Next Generation Recruiting
‘A vision for the future of recruiting’
Revisiting Recruitment 3.0 & 4.0 and introducing Recruitment 5.0
Matthew Jeffery, Amy McKee
Please note: The views in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of LinkedIn or Autodesk. They are published as
one vision on the future of recruiting and the purpose is informative, educational and to prompt debate among recruiting
professionals. Thank you
1 Next Generation Recruiting
A vision for the future of recruiting
Revisiting Recruitment 3.0 & 4.0 and introducing Recruitment 5.0
Matthew Jeffery
Amy McKee
Foreword
Welcome to LinkedIn’s Talent Connect Las Vegas and to ‘Next Generation Recruiting’ which is a collection
of ideas and philosophies about the future of recruiting.
This is a comprehensive read. It is meant to stimulate new ideas. We don’t seek to answer all questions
but to try and provide food for thought. The great thing about recruiting is that we are constantly coming up
with innovative ways to identify, attract and engage the best talent.
FOR THE RECORD
No company has mastered the new recruiting….be it the use of social media, E-Branding or mobile
recruiting but it’s kind of fun trying to get there, isn’t it?
This paper provides one vision for the future of recruiting. Maybe you have different ideas. In which case
we look forward to hearing more about them as we only progress by being challenged and embracing new
ideas.
People ask us why we have written such a paper. Our goal is to put back into the industry we love and
stimulate debate. We want to continue to elevate our profession and the impact recruiters have on a
company’s bottom line. Dip into the sections that interest you and enjoy!
Viva Las Vegas. Viva recruiting.
Matthew & Amy
October 2012: LinkedIn Talent Connect Las Vegas Keynotes
2 Index
Dive into the sections that interest you
Description
Overview
Preamble
Recruitment 1.0 & 2.0
Setting the scene
Describing how recruitment has evolved
‘Recruitment Lottery’, ‘Offer Poker’, ‘Recruitment circle of life’
What are the challenges that recruiters face?
Recruitment is NOT easy!
What is the end goal for recruiting?
General introduction into the main philosophies of 3.0. Overview of the
core philosophies.
Intro into the passive v Active market. 10% of candidates are active.
90% are not looking.
The definition of a candidate. What turns a passive candidate into
active? Introduction of the ‘pactive’ candidate
The changing Talent landscape
Recruiting Utopia
The core philosophies of
Recruitment 3.0
Philosophy 1: Not Everyone’s
looking
Philosophy 2: Everyone is a
potential candidate or brand
ambassador
Philosophy 3: Employment
Brand is pivotal to your success
Philosophy 4: Candidate
experience is more than a
bounceback email
Philosophy 5: Understanding the
psychology of people
Philosophy 6: You are not in
control of what people are saying
Philosophy 7: Building
relationships and communities is
key (Hence, Social Media)
Philosophy 8: Content is
King…don’t make recruiting
boring
The Recruiter skillsets needed
for Recruitment 3.0
Recruitment 4.0 Introduction
Page
5
6
7
10
10
11
11
Overview of Employment brand. What is one? What are the benefits?
Why is it so important?
13
The stages of the candidate experience.
Recruitment & dating similarities
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17
Stage 1: Notice
Stage 2: Considers
Stage 3: Applies
Pre Interview
Interview
Post Interview
Stage 4: Onboarding
Stage 5: Work
Stage 6: Leaves
Stage 7: Remembers
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21
22
23
23
23
24
24
24
Measuring Candidate Experience
An insight into what makes people tick
25
25
A reminder that Companies cannot control what people say about them
26
The Power of the internet & Social Media Stat Attack
Social Media Recruitment 1.0 Style
Social Media Strategy questions to ask
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33
33
What is a Community
Corporate Communities
How to build a Corporate Community
Engaging a corporate Community
How can Recruiting create ‘engagement’?
Why the need to ‘humanize’ the brand?
What should be the 3 core elements of content?
Is it dangerous for people to have opinions?
Key channels to talent
What examples of talent
Who writes content?
The Channels
Blog
Facebook
- Building the Facebook Community
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Social Media Objections to overcome.
What skills will recruiters need in Recruitment 3.0
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38
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The differentials between 3.0 and 4.0
48
3 Recruiting as a Profit centre
Premium Paid Content
‘External Referrals’ through
‘Crowdsourcing’
Recruiting embraces concepts of
Gamification
The death of recruiting agencies
Job Boards faltering
Global Community rating of
companies
Size doesn’t matter
Recruitment 5.0 Introduction
Mobile recruiting FINALLY takes
off
DNA Footprints in the Cloud.
Obsessively knowing your
audience
Personalization adds to
humanization
The end of the traditional ATS
Emerging Markets emerge…..and
dominate
Augmented Reality & ‘Disruptive
Marketing’
Overview of the core drivers of 4.0.
A radical idea into making recruitment a profit centre in the future.
Gaining value from a community. Community = names. Names = data.
Data = Money & Power
Creating engaging content / VIP areas, that people are happy to pay for
Intro into crowdsourcing. Examples of crowdsourcing. Recruiting and
crowdsourcing.
What is gamification?
Key concepts of gamification.
Why gamification is important to recruiting.
Will recruiting no longer need external agencies?
49
49
Job boards: adapt or die?
Crowdsourcing ‘best companies’ to work for.
57
57
Are all these concepts only applicable to large corporates with budgets?
What can small to medium size companies do?
58
50
51
53
54
56
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Mobile stats
mSite or app
Mobile Apps: Autodesk Mobile App Case Study
DNA Data
We have a problem Houston….ethical concerns
What is big data?
Examples: Tweet Psych
LinkedIn Pole Position
Back to basics. Building candidate relationships. Personalization.
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60
63
64
69
70
70
71
72
73
LinkedIn Talent Pipeline the future?
The real recruiting challenge
74
75
What is augmented reality?
Augmented Reality and recruiting
Augmented reality and mobile case study
The difference between augmented reality and QR codes
The limitations to augmented reality
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78
79
81
82
The end of ‘Social’ Media
We create the
candidate….Candidate Cloning
It’s the end of recruiters as we
know it….
Conclusion
Biographies
Disruptive Marketing & stunt PR: Getting noticed
All media becomes Social
Defining ‘top performers’
Companies create their own talent via their own Universities, courses,
qualifications, bespoke training
The future of recruiters…is there one?
Amy and Matthew
84
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87
88
89
Preamble
It’s great to be a recruiter isn’t it?
But it’s not always easy.
The importance of recruiting can often be overlooked in a business. But recruiting can have the biggest
impact on an organization. Literally what we do can make or break a business. If we attract ‘average’
talent, this impacts the quality of work and ultimately the financial profitability of that business. If we can
attract the best talent, that strengthens an organization and the impact on the bottom line can be
phenomenal. This is why CEO’s are being asked in earnings calls how they will attract ‘the best’ talent.
Talent driven companies tend to the most successful.
We all know recruiting is challenging. We are asked to find the perfect candidate to start tomorrow in a very
competitive recruiting landscape. ‘Mission Impossible’ eat your heart out! Expectations of what we need to
deliver are at times daunting and often unrealistic.
4 In a technology driven and talent short world recruiting is changing. In some ways, it’s going back to the
basics. Back to the basics of being a true sales professional whose goal is to identify, engage and hire the
best talent for an organization. Close the deal!
This LinkedIn paper draws together previous ideas in Recruitment 3.0, 4.0 and adds a final, concluding
chapter, Recruitment 5.0. Experience teaches new lessons and we have revised some of the thoughts
surrounding 3.0 & 4.0 while writing this paper.
Some companies are ahead of others and already embracing many of the elements outlined here. Some
are just embarking and mixing ideas from each philosophy. Before, we look into the future, it is important to
review and learn from the past.
Recruitment 1.0 & Recruitment 2.0
I remember the days when in-house recruiting was easier than today. The recruiter could put their feet up
as candidates responded to job postings. Times were even better for Agency Recruiters working during the
dot.com boom. Many fancy cars and houses were bought from the rewards of generous commissions!
For in-house recruiters, recruiting was as easy as picking up a phone and briefing Agencies, then rocking
back and waiting for the resumes to come pouring in. If you felt a little more adventurous, you would post on
a job board, but still rock back and wait for the response. This was reactive recruiting at its best.
The key limitations for both agency and post and pray was that they focused on the active job seekers.
These methods relied on the recruiting lottery of hoping that the best candidate, with the best skills, who
would be the best fit, was either registered on an agency database or even more randomly was looking at a
jobs board at that moment in time. Sometimes people win the lottery. Some companies were happy to
accept mediocrity. But this route was random and hardly required skill, creativity or business acumen.
One of the downsides of this over reliance on the active job seekers was that often the candidate would be
‘in play’ with several companies including your competitors. They would be in a position to solicit multiple
offers. Hence this would see a game of offer poker start as each company would seek to seduce the
candidate and offer better packages UNTIL internal equity would become a problem, then the seduction
would take the form of sign on bonuses, extra stock etc. etc.
This was, and still is, non-sustainable. Plus the candidate is focusing on financial issues and not on their
career. If a company has not sought to generate an emotional connection with the candidate and develop a
relationship they have not earned the ‘heart and soul’ of the candidate and, most likely, the candidate will
leave. Emotional commitment builds loyalty. Loyalty builds longevity at a company. A common trait of
Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 is the frequent movement of candidates and focus on financials as a career driver.
In the scenario above, the company does not win. Yes the recruiter has a req off the list but most likely
temporarily. Of course the agency wins with a fee of 20%. The hiring manager gets temporary help but the
5 time lag of training and settling in is a trade off the manager makes for a longer term hire. If that hire leaves
early, the trade-off is a massive cost and time inconvenience. If the hire has been money motivated, they
may leave again in 6 months to a year and so again, the great recruiting circle of life starts again.
Some of you reading this paper will agree that this happens all too frequently today. Some may see it in
their own companies. This still happens in many of the Fortune 500 companies and does nothing for the
employer brand or the recruiting profession.
Such is the dissatisfaction of modern in-house recruiting that some companies look at other solutions.
Maybe RPO. Embedded agency. Contracting out. New technology.
But this is not the solution. These are band aids to conceal the issues. Companies are taping up wounds
versus healing them.
Why is recruiting not more commonly viewed as a trusted business partner? Through our external contacts,
we know more about the market, competitive developments, trends and candidate motivation than others in
the organization. Having recruiting leaders at the table during the strategic planning process will only
enable the recruiting team to be more proactive in building pipelines and finding talent to deliver on business
goals.
A strong internal recruiting team can provide market intelligence; represent their brand with a passion and
save the company exorbitant amounts of money while building up their internal database of talent. If led by
a dynamic recruiting leader, the gains and ROI are huge.
Many recruiting leaders lack the motivation to make a difference. They report into HR Leaders who leave
the recruiter to it. Happy to spend agency bucks. Why should that recruiting leader seek to change their
model? The easy life is maintaining the status quo. That’s how they are rewarded!
So how to define 1.0 & 2.0?
Recruitment 1.0 encompasses traditional recruiting over a huge timeline including good old fashioned fax
machines, print advertising (post and pray) and rolodexes moving into traditional ATS's.
Recruitment 2.0 saw the move onto online and utilizing technology for recruiting purposes including the
advent of online job boards and online resume searches. Whilst the technology moved forward, the
traditional methodology of 1.0 was prevalent, including online post and pray candidate attraction.
Both Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 were/are fundamentally focused on the active job seekers (i.e. applying to
openings, registered with agencies and watching job boards like possessed predators).
Of course, some will rightly refer to some direct sourcing in 1.0 & 2.0. But this was/is not the norm nor the
key strategic focus for the majority of companies as the prime focus was/is on attracting talent in the active
pool.
Most companies in the world today are mired in Recruitment 2.0 with some attempts at Recruitment 3.0.
6 The Changing Talent Landscape
I want x people to start within four weeks. Shortlist within three days. Boom. Go do it!!!!
Perhaps hiring managers need a little education? Maybe, this next section will help them appreciate what
recruiters do? It’s key that recruiters have solid consulting/influencing skills and can set reasonable
expectations throughout the recruiting process.
Before we can chart a direction forward and suggest new strategies we need to appreciate the changing
talent landscape.
So many variables that make recruiting challenging:
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The Global War for Talent: This is a term that polarises opinion. Some find it a cheesy term,
others claim it describes the reality. What is true is that the competition for attracting and retaining
the ‘top talent’ is intense. Recruiting teams can make or break a company. Hire average talent and
the bottom line will be affected. For the non-believers perhaps the better term is The Global War for
the best talent?
Experienced talent pool is shrinking: As companies expand/replace, the numbers of people with
the right skills to hit the ground running are in short supply. Hence driving up their talent premium.
Talent Greed: As top talent is in short supply, they have become better educated on their market
value. They expect premium compensation and benefits.
Talent disloyalty: Studies show us that the average time spent in a role is less than two years.
That means a highly volatile and mobile talent market. If a company can’t put in place the means to
retain top talent then they will lose them to competitors.
Market convergence: In past years, talent pools were very ‘siloed’, with little if any movement
between market sectors be it IT, Mobile, Consumer Goods, Retail, Banking, Public Sector, Film, TV.
Given the demand for skills there has been a real convergence and movement of talent between
sectors.
External providers losing ground: In previous years, many companies relied on talent magnets
like recruiting agencies and job boards to recruit, (ie: active talent pools). Now, as companies want
to define and attract the best talent, many companies rely on developing self-sufficient internal
teams, who draw upon a plethora of sourcing channels including, internal referrals, CRM database,
LinkedIn search, Web 2.0 Networking, Social Media ‘channelling’ and University Recruiting. Internal
recruiters draw upon their knowledge of the business and passion to sell their brand and company.
They understand the business strategies and hiring manager’s needs. Many of the Recruiting
Agencies and Job Boards are no longer being leveraged and are left clamouring for business.
Explosion of technology solutions: So many solutions, so many directions to turn, have led to
recruiter confusion. Which ATS? Do we need an ATS? Maybe we need a CRM? Which CRM? Do
we combine ATS and CRM? Bolt on solutions to channel Social Media pipelines into the database.
No single solution dominating but just a fragmentation of differing technology solutions.
No clear technology solution has gained market confidence: What is clear is that recruiters rely
on LinkedIn for sourcing and ‘Talent Pipeline’ for CRM which, may, over time lead to the death of the
traditional ATS.
The contagious spread of the ‘Experts/Gurus’: Wherever you turn, a self-proclaimed recruiting
genius, consultant, advisor, futurologist or experienced social media expert guru will be speaking at
conferences and seek to advise your business. This has gained prevalence with the means of
individuals to market themselves and become stars in a Social Media age of self-promotion but a
glance at their LinkedIn profile reveals many have little recruiting experience. This is equivalent to
the footballers who never played becoming the commentary experts.
‘Lazy recruiters’ damaging the reputation of recruiting: Many recruiters wooed by commission
and easy money (especially in the boom times) aren’t passionate about the profession. These ‘lazy
recruiters’ aim to tick the boxes and avoid the ‘square pegs into round holes’, i.e. A square peg may
add more value to a business but not match exactly the job description so they are rejected. As
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recruiting continues to upskill, those low skill, ‘lazy recruiters’ will find themselves facing re-training or
changing professions.
Lazy recruiting leaders who are unwilling or lacking drive to embrace new recruiting
strategies, social media channels, employment brand opportunities, often because they are
rewarded for ‘mediocrity’ and unchallenged by those they report into (who may not understand the
nuances of recruiting).
Competitive threats: Competitors are getting smarter in mapping out top talent, developing
relationships and then attracting them away.
So….recruiting is not easy.
As companies start to lose talent and fall behind in the War for the ‘best’ talent they start getting protective.
The need to block recruiters becomes a key strategy. How do we block head hunters and stop their calls
from getting past reception? Can we block email addresses? They start to look at cutting off communication
tools like Linkedin, Facebook, MSN Messenger, Hotmail/Yahoo email accounts. The whole autocratic
regime of distrust descends. You shalt not speak to our employees!
This is rather a bizarre way for businesses to look at retaining talent. Blocking communications and seeking
to silo employees displays a lack of trust and poor integrity on the part of employers. Perhaps the better
way for employers to look at the issue is that it would be more worrying for a company if their staff is not
being targeted by recruiters? If not, what does they say about the quality of their employees? If your staff is
not being targeted by competitors and headhunted, that speaks volumes about the quality of your workforce.
How does a company prevent someone leaving their business? It is not communication shutdown but
looking at answering these vital questions:
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Are employees challenged?
Are they compensated well? (benchmarked against competitors and market norms)
Do employees have a good work/life balance and can enjoy time with their family?
Are managers close to their employees and provide regular feedback on performance and career
development?
Do employees feel part of a world class company that has a strong future?
Can employees see a ladder of opportunity and strong promotion prospects?
Are employees being developed? What training & development programmes are in place?
Are employee ideas listened to and do they receive feedback on them?
Is Senior Management approachable and do they regularly communicate or are they living in ivory
towers?
Is the culture fun?
If a no answer appears, or multiple no’s, then employees are rightfully the target for head hunters and can
be readily enticed away.
If someone is happy it is extremely hard to recruit them away which is why companies must focus on
retention.
8 Recruiting Utopia
What would our business ideally love from recruiters?
An instantaneous predictable Talent Pipeline
What does that mean? More spin? Rhetoric?
A predictable talent pipeline is having talent already identified to business needs as they arise. To achieve
this the recruiting organization has already mapped the market for key talent and engaged them so that they
are interested in working for your company. So, when the business has a need the recruiter already has a
slate of engaged and qualified candidates to reach out to. Boom ‘AAA’ candidates presented.
Utopia? Just a dream? Or maybe a reality?
How is this possible?
Of course much work and foundation lying needs to be done in advance.
This involves:
1) Sourcing: Identifying the talent, mapping the market, where key talent resides. ‘Key talent’ is not
just those people working in direct competitors, ‘key talent’ can be located in a range of companies,
maybe ones you would never have even considered or maybe they are about to graduate from
Universities.
2) Employment Brand and Marketing: This is about ensuring your company is visible in the market
as a great place to work. This is not about Corporate PR / Marketing spin but opening the doors of
your company and revealing the truth behind the corporate iron curtain. Showcasing employees.
Revealing the culture. Showing the employees at work and play. This is about being transparent,
realistic and authentic in communication about your company. A great Employment Brand helps
talent proactively come to you, or at the very least, makes it easier when the recruiting team reaches
out to passive candidates.
As recruiters, we are familiar with our challenges and we know our weaknesses. We have an end goal
utopia in mind. We have a desire to move from the reactiveness of Recruitment 1.0 & 2.0 to being proactive
and hunting the best down.
This leads nicely to the core philosophical differences between the traditional recruiting, (1.0 & 2.0), and the
new philosophies of Recruitment 3.0.
The Core Philosophies of Recruitment 3.0
So what is Recruitment 3.0? What are the key drivers? What are the key philosophical underpinnings?
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Not everyone’s looking for a new job
Everyone is a potential candidate or Brand Ambassador
Employment Brand is pivotal to your success in attracting candidates
Candidate experience is more than a bounce back email
Understanding the psychology of people
You are not in control of what people are saying
Building relationships and communities is key (hence importance of Social Media)
Content is king: Don’t make recruiting boring
9 Let’s explore them …
Philosophy One: Not everyone’s looking
This goes to the beating heart of Recruitment 3.0.
Statistics show that on average (e.g. Bureau of National Labor statistics), that for any given role, only 10% of
the relevant/experienced talent is actively looking for a new job at any given moment in time.
Of the total labor market 10% is looking for a role.
On the flip side, that means 90% are not looking. 90% are happy in their current roles.
In that 90% the ‘best’ candidates are most likely sitting.
So if we agree that there is a candidate short market, then many companies are fighting the ‘Global War for
Talent’ amongst the active 10% of job seekers.
Given this, Recruitment 3.0 is focused on identifying the best candidates in the WHOLE market and
infiltrating and attracting that inactive 90% market. Our goal as recruiters is to identify that talent and build
relationships with them while discovering the key motivators which will bring them into our companies and
build that ‘Dream Team’ workforce.
Philosophy Two: Everyone is a Potential Candidate
OR Brand Ambassador
So far we have defined that not everyone is looking for a job……but let’s challenge that. Is that true?
Let’s also define what a candidate is.
Recruiting 1.0 defines candidates as someone who has ‘elected’ to be part of the recruitment process which
is normally by submitting a resume.
But, let’s challenge that a little more.
At what point does someone become a candidate?
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When they see your job advertisement?
When they hear about the role?
When they send in their resume?
When they interview?
In many ways, these definitions of candidates are all ‘late stage’ definitions.
What turns a person into a candidate?
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Unhappy at work
Not recognized at work
No career prospects
No training and development
Ineffective manager
Poor bonus
Pay and conditions not satisfactory
Not agree with company strategy
The grass is always greener……
Now many of these are time sensitive. A disagreement with a person’s manager is fertile ground to attract
new hires.
So the definition boils down to timing?
Not necessarily.
Recruitment 3.0 sees everyone as a candidate and defines the jobs market between:
1) Active job seekers (10%)
2) ‘Pactive’ candidates (90%)
‘Pactive’?
A ‘Pactive candidate’ combines the terms passive and active to arrive at the definition of a person who is
currently not looking for a role. These candidates are happy in their job but, if approached with an attractive
opportunity, would turn active.
