RecruitingTools.com » Social Recruiting

Free Recruiting Webinar: Building Your Talent Community In 30 Minutes A Day by Maren Hogan

admin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:12:02 +0000

Maren Hogan – Talent Community Expert, Social Media Maven, all around cool person.

Our last webinar went over the limit over 1K attendees and nearly crashed our system! Don’t get left out this week as @MarenHogan is presenting a very tactical webinar Thursday 2-23-12 on “Building your talent community in 30 minutes a day”.

Register Here Get your free “How to: Social Recruiting” white paper from iCIMS.

Everyone who registers for our Webinar HERE will get a copy of the white paper PLUS 12 free Power Boolean Searches: Register for the webinar HERE

Building a talent community is hard work. Doing it in 30 minutes a day is ridiculous! but Maren Hogan will show you it can be done. Can it? Join her 30 minute session on 2-23-12 to see the strategy and tactical tools she uses: Register HERE

All registrants will receive 12 FREE Power Boolean Searches when you register for the upcoming ICIMS Webinar presented by @MarenHogan: “Building Talent Communities in 30 minutes a day”: Register Here

Sponsored by iCIMS and RecruitingBlogs.com

Talent Communities are great. The Recruiters Suck

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:58:42 +0000

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Engagement. What is it? What does it mean? And how do you measure it? It’s a tough question, and I will jump to say that the vast majority of companies, corporate or vendor based running a form of social campaign

have no clue.

The last few years have seen corporate talent operations engulf social media or “social recruiting” (Google has no definition) as the only absolute in their organization. I want to be clear that I am a firm believer in social and 2^nd generation connecting for the purpose of talent acquisition. But I am a bigger fan of process and meaningful connecting. I talk about it a bit here in the 4 c’s, Engagement and the Electronic Exchange.

This past week I was a silent participant in a recruiting conversation offline that opened my eyes to how dangerously clueless a lot of recruiting leaders are. (Silent as I sat in but remained quiet)

This is a serious problem that will only lead to greater failures. These are large mega companies with billion dollar brands and trillion dollar dreams. Companies that on the surface have elegantly articulated the process for their talent community but have genuinely failed at any backend process that would be recognized as mediocre.

The conversation was around engagement and metrics within the talent community. What do we need to measure and how do we measure it? The companies will 100% remain anonymous and I will not share the participants, but I will share a few good things that came out of the call.

Building and measuring a talent community are 2 separate challenges. How to measure and what metrics “we” (collectively) need and/or want to measure:

Engagement: Engagement was defined as how the organization would approach potential prospects or visitors to the named landing page or community page. Some ideas included activities, contests, give a ways and so on. The end result was an agreement that the engagement must consist of a way to attract potential talent; which I agree with.

The question posed was: What metrics you currently use to measure return on engagement activities? Though I felt this could have been a deeper conversation here are the notes that I gathered during the call.

Metrics to monitor when assessing the return on your talent community efforts: (Not an exhaustive list but a few to get the conversation started):

Content: Content is king and the king will always win. Great content generates great engagement. Though I agree with this there was no serious breakout of what great content is. I am not even sure you can label great content. Great content is in perspective of the reader. My feeling is that you need to understand your target audience and why they are visiting your site or reading your content.

It’s important to understand your goal and have a clearly defined plan on how you will get there and how you will navigate around the roadblocks that will arise. And arise they will.

Content tracking can be accomplished rather quickly and easily with programs like Google Analytics but study these before you choose. There are others that will fit your specific needs better than the standard free applications.
Tracking stickiness: how long a reader was reading your content and how many click thru’s they had during their visit. Did they click 1 article or 4? And which article where they? Were they related to the entrance point they came through to get onto your site or did you entice them to read additional articles that are not related to the original reason they visited your work? Another nice tool I find helps is Yahoo’s Index Tools.
Content Downloads: i.e. whitepapers, research, abstracts. Did you convert the visitor into a candidate? A visitor is a prospect. Do not be fooled by your statistics telling you that you had 600 visitors today but 50 where unique and you only had 5 downloads of the content you wanted to push out.
Measure Subscriptions to your community and to your links or feeds. There are free and paid services. I prefer some of the the paid for tracking details however you can always use free services like a mailchimp (to an extent) but a very strong service or you use an open source like PhP if you can handle it on your own.

