If its early August you can usually find me on summer vacation. But not this year.

Instead I hopped an Amtrak train down to Philly to attend the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference held at the Doubletree on Broad Street.

Roughly 150-200 practitioners and a small number of vendors outside the keynote area attended and it was all emceed by diversity expert/podcaster Torin Ellis. I already have some audio from the event on the RecTech Podcast.

Alison Kruse, Marketing Director at Kforce spoke about creating content for employers;

• Candidates use 12-18 pieces of content before applying to your job
• Must understand the people you are targeting, personas
• Utility X inspiration X empathy = quality content
• Content mapping allows you to prioritize the content you create
• Utility = help candidates unburden, help them with useful content
• Every month: Testimonials, office photos, etc each month – they have an analytics party and review content performance
• Content can help advance the right fit people to the next stage in journey by aligning what matters to them
• Inspiration: no stock photos!
• People want to know who really works there
• Your content should be designed for mobile…break it into chunks
• Replace I or We with YOU to shift to the candidates POV (pic)
• Suggest content for your employees to share…will amplify its reach
• Fight recruiter spam…i’m hiring… i’m hiring….stop!
• Content Ratio 1:5 1 is job post 5 is other content
• Create candidate journey content map …start small be realistic about pace
• Per day: LI 1- 3x per day, twitter more often, Fb less so

Alyssa Gioscia, Senior Client Success Manager, CareerArc spoke on Walking the Talent Tech Tightrope: Balancing Automation & Personalization in the Candidate Experience 

• 82% of candidates are frustrated with an overly automated recruiting experience
• Replace human interaction where it doesn’t make sense: Where to automate: social job distribution, feedback to candidates on process and timeline
• Automation aids transparency, saves recruiters time, keeps things moving and everyone in the loop
• Makes sense in social job distribution, text to apply, resume screening, first rd interviews (scheduling)…
• Half of candidates never hear back upon applying
• Acknowledge receipt of resume, declines candidates and offer transition assistance (example: Rejobify)
• 92% of ppl would consider changing jobs if offered a role with comp who had a great reputation
• By investing in EB you can reduce turnover by 28% (office Vibe)
• Responding to  Glassdoor review can enhance your rep with candidates
• EVP: conduct an employer brand audit check GD, survey employees etc
• Leverage current employees—advocacy—50% of your employees are already talking about your comp on social media
• Candidates trust what your employees say vs your career site content
• Promote what candidates will learn and how they can grow
• Use more video 30 sec or less
• Engage ppl with imagery…memes, pugs, hedgehog babies
• Reuse/recycle your best content
• Takes 10 touchpoints for active candidate to engage with you…for passives its more like 17 times
• Have a call to action

Kerry Noone, Employment Branding & Recruitment Marketing at CVS spoke on how they communicate with heart.

• They track EVERYTHING @KerryNoone with over 130K new hires a year and 2M applicants,
• Email campaign sent to 2.1 million, they received 803 applicants in the first hour
• They have a talent community
• Empowers recruiters with data conversion rates etc
• Career site : google cloud search, real employees video on home page, areas of interest…
• Candidate are surveyed about career site experience
• Job seekers dont necessarily understand what it means to “work with urgency” JDs need to explain it better
• Her team uses Asana to manage and track everything in Recruitment Marketing
• Leveraging Altru for intern videos
• 2 twitter feeds one just for all job postings…@cvshealthjobs vs @cvscareers
• Returning visits page was 2nd most trafficked, 3rd most was the how to apply page
• Use Olivia chatbot for engagement for all jobs to answer FAQs, benefits
• They still do paper flyers with QR codes tracked thru bit.ly

Crystal Miller Lay, CEO, Branded Strategies spoke about Omni Channel Recruitment Strategies.

• Multi channel is a challenge to manage and setup
• Over 80% of your candidates leave your careers site without applying the first time around.
• suggests looking at unique places to reach your candidates. Highlighting @Spotify which offers affordable ad pricing for recruitment marketing. 
• You don’t want #candidates to see the same content on every channel. You want to tell a story that unfolds across your channels

Abby Cheesman from Skill Scout gave a great talk on DIY Job Videos 

• They have done 1500 videos and counting
• Job post vs reality of the job…be real
• Only 1% of job postings have visuals
• Candidates will look at your job desc for 7-8 secs
• They did the SAC wireless tower video that got 500k views
• Video should show you everything about the job so you can make a good decision to apply
• SAC launched it in a company town hall which sped the sharing of it
• Candidates look at a job 3x longer if it has video
• We are wired for stories
• Be specific, be authentic, 2 min or less… avg view time 1:35
• Focus on top 2-3 tasks, minimize talking heads 
• Variety of shots/angles
• 55% of active job seekers say employee-generated content is more credible and trustworthy. 
• Film horizontally, only need a few things tripod, mic, phone
• Great question to ask: what surprised you the most about your job?
• If DIY, Dont let HR person interview employee, let their peers do it for a more authentic conversation

Panel Discussion: Empowering the Candidate Experience…Led by Gerry Crispin

• Candidate experience has really grown in importance to TA over past 2 years
• Apply to your own jobs and your competitor jobs to see how you compare
• Try to personalize the candidate experience more …if they like LaCroix be sure to give them one
• Setting candidate expectations is critical to an improved experience
• Measurement: stories that you hear, reviews, candidate survey
• Even having a bottle of water for the candidate at the interview improves the candidate experience. Interviewing can be stressful, and little touches like this can make a strong impression on the candidate.

The Four Pillars of Talent Attraction from Josh Gampel, CEO, Recruitics

Top of funnel: Companies spend half their budget on ads that don’t work 80% jobs /49% budget /2% jobs

• Pillar 1 progranmmatic
• Pillar 2 targeted advertising
• Pillar 3 employer brand
• Pillar 4 sourcing and engagement
• Need to be able to measure –foundational element #1
• Why dies someone need to work for you EVP messaging –foundational element #2
• 7 years ago there were only 3 ppc sites now a ton across the industry
• Look at non converting jobs getting traffic but not enough applies…
• Drive enagement with candidates who express interest…then nurture them over time (talent network)
• Use social to capture “leads” not resumes
• 64% of seekers research a company before applying
• 37% say they will move on to another company if they cant find any info on you…you need more branding
• Pic of takeaways

Talent Architecture: How Wayfair Designs Talent Acquisition to Scale by Elliott Garlock, Global Head of Employer Branding, Wayfair

• Recruiting at scales gone from 5k employees to 15k in 3 years
• Wayfair is a data driven biz unit
• Organized like traditional dept but they hire non traditional people to run it
• Redesigning their talent architecture and layer diff tech on top of it
• First step collect the data about employees, candidates and prospects
• Then need strategy for the data
• Have to strike the right balance of tech/marketing/sales
• Got to spread the word about why you should come work there
• Multiple brand messages to diff candidate types
• You need 3 key pieces, HCM (employees) ATS Candidates CRM prospects
• Wayfair has team on content specialists to feed their social media
• Did a session on Quora about what its like to be a data scientist on the site…hundreds of thousands of views
• Investing heavily into programmatic advertising via (Joveo)
• For a Berlin Engineering job campaign – 3 months, 10k spend
• 17,212k clicks, 1712 aps, 8 hires
• They also do a l lot of outdoor media with QR codes
• 17 applies off an ad on a street sign!!!
• Rely heavily on outbound, they have tons of LI seats
• Just hired a video guy from nbc who’s made 15 videos in 15 days…head of content is from newspaper.
• They are a “Content animal…3 long form blog posts targeted to tech candidates…https://tech.wayfair.com/