Reflect this on your own career. You may be currently happy in your job, get paid well and enjoy your coworkers. However, there will be certain buttons that can be pressed by specific companies, with specific
offerings that will attract your attention and tempt you into the interview process.
Hence EVERYONE is a candidate. We just need to define the buttons to press to move them from being
‘pactive’ to fully ‘active’. It is our job to create the candidates!
Some candidates are not right. They don’t have the correct skill sets or experience, now or maybe never.
But those people who come into contact with our companies, if not candidates, should ideally be
transformed into Brand Ambassadors. These folks are enthusiastic supporters of your company.
Recruitment 1.0 & 2.0 would overwhelmingly focus on the 10% actives, maybe some companies attempting
some forays into the ‘pactive’ market but this was not the biggest driver.
Key to turning candidates into active status is relationship building. Developing an emotional connection.
So how do you start to lay those foundations?
11 Philosophy Three: Employment Brand is Pivotal to
your Success in Talent Acquisition
Before defining an Employment Brand or an ‘EVP’ (Employer Value Proposition), it is important to define a
brand.
The American Marketing Association define it as: A brand is a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other
feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."
I prefer the simpler definition of a person’s ‘gut’ feel to a product, service or organization.
The goal of a brand is to create that subconscious awareness and emotional connection that bonds loyalty
and trust.
Look at the key consumer brands today. Apple, Coca Cola, Ferrari, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Pixar, Disney,
McDonalds. Each will resonate with you in different ways and have that immediate reaction which may be
good or bad.
Subconscious awareness is key. Some brands seek to annoy through their communications but know that
they will be remembered. ‘Go Compare’ in the UK is one such example of irritating advertising but their
identity in the market has increased and bizarrely this recognition has increased sales.
Product quality may not be enough to differentiate. Take a cup of coffee. The taste between Starbucks,
Costa, Peets, Blue Bottle, McDonalds or a road side café may not vary widely BUT people subconsciously
will make a decision based on the brand and the experience. This shows the power of brand.
Brands done well make a massive difference and not just to sales. Brands provide vision and inspiration to
employees. They drive innovation and quality while guiding business strategy and talent attraction.
BUT, brands need to stand out. Walk around your local supermarket and there are 30,000 plus brand
screaming for your attention.
Reflect on that. Now imagine that supermarket just having shelves full of white packaging. No advertising,
no color. Pure white. How would you make a choice?
How many Employment Brands / EVP’s can you define in the Fortune 500? Most likely…..less than two!
Many companies rely on their consumer brand to attract talent. If you are a great successful company, then
people will want to work for you. That’s the thinking. But those great consumer brands are not always the
best to work for. What is the ‘true experience’ behind those closed doors? You often find the lack of
manager effectiveness, team, listening and nurturing of employees. Some well-known brands may be
successful in sales or bringing innovative products to market BUT they may be less than ideal to work for.
Many modern day candidates are more sophisticated than making decisions on their career based on
product / consumer brands. They want to know what they are joining.
So…..what is an Employment Brand?
I have always loved Libby Sartain’s definition, taken from her great book Brand from the Inside.
‘How a business builds and packages its identity, from its origin’s and values, what it promises to deliver to
emotionally connect employees so that they in turn deliver what the business promises to customers.
Building the employment brand from inside the business, with a consistent substance, voice, and
authenticity, may be the most powerful tool a business can use to emotionally engage employees.’
Key thrust from Libby is that Employment brands build from the inside.
12 Why bother with EVP’s?
A world class Employment Brand (created by employees) brings many benefits:
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Higher Quality candidates. The ‘best’ want to work at the ‘best’ companies
Increase in unsolicited candidate applications
Higher offer / accept ratios
Increased number of employee referrals
Improved employee retention rates (Less attrition)
Increased employee motivation/ satisfaction
Stronger corporate culture
Increased shareholder value
Enhanced university recruiting
Increased media exposure
Let’s confirm the basics of what an employer brand is not.
It is not:
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A logo
A vision statement
An advertisement/advertising campaign
Something that HR owns
Something a company creates
Something companies control
An Employment Brand is authentic. It is what our employees are saying about our company. It is what
people are saying about a company. This cannot be controlled especially in the advent of social media.
We can only influence / try to influence what is said and control the experiences people have with our brand.
If you are a great place to work and employees feel that, BOOM, that is a great employment brand. If it’s
terrible to work at your place then despite whatever marketing/advertising/communications you put out
there, your company, will be a terrible employer. A pig is still a pig, even if you put lipstick on it.
Employment Brands are built from the inside out.
Managers have to manage well. Companies have to communicate to all staff. Everyone has to feel
included. Compensation has to be competitive. Training and development offered to all and career
progression open to all. But apart from the basics, people have to feel part of the business and aligned with
the strategy and vision of the company. Employees must work hard while having fun and enjoying their
work and colleagues. Maintaining this framework means that you have an employee base that represents
your Employment Brand.
On top of that can be built employment marketing campaigns. EVP messaging. If the basics are not there,
the rest is a lavish waste of time, effort and expense.
Just to be clear………..
13 A company, PR Team or HR Leader is not in control of what people say about the experience of working at
a company. All can try to affect the messaging. But messages have to be authentic and communities come
to their own collective decisions.
HR, PR, Marketing and Executives DO NOT own the Employment Brand. Far from it. No one owns it. HR,
PR, Marketing all can help to shape messages but the Employment Brand is shaped by employees and
external communities.
So….Employment brand starts with your employees and what they say and feel about your business. EBrands form ‘inside-out’…..if they hate it, why should others join?
It is so important to listen to their views and involve in two way, authentic and transparent conversation.
This listening includes:
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Employee engagement surveys: Polling the employee base for feedback
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Internal focus groups: Listening to the employees in small discussion and debate groups
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Clear objective setting: Employees need to know what they are expected to do and achieve
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Listen to external views (comments on social media): What people are saying about working for
your company and monitoring via tools like Radian 6.
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Great Places to Work lists: Provides important benchmarking against other businesses.
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Internally communicate: Intranet, internal emails, company meetings, team meetings etc etc
As Libby Sartain advises, Employment Brands build from the ‘inside out’. Aiding the Employment Brand
(innovative products that make a difference in the world, culture of respect) at Autodesk are events to bring
people together and have great experiences at work. Some examples include:
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Global Corporate Fitness Challenge: Fitness teams were formed across the world and
pedometers sent to each participating individual to record the number of foot steps taken per day.
These individual steps were recorded, and then groups/teams added together and then placed into a
competitive Global League table. Great for health. Competitive fun.
Kids at Autodesk days: Certain days throughout the year, employee’s children come in for
organised days to learn about Autodesk, meet other kids and see where family members work.
Global football/soccer competition in Italy: Teams from across Autodesk meet annually for the
Autodesk World Cup. (USA won!!!)
My Autodesk Global Photo Competition: A global photo competition for employees to take photo/s
to capture what Autodesk means to them and the Autodesk culture.
CEO talks: Carl Bass, our CEO, is very visible and can be seen meeting with students or sitting in a
cubicle working amongst employees. He regularly holds “Coffee with Carl” chats with small groups
of employees around the world. This gives him an opportunity to hear from employees directly
while also answering questions from employees.
Office curry nights: Across the world spontaneous office fun which can involve drinks!
Fun use of office space and wall space: We have fun breakout areas and collaborative office
space. This includes places to play games (ie: Xbox) and fun use of Wall space (e.g.: the A-Z
game, where employees are posed questions and grab and add their answers throughout the day,
for example A-Z Cartoon superheroes).
Autodesk flash mobs: Flash mobs, randomly at internal and external events.
Student design competitions: e.g. Partnering with Ferrari to design the next Ferrari supercar.
It’s no wonder that our employees have played a huge role in securing Autodesk’s place on Ten Best
Companies to Work Lists in 2011. Autodesk is already on eleven lists in 2012 including FORTUNE's Top
100 Companies to Work for List. That tells us we are doing something right and re-emphasizes the strategy
of providing the best conditions for our employees to work in!
14 This shows why it is so important to nurture and build the conditions for an Employment Brand from the
inside-out!
Employment Brand is not only about the internal employees, it is underpinned by Candidate Experience.
Philosophy Four: Candidate Experience is More than a
Bounce Back Email!
Candidate experience is key to building a World Class Employment Brand.
What’s the one thing that candidates hate being? One of the crowd. Just a number. A pebble on a beach.
What’s the candidate experience like at your company? How do you measure it?
How often do you put yourself in your candidate’s shoes?
15 Candidate experience is, generally speaking, poor. For many candidates it can be just the bounceback
email they receive thanking them for their application to a job!
Critical to Employment Branding and Recruitment 3.0 is understanding the stages of the Candidate
Experience.
There are seven distinct stages, that all affect the Employment Brand. Those stages are:
Notice:
When someone first notices a company.
Considers:
When someone actively starts to consider whether they would like to work for that company.
Apply:
The candidate finally takes the decision and applies. (Big moment)
Onboarding: When that candidate joins a company and their first few days/weeks experience of that
company and how they are integrated into it.
Work:
Working at that company. Days becomes weeks, weeks can become years. All in-between
is the working experience.
Leave:
The moment an employee leaves a company. How it is done. How managers and
colleagues react creates a lasting impression.
Remember: Looking back. Fond memories? Were things that bad? What was good? Do people keep in
touch? Remembering is a powerful part of the subconscious.
A different perspective……
Kept simple. Recruiting and retention have elements in common with dating and relationships…. Recruiting
and staff retention are about developing relationships. Relationships that are founded on trust, honesty,
integrity. The relationships are anchored on two way, transparent communication. Both need engagement
to build an emotional commitment. The candidate experience lifecycle is similar to dating.
For example:
Notice: The moment you first see your potential partner. How they look. How they dress. How they walk.
What they talk about. Those butterflies when you want to get to know more.
Considers: When you start to think of asking them out. What it would be like to date. What you would do.
Would you feel happy?
Onboarding: Those first few dates. What you do. How interested they are in you. Do they listen? Is there
a connection? Do you want to be with them?
Work: The relationship develops. Marriage. Maybe kids. Like working, this is the longest phase in the
lifecycle. (Or should be…!!!).
Leave: The split. The divorce. Is it amicable? Or nasty. Friends or enemies?
Remember: Time changes perspective. Remembering the good times. How good were they? Maybe it is
worth trying again with the relationship.
Recruitment, relationships and the candidate experience have a lot in common…….
So how can recruiters affect candidate experience? What measures can be taken that will ultimately
improve candidate experience and also Employment Brand perception.
A negative candidate experience will quickly be posted to Glassdoor or a LinkedIn discussion group and
boom, it’s gone viral and becomes a perceived truth.
16 Let’s take a look at the seven stages of the candidate experience in closer analysis.
Stage One: Notice
This stage is when someone first notices your company. Their interest is piqued. They start to make
subjective judgements, (good or bad). They notice your company which may be through word of mouth,
adverts, events, anyone of a number of ways. They will ask themselves: What is the company like? What
do they do? What the culture like? Are people having fun? Do people seem to think it is a good business
to work for? Does the business seem fair? A level of interest/intrigue is nurtured….and builds in the
subconscious.
What are the interaction points for recruiters in the notice phase of the candidate experience?
How can we influence the ‘Notice’ candidate experience?
External PR
PR and recruiting. Surely PR is the exclusive province of the Corporate PR or Corporate Marketing team?
Maybe in the past but today we are all marketers now. Corporate PR / Marketing are focused on product
PR and not on ‘humanising the company’, or positioning it as a great place to work. Why should they? It
does not bring in extra sales does it…..or does it?
Why should recruiting be involved in PR?
We need to get our companies at the forefront of people’s minds. And recruiting has to be frontline in
playing a key role in that ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ of the talent pool. Recruiting must be central in
driving PR and Marketing in looking at the bigger holistic picture away from pure product.
The resultant PR is great, be it online or in traditional print. But always think bigger. Capture this
information in a PDF. Send out to candidates as an email shot. Give to recruiters to send to key
candidates. Post to social media sites. Post to your company blog site. Communicate internally to
employees, (communication and making people feel proud of where they work is so critical…never forget
internal communications).
All of this adds to the candidate view of the company and of course enhances Employment Brand
perception.
Presentations & Events
Events have been very Recruitment 1.0 by nature. Events taking the form of a recruiting booth, recruiting
tour or a stall at a University fresher fair! Set the booth/table up, print some leaflets and then boom, and
wait for people to come to your stand. If you want more traffic/candidates, add elaborate swag. Look at all
those students draped over your stall at Fresher’s because of the free t shirt, sweatshirt, stress ball, pens or
branded coffee mug. The measurement of success? ‘We got 500 resumes in three hours’. Wooooo
Hoooo.
But. Of the 500 resumes / CV’s only three were any good. The rest unemployable. So what happens to the
497 paper resumes / cv’s / memory sticks? Generally teams are too busy to input / upload them into the
database. Effectively, nothing will happen. What candidate experience is that? A candidate invests their
time and details to a company and never hears back, while the company recruitment team celebrate being
so popular and getting 500 applications. There’s a twisted logic there.
17 We know, from experience, that recruiting labelled events don’t work for mid-senior talent. They won’t risk
being seen or caught attending a recruiting event, especially if they are happy in their current job.
Recruitment events are fine but for junior talent e.g. graduates who have no job to lose!!!
But consider this dichotomy. Most companies have dedicated University Recruiting programs. They target
key Universities, build relationships with professors, identify and then nurture relations with key ‘cream of the
crop’ talent. So, why is there the need for recruiting booths at fresher’s fairs? Branding plus….or branding
minus?....when applicants get no communication and are not called to interview with a company. Why have
a University Recruiting team if you are attending events and accepting resumes from non-target
Universities? This is a bizarre contradiction of strategy that many companies have.
Why not look at events in a different way? With a Recruitment 3.0 lens. What’s the goal of a recruiting
event? Gather names? Gather data? Engage with talent? Create a great opinion of your company?
Spread learning? Impress the audience? All of these?
Why not create events that are not focused on recruiting but on information sharing / debate / innovatory
thought leadership seminars. Informative / learning presentations that are focused on topics of interest.
These are not necessarily about your company. They could be about things that affect your industry.
Visions. Now the great thing about these events is there is no stigma hence mid to senior talent from
competitors can attend. If the goal is name generation, then for those who want to attend, set up a preregistration site on the web that captures all the details that recruiters want to capture e.g. name, company,
job title, contact details. Job done. Before the event has even taken place recruiters have a database. At
the event no recruiting activity takes place but the thought learning impresses all those attending and what a
great way to enforce Employment Brand messaging in the subconscious. Your keynote speaker gives an
insightful presentation and then people socialise, meet key staff and drink. Post the event, you have a
database and relationships to leverage and follow up on.
But don’t stop there….there is even more value.
As the event has a keynote speaker, on a topic of interest, then maximize its reach and effectiveness. Invite
the media and generate PR. Invite key bloggers. Spread the word. Again this PR can be used to send to
candidates, post on social media sites and create good will about your company.
This event strategy works for large scale events and can even apply to online events e.g. ‘Meet the CEO’,
with pre-registration and the chance to ask questions online. The same goals can be picked apart from the
face to face relationship building.
For University booths/fares, (if you need to do them) you may shake up the appeal. It’s not just about swag.
It’s about creating a buzz. Creating a popular and sticky booth. We all have minimal budgets but adding in
fun elements can make a memorable experience. For example, you may hold a Karaoke competition, raffle
giveaways and announcements at set times, video game competitions and beat certain times and scores,
musical instruments and jamming sessions, or include Rock Band / Guitar Hero. Booths can be fun and the
subconscious message is: We are a great company and love to have fun, fun, fun!
Events…Recruitment 3.0 style!
Stage Two: Considers
The next stage after notices is considers.
An individual has moved from taking note of your company to asking themselves, would they like to work for
your company.
18 Recruiting Advertising
Recruiting advertising can fit in either ‘Notices’, (if it is the first time a potential candidate has seen it), or
perhaps more naturally in the ‘Considers’ stage. If a potential candidate has noticed your company then
they are more aware and perhaps more likely to notice, stop and consider any recruiting advertising.
What’s your experience of Recruiting Advertising?
It’s very Recruitment 1.0!
In print…..a list of jobs and a pretty image with a call to action?
On the web….a list of jobs hyperlinked back to the web site?
And the description of the jobs? All hyperbole, lifted from the spurious job description, meaningless.
Jargonised. No relevance to what the actual job is?
Dare it be said….boring?
Let’s look at it from a Recruitment 3.0 perspective.
What is the purpose of an advertisement? It’s a call to action. So why not, if a print ad, exclude the job
titles and descriptions, create an advertisement with a simple message that entices people to want to learn
more about your company and about potential roles. ‘Message led advertising’, aids in branding and can
generate response far in advance of simple job descriptions. E.g. If your company is considered dull, too
corporate, why not include eye catching imagery of employees having fun, with a simple message, ‘Our
Product Managers work hard but play hard. Be the best you can be at *** company’. With a call to action to
your web site……?
Corporate Careers Site
At this stage, a potential candidate, considering your company, will take a visit to your corporate careers
site. They will want to get a feel for your company, culture, prospects. This is key in the framing of an
opinion on your brand.
Take a look at your careers site.
Ask yourself the following questions?
What would I think of this site if I were applying?
Is it clean and simple?
What is enticing? What draws me in?
Can I get to know…really know…this company?
How ‘humanised’ is the content? Employee profiles? Are they fun or dull?
Does the site convey a company that your career can develop?
Are the benefits clear and simple?
Is there interesting information about the company?
Are there links to the corporate sites e.g. Product / PR. If yes, why are you driving candidates off
your careers site?
Is your content text based or enhanced with video? People have limited attention spans, hate text
and hence video content makes it easier for candidates to gain insights.
Are videos informative, fun, inspiring or ‘corporate spun’ messages?
How is your culture portrayed? Can a reader gauge if you are a fun / friendly company?
Is job search intuitive or cumbersome as built around an outdated ATS that requires 100 fields to be
completed and then crashes?
Can people register for job alerts on their skill sets?
19 -
Are there any social elements? Facebook? Twitter? Blog? Anything candidates can share on their
site?
Any exclusive insights into high profile individuals and how they reached their position?
Does it reveal behind the corporate curtain?
Any fun elements? Easter eggs? Games? Quizzes?
Are there any reasons for people to come back after looking at it? i.e. aggregated social media
feeds to follow and participate in? Webinars?
How often is content refreshed?
Simply….does it impress?
Lots of questions but one’s that you subconsciously evaluate when you look at career sites, (especially your
own).
If you feel your site is dull, then you can be certain that your candidates do.
The Corporate Careers Site is ‘your one shop window to the world’! Does it stop people and beg them to
look or does it scream walk on by?
Job Descriptions
Take a look at your job descriptions. Do they follow the same old tired format? Do they monotonously split
job responsibilities with required experience with a bland opening paragraph that would send a baby off to
sleep with its dulcet tones?
Job descriptions are in effect marketing documents but hiring managers and recruiters invest minimal
amounts of time into them. They need to entice candidates and differentiate your job from others.
Again ask yourself:
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Does this describe the actual job or is it a collection of words?
Is it from a ‘stock pool’ of job descriptions? (Cut, paste, post, pray, forget!!!!)
Are the tasks explained actually a true reflection of day to day work?
Is the experience sought after the same for every job: University Degree, confident presentation
skills, dynamic leader, excellent team worker etc. etc.
Does it inspire people to apply? (Job descriptions are ‘sales’ documents as well as information
documents).
What differentiates this job from the same role at other other companies? Where’s the sizzle?
The job description is such an important element of Employment Branding. It is the most read document
that a candidate uses in the whole recruiting process. (More closely read than the 300 page Employment
Contract)!
Of all the documents a candidate sees the job description should be the most inspiring!
Stage Three: Applies
The potential candidate has noticed you, considered working for you and been hooked. They have reached
the apply stage.
This stage is critical to the whole candidate experience.
Now we have a candidate. They are applying and will be taking super critical judgements on your company!
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Is this company interested in me as a person?
20 -
Is the application process efficient and well organised?
Does this company act like a great place to work?
Does this company’s collateral and experience feel consistent with its external perception and PR
messaging?
Is the interview informative and challenging?
Does the candidate feel the interview is thorough?
Do the company values feel aligned?
If the candidate feels the decision process is fair; if the candidate is rejected, is it done so
respectfully?
The apply stage can be split into three different phases:
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Pre Interview
Interview
Post Interview
-­‐ Pre-Interview
How candidates interact with your company in the Pre Interview Stage is critical and leaves lasting,
embedded memories. Whether contact is via email or phone, the process needs to be as personal and
‘humanised’ as possible. Personalised communication takes more time but the key gain is that candidates
are made to feel more unique and special.
The goal of any company must be to leave candidates positively gushing at the thought of working with your
company. They are hungry to join. Inspired to tell their friends.
The better the pre interview process, the easier the offer decision process.
How many companies look at their Reception Areas as recruiting experiences? Many visitors pass through
a reception. Are there candidates in waiting? Are they Brand Ambassadors? Why do reception areas
rarely contain recruiting literature or do not reflect the brand of the company they represent?
In the pre-interview process, Interview Packs, add extra value. It’s a great way to convey your company, its
culture, show the company off to best effect and critically, as well as providing the candidate with a great
insight and information on your company; it can be used to see if the candidate has read it and hopefully
asking more informed and perceptive questions. If a candidate asks questions that are covered in the
interview pack that is a measurement as to how well prepared they are for interview.
