learned and mastered their craft.

For the most part, people have become Recruiters accidentally and have learned through mostly on-the-job with the occasional sprinkling in of conferences, articles and either corporate, vendor or consultant-led training.  Recruiting Toolbox (disclaimer: the firm that I work for) is a fine example of a consultant-led training provider, with training built upon years-and-years of proven methods, best-practices, and practitioner expertise.

Other resources for learning such as ERE, Recruiting Trends, Recruiting Blogs, local SMA chapters or grassroots local groups like the one I run, recruitDC, as well as a variety of vendor-led webinars, user-conferences and whitepapers, have also done a fine job of filling a massive gap in educational resources for our profession.

I think a lot about the future of the profession that I have embraced and loved for just about half of my lifetime.  When I think about it though, I have a lot of concerns.  I’m concerned that not many people outside of our profession understand what we do or what impact we have on our organizations.  I’m concerned about our profession’s ability to attract highly-talented, well-aligned individuals in a more deliberate manner.  I’m concerned about our profession’s ability to train and develop everyone in a more consistent and systematic way.  When it comes to the future of our profession and the Corporate Recruiting Function in particular, I am most concerned about our ability to advance and grow our profession without standards, an academic discipline and effective advocacy.

In the coming weeks and months, I hope to spark a conversation through a series of blog posts and articles, both here on the Recruiting Toolbox blog and through other channels, regarding what do we as a profession want to become?  What is our profession’s potential?  How much more effective could we be if education and training of our own was seen as a top priority?  What would the Future of Recruiting look like if the profession was to become more united, transparent, collaborative, standardized and understood?

With each blog post and article, I would like to invite your opinions and feedback.  This time around, what does the Future of Recruiting look like to you and what can be done to build and grow the profession that we know and love?

If you can’t see the video, click here Recruiter, Fill my Req by New Year’s! to watch it on YouTube

Happy Holidays!

p.s. We made this little video a few years ago, but it still rings true for many of us!  :)