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/