-­‐ Interview Process
The interview process is key in shaping opinions and perceptions of the company.
Candidates are again making judgements.
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Is reception expecting the candidate? Is there a name badge? Is it clear who they are meeting?
What’s reception like? Does it inspire? Do candidates feel excited to be there?
Is the interviewer on time to pick them up from reception?
Is the interviewer engaging?
Are they interested in the candidate or going through the motions?
Do they provide the candidate with refreshments?
What’s the interview room like? Does it convey excitement or is it a blank room?
How competent are the interviewers?
21 -­‐
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When interacting with the hiring team, do they feel like the sort of people that the candidate wants to
work with?
Is the interview process laborious with too many people in the process?
Do interviews repeat the same old questions?
How much time is left for questions? Does the company come across as credible?
Does the interview team give a credible insight into the rest of the process?
Does the candidate get any form of immediate feedback?
The key for Employment Branding is that a company must make ALL candidates feel special throughout the
interview process and remain desperate to work for your company.
A bad experience could quickly go viral on a blog or damning review on Glassdoor.
-­‐ Post Interview
Post interview the candidate will be judging your company in the timeliness of your feedback, it’s quality and
how caring you are if you are rejecting.
Both rejecting and offering provides solid bonding experiences.
If the candidate is a ‘Silver Medal’ candidate and just misses out on a job offer the key is keeping that
candidate engaged. Maybe they gain valuable experience and join down the line. Maybe another job
comes up that they are relevant for. Keeping in touch is key as you never know who can become or refer a
candidate in the future. Whether through regular update phone calls or keeping up to date with candidate
news via email blast, the candidate should remain engaged in your brand.
When a candidate is offered a job, it’s a time of celebration. How does your company celebrate? Many
companies neglect this area of bonding and candidate experience. The following all reinforce the decision
to accept: Celebratory swag, bringing the candidate in for team lunch/dinner, taking the family on a tour of
the facility, regular update calls, emails from the team, etc…. Some candidates on three month notice
periods are often left with zero contact in those three months. In that time a candidate can again become
shaky and prone to counter offers. Not ideal!
Lastly, reinforce the image that your company cares with a candidate experience survey and hiring
manager satisfaction survey.
Stage Four: Onboarding
One of the scariest things for a new employee is the onboarding experience. Naturally all new employees
get the jitters in their first few days.
Again, the new employee is passing judgement on:
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Are people ready for me?
Do I have a desk?
Is my computer set up?
Is my mobile phone activated?
Is my paperwork handled efficiently?
Are my essential questions answered effectively?
Do I know the vision of the company?
Is my experience consistent with the brand of the business?
Can I see myself here for a period of time?
22 -­‐
Do I have clear objectives for the next 30, 60, 90 days?
Again, that new employee will be telling friends/ex colleagues about their experience which will influence
other’s decision to join.
Stage Five: Work
Much of the ‘Work; experience relies on the skills of the business leaders and HR to provide the tools and
framework for success.
Much is outside of the hands and influence of recruiters at this stage.
Again, key Employment Brand influencers are at work:
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What Performance Management Systems are in place and how successful are they in motivating
and inspiring the workforce?
Does the company focus on Pay for Performance?
Can the company identify top performers and reward them?
Conversely, does the company know its poor performers and can it either improve their output or
remove them from the business?
How organised is the company in providing Learning & Development?
How open are the leadership in communicating company strategy?
Is two way communication and feedback encouraged?
BUT once onboard a recruiter still has a part to play with the new employee. The key is that there has been
a positive experience to this point. The new employee will want to encourage their friends and their former
colleagues to join your company. Hence become a ‘talent magnet’ and refer into the business great new
talent.
A great employee referral scheme, on average, should approximate for 30-40% of total hires.
Does yours?
Stage Six: Leaves
How a candidate departs a business is equally key, whether it is a resignation, termination or retirement.
If someone resigns or is terminated than a positive experience reinforces the company brand. Companies
should strive to treat all employees with the utmost respect regardless of the circumstances. This will not
only help the departing employee but the remaining employees will see that their company cares.
Stage Seven: Remembers
The final stage is remembering. Over time former employees will remember the good times and positive
experience which can transform into nostalgic fondness.
Hence Employment Brand can wrap itself round Alumni schemes. Keeping in touch with past employees is
a key part of sourcing. Maybe through a LinkedIn Alumni group? Maybe through regular email shots?
Targeted catch up calls by friends? Or even special Alumni events.
Keeping in touch with former key talent can lead to rehires.
23 Measuring Candidate Experience/ Quality of Hire
It’s all well and good seeking to provide a great candidate experience. It can be subjective. Some will think
it great, (if they get a job), some will find it poor, (if they don’t get selected!).
But as recruiters, monitoring trends is key. It helps drive improvement. It helps us understand.
How can this be done?
Firstly, candidate satisfaction surveys. A series of questions monitoring each stage of the candidate
experience lifecycle.
When they are ‘polled’ and ‘who’ completes them is subjective:
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All candidates who are interviewed (do telephone interviews count)?
Only those candidates who are offered (bound to be positive and skew results)?
In addition to the Candidate Experience questionnaire a Hiring Manager survey can be enlisted. This solicits
feedback from hiring managers on quality of service from recruiters and looks right up to the on boarding
experience. This data is useful in evaluating recruiters as well as informing potential changes to the
recruiting process including candidate experience.
Philosophy Five: Understanding the Psychology of
People
A candidate is a person.
We often treat or think of them as object, numbers or even ‘bums on seats’!
Underneath that suit is a person with a real life. Like us they have fun, go to the pub, make mistakes, etc…
People are naturally social.
They like to talk.
They like to engage.
They are hungry for information, the latest news and want to learn and develop. Improve.
Underpinning this is….people want relationships.
Relationships are best founded on honesty, openness, integrity, authenticity, transparency and two way
communications.
We see the power of relationships through sales. People buy from people.
Hence, we learn, Employment Branding is about developing relationships with people. People want
relationships with people not faceless companies.
.
24 What does Simon Cowell’s quote mean for recruiters? What should we be learning? The key big learning is
that we embrace a range of concepts to engage our communities. Humanizing the brand and revealing the
experience behind the corporate iron curtain, being transparent and engaging in two way revealing
conversation is key. Storytelling is an important element like gamification. It encourages repeat visitors and
hooks people in. People want to see how a story plays out.
Create Emotion.
Create conversation.
Key lessons into the psychology of people.
Key for the future of recruiting.
Philosophy Six: You are Not in Control of What People
are Saying
We all love a good gossip. Talking makes the world go round. A chat in the office, in the corridor or over
the garden fence. We love it.
We all do it. Everyone is talking.
Guess what….right now; people are discussing your company. Be it products, service offerings and even
the people. They may even be discussing what it’s like to work for you.
Don’t believe me?
Leap on Glassdoor or Indeed and see what people are writing.
Google “working at ********’ (insert your company name here)” and you can read what people are saying.
Through Google you can drill down and even see what people are saying on blogs, on Twitter, on article
threads. That’s a lot of information out there.
Some companies invest in monitoring software, like Radian 6, to monitor chatter and conversations across
the web.
People talk. People blog. We cannot control what they say. But what we do know is that conversations can
spread across the world within seconds in this global interconnected age. Word of mouth spreads like
wildfire.
25 This can be extremely frightening for businesses that like to be in control about what is said about them. In
the past companies could put out pre-prepared press releases or create 30 second TV spots and these
were taken as the presumed truth. Now, whatever communication a company puts out can, within seconds,
be challenged. People state their views. If a company tries to spin its situation from something that is not
perceived reality then they will be called out immediately.
Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch has famously stated: “Technology is shifting the balance of power away from
the editors, the publishers, the establishment and the media elite. Now it is the people who are in control’.
This results in new behaviors.
Business has to be more humble, listen to what is being said, respond, and seek the opinions of their
communities.
This is true of recruiting.
The market/community will challenge you if you claim that you are something you are not. You cannot
claim you are ‘A great company to work for’ when, in reality, attrition runs at 35%, pay is below market,
products are not selling and no one gets promoted.
If your company is struggling and has issues then why not recognize it? People will respond better to
companies who are humble, listen to views from the community and say you will make changes to improve
things for employees. This buys a company credibility and good will and ultimately support. People respect
that far more than spin messages.
26 Philosophy Seven: Building Relationships and
Communities is Critical (Hence the Importance of
Social Media)
Internet users across the World
As the pingdom slide above demonstrates, no one can deny the speed and growth of the internet. It is here
forever. It is mainstream. There is no turning the clock back.
This is, and will always be, the information age.
Coupled to the growth of the internet is the explosion of social media. Morgan Stanley trend how social
network communication is overtaking email communication.
27 There is only one way to appreciate the growth, potential and power of social media and that is through
statistics.
There are so many stats over the web, (and they are out of date within days), but I always rate the work of
Cara Pring, who has a site called ‘The Social Skinny’, and compiles latest stats, (and is a real Social Media
guru). Her latest compilation of stats is pretty mind-blowing and makes you appreciate the growth of the
internet and the unstoppable spread of Social Media.
General social media and internet stats
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40 % of accounts and 8% of messages on social media sites are spam 91% of online adults use social media regularly YouTube users watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month There are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth (source: AllTwitter) 24% of people have missed witnessing important moments because they are too busy trying to write about them on social networks 83% of people believe platforms like Twitter and Facebook help them make new friends 25% of people believe social networks have boosted their confidence 40% of people spend more time socializing online than they do face-­‐to-­‐face (source: AllTwitter) Every minute of the day: o 100,000 tweets are sent o 684,478 pieces of content are shared on Facebook o 2 million search queries are made on Google o 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube o 47,000 apps are downloaded from the App Store o 3,600 photos are shared on Instagram o 571 websites are created o $272,000 is spent by consumers online (source: AllTwitter) Internet users spend 22.5% of their online time social networking The web contains more than 8 billion pages There are more than 2.27 billion people online (doubled since 2007) 70% of adult social networkers shop online 53% of active adult social networkers follow a brand 80% of active internet users visit social networks and blogs (Source: AllTwitter) Almost 8 new people come onto the internet every second 79% of online shoppers spend 50% of their online shopping time researching products 57% of marketers acquired customers via blogging 44% acquired customers via Twitter 28 61% of global internet users research products online US Internet users spend three times longer on social media and blogs than email= social media use has increased 356% in the US since 2006 the average user spent only 3 minutes on Google+ in Jan 2012 65% of Pinterest’s traffic is from the US there are 152 million blogs on the internet companies that blog have 55% more website visitors 35% of consumer comments on Facebook Pages are compliments 93% of US adult Internet users are on Facebook 9/10 mobile searches lead to action – over half lead to purchase (source: Hubspot) •
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Each day Facebook users spend 10.5 billion minutes (almost 20,000 years) online on the social network Australians spend 26 minutes, 27 seconds on Facebook each day, New Zealand 30m31s, Singapore 38m46s, United Kingdom 26m27s, France 21m53s, United States 20m46s, India 20m21s, Brazil 18m19s Only 50% of Facebook users have more than 100 friends (source: AllTwitter) There are 955 million active users on Facebook that spend an average of six hours and 35 minutes per month on the network (desktop only) An average of 3.2 billion likes and comments are posted every day Facebook posted a 67 percent year-­‐over-­‐year mobile growth rate (543 million monthly active users on mobile). The 6:35 per month spent on Facebook is nearly double the time (3:20) spent on Google. •
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58% of users return to the site daily. In an analysis of more than 60 Facebook marketing campaigns, 49 percent reported a return on investment of more than five times, while 70 percent had a return on investment greater than three times. (source: AllFacebook) In any given week, less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with the brand they are fans of. (Source: Marketing Science) 20% of Facebook users have purchased something because of ads or comments they saw there. (Source: Ipsos) We are finding that 50 percent of smartphones are actually connecting to Facebook every hour of every day. (Source: AllFacebook) Facebook has 232 million users in Europe, 222 million in North America, and 219 million users Asia. (Source: AllTwitter) LinkedIn
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61% use LinkedIn as their primary professional networking site 81% of LinkedIn users belong to at least one group 42% of users update their LinkedIn profile information regularly 82% are aware there are ads on LinkedIn 60% of users have clicked on an ad 90% of users find the site to be useful 61% do not pay for a premium LinkedIn account (source: Socialtimes) Twitter
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Twitter has over 500 million registered users, but just 140 million active users (compared to Facebooks’ 950 million active users and probably over 2 billion registered users) The USA, whose 141.8 million accounts represents 27.4 percent of all Twitter users, good enough to finish well ahead of Brazil, Japan, the UK and Indonesia. (Source: AllTwitter) There are over 1.3 million active Twitter users in Arab countries Kuwait leads the way in Twitter penetration in Arab nations at 8%, ahead of Bahrain at 4%, Qatar at 2%, the UAE at 2% and Saudi Arabia at 1% Kuwait sent almost 60 million tweets in March (source: AllTwitter) 29 •
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15% of online adults use Twitter 28% of black online internet users use Twitter 14% of Hispanic internet users are active on Twitter 12% of white internet users are active on Twitter The 18-­‐29 demographic is most represented on Twitter, at 29% of user base, ahead of those aged 30-­‐49 (14%) and 50-­‐64 (9%) 14% of online men use Twitter vs 15% of online women (source: AllTwitter) Roughly 9% of US adult Internet users are on Twitter The average Twitter user has 27 followers 25% of Twitter accounts have no followers 40% of Twitter accounts have never sent a single tweet Only 18% of Twitter users tweet once or more a day More than half of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks 79% of US Twitter users are more like to recommend brands they follow 67% of US Twitter users are more likely to buy from brands they follow 57% of all companies that use social media for business use Twitter (Hubspot) Social Media for Business
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Facebook is the number one social marketing tool for brands at 83% (88% target for 2014), followed by Twitter at 53% (target 64% in 2014) (source: AllTwitter) On average companies respond to only 30% of social media fans’ feedback (Source: Factbrowser) 30 •
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By 2016 more than half of the dollars spent in US retail will be influenced by the web (Source: Forrester Research) 42% of employers say no to any use of social media in the workplace 40% of young workers rate access to social media at work above receiving a higher salary 53% of employers have a formal policy on social media 59% of media companies actively encourage their employees to use social media 71% of energy companies prohibit any use of social media at work Over 50% of workers aged over 50 use social media every day at work (source: AllTwitter) 73% of Fortune 500 companies have a Twitter account 66% of Fortune 500 companies have a Facebook page (source: AllTwitter) 18 different countries across Asia, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand discovered that Facebook (88.8 %), Twitter (66.4%) and YouTube (62.4%) were the social platforms of choice amongst all respondents. LinkedIn (40%) finished fourth, ahead of blogs (39.2%) and Pinterest (20.8%), with Google+ being used by just 12.8% of Asian corporate marketers.(Source: AllTwitter) 94% of corporates use social media and 85% say it’s given their business more exposure 74% of brand marketers saw an increase in website traffic after investing just 6 hours per week on social media 61% of corporates still rate blogging overall, 23% of Fortune 500 companies actively maintain a corporate blog 76% of corporate marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube or other video marketing 65% of corporate marketers use social media to gain market intelligence (source: AllTwitter) 24% of the top 10,000 websites in the world use some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage (if standard links to Facebook Pages is included this jumps to 49%) 42% of the top 10,000 websites have some form of Twitter link on their homepage, just 4% use Twitter’s share button and only 10% utilize any official Twitter widgets The Facebook Like button is used on 7% of the top 10,000 homepages LinkedIn is featured on just 0.6% of the top 10k websites (0.3% using the LinkedIn share button) (source: AllTwitter) People are 25% more likely to buy a product that they would be proud to own if it has social media buttons next to it People are 25% less likely to buy an embarrassing product if it’s placed anywhere near a social sharing tool 70% of brands ignore complaints on Twitter 83% of people who complained on Twitter loved the response from those companies that did make the effort Only 26% of businesses regularly include a call to action in their tweets (source: AllTwitter) 42% of marketers believe Facebook is critical or important to their business (+75% since 2009) 62% of marketers say social media became more important to their marketing campaigns in the last six months Social media has a 100% higher lead-­‐to-­‐close rate than outbound marketing 77% of B2C companies have acquired customers from Facebook vs 42% of B2B Retail is the top industry that has acquired customers through Facebook (over 90%) 80% of US social network users prefer to connect to brands through Facebook Brands have seen a 46% increase in user engagement with the new Timeline format in Facebook Auto-­‐posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70% (Source: Hubspot) Facebook is responsible for 86% of social referrals, Pinterest 11% and Twitter 3% Facebook users generate 2.5 times more page views than Twitter and almost twice as many as Pinterest (FB 7, Pinterest 4.1, Twitter 2.7) Conversion rates for Facebook traffic: 2.6%, Pinterest 0.9% and Twitter 1.1% Average order value (AOV): FB $2.50, Pinterest $1.60, Twitter 80c (source: AllTwitter) 25% of Twitter users connect with a brand on the platform (over one third of these do so for discounts and promotions) Over 25% of Twitter users would consider contacting a business via the platform Over half of social networking users who share business-­‐related content do so on Twitter (source: AllTwitter) 39% of companies do not track their social media responses at all, and 55% ignore all customer feedback on Twitter and Facebook, largely because they have no process in place to respond. (Source: AllTwitter) What do people want from brands on social media? 31 o
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83% want deals and promotions 70% want rewards programs 58% want exclusive content 55% want feedback on new products (source: AllTwitter) WOW. If that stat attack does not grab you nothing will. (Hat-tip Cara Pring: The Social Skinny)
Social Media Recruitment 1.0 Style
Given the reach and dominance of social media, it makes sense that business sees the value of it. Social
media is all about people which lends itself perfectly to our profession: Recruiting. The drive towards having
a Social Media recruiting presence is unstoppable. But only a handful of companies are doing it right. Why
is that?
Look at the market. Look at your competitors. Maybe look at your own company. Many companies are
beating their chests in a ‘King Kong’ gorilla way and chanting proudly that they have a Social Media
presence. Some on the conference circuit rush to proclaim their mastery of Social Media and the fact they
have their own Twitter / Facebook page.
But here we are back to Recruitment 1.0 as companies create a Facebook and / or a Twitter page. What do
we really see? The company creates a landing page on Facebook/Twitter, and then adds a sexy logo with
swish background graphics. Then they post a list of all current jobs with a hyperlink back to their corporate
careers page. Reminiscent, they again rock back in their chair and wait for the resumes to flood in.
Proud to have mastered this, they then create a YouTube Channel, with the first video being a slickly
produced, corporate video of the CEO talking straight to camera, (looking like a petrified bunny caught
between the headlights of a rapidly approaching juggernaut).
Social Media Strategy: Questions to ask
Social Media Strategy requires some direct questions being answered:
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What’s the purpose/goal of our Social Media community/s?
What is the core strategy?
Who is the core target audience?
What experience and takeaways do we want our community to have?
Will these sites generate repeat visitors?
How are our sites ‘sticky’ so that people want to stay on?
What’s differentiates our social media sites and our careers portal?
How does our social media strategy build relationships with talent/people?
What’s the word of mouth likely to be on our social media?
How do we measure/define success?
What makes our site unique?
How do we handle negative comments?
How do we involve employees?
Who is responsible for the site and content?
Many current companies are making basic, yet fundamental, mistakes in Social Media.
Many companies publish a list of jobs on their Twitter/Facebook account with a hyperlink back to their jobs
community. Why? What’s the point? How does that engage people? Why would people repeat visit that
32 site unless they are looking for a job? What’s the difference between their jobs site and a list of jobs on a
Twitter/Facebook page?
We are back to Recruitment 1.0 but this time involving Social Media!
The key to Social Media lays in the title….Social!
Social Media is not about immediate bums on seats hiring!
Social Media is about building communities of evangelists and potential hires.
It’s about taking people on a journey to discover your company, people and culture. The journey should be
inspiring, revealing and engaging….
While companies focus on posting jobs onto their Social Media feeds what else can they do to make
recruiting less boring?
What is a Community?
Building communities and engaged communities are the current recruiting buzzwords. But what does this
mean?
Let’s define a community first…..
Definition of a community:
“A group of interacting people, that shares common values/interests and through these bond social cohesion
/ belongingness.”
Applying that to recruiting is easy. Most companies have multiple communities in play:
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LinkedIn discussion group members
Facebook ‘fans’
Twitter ‘followers’
YouTube ‘subscribers’
Blog page ‘subscribers’
For many companies, they will have multiple communities, not just the one central list of people engaging in
communication. And this makes sense since people crave different experiences and prefer different
communication structures. For example, those in the Twitter community are used to short, sharp, frequent
communication. Those looking at a blog may want longer communication etc. It’s okay, and even the norm,
to have several differing community structures.
Now the interesting thing here is that in the above examples, many in the community will not have
considered working for a company, or even wish to in the future. But key is that they will start on a journey
of familiarization with a company. The goal is that they either become a brand ambassador, (be positive
about the brand, join in discussions and share with friends), or physically consider and apply for a role, (or
33 encourage their friends to). These communities benefit the company’s Employment Brand, wider corporate
brand and product familiarization.
So we have defined a community……..
Let’s try and break that down a little more.
‘Corporate’ Community
A grouping of individuals which has been manufactured or created by a corporate entity with specific goals
in mind which may include branding, marketing, sales., crowdsourcing or immediate “bums on seats” hiring.
