On a warm fall day in Boston a few dozen recruiters and TA professionals gathered to talk shop. Held at the swank ALOFT in Boston, we sat is a purple glow of lights like something out of a Star Trek movie. Put on by BLR, the event brought together industry pros such as myself, Joel Cheesman and Susan Vitale of iCIMS.

I took notes from most of the speakers throughout the day and jotted down some of the highlights/tips they talked about. My session was on career sites and I’ll be publishing that audio on the RecTech podcast in the coming weeks.

Part of the TA team from Definitive Healthcare spoke about their recruiting challenges and successes;

• HR needs a long term vision
• Don’t fall into “talent traps’ like we just need a body
• Candidate experience: pretend every candidate is a secret shopper.
• They hold group information nights (aka open house)  and conducts peed interviewing for candidates that show up (evenings from 530-8) where they look for “minglers” who tend to be the best candidates. Later they would gather the recruiting team and discuss fav candidates around pizza.
• Make a point to interview all your referred candidates
• Always do a face to face interview with internal candidates

Joel Cheesman from Ratedly Talked about Glassdoor and Company review sites;

• 92% of candidates look at review sites (gulp)
• 1 in 3 people will decline a job offer because of negative reviews
• Doing it right: Uber leaves a public email address in every response
• Need to respond to both positive and negative reviews
• Other review sites you may not know: Kununu, FairyGodBoss, Comparably, Reddit, Blind (mobile app) and traditional sources like Twitter and Quora

Elena Valentine from SkillScout showed off some great job description examples;

• Most job descriptions described as a laundry list, a legal doc, ugh!
• JD’s come in many forms text, video, images
• HR is the ‘chief story teller’, need to tell more stories in JD’s
• Types of things to add to your JD’s – Aspirations: How can i grow into this role? Impact: how does the role fit into company mission
• Audience member said: “I get more responses by sharing what the job is, not what we need“.
• Use Google and Indeed trends to see what keywords are popular to add to your JD

Susan Vitale from iCIMS spoke about how to make recruiting technology work for you;

• “Job seekers are in control”: 83% of recruiters feel power has shifted to candidates
• Survey: company mission is not the most important thing to millennial’s—salary is!
• Things you need on your career site: be able to mark jobs that are of interest (save for later)
• Things you need on your career site: Customized job recommendations
• Things you need on your career site: Easy mobile apply
• Companies spend $4,000 on average to fill a job req
• Survey: Linkedin, Facebook and Glassdoor are the most important channels for candidates
• Content for social media be sure to include a call to action (search our jobs)
• Recruitment MUST embrace marketing (Amen sister!)
• Advantage Solutions hires cheese demo’ers for Costco stores…they call all candidates within 15 mins of applying!
• 39.5% of their career site traffic is mobile
• 20% of candidates apply via mobile
• Best content to share on career site: Advancement possibilities, Work/life balance, Exec team, Department overviews, Culture and values
• Hire more marketing in HR! (amen again)
• more than 2/3 of candidates have quit an application because it was too long

Devon Brown, Recruiting Mgr from Hubspot talked about perfecting your communication strategy;

• Hubspot responds to every review on Glassdoor
• Leverage more video, do more employee testimonials
• Tip: have your hiring manager send follow up email to 5 strong passive candidates
• they leverage co-workers Linkedin connections…who do you know