Recruiting Strategy 101

There are many views on how to best go about creating an effective recruiting strategy. And while there really is no magic bullet, there are some key fundamental techniques that every employer should utilize as they look to identify, convert, and hire key employees into their organization. With all of the competing resources that are available out there, it is very important to have a solid baseline understanding of how you will structure your recruiting efforts. Below is a good formula for how to establish this baseline and how to reduce your reliance on 3rd party recruiters.

1. Employee Referral Programs: One of the most effective methods of bringing talent into an organization is to establish a good Employee Referral Program. And while most companies do have an ERP in place, most do a less than adequate job of communicating the program. Employee awareness is key to managing an effective ERP. Within most companies there is a great deal of confusion as to how much the ERP pays out and to the timing of the payouts. If an employee is unaware that they can make significant money by bringing their friends, former colleagues, and acquaintances into the organization, it will quickly slip into the back of their minds and they will not spend their free time doing so. However, if an organization continuously promotes the ERP and recognizes those who have made successful referrals, the word will quickly spread and everyone in the organization will effectively become a part time recruiter. This is by far the easiest way to make a significant dent in your hiring requirements.

2. Job Boards: While there are a lot of skeptics out there who like to criticize the effectiveness of job boards, it is usually the most cost effective means of getting your positions in front of the largest possible audience for the least amount of money. Even if you have had limited success with job boards in the past, you really need to be out there in case that perfect candidate happens to be looking for a job in your area. A great example of this is with employees who move away from home after college. Many of these are great students who move away to pursue their dreams. Often, after spending a few years building their resume and getting a great deal of experience, they decide to move back home to raise their family. In this case, the most logical way for them to start their job search is to go to the major job boards and do a search for relevant jobs in their hometown. In this instance, if your job is not posted and your competitor’s is, you may very well lose the chance to interview (and hire) this candidate. Besides, job postings are relatively inexpensive, especially when purchased in bulk. Even if you only make one hire for every ten job postings, your cost per hire is well below the typical average.

3. Interactive Advertising: This is a very large “bucket” which includes email campaigns, targeted job ad placements, Search Engine Marketing, targeted sponsorships, direct mail sourcing and more. Interactive advertising is a great way to reach out to the “passive” candidates, because it is very targeted. To most effectively utilize interactive advertising, you should first profile your ideal candidate. Where would this individual go for research or relevant content? What communities might they belong to? What subscriptions might they receive? Once we know these things, we must then meet them where they hang out and serve them a compelling message to convince them to click on your opportunity and check it out. This targeted approach is easily utilized on line, but can also be used for off line advertising as well. For example, through targeted, personalized direct mail such as RecruitCard (www.recruitcard.com), you can reach your target audience at home, by name, speaking to them about a specific opportunity that they are a potentially great fit for.

4. Targeted “landing pages”: Wherever possible, you should try and provide only the content that is relevant to the job seeker that you are going after. Candidates don’t want to have to sort through irrelevant information to get to the information that is important to them. They want to quickly assess the opportunity and to see if it is something they should look into further. By segmenting your audience and serving them only relevant information (video, job function specific testimonials, slide shows, objectives, work environment, opportunities for growth, etc.) you will drastically increase your conversions. Recruital (www.recruital.com) is a great example of audience-specific websites. By driving your traffic to job family specific, targeted website, you can track your visitors by source, enabling you to make more informed decisions on future campaigns.

There will never be a replacement for 3rd party search firms. They provide a valuable service and put a great deal of effort and resources into finding the right candidates for your positions, often in a very timely manner. However, this should be a last resort. The cost of just a few placements can usually cover a strong interactive campaign with a targeted “micro-site”. It is time to be proactive. Doing so will allow you to more effectively compete for scarce talent and, in the end, will drive your recruiting costs down significantly. Happy recruiting!

A Telescopic View of Online Recruiting

In many ways, it seems as though we have always had the Internet. Even for most of those who swore they would never get caught up in it, the memories of going to the study to grab an encyclopedia for a quick research question are distant. Everywhere you look and every thing you see is highlighting some sort of Website address. Virtually every aspect of life is being driven to one Internet destination or another. Whether you are ordering food, looking for a good book, banking, or buying insurance, everything can be done from the comfort of home via the World Wide Web. It is certainly no secret that people have been and are continuing to flock to the Internet by the droves. According to Pew Internet, 70% of the U.S. population is now on line, 50% of which have high-speed Internet access.