Corporate communities are generally smaller by nature. They have a massive challenge in attraction, and
more so in retention, of members since it’s tough to engage people with so many corporate community
options. How many communities will talent want to be a part of? If the answer is lots, (which it won’t be),
what is the time, quality and value that person can input into that community. The key to retention is
content….and engagement.
Organic Community
A grouping of individuals that share common interests e.g. Java Developers, Sales professionals. The goal
is to share best practices, ideas and discussions. These communities grow organically and are naturally
evolving.
Talent Community
A mass grouping of individuals deemed as talented and employable for specific roles by a business. This
encompasses a large number of individuals.
Talent Puddle
A smaller, concentrated and defined grouping of employable talent.
Delving into communities…..
The key to Recruitment 3.0 is the difference between the active market and the passive, (pactive), talent
pool. This is best represented pictorially below:
Note the small green circle (the active pool) where many recruiters solely focus. The huge yellow sun is the
passive pool, (the pactives). To reach into the passive pool requires a coordinated effort by several wings of
34 the recruiting team. The sourcers will be identifying the top talent. The Employment Branding / Employment
Marketing team will both be focused on messaging.
Let’s examine this further:
The key is to remember that as corporations build their ‘manufactured’ communities that not everyone will
want to work for a company. More importantly, not everyone will have the right skills to work for a
company. In fact, as the picture above depicts, the talent that a company wants to engage with is only a
very small proportion of the community created. There will be hundreds/thousands of people who are not
right to work for a company but add value to your company and brand as supporters of the community.
They become Employment Brand Ambassadors/Champions.
To add more color to this you may reflect on your Facebook Community. You may have thousands in that
community. Your family/friends may have joined, (to see what their son/daughter/friends do for a living).
We won’t hire them. And hence, whilst nice to have Brand Ambassadors, the ‘value’ of that Community is
low.
Hence, building a Community is not about a collection of random individuals from Social Networks imported
into a ‘manufactured’ community, it is about targeting, attracting and drawing in people from key talent pools
into your community.
Targeting is key…..
35 How do you target people to be part of a community?
There are several ways.
In terms of the best targeting:
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The sourcing team who are mapping out competitors and building relationships should be helping to
entice targeted talent into your Corporate Community
Your ATS which may have thousands of names. These are people enthusiastic about your company
who have already given your company a vote of confidence by creating a profile. Why are they not
in the Corporate Communities joining in discussion and keeping up to date on news? You may want
to consider a mass email to the database reminding them to keep in touch? Maybe targeted emails
to the database e.g. all programmers, all programmers in San Francisco
Targeted LinkedIn Communications
SEO/SEM
Other areas to consider using in building a ‘Corporate Community’ include:
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Targeted advertisements e.g. on Facebook, Glassdoor, Indeed. Select ads that pop up and catch
the eye and encourage click through to your community/s. Ads can be targeted e.g. Project
Managers in San Francisco.
Event listing of names of attendees
In many ways attracting talent to look at a site or experience a community is the easy part. The hardest is
having content that grabs their attention and entices them to come back on a regular basis. Come back and
actively engage in debates/discussion and share them with their friends and networks. Content is King.
What is an ‘Engaged Community’?
An engaged community is one that demonstrates a high degree of participation. Be that through reading
company community information (page impressions), participating in discussions (comments on blogs/social
sites) or sharing links with friends and colleagues. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire across social
communities.
36 Building a community implies developing a relationship with people. That means people ‘care’. i.e. they
decide to devote time to look at the latest posts and see what their ‘friends’ are doing. When people ‘care’
they invest an ‘emotional commitment’ to something.
The goal of any recruiting community is to either create ‘brand ambassadors’ or ‘physical job applicants’.
Recruitment 3.0’s goal is to nurture an emotion and ensure people take an interest and want to share or
have an opinion.
How Can Recruiting Create Engaged Communities?
Again to stress this point…..recruiting communication / marketing can be fundamentally boring.
People tend to only visit jobs sites when they are looking for a job. Generally there is no ‘hook’ or
‘engagement tool’ in place to encourage repeat visitors.
Consider why someone NOT looking for a job should go to your careers page!
Recruiting focused content will not create an engaged community nor generate repeat visits. It will not seek
to ‘humanize’ the brand.
A different angle is needed in order to hook people in…..
It is important to visualize that a Corporate ‘Manufactured’ Community will always be smaller, (far far
smaller), than the total available talent pool. As well as your Corporate community there will be all those
talents out in LinkedIn, talent reachable by Boolean search on Google, Social Media talent and of course,
those rare breed of people who are not reachable online (they exist).
37 Discussions surrounding communities can feel theoretical until real examples can be used to illustrate the
point. LinkedIn is the perfect example of a Talent pool with lots of talent puddles. Take a look at the slide
above. You can see a range of discussion groups or communities. For example, there are Talent Pools for
Java Developers and these can be broken down into Talent Puddles like Java Developers in the UK or even
down to City Level etc.
Key is how to use these communities.
Of course the sourcing team can join discussion groups, monitor active discussions and see who are the
thought leaders and then approach them. LinkedIn discussion groups may also be used to harness the
wisdom of the crowd and seek referrals and recommendations for candidates. ‘Crowdsourcing of Talent,’ is
a subject we visit in recruitment 4.0.
Employment Brand Marketing & Messaging will be most interested in these communities. They will be
seeking how to message to those communities and use company thought leaders to reply.
Philosophy Eight: Content is King….Don’t Make
Recruiting Boring!
Ask yourself how many recruiting job sites or recruiting Social Media pages you visit when you are not
looking for a job? When people are looking for a job they will engage and look at job boards and corporate
careers sites but once happy in their job they have no reason to come back.
Why would someone who is not looking for a job:
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Visit on a daily basis a list of jobs on Twitter?
Visit a list of jobs and employment statement on Facebook?
Visit a corporate careers site?
Visit any jobs board?
Answer is not many people.
38 So why are so many companies acting in a Recruitment 1.0 fashion?
Key is building an engaged community.
Why the need to humanize the brand?
Corporate PR & Marketing is naturally focused on promotion of the product to increase sales/market
penetration. There is generally less attention directly focused on company and people promotion. But it has
to be remembered that it is not the prime driver for Corporate PR & Marketing to humanize. Their driver
must rightly be, raising product and company awareness to increase sales and market penetration. This
means a focus on controlling the message to ensure strict adherence to a brand / core message.
Anything that encourages feedback can distort the message and move away from the core proposition
which is tougher to control.
BUT. Controlling a message or perception is tough in an interconnected world. The question is whether
modern corporations are happier to have people commenting on their company and products on their official
sites or elsewhere where they have zero control or influence.
Whilst corporate PR & Marketing focus on product messaging, there is a potential gap in understanding a
company. People cannot take a decision on working at a company based on product information. They
need to answer in their own minds:
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Is this a company that I could work for?
What is the culture like?
Do I like the people?
Who are the key leaders? Are they leaders in their field and will drive a company forward?
What is the experience of the leaders? How did they get to their positions?
What are the key challenges facing the company and how are they overcoming them?
What are the different locations? How do they differ?
What are the offices like?
Do they focus on university recruiting?
What do people do to have fun?
Is the company involved in community relations, if so, what sort of activities?
Compensation and benefits. What’s included?
These insights can take many forms but are clearly different than the goals of product PR/marketing. That
again is natural.
Revealing the true side of a business greatly enhances the ‘offering’ to candidates and new candidate pools
as they get to see a humanized company.
Key is who attracts the best talent…gets the best business results.
If a company does not as yet possess a killer Employment Brand, the goal must be to map out key talent
pools and proactively attract the best talent. Sourcing can help identify top talent but cannot spread the
positive subconscious messaging throughout talent pools. Hence the need to ensure recruiters have every
weapon at their disposal and can use tools to attract talent.
What should be the three core elements of content on 3.0 Social
Media Sites?
Recognizing that our goal is ‘engagement’ then any elements of social media communication must
encompass three core areas:
1) People: Aim is to humanize the brand, show the culture and remove the corporate iron curtain.
Highlight the people, what do they do, what they experience, what do they do in their spare time,
what challenges they face etc… This all opens up the company BUT shows the culture.
39 2) Opportunities: This is the subconscious push towards jobs … but in an interesting way. For
example, how do I progress my career, what are promotion prospects, what training and
development may I expect etc…..
3) Product: Yes…we cannot get away from product as we need to get people excited about what we
do. But we have to be short, sharp, simple and fun in our communications.
Product is the most controversial element here as there is content crossover with the PR and Corporate
Marketing teams. Our goal as recruiters must not be to duplicate their content and become yet another
channel of repeat information. Key is to have short, sharp product content that educates and maybe tempts
people to visit the corporate sites. We at Autodesk have debated this long and hard. Many of our
employees are proud to work at our company because of our cool products and their impact on the world.
This is one of our key differentiators as an employer. Our goal is to ensure that we engage people while
demonstrating the impact our software has on the world around us. For example:
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On Facebook a post that Autodesk software created the visual effects for Inception with a caption
like, ‘Have you seen Inception?’ Love what the guys at Double Negative have achieved with
Autodesk Maya. What’s your favorite scene in the film? (and can be posted on D-Neg’s site as well
for cross community building).
A photo of someone standing by the Bay Bridge with a caption ‘Gotta love this photo of John by the
Bay bridge. We were so happy that our customers used Autodesk’s software to create the new
bridge. Would you guys have designed the bridge differently?’
Note the use of open questions to stimulate debate.
What’s cool as well is that this differentiates us from pure product PR and corporate marketing and allows
people to provide feedback.
It is too dangerous for people to have opinions
The biggest fear of social media is that people have opinions and could disagree and slam a company. Bad
feedback is not what anyone wants to see especially the PR & Marketing teams.
But….if people feel passionate to post bad feedback on a site they will do it anywhere. Be it on a news site
or a blog and will still tell their friends. No company can control that.
Better that any negative feedback is posted on ‘official’ sites.
The pressure for any company is to want to delete negative feedback or have a member of
HR/Marketing/PR reply in a professional way. But if a company is misleading through messaging and
information, this will be recognized by the community, and whatever degree of messaging won’t work. If
someone says something critical in the community and it is ‘without basis or untrue’, then the community will
spring to the defense of a company (much to the proud delight of HR/Marketing/PR). If something being
done by the company is ‘wrong’ then it gains considerable kudos amongst communities to demonstrate that
a company listens and proposes corrective action.
Key channels to talent
We are already well aware that Social media is rapidly becoming the communication channel of choice for
millions of people, (soon to overtake email communication). Social media is also bridging generational
divides. No longer the preserve of Generation Y and younger generation. Social media is proving a cross
generational communication vehicle.
Focusing on a key strategic number of social channels will reap rewards for an Employment Brand. At
Autodesk we choose to focus on:
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LinkedIn
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Glassdoor
Key to all Social media is content………CONTENT IS KING.
What examples of content?
Content is so diverse.
Content must be short & sharp. It must GRAB someone’s ATTENTION. The general rule is one short
paragraph and one to three pictures. That is what grabs. It also means multiple people across the world
can generate and post content without impact to their day job.
For example, a member of staff takes a picture of the food from the cafe that day. BANG. The picture
reveals a little of the brand. The subconscious says they have great food and cafes at a company. A
member of staff takes a picture of the outside view from their India office. BANG story. This emphasizes a
global company
So…what else…..some examples from Autodesk posts.
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Photos from inside offices/locations across the world with intro into the offices
Employee profiles (photo plus answer to four to five questions)
Photos of a cool events / holiday parties
Product…taken from product press releases
Sharing of relevant articles in the media with a hyperlink to content.
University Presentations
Photos from the launch of My Autodesk global photo competition. This was a global Autodesk
competition for employees to take photos to capture what Autodesk means to them.
Community Relations and corporate social responsibility. People do this for Autodesk and in their
own time. Great subtle PR coverage for a company that cares.
Key member of staff profiles and exclusive interviews.
Competitions. Encourage the development community. “Look what I created with Maya” etc.
Who writes content?
A common misconception is that vast resources are needed to run Social Media Channels. The frequent
accusation focuses on the perceived need of teams of full time content providers who scrupulously watch
over every post on each channel.
Truth is that running channels can be a small part of the Recruiters daily day job. And an enriching one at
that.
If you want a Global reach, then all you need is a handful of people across the world that can provide
content and check feedback periodically throughout the day.
It really can be done simply if content is short and sharp e.g. post a photo plus one paragraph of short
text. It’s easy and not time consuming. As communities grow, content will be posted by community
members and becomes a self-evolving beast.
41 Recruitment 3.0 Corporate Careers site
Key to the whole ‘humanized’ approach is the Corporate Careers Site.
This is not only an information site or a ‘sales site’ but a communication channel.
This website should be reviewed for ability to generate repeat visitors and engage with ‘sticky content’.
Perhaps the best way to achieve this is having an area on the careers site dedicated to social media
aggregation creating an area for viewing and participating in all social media channels.
The Channels: Insight
Recruitment 3.0 Company Blog
A blog should act as the anchor piece of social media. This should be the mother ship which directs people
out and back from the other social media channels.
By having the blog embedded in the careers site this ‘repeat visit’ content drives continual traffic.
A company blog should contain:
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Regular short insightful content
Ability for the community to comment on content. They will need to register their identity and email
address, (hence allowing data capture) and preventing spambots.
Community can share content on their social networks
Ratings: community can rate articles on a scale of 1-5
Links to all Social Communities: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
RSS Feeds: from corporate relevant sites
Contact form: allowing people to contact directly
Newsletter: a daily email newsletter for those that subscribe. This is generated by automation and
sent at a specific time each day, with no input needed by the host. (Again capturing data including
email address)
Tags: i.e. section which community members can see the most discussed subjects
Tabs: separate sections inside the blog on company, culture and why work at your company
Company Video content: derived from the YouTube Channel
The blog is linked to all social media and ideally on publishing of a story, pushes…..
-­‐
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Full story to Facebook (includes images and full text), comment able by whole Facebook community
Short Tweet of the headline plus short URL to the blog article
The great thing about modern blogging is that a great blog site can be created on minimal / zero budgets.
Blogging technology through packages like WordPress and Blogger is free to use and a community of
software developers helps create content.
Key to WordPress is the developer community are continually writing plugin’s and updating software AT NO
COST TO THE END USER.
Recruitment 3.0 Facebook Community
Facebook is a ‘social’ network and is hence most successfully utilized in a light hearted way. Posting a list
of jobs will not engage a community or derive brand loyalty. Discussions need to be light and encourage
participation.
42 The key is subconscious brand recognition.
Interestingly when I was responsible for growing the InsideEA Facebook community, open ended questions
and feedback helped grow the community to over 150,000 in just over a year.
People are social beasts and love to talk.
Even more interesting was what discussions people engaged into. Bizarrely not games but the following
Facebook updates drew response rates of over 300 comments deep:
-­‐
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What are you doing this weekend?
What’s the weather like where you are?
Where in the world are you?
What are you doing right now?
What’s on the TV tonight?
Any good films at the cinema right now?
Rightfully, the question will be asked internally, how does this benefit our company? But PR & Marketing
should quickly be encouraged that people are on the Company site talking and their friends are joining them
and talking and it’s brand recognition.
But content can be mixed with careers messaging and at Autodesk we mix ‘fun posts’ with posts like:
-­‐
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Have you ever considered working for Autodesk?
What sort of jobs could you do at Autodesk?
We are looking for a great Sales person in Australia. Any recommendations?
Register for a job alert to ensure you never miss out on a dream job.
Key is a balance…..too much recruiting does not engage and can be seen as dull.
And again, community generation is not random but is targeted on key names and groups of people and
encouraging them to join.
How build the 3.0 blog & Facebook community?
Building a community of strong numbers is key. How can this be achieved?
Relatively easily:
-­‐
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Mass email your ATS of most likely many thousands of candidates. (These are people who already
‘like’ your company as they applied to work it. Why not they join your social networks?)
PR encourages main contacts to look, review and publish stories…hence drive traffic. E.g. key
websites publish a story on the launch of our new strategy and sites.
Advertise in Facebook and Linkedin communities etc.
Through a combination of the above, traction can be quickly gained. Again at zero cost.
Recruitment 3.0 Twitter Community
Twitter does not offer short term candidate pipeline/bums on seats. However it is the fastest growing of the
social media communication and is an engagement tool beyond compare.
Key to understand that communication is limited to 140 characters and is crisp & short….and frequent.
43 Due to ‘frequency’ playing a part that means that a range of people across the globe would assume the
avatar identity of Autodesk’s tweeter. This ensures that it is not a full time job for someone, they take a look
every two to three hours and reply and rest assured someone else takes over in a few hours.
Put crudely, Twitter can be monitored by someone as they make a cup of tea and the kettle boils.
Hence not impacting on their day job!
The successful use of Twitter as an engagement tool is ensuring that one way ‘push messaging’ is not the
norm. Engagement means participating and replying to the community.
This does not mean that someone replies to every tweet but a healthy number of tweets to the following
community help demonstrate two way communication and feedback.
Recruitment 3.0 LinkedIn Community
LinkedIn is the resume/cv shop window to the world. It provides recruiters and sourcers the chance to map
and locate top talent.
But that top talent may not be aware of the company brand or ever considered working for it.
There are two areas of functionality key to Employment Branding, (apart from all the expected benefits
surrounding sourcing, inmails etc).
1) LinkedIn Company Page. Ensuring that it is up to date with all details describing & ‘selling’
your company. The goal is to build up a following.
2) LinkedIn Discussion Groups: Setting up a discussion group, (maybe both for your
company and one for Alumni professionals to keep in touch when they have left the business)
The goal with LinkedIn Discussion Groups is to develop an active community of professional
followers. Membership is controlled to let in only relevant professionals who can engage in
more intellectual discussions. Unlike Facebook and Twitter communities, discussions on
LinkedIn are deeper, more intellectual and more profane. Discussions are the key to
engagement.
LinkedIn is making great strides forward to be more ‘social’ and have engaging content and given the size of
their current database, they are in prime position as recruiting strategies focus on community development
and crowdsourcing.
Recruitment 3.0 YouTube Community
The Company YouTube Channel should reflect the culture and opportunities. It is not a tool to post
corporate ‘overly manufactured’ corporate spin video. Raw footage from employees representing the culture
works the best.
A good example again, based on experience, was setting up the original InsideEA YouTube channel, (linked
to the main EA Channel), which was broken down into 5 categories of content.
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Favorites: Mix of EA product video
Career Paths at EA: Video taking from training sessions and vox pops on career development
EA having fun: Fun staff made videos, and culture insights
Hey EA that’s soooo cool: Videos that showed EA on the cutting edge e.g. use of technology.
EA Graduates: University presentations; graduate interviews
PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) are the perfect example of YouTube success. The exec team spent
thousands on a slick corporate PR video which attracted less than a thousand hits. A few members of staff
created a video with a flip camera based on Tony Christie’s ‘Road to Amarillo’, which was raw, fun and
44 portrayed a fun side to working in auditing (can be seen as a dull profession). The video achieved 125,500+
hits.
Videos on YouTube don’t need to be slick or corporate.
great video giving viewers insight into a company.
One person and one flip video cam can make a
Social Media: Objections to Overcome
Do you know that Social Media is key to your Talent Acquisition strategy but are facing opposition internally
from Senior Managers, Legal, HR?
Then this section is for you……
Recruitment 1.0 excuse
Recruitment 3.0 Answers
People would say bad things
about us.
People are already saying bad things about you, if there are bad things to
write. Is it better for people to say them on your own site in one place,
than push underground and allow wider coverage on a brace of different
sites?
Never lose faith in your community. Many will support you and defend
your company if you are faced with trolls.
It is free to set up a Facebook page
It is free to set up a Twitter Page
It is free to set up a YouTube Channel
It is free to set up a LinkedIn community
It is free to set up a blog, (if hosted on your domain). Site design is free
when using software like WordPress and Blogger.
Key is content.
Do they not trust their employees? If employees are delivering on their
objectives and love working for your company, why not let their collective
enthusiasm run free and benefit from their word of mouth through Social
Media.
If a country proclaims the benefits of free speech, why curtail it in the
workplace, as long as people are delivering?
You don’t want to develop relationships with talent? You don’t want to
build an engaged, open, transparent Employment Brand and show
potential candidates the benefits of working at your company? It’s all to
scale. Bigger companies will have a bigger community that does not
mean they are better or more qualitative focused. Small can mean
better!
Why work for your company is it is so boring. One person’s boring is
another’s fascinating. Key is content. Companies are made up of
people. People have stories. People have lives. Does not matter if you
are accountants or pack fish at the local market, there are stories of
people’s lives to be told. And people love that.
Engaging with Social Media Communities should be a minimal activity.
We all have day jobs. Key is to create a number of people who can
blog/add Facebook comments or Tweet etc. Remember a blog story is
only a photo plus 1 paragraph of text.
Social Media is a very metrics focused area but sometimes it is tough to
track key metrics to focus on.
Obviously, track able stats like volume of traffic to sites and click thru’s
demonstrates ‘popularity/success’ but it goes deeper than this.
I don’t have any budget for
Social Media
My company blocks Social
Media
We only have a small
company, not worth the effort
Our brand/product line is
boring, we have nothing to
say!
No time to do this
No clear metrics. Nothing is
measurable. It’s all fluffy.