A career blog for example that has 17,000 subscribers looks good, but is it relevant? This is the same argument as being a top 10 connector on LinkedIn. What does this get you? Access to more people? On the surface yes, but relevance..not a chance in hell. We’ll discuss that in another post, but you can read bit on relevance at Boolean Blackbelt and Glen’s post on LinkedIn’s Competitive advantage.

Target your network accordingly. If you are focused on sales recruiting than have a plan to target your top prospects (companies not individuals) and work out a way to effectively convert them into a candidate.

Recruiter return is a serious metric that without fail needs to be measured, tracked and monitored. Your recruiters are the face of your organization. Their attitude tells the story. Their ability to effectively articulate the message decides whether or not the prospect is converted into a candidate.

I will leave on the note of “recruiter return” and tackle that in the next installment.

Site Surfing and Brand Management for Recruiters

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 15:00:03 +0000

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As a recruiter one of your key drivers is to create value around your insights. Creating this value can sometimes be a difficult task. Having the proper tools to efficiently mine conversations and comments better ref, “micro-conversations” will provide you with some great ammunition when targeting prospects both candidates and clients.

I’ll look at this from 3 different perspectives and show you one of my favorite mining tools in the video below. When leveraging these tools I really focus on 3 key areas; Candidate prospecting, Client prospecting, and Personal brand management.

As difficult as it can get, with the proper tools it can be easier. And I’ll stress the ier part of that because this job is not a cake walk. But having the ability to set filters, targets and mediums allows you to get inside of the candidates and clients world is essential.

One of the first rules of social media or social recruiting is listening. It’s about understanding how to build your social world around you in an effective and efficient matter that I refer to as the 4C’s.

Understanding where and how you prospective candidates and clients are communicating with each other will not just provide you with some critical messaging but will allow you to be genuine in your approach and help you to refrain from sounding like a sales person that just read up on the company website.

Here are 2 key tools we’ve been playing with and find to be pretty solid:

WhosTalkin

This is a failry in depth search tool with free acces to monitor conversations online across more than 60 top social media sites. You can use the tool direct from their site at WhosTalkin or you can use the very cool iGoogle widget or one of teir 2 search plugins below.

Click here to add gadget.

Browser Search Plugin

The WhosTalkin Browser Search Plugin brings the power of the WhosTalkin.com platform straight to your browser search bar! You can now use the WhosTalkin.com Platform by simply typing in your search request into your browser’s search bar. To install check out the video guides below.

Installation Instructions for Firefox

Installation Instructions for Internet Explorer

Quarkbase

Quarkbase provides an easier way to find website information. You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase

‘whois on steroids’ or ‘imdb for websites’. Quarkbase saves you from spending hours on search engine finding website details, as it provides you with up-to-date information in seconds for free!

Why we like it:

This is a great site for gathering key compeitor infor for free in an easy to read and real time format
You can serch by topics, category or industry sites
Tracks realt time updates including twitter
With nothing more than the website address you can serach individual controbutors in your competitors

Give these 2 tools a try and subscribe here to get updates on more tools like these.

JobKatch and Hashable: Jobsearch / Sourcing Super Power

mikevandervort — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 20:00:43 +0000

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One of the major benefits of using social media in a job search is that it allows you to build a bigger network of connections. Given the reach of social media, the size of these networks can grow large in size, requiring powers far beyond those of mortal men to manage.

Fortunately, you can now download super-powers off the Interwebs. These super-powers are now called apps.

Here are a couple of apps that will help you crank up your networking super-powers

Jobkatch is a social CRM, now in open beta that allows you to add a bookmarklet tool to your browser that registers your job leads to JobKatch from any other web site. This will allow you to add as many job leads to your account as you want, and review them at your leisure.

According to their site, Jobkatch is designed to help make searching for a job easier.

We give job seekers a great set of tools to make their search as effective as possible. We’ll help you organize all your job search information, including leads, companies, contacts, communication, and to-do’s and feel that our solution will keep you on task and help you find that new job as fast as possible.

JobKatch can be described as a Social CRM system for Job Seekers. JobKatch can tap into your online and offline networking connections to help you identify the people you should be reaching out to help you achieve your job search goals.

Hashable is a tool (still in private beta)that uses the power of Twitter to make professional introductions in three simple ways, through Twitter, email, or its website. This profile from TechCrunch describes how #Hashable works:

On Twitter, all you need to do is include the Twitter handles of the two people you want to introduce as well as @hashable, and the hashtag “#intro.” For instance, if I wanted to introduce investor/entrepreneur Chris Dixon to VC Fred Wilson (assuming they didn’t already know each other), I would Tweet out something like “@cdixon meet @fredwilson, you guys would get along #intro cc @hashable.” Then Hashable would put out another Tweet to both of them with a short link to an icebreaker page on Hashable with some bio information from each one and a quick way to reply via Twitter. The icebreaker page also shows Twitter followers both people share in common.

Hashable also works through email by simply sending an email to both people and Ccing post@hashable.com. (You can do private introductions through email by CCing dontpost@hashable.com). Each recipient will get an email with the other’s bio in the body of the email. Finally, there is an intro tool on Hashable.com which creates either Twitter or email intros automatically. The bio info is pulled from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Hashable profiles. A few days after each intro, Hashable follows up with each recipient to see if they connected.

Pretty cool tools to add to your job search arsenal! If you know a cool tool, mention it in the comments.
This post was written by Michael VanDervort. Michael writes on human resources, labor realtions, and social media issues at the Human Race Horses Blog. He also walks dogs.

22 Tutorials and Insight Posts on #Recruiting with #Linkedin

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 11:30:50 +0000

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Top LinkedIn Sourcing Posts from RecruitingTools.com and some of our friends:

Sourcing and Video Tutorials:

These tutorials were gathered from various sites including RecruitingTools.com, BooleanBlackbelt and StaffBytes.

Articles about LinkedIn (Links direct to Arbita’s blog. Great info and resources.)

Here is the direct link to Arbita’s LinkedIn page: http://aces.arbita.net/LinkedIn

#SocialRecruiting for College Grads just got Easier

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:17:30 +0000

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, but a reference article about social recruiting for college grads. CollegeRecruiter has been a client of our company before however.

Riddle me this: What has more than 17 million candidates with more than 10 million active and graduating students and more than 7 million recent grads wanting to work for you? Or maybe this: What has hundreds of thousands of entry level jobs and internships waiting for you to see?

I asked Steven Rothberg and he proudly told me CollegeRecruiter.com. Have you heard of it? If not, you might not want to admit that. It’s been around since 1991 and recently has gone through facelift to emphasize social recruiting for college grads. I had lunch with Steven a short while ago and we spoke about what the evolution of job boards and social integration into the name termed “social communities”

You may have received an email from Steven and his group this past weekend but if not I encourage you to goes check out their new digs. It’s packed with video, reference material and candidates.

Pros:

Companies targeting college students or recent grads have the opportunity to create sub groups to court potential talent.
It’s built on the NING network which is fast, reliable and allows for complete interaction between employers, recruiters and candidates.
Video is plentiful and the resource section for college students and employers is overstock with great info.
Employers can have a “spotlight” page advertising your brand to your target audience.