Volume of cv’s/resumes received demonstrates the success of
‘engagement’ on talent attraction. But the branding elements can be
quite fluffy and immeasurable…as it much or PR and marketing.
45 But other stats also demonstrate success:
We need to assign a value to
a Facebook Fan or Twitter
follower, to demonstrate a
true ROI (Return on
Investment)
-­‐ Number of Facebook fans
-­‐ Number of average comments per thread
-­‐ Facebook fan group age spread
-­‐ Facebook fans per geography
-­‐ Blog. Google rankings
-­‐ Blog. Site traffic
-­‐ Blog. Site commentary
-­‐ Blog. Number of people registering for a candidate newsletter
-­‐ Blog. Number of article mentions on other influential sites
-­‐ Twitter. No. of followers
-­‐ Twitter. No of re-tweets
-­‐ Twitter: Trending topics
-­‐ LinkedIn: Size of community
-­‐ LinkedIn: Number of user generated discussions
-­‐ YouTube: Number of friends
-­‐ YouTube: Number of subscribers
-­‐ YouTube: Number of views per video
-­‐ YouTube: User ratings per video
For some, this is a real sticking point. Measuring addicts need to be able
to attribute a ‘value’, especially with Social Media. What is the true value
of a Facebook fan or Twitter follower?
As in all walks of life, mathematical geniuses can produce proprietary
algorithms that calculate a figure. So we have different values like:
$1.07 (WSJ) or $3.60 (Vitrue) or even $136.38 (Syncapse). If you can
place a value on something, it obviously gives sales people a method to
sell solutions based on the more fans you have, the more value that
fanbase has. E.g. If you add 10,000 net new fans per month x $136.38 =
a $1,363,800 value. At a mere $75,000 per month!!!
But we know in reality, this mathematical calculation is just a nice theory
but not a true reflection of value. Interfering variables are at play. Some
fans will have direct value i.e. they spend on products or become a hire.
Some will have an indirect value i.e. they persuade lots of people to buy
or give lots of employee referrals. Calculations based on sales value
generally don’t include the ‘cost to acquire that fan’, hence another
blurring statistic. The best way to look at it is that each fan/follower is
unique and has their own value to your business, (and this will be flexible,
sometimes they will be engaged and ‘valuable’ and other times quiet and
‘disengaged’.
Sometimes statistics lie and not the best measurement of value!
The new Recruiter skillsets needed for Recruitment 3.0
Recruitment 3.0 is about building engaged communities, telling a story, listening, discussing and fostering
an emotional attachment with new talent.
Recruiter 1.0 will be a dying breed in the coming months and years. Replaced and thrown on the scrap
heap by Recruiter 3.0 who can combine a range of skills. It’s really back to the basic competencies of
successful recruiting professionals before the age of the internet and job boards:
46 -­‐
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PR and messaging
Direct marketing
Market segmentation
Candidate relationship management
Sales
Presentation and communication skills
Consulting and influencing skills
Are your recruiters ready?
Is your recruiting leader ready?
All will unravel in the coming months and years and we will see which companies can be transparent, build
and engage communities. Will yours?
So this brings us to Recruitment 4.0
As a recap for those that did not read the previous section:
Recruitment 3.0 is a huge leap as it moves recruiting out of its comfort zone. The beating heart of 3.0 is the
non-active/passive individual and a focus on ‘best talent' and building predictable talent pipelines. In
addition, the philosophy of everyone is a potential candidate and engaging them is central. 3.0 takes us into
building engaged two way free-conversation based, and transparent communities. This is anchored by
things like employment branding, marketing and PR. 3.0 is not only concerned with building communities
but mapping key competitors and seducing top talent with your brand.
To move forward, we need to unlock the passive market. This encompasses those candidates who are
happy in their jobs. Expect to be wooed and attracted.
So….4.0…
47 Recruitment 4.0: Crowdsourcing, Gamification,
Recruiting as a Profit Center……and the Death of
Recruiting Agencies
Recruitment 4.0 is an evolution of 3.0. It takes the philosophies naturally onto the next level.
It includes:
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The idea that Recruiting can, in the future, move from being a cost centre into a profit centre
The end of the need for recruiting agencies
Job boards folding and repurposing
Companies hiring through crowdsourcing and external referrals
As Communities build, Exclusive/VIP/Premium ‘paid’ ‘in-community’ content and ‘monetised’ mobile
apps
Gamification shapes resourcing strategies and underpins content stickiness and virality
Companies subjected to global reviews by Crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd
Yes, some elements are in play today, parts of 3.0, BUT in the next generation the above will be central and
prevalent to recruiting strategy and thinking.
Some may feel utter fantasy. Impossible. But when forecasting the future surely it is the goal to challenge
thinking?
Recruiting as a Profit centre
Even to this day, this remains a controversial element of Recruitment 4.0.
Discounted as fanciful.
Too futuristic.
But forming a vision for the future of recruiting is surely what this document is about?
Recruiting has traditionally been a ‘cost centre’. It chews up money from the business especially if there are
agency fees, job board costs, consultancy fees.
This point cannot be exaggerated. Take a look at the some of the large Fortune and FTSE companies.
They are happy to use/addicted to using agencies and mass job board advertising.
Why focus on the bigger companies? Well, they have the resources to wean themselves off their addiction.
They can build their own internal functions and set up sourcing teams. They should be able to identify and
source passive candidates more easily than the small to medium companies. (But funnily enough the
small/medium companies have their own competitive advantage of being more flexible in strategy, faster
moving and of course more innovative in their ability to position themselves again the larger Fortune
companies).
Moving towards being a profit centre is not new. Some companies like Autodesk experimented with a form
of this some years back. Autodesk attributed a value to the business and charged hiring managers per hire,
hence at the end of the year, giving money back. Of course this is a form of ‘shifting of internal money’ as
opposed to a true profit centre model, but demonstrates some of the innovatory thinking out there.
Recruiting as a profit centre is a huge step.
48 Revolutionary.
Impossible…..but is it?
Perhaps not…
Let’s frame this again. This is some time off. Not in place for tomorrow. Years…..away.
In the world we live in ‘value’ is defined differently.
Look at companies like Zynga and Facebook which have valuations well above their profitability margins.
Why is this? Well it boils down to their potential, derived from their reach and potential reach. They both
have huge access to people. Mass followings. Mass ‘engaged’ followings.
This is an age where audiences are disperse. Take a look at TV/Radio with so many channels but so little
ways to communicate with target audiences effectively. Communities like Zynga and Facebook have
showed the power of crowds and communities.
Our generation is living in the information age. Power lies in networks. Networks = communities.
Networks/communities = data. Data = power. Data is also money.
So how does a community, (or let’s crudely call it data), = value = monetization = recruiting becoming a
profit center?
There are several facets to recruiting moving to a profit center.
1) Reduction of recruiting costs to a minimum, (agency usage close to zero, less need for mass job
board advertising, reduction in number of in-house recruiters employed).
2) This depends on building & nurturing a ‘qualitative’ Community, strong Employment Brand, vibrant
Social Networks, mapped competitors and putting in place a ‘predictable talent pipeline’ for key hiring
channels.
3) The ‘Community’ itself evolves into a ‘self-service’ Community, where recruiting can be executed by
‘Crowd Sourcing’. In addition, Hiring Managers becoming more engaged into pipeline generation &
hiring themselves. ‘Everyone can use LinkedIn…why not Hiring Managers?’
4) ‘Value’ in the community is identified by both internal and external advertisers / marketers that allows
for revenue for recruiting.
5) A sense of increased value is attached to belonging / being part of that community, hence VIP /
Exclusive areas / content that people are happy to pay for.
6) ‘Gamification’ principles create more engagement and sense of belonging and ‘stickiness’ to sites,
hence driving potential of more opportunities for monetization.
7) Actual games / cartoons / content that people subscribe to that has repeat value that people are
prepared to pay for.
So…….
Thriving ‘Engaged’ community + rich, sought after, premium content = people prepared to pay + profit.
Let’s say, you create an app that people want to access. You charge $2 for it, (nothing). 150,000 people
download it, (a fraction of your recruiting database) and that’s $300,000 in the bank……
Some radical concepts but ones that sit nicely together.
Premium Paid Content
Recruitment 3.0 recognized that recruiting is fundamentally boring. People tend to only visit corporate
careers pages when they are looking for work. There is no engaging ‘repeat visit’ content that drags them
back for more. Many companies are using Social Media as a replacement job board and listing jobs with
hyperlinks back to the job site. Hardly the most engaging content.
49 3.0 sees the exploration of building ‘engaged’ communities. Key is ‘content’ that is compelling, rich and is a
destination that people wanted to go to on a frequent basis.
Remember again that recruiting is not all ‘bums on seats’ it also encompasses nurturing a strong
Employment Brand proposition, attracting & seducing those not familiar with your brand and taking them on
a journey to either apply to work for your company or be an active brand ambassador, championing in your
community.
As communities build up in 3.0, underpinned by engaging content, and when those communities reach a
critical mass, the next step is starting to grant VIP access and ‘exclusive content’ to community members. If
communities are ‘engaged’ they will be, by very definition, happy to ‘pay’ to be part of the VIP area, hence
we will see the monetization of these communities and a potential revenue stream for recruiters.
What is engaging content?
Of course aggregating all your Social Media feeds, (be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube content and your
blog), is the first step. This could and should be aggregated both on your corporate careers site and your
mobile phone app, (for those that want to be part of the community on the move). A one stop shop for
people to engage and follow your company. This encourages repeat visitors.
Crucially this content on the Social Media sites needs to feel ‘personalized’ and ‘humanized’ giving exclusive
access behind the scenes of your company and the individuals behind it.
But what else……..?
Key is understanding the public pulse and there is no better place than the Apple Store. This shows what
content keeps people coming back and is most popular to download. And guess what that is:
-
News & Information (knowledge & exclusive access news)
Games (fun games but also including quizzes).
Comics & books (The appeal of an ongoing story that people want to follow)….
Photography / photos / videos (uploading & sharing)
Particularly this content often focuses on getting people involved, something to do with your friends and
hence brings that ‘global community’ together.
Each of these is ‘sticky’ and keeps people coming back.
Why can’t recruiters use these same concepts as part of their community building but adapt them for their
own companies?
External Referrals through Crowdsourcing
Recruiters can learn a lot from crowdsourcing.
This term was arguably defined by Jeff Howe in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine.
Howe states:
‘Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once
performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the
form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively),
but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format
and the large network of potential laborers’.
Howe further drives this home by stating that ‘it’s only crowdsourcing once a company takes that design,
fabricates [it] in mass quantity and sell[s] it’.
50 In laymen’s language a company posts a problem online, a vast number of individuals offer their opinions &
ideas how to solve it, with the winning idea rewarded in some form, with the end result of the company
adopting the idea for its own benefit.
Some great examples of the power of crowdsourcing exist on Wikipedia: (the following are all directly
quoted from Wikipedia).
In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called "HITs" (Human
Intelligence Tasks") can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed "Artificial
Intelligence", it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing "machine".
Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The
winners in 2008 was a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey
Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than
2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won US$250,000
The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video
gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose —
whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc
Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method
offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures
General Electric organized a multi-million dollar challenge to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and
economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. The winner will be announced on
Nov. 16, 2020
The Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD′s
investigations into the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during
the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social
media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of July 1, 2011, 101 arrests have been made
IBM collected over 37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees and
their family members in 2006
L'Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of Current TV to pool new and fresh advertising ideas
Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would
receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States
Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to
find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack food brand Peperami since 1993, but has
decided to submit their brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives
Autodesk successfully used crowdsourcing to define their company vision.
Ironically, Wikipedia is itself a successful example of crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing can take on different guises.
Crowdvoting, whereby a company gathers a large group, (crowd), and seeks judgement on a certain topic.
Allied to this is the concept of Wisdom of the Crowd. Wisdom of the crowd collects large amounts of
information and aggregates it to gain a complete and accurate picture of a topic, based on the idea that a
group of people is often more intelligent than an individual.
Crowdfunding is the process of funding projects by a multitude of people contributing a small amount in
order to attain a certain monetary goal.
Crowdsourcing, as a concept, lends itself perfectly to recruiting.
Posing the question to your Community, ‘We are looking for a dynamic Product Manager, with x/y/z
experience…Any ideas/recommendations’, will soon become a normal sourcing/name generating activity for
recruiters.
Key is how to incent/ motivate the crowd to do your recruiting?
51 LinkedIn is already making headway towards this goal with aiding a company’s ability to leverage our
employee networks and matching up people on Linkedin who are connected to our employees who closely
match our job specifications.
But what about the wider crowd? That’s where attentions will turn next…..
Recruiting Embraces Concepts of Gamification
The latest cool recruiting concept and buzz word is ‘Gamification’. Thrown into conversation to look cool
and funky Gamification is one of the most misunderstood concepts in recruiting.
People view Gamification as just adding games to websites or Facebook.
This misses the point completely.
Of course there are millions who love to be entertained. Gaming is huge. The spread of casual gaming be
it on Facebook or on mobile shows the power of people of all ages wanting interactive entertainment.
Gaming educates us about the dynamics of engagement, (some would take this further to addiction). What
a great game does is that it ingrains itself into the conscious and subconscious of the player. You think
about it and you love the roller coaster of emotions that the game takes you through. You may pull an allnighter or get up extra early to get in an hour or so before having to venture off to deal with hum drum
reality. Escapism is the new drug of the austerity ‘tens’.
But what else can we learn? Casual games are the key to the door of mass/ mainstream and that elusive
community engagement via compelling content that we all seek…….. Casual games are those that
embrace all demographic and are simple, fun and accessible. These are games where users get an instant
form of gratification.
Farmville on Facebook is a classic example of community building and demonstrates some key buttons in
engagement theory (in a Social context). Farmville has been such a success for a number of reasons.
Firstly it recognized the unbridled thrill of gifting. When you first visit your farm, you don’t go straight to it but
to a page with a list of gifts. Many games ask you to spam mail your buddies to play the game. Farmville
cleverly goes further by allowing you to send a gift of an animal or plant/crop to your friends. Of course,
when we receive gifts, we also like to give them back igniting the spiral of interaction.
Part of this psychology also encourages you to help your friends by reminding them to harvest their fields
and to ‘weed’ their farms. This is all very community oriented and friendly stuff.
These gifts also have a perceived ‘value’. The whole point of Farmville is to build a busy and profitable farm
and maintain it. But to do this you need to build and grow the farm. This is time consuming and it takes a
while to buy plants, crops and trees etc. But luckily your saving grace is your friends as they help out by
sending all these ‘valuable’ items for your farm. Hence my farm looks better with more content so I will
invite more of my friends to play, give them gifts and expect / request gifts in return. This is a clever use of
personal psychology and the satisfaction of wants.
Farmville also gets that the game has to be accessible and simple. There are no extra levels as you just
keep on growing the size and scope of your own farm. The only limitation is money. But having lots of
friends gets round that.
Now the clever part kicks in. The game keeps you coming back. Certain crops you plan require harvesting
at certain times. Some crops will die if you don’t come back. For example, strawberries mean you come
52 back every four hours. That locks in an ‘engagement’ and repeat visit. “I must log back in at 2pm or my
crops will die!”
Farmville also cleverly gets the whole concept of ‘one-up-manship’ and competing to have the bigger farm,
the more money and the latest gadgets. That’s where monetization kicks in. Someone can pay to get ahead
of their friends and for many that is a key driver. “I must have the biggest farm and the latest items and be
ahead of my mates!”
Farmville teaches us there are three things to making social games huge viral successes: getting users to
invite their friends, (virality), getting users to return frequently (stickiness) and people competing to win/be
ahead of their friends (showing off).
Interestingly, one of the first to understand these dynamics was the Hotel Chain Marriott. They released a
Facebook game designed with the goal of introducing potential employees to life in the hospitality industry.
MyMarriottHotel gives players the opportunity to ‘work’ in various hotel roles including hospitality manager.
You can start by working in the hotel kitchens and gain points for excellent customer service and
profitability. The game is geared to raising awareness amongst ‘millennials’ to job opportunities around the
world (cleverly available in five languages).
Critically for recruiting, the MyMarriottHotel Facebook game includes a banner at the top of the game
shouting “Do It For Real” that hyperlinks to Marriott’s jobs site. Marriott’s goal is to fill 50,000 positions at
their hotels around the world with this game raising awareness predominantly outside the USA. Smart
branding and awareness cookies also add pipeline!
So what is ‘Gamification’ and how can it be applied to recruiting?
‘Gamification’ is using game methodology to inspire engagement in activities that otherwise would
be considered boring or routine.
The key concepts of Gamification that recruiters can learn from when developing communities and building
compelling/repeat visit content include:
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The key word when engaging in social media & community building is remembering the key element
i.e. ‘social’ (often forgotten)!
Keeping activities / content simple, fun and interactive. Is your blog/social media light, short,
informative, stimulating or even entertaining to read?
People want to know what other people are doing. Especially their friends. Can people see what
their friends have been doing? People love engagement and giving their opinion be it by rate-thispage, commenting, opinion polls. These are all ‘interactive’ elements that engage.
As people interact, degrees of personalization & humanization help e.g. ‘Avatars’ / upload
people’s pictures. People prefer engaging with ‘perceptibly real’ other people. Avatars aid that.
Are you encouraging sharing content / activities with your community? Are people ‘rewarded’ or
‘recognized’ for sharing content?
Inspiring members of your Community’s friends to get involved and get their friends engaged i.e.
Virality - i.e. sending community growth viral.
Gifting. Can content be shared amongst friends / can someone get something in return?
‘Keeps em coming back for more’- Certain reveals at certain times of the day / week that the
community have to be there. Prizes / giveaways ingrain this activity. Some companies do specific
content reveals at certain times of the week. Live webcasts also encourage ‘set time’ attendance.
Competition against friends / leaderboards. Be it quiz questions about your company, most
referrals of job seekers, or most comments made in your blog/social community. Leaderboards keep
people coming back to chart their progress and who is top. (and they have to be ahead of their
friends).
53 -
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‘Easter Eggs’ i.e. those intentionally hidden features that people can’t find. Especially cool for
University/Intern sections and can be used to encourage people to find about more about your
company and unlock ‘exclusive’ content.
Enabling unique experiences / personalization- Can people create their own unique user
account, person
Progress bars- People are addicted to completion and progress bars are often used in online
shopping as you are guided to place things in the shopping cart and progress to the checkout.
Progress bars fit nicely with job application processes of a series of tasks that people will want to
‘complete’. ‘Completism’ is a natural human psychological compulsion.
User Generated Content- Games like ‘LittleBigPlanet’ has showed us that people love creating
their own content and sharing that content i.e. gaming levels, with the community. Can your
community do the same e.g. upload photos to you blog/corporate careers site?
These concepts can all be applied to corporate career sites which are purely a repository of information
overload and fundamentally dull and of course to Mobile apps. People want content to engage them while
they are sitting on the train, plane or bus.
It is important to note, (as the above demonstrates), that games and gamification isn’t the same
thing. But there is room for games…..
A natural element to encouraging engagement is fun & entertainment. This does includes games.
Interestingly some Corporate Sites already include games and other challenges—almost always in the
Careers section—and some companies have added game elements to the recruiting process.
Some are asking surely this is expensive? How can a recruiting department make games? But at minimal
cost there is a thriving development community and graduates studying at University who would love the
opportunity and exposure that creating and publishing a game on a corporate site brings them. Development
time on games for mobile is minimal but the key is fun (look at games like Doodle Jump & Flick Football,
massively popular but simple to develop).
Many recruiters are currently using Empire Avenue ‘The Social Stock Market’ as a way of engaging with
communities and making new contacts. Some are even using it as a sourcing tool to recruit from. For those
that don’t know, Empire Avenue is fundamentally a stock market simulation ‘social network game’ that
encourages users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. Players have their own portfolio in a
‘virtual’ economy and earn money, (called ‘Eaves’) by investing in other people and this sees your own net
worth rise by encouraging friends and community members to invest in you. What is cool is that when all
accounts are linked together i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and blogs, you’re net worth
rises based on the content you either create or share. What’s cool about this approach is that it combines
simplicity with what we do on the web every day…creating and sharing content. Interestingly, Empire
Avenue mimics the other sites as it's also a social network itself. It's allows opportunities to connect and
debate with others by finding affinity groups ("Communities") within Empire Avenue. These are clever
engagement mechanisms at play.
Concurrently, Google are also on the move with their Google News Badges. We all read the news, and
applying the above theory, let’s call it ‘Gamification’ methodology, Google have created ‘Google Badges’.
Google News users in the US can earn different pins, for reading the news, starting with bronze and moving
up to Ultimate. There are more than 500 badges available to suit all types of interest, such as ‘stock market’,
‘Harry Potter’ and US elections. These ‘Google Badges’ follow closely on the heels of Google launching its
own social network, Google+ in the last month, and is increasingly trying to get people to share content via
its network of services in a similar fashion to Facebook.
54 This will sound very similar to users of Foursquare which this is a central philosophical tenant of.
Foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on mobile phones. Users "check-in" at
venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application and selecting from a list of
venues that the application locates nearby e.g. restaurant, library, pub, house etc. Each check-in awards the
user points and sometimes "badges". The first time a badge is unlocked on Foursquare, be it an easy
achievement, (like the "Superstar" badge for 50 check-ins), or one that comes as a surprise, (‘Douchebag
Badge’, which is unlocked after checking into venues tagged with “douchebag”, or the ‘Don’t stop Believing
badge’, awarded for checking in to 3 venues tagged “karaoke” in a month), the ‘game’ keeps people
engaged with rewards that makes members want to use the system even more and compete with friends.
Especially those who live or work in close vicinity of each other as they compete to be the Mayor of a
location.
Why is ‘Gamification’ so important?
Interestingly, to give more credence to this area, Gartner, in research published in April 2011 stated: “By
2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.
By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important
as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least
one gamified application.”
That’s a big statement. 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified
application.
Many commentators see that naturally fitting in the corporate careers site.
Perhaps ‘Gamification’ will be taken more seriously amongst current Recruiting Leaders moving forward?
The Death of Recruiting Agencies….
At the same time, savvy companies will be seeing their recruiting costs decreasing.
As companies build their database of talent via direct sourcing coupled with their valued online communities,
the need for recruiting agencies will dramatically decrease.
This will also coincide with less need for corporate in-house recruiters. Hiring Managers are more than
adept at searching on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is greatly expanding its offering and making recruiting easier for
everyone. Initiatives like ‘Genome’ from LinkedIn will radically lesson the need for dedicated in-house
recruiters in the future. Coupled with your community recruiting on your company's behalf, (‘Crowd Sourcing
of Talent’), the need for recruiters will lessen and hence accelerate cost reduction.
The very future of recruiting agencies depends on their ability to adapt to the new realities that
companies are waking up to the need of breaking out of the active candidate pool and identifying
and attracting the passive candidates. This also takes into the account that in-house recruiters are
becoming more aligned with the business and increasing their consulting capabilities.
Contingent recruiting agencies, especially the large ones, are in the business of competing to be the first to
present the resumes of the 10% active pool. Unless they start to adapt to attracting and mapping out the
90% non-active and building their own communities, their model will face extinction.
Even worse, the business model of traditional retained search is founded on the delusions of lunacy. A
client paying a 30% fee for first year guaranteed compensation split into thirds has the risk loaded on the
paying client. Certainly, cost models will change towards loaded placement fees.
The irony is that the Search firms marketing is based on its peerless reputation and ultimate rolodex of all
the golden names in the industry. Their network is the goldmine that we are seduced to unlock. If their
databases are that peerless and they have done hundreds of similar searches then why does it take four to
five weeks for a shortlist? Perhaps that question is not raised enough? I guess that they are using the
same sourcing methods as strong internal recruiting teams.
55 Ah, the zealots will cry. The agencies are peerless in assessment and interviewing. Don’t in-house
recruiters have the same skills? Why am I paying two thirds of a fee without a placement? Even more
laughable is that the shortlist of contacts is most likely generated by a fresh graduate on £25k a year in the
back room of the agency who then passes all their lead generation to the Search Consultant.
A little tip. Companies should recruit the back room search name generator on £25k to work on their
internal searches versus paying the hefty agency fee. A sound investment! The future is not bright for
external search firms unless they adapt to changing new business realities.
Job Boards Faltering
Coupled with the death/decline of agencies will be the faltering and restructuring of the large job boards.
As companies build their own recruiting databases and, even more importantly, their own communities, they
can use creative ways in sourcing talent.
Communities themselves will evolve around certain disciplines / careers / industries and hence negate the
use for paid job boards. Why pay for a large job board in the active pool when we can reach passive
candidates in a ‘free’ community?
Job boards will have to look at community building themselves and earn their revenue through product
placement advertising rather than paid for job advertisements.
Companies have always embraced the concept of internal referrals. Why not the reverse? External
referrals. Even better through 'Crowd Sourcing' through their communities.
Of course nay-sayers will point to the rewards attributed to internal referrals, generally through monetary
bonus and hence the difficulty of applying this externally as companies don't want to pay for talent they
would have got anyway.
But recent times have showed the power of recognition and public reward through games like Foursquare.
People love the status of being the Mayor of a local curry house.
Why not take this principle into recruiting and reward referrals from crowd sourcing. Public recognition and
rewards in the community, (badges, leaderboards), on a sliding scale to reach actualization of real rewards
be it monetary bonus, holiday or a PC or iPad.
So as recruiting agencies struggle and job boards falter, we see new ways of recruiting moving into their
place……one of which is ‘Crowd Sourcing’……
Global Community Rating of Companies
It is clear that people trust each other and members of their community far more than they do advertising or
company communications. Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers, talked about the impact of social
media. One of his key points was that 78% of consumers trust each other more than they trust advertising –
which is why they read blogs and go to chat rooms.
There are many examples to back this up, particularly when we go on holiday. The holiday industry has had
to get far more authentic and responsible in its communications. No more fantastic rating of restaurant food
when it is tripe; no more ‘the beach is in walkable distance’….But only for those who are happy to walk for
two hours and no more ‘great local entertainment’ when it is two people playing spoons. Why is that?
Primarily because people rely on their friends opinions and community views. Many people now check out
Trip Advisor and read how people have voted/rated their holiday/hotel en mass and then read through
56 some of the commentary. Real & authentic. Trust worthy as there are no hidden agendas but just shared
experiences.
Companies value their placing on “Great Places to Work” lists. The recognition is a mix of internal employee
surveys and an evaluation of policies/culture evaluated by a panel of experts. Glassdoor is the closest to a
‘trip advisor’ for recruiting. Although it was initially focused on the U.S. market the organic growth of ratings
and traffic outside the U.S. has been remarkable.
As we head to 4.0, those principles behind Glassdoor will see job seekers trust the crowd and companies
will value that authenticity far more than traditional manufactured best places to work lists.
Trust the crowd. It’s an extension of democracy……
Size Doesn’t Matter!
Some reading this will rightly raise the question of whether this is all this scalable. Cynics will openly
proclaim there will always be a need for high street agencies and job centers in local areas to hire
receptionists, builders, joiners, hairdressers, admin assistants and hosts of other roles. A scream will be
heard that ‘job boards will never die’. This was all predicted ten years back and it never happened. How
can a small company generate its own community? Many criticisms and protection of vested interests will
emerge in this debate.
Fair points to discuss. Interestingly, when Hard Rock Café wanted to open a new venue in Firenze
(Florence) they used Facebook to reach out and recruit. They built a community around the new venue
opening. Hard Rock needed to hire 120 staff, (across eight categories from waiting staff, bartenders to
accounting). They were inundated with responses and were able to interview 600 candidates for the roles
and whittle down to the 120 needed for opening. A pure social media success. And their community lives
on…..
Technological, access to information and communities know no boundaries. That’s the difference the past
ten years have made and why jobs boards and agencies have to adapt.
Conclusion
Recruitment 4.0 is a long way off and yet many of its concepts are resonating today and being built upon
and planned. Some early adopters are even part way implementing some of the components. 4.0 is a
natural progression from 3.0. It takes the community concept onto the next level.
Some will be initially shocked at the radicalism involved at suggestions of recruiting transitioning into a profit
center, ‘crowd sourcing’ talent and entertaining/gamification. Upon reflection they will understand that it
makes sense as a natural strap-on of 3.0 communities.
57 New- Recruitment 5.0
Mobile…finally! DNA footprints in the cloud; recruiting
“back to basics”: getting to know the candidate; end of
the traditional ATS; emerging markets dominate;
augmented reality; disruptive marketing and stunt PR;
the end of Social’ media! ‘Candidate cloning’ and the
end of recruiters as we know it!
The impact and level of debate created by Recruitment 3.0 and 4.0 certainly took us by surprise. Based on
feedback, it is clear that there has been healthy discussion and many companies have re-appraised /
reviewed their recruiting strategies.
Recruitment 5.0 is the final paper in the trilogy.
Predicting the future is not easy….but it is kind of fun.
Recruitment 3.0 & 4.0, in many ways predict next steps. But seeking to move on from there is tougher.
What is the future of the future? That is tough to define.
Writing ‘futurology’ papers invites debate and disagreement. In writing 5.0 the key is to try and be realistic
and keep things in perspective. Many of you will identify with some of the theories in both 3.0 & 4.0. You
may be doing some or even all of them now. There is no strict timeline or hierarchical structure. There may
be a blurring between the philosophies and you are doing elements of both.
So… 5.0. is tougher to write. But there are trends and developments at play that are down the line and we
can see them coming. And it’s fun to thrash them around and start theorizing and planning.
So……Recruiting….
3.0 was all about building.
4.0 all about driving ‘value’
5.0 is all about…Personalization, self-sufficiency, predictability, big data and back to basics.
What are the defining features to Recruitment 5.0?
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Mobile recruiting finally takes off and becomes the dominant channel
Recruiting gets ‘back to basics’ and focuses on building relationships. Included in this is a focus on
Personalization / humanization and dominating/driving communications
Footprints in the Cloud. Companies obsessively get to know their customers/consumers, and
recruiters do the same with their ‘Corporate’ talent pools
Data DNA: Companies draw data to profile candidates based on online habits and trends
Technological developments bring an end to the Traditional ATS
Emerging Markets….emerge and dominate
‘Augmented reality’ & ‘disruptive marketing’ dominate recruiting marketing
As companies seek to attract the best talent in a candidate short market, they set up their own
courses, Universities/Academies, and ‘clone’ future employees
As talent becomes more scarce, talent becomes more contract by nature and more flexible
58 •
‘It’s the end of recruiters as we know it’…..the death of the recruiting profession?
Some meaty stuff.
Reviewing these bullet points, some companies are already experimenting and executing on elements but
as time passes, these will become dominant in our thoughts, planning and strategizing.
Let’s explore in more detail.
Mobile Recruiting…..FINALLY….Takes Off
This may seem rather surreal to include Mobile under Recruitment 5.0. Mobile Recruiting is surely now?
Many would include it under Recruitment 3.0. But adoption of mobile has been super slow in recruiting thus
the placement in 5.0. There is a definite time lag in mobile adoption for recruiting purposes.
(Embarrassingly, this problem is thanks to us in that we are not providing candidates the tools to look and
apply for jobs on mobile and not the other way round as candidates are wanting to use their mobiles to try
and look for jobs). The demand is there for mobile job search but the supply isn’t. In a recent study by Dr
John & Associates, it was found that only 8% of the Fortune 100 Companies careers sites are mobile
enabled. Further analysis showed that of the largest 35 companies in the USA and UK, only four had
mobile enabled careers sites, with only one having a mobile recruiting app. That hardly screams mass
adoption. That shouts of delay and scepticism and laziness in adoption.
Let’s be clear. Mobile is not the silver bullet to recruiting that many proclaim but it will become a key
channel in the recruiting mix and arguably THE key channel. It cannot, as it is now, be ignored.
Mobile recruiting is not new. Five to ten years ago companies were experimenting with SMS messaging
campaigns. That’s a long way from today. What is pushing mobile adoption and stimulating recruiting’s
interest in mobile is the rise of the Smart Phone which is really making mobile a mass market medium.
Based on current projections by Morgan Stanley, within the next three years, mobile internet users will
exceed desktop users. Some predict that this may even happen next year in 2013.
59 Why is mobile so important? Why does it deserve our attention as recruiters?
Well we can’t argue with the stats………..
Delving down into that data is even more inspiring, as per this Key Global Telecoms Indicator by
mobiThinking. Mobile growth is HUGE.
These final stats are powerful……
•
Mobile now accounts for 10% of internet usage worldwide (this has more than doubled over last
18months) (The Next Web)
•
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1.08 of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones are smartphones Apple and Android represent more than 75% of the smartphone market 7.96% of all web traffic in the U.S. is mobile traffic. That number skyrockets to 14.85% in Africa, and 17.84% in Asia — up 192.5% since 2010 29% of mobile users are open to scanning a mobile tag to get coupons •
60 •
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39% of instances where a consumer walks out of a store without buying were influenced by smartphones 91% of mobile internet access is for social activities, versus just 79% on desktops (Source: Hubspot) Over 1/3 of Facebook’s users access Facebook Mobile; 50% of Twitter’s users use Twitter Mobile Facebook stated at the last GigaOM Mobilize Conference that mobile was their key growth area. They
stated that they have over 320m active mobile users who log into Facebook twice as often as desktop users.
The CTO then stated that ‘within 12 to 18 months you will consider Facebook a mobile company and not a
social company’. That’s a bold statement.
•
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The average tablet user spends 13.9 hours per week with the device 73% of smartphone owners access social networks through apps at least once per day (Source: Hubspot) There was 103% growth in website traffic from smartphones from 2011-­‐2012 US consumers spend almost 1 in every 10 ecommerce dollars using a mobile device (Source: Hubspot) There are currently 6 Billion mobile subscribers worldwide This equals 87% of the world’s population China and India account for 30% of this growth There are over 1.2 Billion people accessing the web from their mobiles Over 300,000 apps have been developed in the past 3 year Google earns 2.5 Billion in mobile ad revenue annually (Source Digital Buzz Blog) 38% of UK tablet owners spend more time on their tablet than watching TV
53% of people in the UK are ‘dual screening’ (using phone whilst watching TV for example)
Total of $241 billion in mobile transactions in 2011
There are regular mobile transactions with value over $5,000
86% of all adults own at least one mobile phone
Too many stats? Maybe. But the key is to impress on Talent Acquisition leaders the importance of mobile
as part of the mobile mix.
Let’s turn now to recruiting and mobile.
Research is showing us that people are actively searching for jobs on their mobile. Interesting, while people
are looking at jobs throughout the day, they wait till they get home and apply via desktop. The technology
for applying and linking resumes/cv’s is not quite there. Mobile internet research shows us that the heaviest
usage of mobile internet is between 8pm-10pm.
Comscore estimates that the UK has 2.8m jobseekers a month accessing job listing from mobile devices,
with 67% looking every day. Recruitment 5.0 is all about the future and hence tracking student’s views of
today, (the job seekers of tomorrow), shows that, according to PotentialPark research that 88% of job
seekers are or would search for jobs via mobile internet, with one in three job seekers wanting to actually
apply from their handset.
Mobile, offers great opportunities to build trust and brand awareness and engage with talent. In India,
consumers are leapfrogging traditional media and the PC to embrace mobile devices, while low literacy
rates spur the development of voice activated web sites and services.
Perhaps one of the reasons for low adoption of mobile is confusion over what to do. Go for a mobile
enabled site or create a mobile app?
mSite or App?
So what do you go for?
An mSite or a mobile app? Or both? Let’s differentiate the two.
An mSite is a mobile optimised website. (ie a site that is visible on your desktop can be viewed on a mobile
device without a loss in visual). mSite’s will run on any modern smartphone. If a site is not mobile enabled
graphics may not appear, text not load and hence create a bad experience for the viewer. Hence, the
design of an mSite is generally much simpler and cleaner with less emphasis on graphics, (helps loading
61 times on mobile as well. Too many graphics and download speeds with frustrate end users). It is also
important to note that some phones like iPhone/iPad don’t support flash.
The big advantage to mobile optimised sites is that they can respond to finger tapping and movement on
screen. Hence creating a more engaging and interactive candidate experience.
In comparison an app is designed for specific mobile OS’s, (operating systems). Apps can be designed for
iPads/iPhones, Android, Blackberry etc and are normally downloaded through stores eg iTunes, Google
Marketplace.
What should your company have?
Ensuring that your careers site is mobile enabled is step one. It ensures that, after mobile optimization, your
site is open to viewing on a range of smart phones and critically attracts mobile Google searches, (mSite’s
appear in Google mobile).
An app can provide a richer candidate experience, employment branding opportunities and critically the
advantage of push notifications. These are real time messages that alert candidates of an immediate call to
action like a job alert. Mobile phone users respond quickly to such push alerts.
Comscore estimates that 50% of all mobile internet use is via apps, (iPhone being the biggest).
Mobile Apps
So what should an app contain? Autodesk have been developing an app for quite some time.
The key questions that have dominated passionate debate have been:
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Who will download the app?
Why should they download it?
If downloaded why should someone keep the app live on their phone / tablet?
What causes people to repeat visit?
Why should passive job seekers, (i.e. not looking), download the app?
What does success look like?
How do we market and build a mobile community?
In many ways, you only get one shot at releasing an app and persuading people to download. If they
download and they don’t like what they see, the chances of getting them to download in the future are slim,
(even if enhancements are made). This is why we have delayed the release of the Autodeskers app. The
key is releasing an app when you are happy with it.
To help you in your decisions over mobile apps and content, we are providing an insight into the Autodesk
app as we ready for launch. This is by no means a perfect app but meant to stimulate your imagination for
your own mobile strategy.
62 ‘Autodeskers’ Mobile App Home Page
The home page is the hub of the app and contains key links to content throughout the site.
Keeping the app simple (and one that translate to iPhones & Android) the search functionality/tabs have
been restricted to:
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Home Page
Job Search
Gallery / photos (A section dedicated to images of what our software has helped create)
Social (One stop social media aggregator)
Information (About us…the company, meet the people and employee profiles)
The home page includes our game: Fake or Foto where there are twelve pictures and people have to guess
if they are real photos or computer trickery, (i.e. Computer Generated (CG) ). Fun. But, this also reinforces
Autodesk’s software capabilities.
Continuing the theme of humanizing the brand there is a montage of ‘people’ photos and a call to action to
in the Meet Us section.
The Home Page also contains a link to the Autodeskers blog page, (and all stories/ images / videos can be
viewed and the reader can comment on all stories and share content across their social pages for their
friends to view).
There is also a roll call of the latest jobs just posted. The page is dominated by an image which changes
each time you log in/refresh the page. This keeps the page feeling new. We have also placed some a
video linked to YouTube.
Let’s delve a little deeper past the home page.
63 Work with Us- Job Search
Mobile technology has been slow in linking in the ability to apply direct into databases. This is now a reality
and one which will see the take-off of mobile recruiting.
The key is that the job seeker can register for the latest job alerts as we post jobs according to their
preferences, (skills, location etc.). These alerts take the form of pop up messages on their phone which are
hyperlinked to the new job
64 About Us- Company Information
Of course an app needs company information. While this can be criticized for marketing spin those in the
app may want to learn more about the company. They may want to gain a feel for what life is like behind
the corporate iron curtain. The goal is to inform a potential recruit/brand enthusiast about life at Autodesk.
But this has been kept visual and kept brief. We took the opinion that if someone is in the app, we did not
want them to leave the app to look at info on other Autodesk sites.
Look at Us- The Gallery
We wanted our app to be visual and feel fun which was the goal of our Gallery section. It is certainly visual.
It impresses the multiple ways that our software helps create the world around us. Be it cars, bridges,
buildings, video games, films visual effects or consumer products and apps like Sketchbook Pro, 123D
Sculpt and Pixlr.
65 Meet Us- Humanizing the Brand
People buy from people.
Thus the goal of having a number of employee profiles. The profiles are written in the words of the
employees. It’s important that we used pictures they have provided, (not corporate headshots looking like
an employee caught petrified in the headlights of an incoming camera crew). This makes it feel more
authentic. Real.
Talk With Us- Social Media Aggregator
Social media is key to gaining that repeat visitor and creating that reason to come back. Creating a ‘one
stop shot’ for key Social Media Channels on the app was central to its design.
Rather than have a candidate/brand ambassador visit each of our Social Media sites and waste time logging
into each of them (and interest) the app presents the ideal way to quickly and efficiently join in with
66 discussions on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and YouTube. You can also view art created by consumers with
Sketchbook Pro on Flickr. This page presents a key reason why people keep the app on their phone / tablet
and come back for more on a daily basis.
One stop shop social media aggregation is a key feature to mobile apps.
Play With Us- Game Time
With a focus on why would someone download and keep this app on their phone we needed another aspect
to add to the social media one stop shop aggregator. That was….fun and games.
Fake or Foto was born.
A mix of real photos with images visualized with computer graphics. The challenge is to spot the difference
and test your eyesight. There are twelve image and each can be enlarged to full screen. Then boom. Say
if it is Fake or Foto. It’s great fun but more importantly people will subconsciously think “Wow, I cannot tell
the difference between a real photo and what your software creates.”
Then hopefully they share the content with their friends and challenge them to beat their score. The goal is
for the game to go viral.
Hopefully this section gets you thinking about what you can achieve with an app. But most of all understand
the real power of mobile for recruiting and building your Employment Brand awareness.
67 DNA Footprints in the Cloud. Obsessionately Knowing
your Audience
Only a few years back most people logged on to the Internet to access their emails, search the web and
maybe do some online shopping. Our corporate web sites were just ‘push-message’ vehicles for corporate
marketing to ‘spread the message’ and detail product information. Corporate marketing was not even
worried about how many people clicked ‘Like’ on their page! We have travelled a long way since then.
Fast forward to 2012 and there are a plethora of online communities and social networking sites. We do
most of our shopping and banking online. Some of us reinforce our beliefs and opinions through our
crowds/friend networks. We rely far more on our ‘friends’, (often people we have never met), on social sites
and trust their judgement on what films to see, what hotels to stay in, what holidays to go on, what cars to
buy, clothes to wear and stances to take on news issues. Social Media has created platforms for individuals
to become stars e.g. Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, posting to YouTube in their ‘undiscovered’ days.
As we have seen, over 1.5 billion people are on social networking sites. Almost one in five hours is spent on
these networks, increasingly on mobile devices. These social networks have been a cultural, social and
economic phenomenon. New social behaviours have been created. New freedoms gained. Social Media
has been used for organizing political activities as seen in the Arab Spring. Planning weddings. Playing
games. Talking with companies.