Cons:

I wish I had this when I graduated
I wish I had that massive database of candidates to source from on my pc
I wish this was my idea

Didn’t receive the email? No worries, here it below:

We just re-launched CollegeRecruiter.com and I guarantee you it is radically different from just about any “job board” you have ever seen! Our web site always did have thousands of white papers and blogs for students, recent grads and employers. But now? Now we are offering so much more:

Our new Web 2.0 site emphasizes user generated content and facilitates interaction between job seekers, employers, career counselors, and others. At the same time, we have preserved the ability for job seekers to search and apply to your job posting ads.
Candidates will now search for jobs, click on posting summaries, and immediately be taken to your web site to both read the posting and apply to it. Think Google, where you search Google and then go to the third party site to read the information.
Candidates can post profiles on our site and you may review those and contact the candidates directly — at no charge.
We anticipate that we will continue to see hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors per month from our primary target markets of job seekers and employers but we will now also see significant use and great content from college career service office professionals, career counselors, resume writers, admissions counselors and more.
We’ve built hundreds of Employer Spotlight pages for the top employers of college students and recent grads. The current job openings of those employers will automatically appear on those Spotlight pages … even if the employer has not paid us to do so. Realistically, most candidates who come to CollegeRecruiter.com don’t know about your opportunities so they’re unlikely to go first to your Spotlight page. They’re more likely to run a job search by entering their location, desired job title, and other keywords. If you want your postings to come up at the top of the search results, which is necessary get a good response rate, post your jobs to CollegeRecruiter.com and therefore also our network of thousands of complimentary niche career sites.
Video, video, video! Employers and other users may post videos at no charge, helping them better connect with job seekers. Want to do this today? Go to your Employer Spotlight page or create one of your own if we do not yet have one for you and copy the embed code for your videos on YouTube etc. and paste it into the Spotlight page.

It seems like a great new tool for college recruiting, and I like that it uses social recruiting ideas to approach this demographic. Let me know your thoughts about CollegeRecruiter and if you have had luck sourcing college grads using other social recruiting methods.

#TwitterJobSearch = “Tweet This Job Button” w/@williamfischer

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:12:08 +0000

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The team at TwitterJobSearch is up to it again. I’ve written about these guys a few times because I like them. Genuinely nice people and the product just makes sense for recruiters. Twitter can certainly be an asset to recruiters but it’s often a detractor. The team at Work Digital are working to make some of these features more efficient for recruiters.

I spoke with Bill Fischer and his thoughts are: “We’re going through the popular Twitter tools one-by-one to build specialized versions for recruitment.”

Thoughts?

Using the same basic concept popularized by the Re-Tweet buttons now used by almost every major publisher and blog, the Tweet This Job button is designed to easily share job offers via Twitter.

Provides a Small Button that can be easily added to each job spec,
Creates a customizable Tweet utilizing best-practices for job Tweets,
Builds a tiny URL that links directly to the job,
Uses Twitter OAuth – to securely and quickly facilitate Tweeting

Tweet this Job not only makes it easy for employees and fellow job seekers to share a job offer with their friends/colleagues but it also demonstrates how common Twitter tools are being repackaged for industry specific usages. This button can put your jobs in front of millions of Twitter users, help them to be indexed to major search engines and all it requires copying and pasting a simple bit of code, found here.

By placing the Tweet This Job button on your job board, recruitment consultancy or company career site, you can use Twitter as a free distribution channel by utilizing the network of job seekers you already have engaged.

Tweet This Job

5 Free Job Posting Sites for #Recruiters and #Employers

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:02:09 +0000

If it’s free, it’s for me. That seems to be the mantra these days. We’ve been getting a lot of questions around free resources not just for sourcing but for job posting as well. Here are 5 free job posting sites that I use to help spread the word of openings I am working.

(This is not a sponsored posting and the services below are not clients at the time of this posting.)

5 Free Job Posting Boards and a brief overview with the text taken directly from their websties without modification.

Here are 5 Free job posting and Spidering sites in no particular order of preference.

Resumark.com (Text is from the Resumark.com website)

Unlike most other job websites on the Internet, we will list your jobs for free. That’s right – you can post as many jobs as you want – completely free. We are the first website to come up with this idea and here is how it works:

ZipRecruiter.com (Text is from theZipRecruiter.com website)

ZipRecruiter offers a do it yourself web based hiring solution as an alternative to recruiters. Founded in 2010, Ziprecruiter enables companies to post to multiple free job boards with a single submission and vet all applicants through simple-to-setup online interviews. Hiring personnel can toggle between applicants answers and resumes online as they collaborate to rate and select the best candidate.

Jobvertise.com (Text is from the Jobvertise.com website)

Jobvertise basic services are FREE to employers and jobseekers because we generate our revenue through premium services and advertising on the site. As an employer using the basic services you never have to pay a fee to post jobs or search over 800,000 resumes in our database!*

JobZoom.com (Text is from the JobZoom.com website)

To make posting easier, we want to go beyond the norm. You have the option of posting INSTANTANEOUSLY, without lengthy processes, boring signups, or hassle, in under a minute your job is up and running, it activates simply through email. BUT… if you want to easily manage jobs on your very own DASHBOARD where you can edit and delete jobs right there on one screen… we recommend a free member account. click here for the dashboard area We have many more features coming and job posting will only get smoother.

JobSpider.com (Text is from the JobSpider.com website)

JobSpider.com is a free employment information exchange job board actually modeled from http://www.craigslist.org. My name is Chris McGarry and I designed it because I was looking for a network administrator and it was frustrating to not see an intuitive and nicely organized free job board. The response has obviously been overwhelming and my “small project” has blossomed into a very popular job board that, in many ways, rivals the big boys (i.e. Monster, HotJobs, etc.).

JobSpider.com is FREE to employers and jobseekers. There is no charge to post a resume, post job(s), search through the resumes, search through the jobs, or create a job alert. JobSpider.com is FREE to employers and jobseekers because I generate revenue through advertising on the site. The only fee that I will charge is to bulk import jobs for employers.

Free job posting sites used to contain very little functionality, or at worst, be a simple forum of spam type posts without very much value. However, it seems now like free job boards may be able to offer some interesting services. Free job posting is here to stay and will keep the non free job boards innovating and adding more value for recruiters, employers, and job seekers.

Jobvite Launches a Free #SocialRecruiting Tool: Jobvite Share

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:39:25 +0000

Jobvite kicks A$$ right? I think so. And today they’ve got some great news to share with everyone. Today marks the release of a free social recruiting tool to help recruiters with their sourcing activities. It’s different than your normal sourcing tool and really gives you an idea of the effectiveness of the full Jobvite experience.

I’ve used it this morning but I haven’t gone through a complete review just yet. I will certainly do so this week and report back with my findings, but I can tell you it is different than the sourcing tools you are using today and certainly worth the try. It’s free!

Try the tool here for free: Click Here

Here are the key features of the new tool:

Anne Murguia, Jobvites VP of Marketing say: “It’s completely free, and makes it easy for anyone, at any company of any size, to use the social web to find the best candidates for job openings. Jobvite Share combines the exponential reach of social networks with real-time tracking to provide a targeted, analytical approach to online recruiting.”

Key Jobvite Share Features:

Share – By entering a URL or job description, users get short, trackable Jobvite links to share anywhere on the social Web. Users can send Jobvites to individual contacts or post to social networks, blogs and job boards. The Jobvites are optimized for each social network, and the user can post to multiple networks at once, creating a far more efficient recruiting process.

Target – Users can instantly select and target appropriate contacts to share a Jobvite in their social networks or email address books; Jobvite matching technology selects the most relevant profiles from the user’s network for the job. Those recipients can pass on the Jobvites to matches in their networks as well – quickly expanding Jobvites’ targeted reach across the web to find more qualified candidates.

Track – Users can track and label multiple shortened links to see results for each source in real-time. Jobvite Share provides the metrics needed to see what works – and what does not – in job marketing and distribution, including views, clicks, forwards and clicks to apply; all metrics are tracked by individual channel (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email) and can follow referrals as they spread across the web.

I’m sure we’ll see more free social recruiting tools announced in the near future, because there is so much interest in social networking. Social recruiting seems free at first, but of course there are a lot of considerations and it takes a lot of work. I expect more software to come out like this one that automate various aspects of social recruiting. We will be sure to write about any social recruiting services, but especially ones like this that are free for recruiters.

*Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, but rather a quick objective review of a new social recruiting tool. However, Jobvite has been a client at other times, so please know this and consider all your options when making a purchasing decision.

6 Things a Hiring Manager looks for in a #Recruiting partner

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:48:09 +0000

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This post was contributed by Michael Goldberg can be found on Twitter “@SuperRecruiter”

All this hype around Cleveland Cavalier guard Labron James – will he be a Net, Knick, Cavs, Bulls? Is he the next Michael Jordan? Magic Johnson? Larry Bird? No! Each one of the players mentioned had a major impact for elevating the level of play for their teams and the NBA. However, when you look at the four players mentioned…whose the odd man out? Who hasn’t elevated his A-game come playoff time and who hasn’t won a title. Sorry Cleveland! Labron James. So why and how does this relate to recruiting?

When you look at Michael, Magic, and Larry you need to look at the teams they played on. Each player had other A-level impact players on the team which helped them win a world champion. Who are the other A-level impact players on the Cavs. Sorry again Cleveland (and Shaq)…no one. Corporate teams whether in Sales, Operations, Accounting, or Human Resources need to have a team of supporting cast members that bring their A-game every day. When one or more of those team members leave the organization or transfer to another department, it is up to us as Recruiters to go out and replace that person with the same type of play style in order for the department to stay on top of their game.

We can use Google, ReferYes, LinkedIn and play a game of source till the cows come home but it is up to us as recruiters to educate our hiring managers to go beyond the buzzword bingo and identify A-level talent. Not to switch gears, but one of the best books a recruiter can read is MoneyBall by Michael Lewis. It’s about my other favorite sport-baseball.

In his book, Lewis discusses how the Oakland Athletics used sabermetrics vs. traditional statistics to find the best talent and at an economical price and helped produce one of the hottest teams in baseball during the late 90s and early 00s. Sabermetrics is the objective knowledge around the game of baseball. A good example of this focuses on reasoning saying the number of runs wins the game and not high batting averages. Recruiters and hiring managers tend to take the subjective approach or the batting averages and says this candidate is the best because he has tenure, he is a currently working, and he has all the skills you are looking for. Boom! The candidate is hired at big money and thought to be the A-level talent but turns out the department cannot progress forward. 12 months later –gone!

We tend to think that high dollar talent equals A-level talent when that is definitely not the case. I have talked to that type of talent and find them to be average at best. Why because they want to be the superstar and when they enter the organization will mow down anyone that tries to get in his/her way. Here are some of the objective stats I look for along with the technical skills my hiring manager seeks:

Level of engagement – candidates who take the time to ensure I understand their world. The best IT types I have recruited have stopped to explain how the technology works together. This is key especially when this person will be asked to engage business leaders and speak in layman’s terms.
Consistent enthusiasm for each position they have held –hearing the enthusiasm will transfer to positive energy for team dynamics on your hiring manager’s team
True understanding of their role, the department’s role, and the company’s vision
Accomplishments centered on team play and not just individual play.
Passion for the work they do everyday –from the tactical to the strategic tasks
Money is not the most important factor to be hired..yes, I said that.

I take a two pronged approach in delivering candidates. Not only do I send a write up of the must have skills, but I also schedule a call with my hiring managers to talk about objective points for consideration. Encourage your managers during their face to face interviews to ask questions around those objective points and listen carefully to their responses as well as watch the nonverbal cues to determine if those characteristics are present.

Real world example-After 10 years with AT&T Chris Hoyt (aka The RecruiterGuy) decided to make a move to Pepsico /Frito-Lay. If you have not read Chris’ blog (www.therecruiterguy.com), you will understand how much of a rock star this recruiter is. Jim Schnyder recognized that Pepsico / Frito-Lay someone with Chris’ accomplishments, knowledge, passion, and enthusiasm he has for recruiting. With so much A-Talent on one team, that recruiting team will win the title every year.

SO…looking for the next Labron James or would you want a Shane Battier on your team? Read the article and see what I am talking about: http://is.gd/cfvk7

Are there other objective factors you look for? Reply to the blog and share!