Social media is not just about consumers/people. Businesses are rushing to utilize social networks and
communities, to help them get ‘informed’ opinions, generate new consumer insights and online focus
groups. Like individual users companies are using the web to listen, watch trends and monitor chatter (e.g.
through Radian 6). In Recruitment 4.0 we referenced ‘Crowdsourcing’, ‘Crowdfunding’ and the whole power
of the crowd, which can be harnessed by business. ‘Value’ is there.
This is a lot of communication. That is even more information. Information is data. Data is power.
Data is everywhere. Just take a step back and reflect on the explosion of data in the world today.
Companies around the world are capturing trillions of bytes of information about their customers, suppliers
and operations. Coupled with that, the rise of multimedia, social media and the internet is fuelling the
growth in data and what can be learned about people and their habits.
Analyzing these massive sets of data, (‘Big data’), will become the central point of competition, driving
productivity growth, innovation and vitally this applies to recruiting.
What we do with this data in recruiting will be key.
Imagine a world in which recruiters receive job applications, weighted and analysed based on data patterns
and ‘footprints’ in the Cloud, which weigh & rank:
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Skill sets
Successes
Strength & depth of Networks (e.g. LinkedIn connections)
Experience (People who have worked at certain companies have a better track record of success)
Educational background (people with certain educations have a better track record of success
based on your companies previous hires)
Behavioural patterns (‘Footprints’ in the cloud’) What sites have been visited
Psychological profiling (what people do and say)
Result: The computerized pre-selection and ranking of candidates. The ‘ideal’ shortlist.
Appealing? Bizarre? Unethical? Legal issues?
Hiring Managers want anything that provides them a clearer insight into an individual and reduces the
change of a miss hire. ‘Big data’ brings that one step closer.
68 The cost of a bad hire? Harvard business school defines that as three to five times an employee’s
annualized compensation. In specialist functions they define that as ten times an annual salary. That’s a lot
of money and wasted time. This is a cost that Hiring Managers want to avoid and if better assessments and
insights into candidates help make recruiting more ‘predictable’ then there will be an appetite for it.
Houston, we have a problem
STOP. Before we go any further…Let’s get this right out in the open and out slap bang on the middle of the
table. This section of the paper is controversial. There are risks and big issues surrounding ‘data usage’.
This raises a host of ethical, legal and other issues including privacy, due process, equality, security
and liability.
Of all these, privacy is perhaps the biggest concern. Profiling technologies make possible an intrusive
analysis of an individual's behavior and preferences. Behavioral and psychological profiling are key
examples. Profiles can reveal private and personal information about individuals that they might not even
know about themselves.
Profiling technologies are very discriminatory tools. They allow unequalled kinds of social ranking and
segmentation which could have alarming effects, for example, profiled individuals may be excluded from
important offers or opportunities by the nature of how they have been profiled e.g. a job interview. The
process of profiling is more often than not invisible for those that are being profiled. This creates difficulties
in that it becomes virtually impossible to contest being ranked into any particular grouping. Also, scarily, is
the potential of profiles ending up in the hands of the wrong people who use the information for criminal
purposes e.g. identity theft. It will be interesting to see how this highly controversial area of evolves……
Big Data
So, let explore this concept of ‘Big Data’ some more….
The McKinsey Institute published a superb report in May 2011 entitled, ‘Big Data: The Next Frontier for
innovation, competition and productivity. In this report some truly impressive stats were published:
-
$600 to buy a disk drive that can store all of the world’s music
5 billion mobile phones in use in 2010
30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month
40% projected growth in global data generated vs. 5% growth in Global IT Spending
235 terabytes data collected by the US Library of Congress by April 2011
15 out of 17 sectors in the United States have more data stored per company than the US Library of
Congress
$300 billion potential annual value to US health care, more than double the total annual health care
spending in Spain
€250 billion potential annual value to Europe’s public sector administration---more than GDP of
Greece
$600 billion potential annual consumer surplus from using personal location data globally
60% potential increase in retailers’ operating margins possible with big data
140,000 – 190,000 more deep analytical talent positions and 1.5 million more data savvy managers
needed to take full advantage of big data in the United States
Source McKinsey Big Data report May 2011
‘Big Brother’ data is monitoring and teaching companies about us as we speak. Consider all the millions of
networked sensors which are in place in cars, iPads, and mobile phones. These technologies sense,
monitor and communicate data back to their originators. Our trends and behaviours are being monitored so
companies can learn more and better tailor their propositions to the market. (Known as ‘behavioural
targeting’). Big Brother is truly here in 2012!
69 The ability to study and the gain ‘real value’ from data increases as the amount of data captured rises.
Companies are using this to good effect already especially ‘predictivity’. Amazon makes recommendations
to you based on your buying and viewing trends. The same is true with iTunes and services like Spotify or
Pandora. Recommendations are made for other bands or music that data match your current listening
favorites. Both Apple and Amazon use this data predictivity or to use the proper term ‘behavioural targeting’
to drive additional sales.
When a consumer or customer visits a web site, the pages they visit, the length of time spent viewing each
page, the links they click on, the searches they make and all the elements they interact with, allow sites to
collect, store, disseminate and analyze that data. This data creates a ‘profile’ that link’s to that visitor’s web
browser. With the data collected, web site publishers can use this data to ‘group’ similar data matches
together. When a visitor returns to a specific site or network of sites using the same web browser, those
profiles can be used to all advertisers to target customers, ‘likely’ to be interested in their product. Most
platforms identify visitors by assigning a unique ID cookie to each and every visitor to the site thereby
allowing them to be tracked throughout their web journey, the platform then make a rules-based decision
about what content to serve. Hence, in theory, maximizing the chances of tailored messaging and greater
return e.g. sales.
Any examples today?
If this drive to understand the ‘DNA’ of candidates and the stack ranking of individuals is the future, you may
ask for evidence today pointing to this.
Some technologies are available today to ‘stack rank’ candidates based on simple criteria. Of course
LinkedIn provides us candidate matches based on complex algorithms.
But what other examples, however basic, show us a potential of the future?
Tweet Psych is an example of Psychological Profiling that exists today.
Tweet Psych: Psychological Profiling on Twitter
Psychological profiling is a controversial area.
When people come in for interview they have their interview face on. Their ‘polished’ personality is ready to
go and they are well-rehearsed….. and fake.
Some companies insist on psychological profiling through assessments.
But understanding a person and who they really are is key for a company since they want to avoid
expensive mis-hires and “team disruptors.” If we deem that people are not putting an act on over social
media and ‘speaking their mind’, then analyzing tweets can make interesting reading. While early days the
basic technology is in place which is attempting to do this. Take a look at Tweet Psych.
Communication is a window into a person’s mind and the way a person talks can tell you a lot about how
they think. Linguists have developed two methods to decoding the written word into a meaningful profile of
a person’s cognitive processes.
One method is called the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID). This coding scheme is designed to measure
the amount and type of three categories of content: primordial (the unconscious way you think, like in
dreams), conceptual (logical and rational though) and emotional.
The other method is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which measures the cognitive and emotional
properties of a person based on the words they use.
TweetPsych uses the both the LIWC and RID to build a psychological profile of a person based on the
content of their Tweets. It claims to compare the content of a user’s Tweets to a baseline reading built by
70 analyzing an ever-expanding group of over 1.5 million random Tweets and highlighting areas where the user
stands out.
The service analyzes the last 1000 Tweets; as such, it works best on users who have posted more than
1000 updates. It is also better suited for running analyses on accounts that are operated by a single user
and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.
What is attempted to be measured?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Anxiety
Oral Fixation
Work
Positive Emotions
Negative Emotions
Social Behavior
Sadness
Spirituality
Swears (Bad Language)
Sexual References
Sleeping
Sports
Education
Self-Reference
Money
Entertainment
Once done effectively, recruiters will surely want to use this data. It will be a legal minefield and it’ll
be interesting to see how it plays out ………
LinkedIn: ‘Pole Position’
Bearing in mind the two case studies above, and the whole potential in this area, who is in prime position to
benefit from this desire for behavioural and psychological profiling?
LinkedIn of course are in pole position.
BUT they may not want to follow do certain paths e.g. psychological profiling for ethical reasons, but if they
wanted they have access to:
-
Skills/expertise
Experience (companies worked for etc.) Length of time at them etc.
Career progression (duration at certain positions & their seniority)
Training & Development
Education
Further Education
References
Interests
Groups/Associations/Discussion Groups members of
What comments made in those groups (maybe analysed Psychologically)
Personal Information
Articles we read
Articles we share
Profiles we look at/befriend
Size and quality of our networks
Tweets we make (again analyzed against certain data)
What we click ‘Like’ on
Etc. etc. You get the idea.
71 Obsessively knowing your audience: key for business & recruiting.
Reflect on this: Your/Our DNA and footprints are embedded all over the cloud.
Recruiting Goes ‘Back to Basics’: Identifying and
Building Relationships with Candidates and Keeping it
Simple
Personalization Added to Humanization
Remember the good old days.
In the times of Recruitment 1.0, at the very start.
Recruiting was about building relationships- it was essentially a sales profession. It was about getting to
know candidates and their motivations and providing great candidate experiences.
This has been lost over recent years.
In fact quite the reverse has happened. Candidate care and building relationships has not been a priority for
recruiters. This can be linked to the reliance on technology. Recruiters are not picking up the phone and
speaking to candidates but instead relying on emails and in-mails. Posting jobs to job boards and then
waiting for the electronic response. When candidates apply for a job they get a standardized bounce back
email with the hallowed words “thank you for your application. A recruiter will review your skills and
experience against those required for the role.” The reliance on the bounce back email when someone has
applied for a role is one of the criminal injustices of recruiting in this generation.
Recruitment 3.0 detailed the candidate experience and how to influence each stage. Recruitment 5.0 looks
at getting back to the very basics of recruiting:
-
Picking up the phone
Building relationships with candidates (even if they aren’t a candidate today)
Identifying key motivators for candidates
Understanding business strategies and cultural fit
Advising the business and being a consultant on the talent market
We cannot get away from technology and mass communication which actually assists recruiters. But, how
can we can take the data we have and personalize or humanize the message to candidates? How do we
get back to the basics and reconnect with individuals and form relationships?
Back to big data… In the era of 5.0 we strive to get more data on people and understand trends and
behaviors and a key driver will be personalization. This is particularly true in terms of defining a great
candidate experience and Employment Brand Marketing. Technology has a part in providing a better
candidate experience, whether real or perceived. Personalization technology adds to perceived
personalized candidate experience.
So what is Personalization? Wikipedia defines it as: ‘Personalization technology enables the dynamic
insertion, customization or suggestion of content in any format that is relevant to the individual user, based
on the user’s implicit behavior and preferences, and explicitly given details’.
What does this mean?
Effectively it means that any content can be inserted to a form of communication, (content includes images
and text), and that communication could take the form of an email, app, social media communication and it
is personalized for that individual. An individual communication for an individual! Thus, making the
individual feel more special!
72 Companies not only seek to personalize emails/direct communication to individuals. They can seek to
personalize experiences like visiting web pages. How is this achieved? Web pages can be personalized
based on an individual’s characteristics, (e.g. interests, social category, context...). As mentioned shopping
sites are great at this, Amazon, iTunes, Wal-Mart etc. Personalization leads us to make the assumption that
the personalized changes are based on implicit data, such as web pages looked at or items purchased off
the web. Personalization is differentiated from customization. Customization is where a web site only uses
explicit data such as ratings or preferences.
There are three categories of personalization:
1. Profile / Group based
2. Behavior based (also known as Wisdom of the Crowds)
3. Collaboration based
There are three broad methods of personalization:
1. Implicit
2. Explicit
3. Hybrid
With implicit personalization the personalization is performed by the web page (or information system)
based on the different categories mentioned above. With explicit personalization, the web page (or
information system) is changed by the user using features generated by the system. Hybrid personalization
combines both features and gains the best of both worlds.
Another aspect of personalization is the increasing availability of open data on the Web. Many companies
make their data available on the Web. This can be done by web services, APIs and open data standards.
Ordnance Survey Open Data. This data is structured to allow it to be inter-connected and re-used by third
parties.
Creating a personalized experience is key to 5.0. Whether that is achieved through a back to basics
approach or whether that is through the use of personalized technology both are key to make a candidate
feel special and cherished.
It’s time for recruiters to get back to basics!
The End of the Traditional ATS
My dad always told me that a good workman never blames their tools.
But don’t we hear Recruiters doing just that every day?
More often than not, at the root of their gripes is the amount of work and effort that it takes to source and
engage great candidates and then lose that momentum by lacking an effective central repository to store,
access and mine all those great leads (both as an individual recruiter and as a wider team).
How often do you hear Recruiters bemoaning their company’s ATS? The clarion call is heard of recruiters
squealing: ‘Our ATS is too slow’, ‘Candidate information is out of date’, ‘It takes too long to add candidates’,
‘The search functionality is bust’, ‘It requires too many clicks to get to the information’, ‘It’s impossible to
segment the data’ and ‘I can’t target/market to the candidates I want’. Sound familiar?
But…..maybe we are on the cusp of a new era. We may not hear these twittering’s of discontent
again…..so here’s a bold prediction for you.
Within three to five years there will be no need for a traditional ATS. LinkedIn will have made them
defunct.
73 This may seem farfetched to many. But take a step back and review today’s reality.
The issue today is that Recruiters are still building their talent pools outside of the traditional ATS. Not
every candidate applies for a job via a corporate careers site, (which is the standard route into the
ATS). Maybe recruiters are proactively sourcing candidates in LinkedIn and reaching out to passive
candidates via InMails; maybe they are doing Boolean searches on Google; utilizing job boards or storing
info in Excel spread sheets. Many companies may be doing good ol’ fashion headhunting and picking up the
phone and networking. How much of this information gets back to the ATS? In reality, very little gets back
into the ATS and it becomes more of an offer processing tool. Given demands on Recruiters to find the
best talent leaders can’t expect, and would not appreciate, recruiters spending their time in data entry mode
getting all this data registered into the ATS.
This poses other more serious questions if an ATS is not capturing ALL candidate applications or pipelines.
What happens to those talent pools if and when a Recruiter moves on? How good can the candidate
experience be if they are left rotting in a solitary recruiter’s inbox? Which company would want to lose that
information? By not utilizing a central repository to record, store and track talent, how much talent are we
losing or ignoring?
So what’s the solution if ATS’ aren’t fulfilling their very core goals?
Here’s where we keep an eye on what LinkedIn are doing.
LinkedIn is cleverly moving into this space through several initiatives. First of all, ‘Work for us’ allows
companies to post advertising / employment branding information against their employees on LinkedIn so
when someone looks at an employee’s profiles they will be subconsciously taking in the company
information and and most likely applying for jobs via LinkedIn.
And of course, the next game changer, ‘Talent Pipeline’. Talent Pipeline is another step forward with
several key benefits. It’s essentially a CRM which allows leads to be centralized, whatever source they
have come from, (company careers sites, ATS, job boards, direct sourcing), in one place. A great win as it
permits all these leads and CVs to be imported from anywhere into LinkedIn Recruiter allowing Recruiters to
search, track and share leads like any profile sourced from LinkedIn. Recruiters can then organize and
evaluate pipeline with the ability to use tools to add tags, source, status and notes. They can even run
activity reports.
What’s great about this is that most ATS’ have a lot of stale data. Over time CVs need updating so a
database will always be dying over time. How many candidates send in updated resumes to an ATS?
People tend to consistently update and maintain their LinkedIn profile. Talent Pipeline transforms these
stale leads into up-to-date LinkedIn profiles by connecting outside leads directly to their LinkedIn profiles.
The last benefit is that Talent Pipeline connects an entire recruiting organization on one platform allowing
lead sharing, activity updates and access to the latest information for all the team. It finally brings the
technology of search agencies to the in-house recruiter.
Some will rightly point out that this LinkedIn functionality does not cover all ATS functionality. True. But it
does show a clear step by LinkedIn and one that will have recruiting organizations asking whether it is time
to switch off the current ATS.
This is not a promo piece for LinkedIn but recognition that traditional ATS systems have not made the right
impact for Recruiters. There is a void and that void will be filled and companies like LikedIn are forging the
way. Emerging Markets Emerge and Dominate
Consider this.
74 By 2025, it is forecast, that annual consumption in emerging markets will reach $30 trillion. This represents
the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism. A phenomenal opportunity!
The Industrial Revolution is widely seen as one of the most important events in economic history. Yet, in
many ways, this will pale into insignificance. The rise of a new consuming class in emerging countries is the
predominant trend. Something that all companies want to be part of, shape and exploit.
CEO’s at most large multinational firms admit that emerging markets are the key to long term success. But
the problem is many execs are stumped by the complexity of taking advantage of this opportunity. Despite
these execs running companies that are bigger, superior product technology, have larger capital bases, and
more the best marketing tools, they are struggling to compete against local companies.
This is demonstrable through statistics. In 2010, 100 of the world’s largest companies headquartered in
developed economies earned just 17% of their total revenue from emerging markets, but these markets
accounted for 36% of global GDP, (and projected to contribute more than 70% of Global GDP growth
between now and 2025).
By 2025, McKinsey Global Institute estimates, annual consumption in emerging markets rising to $30 trillion,
up from $12 trillion in 2010, and account for nearly 50% of the world’s total, (up from 32% in 2010). As a
result, emerging-market consumers will become the prevailing dominant force in the global economy. In 15
years times, almost 60% of the approx. 1 billion households with earnings greater than $20,000 a year will
live in the developing world. In many product categories, such as white goods and electronics, emerging
market consumers will account for the overwhelming majority of global demand. That is a seismic change.
Trailblazing the way forward is a new generation of consumers, in their 20’s and early 30’s, who are
confident their incomes will rise, are highly ambitious and are willing to spend to realize them. Already,
more than half of all global internet users are in emerging markets. For example, in Brazil, social network
penetration, even in 2010, was the 2nd highest in the world. In a McKinsey survey of urban African
consumers in 15 cities in ten different countries found that almost 60% owned internet capable phones or
smartphones. As e-commerce and mobile payment systems spread to even the most remote hamlets,
emerging consumers are shaping, not just participating in the digital revolution.
Key to remember is that the preferences of emerging market consumers also will drive global innovation in
product design, manufacturing, distribution channels and supply chain management. This impacts on our
world…recruiting.
I make no apologies in taking time to line up the importance of emerging markets. But how does this affect
Recruiting?
To win in emerging markets, developed market companies must be willing to embrace massive changes
fast. Companies will need to be able to reallocate resources quickly or face being wiped out by local
competitors. Research points to emerging market companies redeploying investment across business units
at much higher rates than companies located in developed markets. Emerging market firms are growing
faster than their developed market counterparts
Unskilled workers may be plentiful in emerging societies, but skilled managers are scarce and hard to retain.
In China barely two million local managers have the managerial and English language capabilities
multinationals need. A recent McKinsey survey found that senior managers working for the China divisions
of multinational firms switch companies at a rate of 30 to 40% a year, (five times the global average).
Barely half of the executives thought their organizations effectively tailored recruiting, training and
development processes across geographies. In a recent McKinsey survey, data showed that just 2% of
their top 200 employees hailed from key Asian emerging markets. That is a scary trend.
How should companies react, especially Developed market companies? Some companies are increasing
salaries to win. As we recruiters know, this is often a temporary solution. In emerging markets, global firms
must develop clear EVP’s, to differentiate themselves from local competitors. In South Korea, L’Oreal made
itself the top choice for female sales and marketing talent by creating greater opportunities for brand
managers, improving working hours, expanding the child care infrastructure and adopting a more
75 transparent communications style. Other Western firms, like Motorola and Nestle, have enhanced their
employment brands by building relationships with employee’s families.
Deepening ties between key corporate functions and emerging markets can create opportunities for local
talent while enhancing organizational effectiveness. Companies like Cisco, HSBC and Schneider Electric
have benefitted from strengthening links between headquarters and high-growth regions and offering
emerging market managers global career paths and mobility programs.
Given the leadership requirements of emerging markets, global companies need ambitious talent
development targets. The need to multiply the number of leaders in emerging markets tenfold---and to do
that in one tenth of the time they would take back home. For example, in India, the Reliance Group, (the
largest private employer), addressed a leadership gap, (a need for circa 200 new functional leaders to
support growth initiatives), by recruiting a new wave of 28-34 year old managers and enlisting help from
local business schools and management experts to design new development programs.
It will be interesting to see how many Recruiting Leaders and Recruiters from the West relocate to help drive
talent acquisition in the emerging markets. What is clear is that the ‘Global War for Talent’ will be the most
furious in the emerging economies that will need that talent to grow, expand and win.
Augmented Reality and Disruptive
Marketing……..Disrupt, Disrupt, Disrupt
As companies realize the importance of Employment Brands and the value they bring to building ‘best
quality’ workforces and of course retaining the best staff, Employment Brand messaging and marketing will
start to converge and look very much the same. Companies will all be competing for market share and mind
share and need to try and differentiate and be unique in their offerings.
Current EVP messaging focuses on companies proclaiming:
-
We offer the best career development
Work / life balance. Get to spend more time with your families
Culture. Work hard / play hard
Climb the ladder….gain promotion
Show me the money….pay & conditions
There is a limit to the positioning a company can have. All companies claim to be unique in what they offer
new employees but in reality few are that different.
Fast forward down the line, as attracting and retaining talent ‘differentiators’ are so similar between
companies. How will a company stand out? How does a company ‘shout out’ in the market and get
noticed?
If everyone looks the same, then talent will be staring into a sea of blandness…..
Therefore, the emphasis on augmented reality, disruptive marketing and stunt PR to get noticed.
We all know that brand is about reputation. It’s what we hear, think, and feel about working at a company.
We care about what other people say about a brand, how they rate a product. For example, 2012 marketing
data shows that conversion rates are 105% higher when ratings and reviews are used by customers.
So what’s next? Giving customers ways to experience the brand in increasingly personal and emotional
ways.
76 In Recruitment 5.0, Augmented Reality will be central to Employment Brand messaging and
marketing.
The whole thrust of Recruitment 5.0 is about learning about our communities, gaining knowledge on them,
analyzing data about their behaviors and going hand in hand with that is personalization. On the
candidate’s side, as we open up our Employment Brand, we become more transparent. Candidates will
want to ‘experience’ us.
‘Experience’ a company?
What does that mean? Work experience? Nice videos? Employee profiles?
‘Experiencing’ in Recruitment 5.0 embraces the concept of Augmented Reality and Augmented Reality
Marketing.
What is Augmented Reality?
Computer graphics today are almost photo realistic. Think of films like Avatar, (designed using Autodesk
software), and the gap between graphics and reality is blurred, (almost indistinguishable to the naked
human eye). Today, researchers and engineers are partnering with marketing and taking cutting edge
graphics and integrating them into real world environments. This technology is called augmented reality,
which blurs the line between what’s real and what are computer generated by enhancing what we see, hear,
feel and smell.
What’s the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality? Virtual reality creates immersive,
computer-generated (CG) environments, (but not in real world environments). Augmented reality is closer to
the real world as it adds graphics, sounds, touchy/feely feedback and smell to the natural world as it exists
today. Video games and mobiles phones are driving the development of augmented reality.
Augmented reality will start to change the way we view the world. Picture this. Imagine walking or driving
down the street. With augmented-reality displays, (currently rather cumbersome spectacles but one day
these specs will look like an ordinary pair of glasses or Ray Bans), informative graphics can appear in your
field of view, and audio will coincide with whatever you see. These enhancements would be refreshed
continually to match your head movements. (Interestingly, there are iPhone which replicate this today).
Augmented reality is being enhanced and driven by University research. In February 2009, at the TED
conference, Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT shell-shocked the audience with their ‘SixthSense’
augmented-reality system. SixthSense relies on some basic components: A camera, a small projector, a
smartphone and a mirror. These simple, off-the-shelf components only cost circa $350, hence meaning a
technology that will be relatively cost effective to introduce.
All of these components wed together in a lanyard that an individual wears around their neck. The user
wears four colored fingertip caps, and these are used to move & manipulate the projector images.
The projector effectively turns any surface into an interactive screen. The basics of the system is that it uses
the camera and mirror to examine the surrounding world, then feeds that image to a phone, (which
processes the image, gathers GPS coordinates and pulls data from the web), and then projects information
from the projector onto the surface in front of the user, whether it's a wrist, a wall, or even a person.
Because the user is wearing the camera on their chest, SixthSense will augment whatever they look at: for
example, if they pick up a can of drink in Wal-Mart, SixthSense can project onto the can information about
its ingredients, price, and nutritional value. Even cooler is that it could project customer reviews.
77 Augmented Reality and Recruiting
Some may be asking what’s augmented reality got to do with recruiting?
Let’s spice up the debate about what is possible.
Image-recognition software coupled with AR will, quite soon, allow us to point our phones at people,
even strangers, and instantly see information from their Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn or
other online profiles. With most of these services people willingly put information about themselves online,
but it may be an unwelcome shock to meet someone, only to have them instantly know so much about your
life and background.
Software today exists that can ‘listen’ to music and then identify the track name and artist within seconds.
Facial recognition is next.
BUT Like ‘Big Data’ we are back to privacy concerns.
But consider this. Recruiters, attending events, going to University campuses, standing outside competitors
and identifying key prospects, scanning photos from news stories and then receiving their personal details
e.g. A LinkedIn profile through that facial recognition.
Sounds bizarre now. But we are not far away…….
What else does Augmented reality bring?
It can give people a real experience of your business. A real insight. Imagine a 360 degree view of your
office. A candidate gets the chance to ‘experience’ the office and see a desk with their nameplate, and then
the ability to upload a photo of them sitting at that desk. How cool is that for ‘experiencing the office’. Many
variations can be developed on this theme, including fun elements like creating a newspaper front page with
a massive headline, ‘X joins Autodesk’, with a picture of the individual scanned in.
Imagine scanning a recruitment advert online, in a magazine, on a billboard or even walking past an office
block, and immediately have a list of relevant jobs which match against your pre-stored skill sets. A host of
information could also be made available including company information, employee profiles, reviews from
sites like ‘Glassdoor’. The possibilities are endless.
Augmented Reality and Mobile: Case Study
There is no point about talking about future technologies like augmented reality without looking at practical
examples.
Mobile is a key adopter of early stage augmented reality.
Take a look at Blippar. This is the first image-recognition phone app which a goal of bringing to life realworld newspapers, magazines, products and posters with exciting augmented reality experiences and
immediate content.
Blippar is working with some of the biggest and best brands in the world today, including Unilever, Nestle,
Heinz, Diageo, Xbox, Samsung, Cadbury, Domino's and many more.
So what is Blippar?
The apps use image recognition to launch interactive content on the user's phone, so an image or logo on
the ad is the trigger to launch content on the phone. This Omega watch campaign is a great example.
78 The print advert has James Bond standing posing, looking suave and sophisticated, with his watch
dominant.
With a mobile phone, installed with the Blippar app, scans over the advert and the watch and brings
a 3D version of the watch to the mobile screen.
79 With this 3D watch image, your can then hover your phone over your wrist and this then allows you to try the
watch on. Let you personally experience what it looks like on your wrist.
By offering a simpler user experience, the Blippar apps do have the potential to become a valuable tool for
multichannel marketers, offering potential for extending campaigns beyond print, billboards, or whatever
advertising medium is being used. And this has great potential for recruiters.
As with QR codes, these apps mean that brands have an opportunity to adapt their marketing messages
based on where consumers are geographically when they see them, and also what that location may tell
you about their habits.
What is the difference between augmented reality and QR Codes?
QR codes are well known for their rather ugly black and white pixelated box, (which are added to
advertisements). Augmented Reality apps like Blippar automatically have an aesthetic advantage over QR
codes. Blippar is integrated in the creative, (invisibly), and takes the creative itself (the whole poster, a logo,
the product itself) as the trigger for an interactive engagement. The Cadbury’s Dairy Milk above shows the
effect visually.
The only engagement QR offers is a web link to a smart phone (assuming the pixelated box is recognized
from a photo the phone takes of it).
Also it can offer a whole world of potential virtual content on the phone screen including overlayed 3D
experiences (3D product views, games etc), video, e-coupons, GPS enabled directions to nearby outlets,
web links and more.
Hence making QR codes redundant in the future?
The limitations to augmented reality
At the moment much of augmented reality is geared to cell phones, (whilst not exclusive, mobile is the
current main vehicle).
Mobile phones have their disadvantages. People may not want to rely on their mobiles, which have tiny
screens on which to superimpose information. Hence wearable devices like SixthSense or augmentedreality capable contact lenses and glasses will provide users with more convenient, expansive views of the
world around them. Screen real estate will no longer be an issue.
Information can become addictive as we have seen with Blackberry’s ‘crackberry’ phenomenon. An
overreliance on augmented reality could mean that people are missing out on what's right in front of them.
80 Imagine at interview and ‘company walkround/tour’. Recruiters may prefer to let candidates use their AR
iPhone applications rather than show them round, even though the recruiter may be able to offer a level of
interaction, an experience and a personal touch unavailable in a computer program.
Despite these concerns, imagine the possibilities: you may learn things about companies that you have
always wanted to work at by pointing your AR-enabled phone at the office building.
The future of augmented reality is clearly bright, even as it already has found its way into our mobiles and
video game systems. Added to this Augmented Reality and new experience for candidates, is the need to
‘be seen’ and ‘stand out from the crowd’.
Hence the acceleration of disruptive marketing….to gain attention.
Disruptive Marketing
Disruptive marketing is not just about shock.
It is about emotion. Creating a lasting feeling. Planting a seed that will grow in someone’s mind.
Recruiters and Employment Branders are fighting for the attention of potential candidates, people who have
already been reached by competitors and aren't necessarily looking for new options. Hence, down the line,
a ‘new marketing’ will be needed by recruiters.
What is disruptive marketing? Disruptive marketing is a marketing message/initiative that serves to disrupt a
market space and interrupt the reader of the message by combining new technologies, new business
models, new markets and a new approach to redefine conventional thinking and consumer behavior.
In any category there are unwritten rules and assumptions that everyone follows. Everyone follows these
rules and design their product as well strategies to suit these 'rules' and trends. But to every trend there are
exceptions. There is also a different way of interpreting that 'rule'. For years recruiters have followed the set
rule that job advertisements must contain a long list of job requirements, be dull and bore readers!
When a smart marketer creates new products and strategies for those new interpretations, suddenly
everyone sits up and looks at things differently. The new entrant becomes a 'leader' and other people start
following their new ideas.
The guerrilla-marketing school of thought looks for devious ways of going under the radar and reaching the
consumer in ways that the competition has not thought of. This is disruptive as it seeks to bend the rules to
do things differently, to get noticed. It shakes up the rules of engagement.
Being disruptive creates attention. In business this is a good thing. It means getting noticed. It is important to
note that gimmick marketing will quickly be frowned upon. Effective disruption is an art and is not easy.
There is a fine line between disruptive marketing and stunt PR. If the goal is to get noticed, then there are
some interesting ideas below.
81 A few years back Electronic Arts in Canada wanted to hire programmers. They produced this advert, in
programming code, (which effectively tells the programmer that EA is hiring), and strategically placed it on a
bill board outside a competitor. It was certainly noticed and caused controversy in the games industry.
A current trend is the art of ‘projection advertising’, using projections onto well-known landmarks. This form
of disruption is popular with journalists for photos for the national media (great brand exposure). Why not for
recruiters wanting exposure for smaller brands?
82 At events, ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ is making its mark. Effectively by the use of clever use of projections and
mirrors, ‘realistic’ 3d looking holograms can take to the stage and present. This was recently achieved with
the ‘return’ of Tupac.
Key to 5.0 is that Employment Brands will need to stand out. Augmented reality, disruptive marketing and
stunt PR will be key in that goal.
End of Social Media- All Media Becomes Social
The shortest section of Recruitment 5.0!
Just as we don’t use the term ‘ecommerce’ the term ‘Social Media’ will fade away.
As companies seek engagement, seek to understand their audiences, to listen, to crowdsource and
humanize experiences then all media and communications will become social by nature. (That includes all
consumer, corporate…any communications by a company!)
The need for ‘social’ removed.
#NuffSaid
We Create Candidates….Candidate Cloning
As the Global War for the Best Talent continues, companies will be posed with a set of new questions and
challenges:
•
•
•
•
We want to hire the ‘best’ talent
There is a Global War for the ‘Best’ Talent….it’s not easy to hire ‘the best’
The experienced talent pool is shrinking (less talent to pick from)
Talent is less loyal, moves jobs and is more expensive
83 Given all these questions and challenges, more Employers will start to look at new solutions. Companies
will consider creating their own ‘Universities’, ‘Academies’, ‘Educational facilities’ or training development
programs to ready future talent for immediate worth to their business.
Reflect on that.
We know that many companies already sponsor courses, partner with academics on course criteria. This is
the next natural step.
If companies are to create their own courses it is important to understand what their goal is in ‘educating’
and ‘shaping’ their own talent and what skills they can add to the mix.
Key to this is that it is important to confirm what ‘BEST’ means and what makes a top performer.
There is enough ‘average talent’ to fill roles but companies gain competitive advantage by hiring the best. I
love this slide based on data by the Journal of Applied Psychology in a presentation by CPL which tries to
visualize the difference between a top performer and an average performer.
If companies are truly serious and focused on hiring the best performers, first it is important to define the key
skills they possess. What makes them out as a ‘top’ performer? Can they be created or trained?
What characteristics make a person a top performer? Interestingly, basic job knowledge or technical skills
are not the primary factor. All skills being equal, what distinguishes top performers from the average is what
behavioral researchers call “emotional intelligence competency”.
Emotional intelligence is a term popularized by Salovey and Meyer which details a combination of traits,
values and behaviors that is viewed as the most powerful and reliable predictor of success in the workplace.
These traits, known to you and I as “people skills” include self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation,
empathy and social skills.
In 1997, Goleman wrote a paper called: “Working with Emotional Intelligence” (1997). This brought
emotional intelligence (EI) to the fore. Goleman studied 286 organizations worldwide where job
competencies of star performers at every level were analyzed. Twenty common competencies were
identified, classified within four broad categories - all but three are emotional competencies:
Self-Awareness Knowing what is felt in the moment
and using that to guide decision making; having a
realistic assessment of own abilities and a wellgrounded sense of self-confidence.


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Emotional self-awareness
Accurate self-assessment
Self-consciousness
84 Self-Management
Handling emotions so that they facilitate rather than
interfere; delaying gratification to pursue goals;
recovering well from emotional distress; deploying
deepest preferences to take initiative, improve and
persevere.
Social Awareness
Sensing what people are feeling, being able to take
their perspective and cultivate rapport with a broad
diversity of people.
Social skills
Handling emotions in relationships well and
accurately reading social situations; interacting
smoothly; using these skills to persuade, lead and
negotiate.

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
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Self-control
Trustworthiness
Conscientiousness
Adaptability
Achievement orientation
Initiative



Empathy
Organizational Awareness
Service Orientation








Influence
Leadership
Developing Others
Communication
Change Catalyst
Conflict Management
Building Bonds
Teamwork and Collaboration
This is quite revolutionary by nature. Don’t reach the conclusion that cognitive abilities (IQ, technical skills,
etc.) don’t play a role in successful, productive work performance. Of course they do. However, if two
individuals have comparable technical skills, research indicates that the individual with strong emotional
intelligence (people skills) will be more successful and productive on the job.
We are faced with the scenario that as the ‘Global War for the ‘Best’ Talent heats up. As the ‘experienced’
talent pool continues to shrink. As companies continue to expand, especially in the Emerging Markets,
will companies feel the need to ‘create’ their own talent?
Some may argue that some companies are doing this already. Most larger companies have dedicated
training programs for new and existing hires. Companies focus their time on defining and then targeting the
‘Best Universities’ (their definition defined by the talent they seek), and then partnering with Professors to
help support, nurture and bring on the best talent.
Would ‘Company’ run Universities/Academies/Degrees/Qualifications appeal to students?
To understand that we have to understand their current position.
Does a ‘Degree’ open doors like it once did? Are Degrees the passport to a bright and glittering future? Or
could they be a waste of time and money? Are recruiters so set in traditional ways of assessing talent that
companies are missing out on great future leaders?
Tough questions and obviously controversial.
Choosing a degree and university is certainly one of the most important decisions in the course of a life for a
student. BUT we have to be honest. For many, a degree is a waste of time and money. Some courses and
Universities have spurious offerings. Graduates may be better off taking advantage of some of the new
online universities. This includes Khan Academy and Udacity. These online institutions are attracting
bright talent around the world as they seek to democratize education. To hire this talent requires a change
in thinking by businesses and especially amongst us, the recruiting gate keepers.
85 Some will say this is sensationalism and headline grabbing. But underlying real issues need to be
considered by students, parents, business leaders and politicians. It is our duty as recruiters to pick up the
baton to drive awareness and change.
Yes, great entrepreneurs, like cream, will always find their way to the top. But let’s be honest most
businesses would not have hired the likes of Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates based on their
qualifications. That’s a FACT. As recruiters, we should naturally ask ourselves, who and how much raw
talent are we missing out on?
Most recruiters are formulaic and assess via tick box techniques. Right Grades, Right University. Tick.
Education is a prop for many but can never supplant drive, ambition & entrepreneurialship. Our job, as
recruiters, is how we react to changing macro-economic conditions, recognise the limitations of assessing
Graduates by their Education and most importantly, educate our businesses to be open to taking risks on
talent that does not meet traditional norms.
Conclusion? This article’s aim is to stimulate debate and thought. It hopefully will encourage some
recruiters to be more vocal about the inside practices of assessment and filtering within their businesses.
It’s the end of recruiters as we know it……
A powerful headline. (“Perhaps sung to REM’s phenomenal tune ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it”)
Under Recruitment 3.0, we saw the drive away from the traditional core skills of recruitment. The ‘new’
recruiters needing skills in marketing, PR, communications, CRM, direct marketing, database segmentation.
This drive continues through 3.0, 4.0 and into 5.0.
But 5.0, which is some time off yet begs the question, do we need recruiters at all?
Will recruiters become obsolete?
Let’s look at why that could be.
The presumption is that talent acquisition and identifying talent will become easier. Recruitment 4.0
‘crowdsourcing’ will show the power of the crowd in sourcing talent. Just sending a message into a
company’s networks yields immediate high quality candidate recommendations, 5.0 sees the next step.
‘Big data’ allows for companies to quickly assess the best candidates for a role. In those assessments,
behavioral, psychological profiling, from data patterns in the cloud, allow for ‘greater predictivity’ in hiring.
Imagine a Hiring Manager they can:
-
Seek recommendations from ‘crowdsourcing’
Source candidates from ‘the cloud’
These candidates are ‘profiled’ and ‘predictive fit’ from behavioral and psychological traits
What role for the recruiter?
What need?
Maybe artificial intelligence will replace real intelligence…..but that is a whole new debate!!!
Will hiring managers be able to do their own thing?
86 Will marketing take over employment brand messaging?
What role for today’s recruiters?..................
Recruitment 5.0 Conclusion
Here we are. The end of the final paper Recruitment 5.0 in this trilogy.
What struck us writing this was that many of the Talent Acquisition Leaders in place today are not ready for
3.0, 4.0. let alone 5.0. They have been schooled in recruiting techniques that will soon be outdated and
detrimental to their business. Many are more focused on process than end results. Where does your leader
stand?
Imagine those recruiting leaders who can go to their CEO and demonstrate that they have been able to map
out competitors and build relationships with the best talent. They have created a predictable talent pipeline.
Leaders who have created engaged communities with two way communication thus enhancing Employment
Brand attractiveness while enhancing the Consumer/Product brand. Imagine leaders who are embracing
gamification and crowdsourcing. They may be producing content and creating VIP areas that could be
monetized. Recruiting leaders who have been able to reduce recruiting spend while delivering top talent to
achieve business goals and drive company revenue. Leaders who are directly impacting a company’s
bottom line.
Compare that to your current Talent Acquisition Leader. Are they shaping your future in this
direction?
Who do you think your CEO would prefer as Recruiting Leader. The one described above or your
current one? Go figure……….
There is plenty above to chew on and debate and you may agree or disagree. There are certainly exciting
times ahead for recruiting professionals.
Whatever your views of this paper and the previous ones we hope you seek to challenge the status quo.
Blaze trails and help to elevate our great profession and come up with new ideas.
Best of luck and happy hunting!
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87 Author Biographies
Matthew Jeffery
Amy McKee
Amy McKee
Amy McKee is Sr. Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Autodesk which is a $2B world leader in 3D
design, engineering and entertainment software. Amy has over 15 years of recruiting experience. She
started her career in Executive Search delivering talent for many of Silicon Valley’s start-ups before moving
into an in-house role with Autodesk. She helped build Autodesk’s international recruiting structure and
currently leads a global organization of 55 spread across 11 countries.
She is passionate about search
and engaging the best talent for Autodesk so the business can execute on their goals. Amy is based in
San Francisco, CA where she can be found at the beach, hiking, biking or skiing most weekends. She
has two daughters and is the soon to be owner of a Golden Retriever puppy!
Matthew Jeffery
Matthew Jeffery, cited as one of the world's leading renowned recruitment strategists and futurologists is the
Head of EMEA Talent Acquisition & Global Talent Brand for Autodesk. In this role he combines strategic &
operational talent acquisition with a global role focused on raising employment brand awareness, to facilitate
an increase in perception of Autodesk amongst key recruiting populations and hence, increase both quantity
and quality of pipeline of candidates. He was the Global Director of Talent Brand for Electronic Arts, the
leading developer & publisher of interactive entertainment. Matthew possesses 10 years of recruitment
experience and over five years of marketing & sales experience. Before heading up EA’s E-Brand, he was
the Head of European Studio Recruitment for EA. He was voted UK "Recruitment Personality of the Year"
in the Recruiter Awards as well as a judge on the 2012 Recruiter Magazine awards and was the first
international chairman & Keynote Speaker of ERE’s Spring Forum. He is also Keynote Panelist on the
Future of Recruitment at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2011 and Chair & Keynote Speaker of HCI’s Strategic
Talent Acquisition Conference 2012. He is author of thought leading articles including Recruitment 3.0: A
Vision for the Future of Recruiting and Recruitment 4.0: Crowdsourcing, Gamification, Recruitment as a
profit centre…and the Death of Recruitment Agencies. Which to date, have the most comments attributed to
them, in ERE’s history. Matthew loves politics, current affairs, and most sports in his spare time. He is a
passionate Formula 1 motor sports fan.
88