What does this mean to on-line recruitment? It means that you can get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before. There are various ways of accomplishing this objective.

The first and most obvious way to use the Internet as a recruitment vehicle, is to make sure that you have an effective job board strategy in place. Job Boards such as Monster, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder along with niche and local sites are still and will continue to be the primary on line recruitment vehicle for most positions. With focus and singularity of purpose, job boards provide the most inexpensive method of getting your jobs in front of “job seekers”.

Before leaping out of the box to launch an assault on the passive candidates, it is important that an effective job board strategy first be employed. However, while job boards are the best vehicle for reaching “job seekers”, they are not going to help reach those ideal qualified people who are the perfect candidates, but are gainfully and happily employed. Loyal, hardworking, effective people often have great job security and don’t have the time or the desire to browse job boards.

Attracting these types of people is where it takes the same creativity and targeted profiling that have been used by corporate giants in America for years in marketing their products or services to potential customers. There are various methods for utilizing the Internet to reach potential candidates: targeted email campaigns, buttons, banners, tiles, skyscrapers, “pop-unders”, etc., and those are just the basics. A great thing about the Internet, is that as it has developed and grown in functionality and popularity, so has the sophistication of the tracking and profiling capabilities used by the various Websites. What this allows for, is getting your message in front of only the candidates you are wanting to target.

There are various techniques for establishing exactly what that profile is, but a few have proven to be more effective than others. One of the best of these techniques, is through the construction of profiles based on the most successful individuals within your organization. This is far from a new concept, but exactly what type of profile you are building is very important. For the targeted reach that the Internet can provide, it is important that you talk extensively to your “A players”" as to how they use the Internet. Are they all utilizing on-line banking services? Do they all regularly visit Weather.com? Are they playing games on-line? Do they check their stocks on a particular site? Do they tune in daily to Dilbert.com for the cartoon of the day? You might be surprised.

By determining where and when your top performers are spending their “on-line time”, along with how often they frequent these destinations, you can start crafting your strategy for reaching out to individuals who share this profile.

The Internet is not a fad. It is here and it is here to stay. The challenge is in how you harness the full capabilities of the web to get your message in front of your target audience, in this case, potential employment candidates. While print is still a viable marketing outlet in some cases, it is quickly becoming to advertising what the Encyclopedia has become to research. As the markets rebound and hiring growth returns to normal levels, it will become increasingly important to have a strategy in place to reach out to both active “job seekers” and passive ideal candidates. The good news is that thanks to the reach made possible by the Internet, you can now get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before.

Building Your Successful Recruitment ‘Dream Home’

Building a successful Internet Recruitment Strategy is much like building a custom home. It takes careful planning, the proper mix of supplies and labor, a well coordinated and thought out scheduling of components, and most importantly, it takes a good initial vision. Unfortunately, unlike a custom homebuilder, many corporations dive into their recruitment strategy with their attention focused on the final exterior of the home, or the features in the kitchen, etc. rather than keeping their attention on the big picture. To really understand what it takes to build the custom “dream home” recruitment strategy, one must first understand what are the various components that make up the final product.The primary benefit of the Internet as a medium for recruitment is that it is fast, easy, and relatively inexpensive to generate candidates. The two questions then become “Where do I find the best candidates?” and “Then what?”
Below are 5 components that should be included in the blueprint for your successful “dream home” recruitment strategy:
1. Candidate database: Depending upon your recruitment budget (which is often heavily under represented in Fortune 1000 companies), some type of private, searchable database is critical to a successful strategy. With a little research, one can find a suitable database regardless of how challenging your budget is. A $500,000 Applicant Tracking System, while very nice, is not necessary to be able to have a private, searchable candidate database. Solutions range from as high to as low as you can afford to pay depending on what functionality you can or can’’t live without.
2. Centralized recruitment: Too often companies keep recruitment as just another part of a Human Resource Generalist’s duties. Unless the company is very small or has virtually no turnover, this approach will usually be a “strategy killer” and result in increased use of expensive 3rd party search firms. Ideally, a company would have dedicated recruiters broken out by functional area with a close working relationship with the hiring managers in those functional areas; an “in house” search firm so to speak. This will enable those recruiters to become specialists in their areas and thus be very effective.
3. Job Boards: Now that you have completed the “dirty work” and laid the foundation, it is time to frame the house. Since your private, searchable database is ready to start receiving candidates and your focused recruiters are ready to start screening resumes, it is time to generate your candidate pool. To do so effectively, one must really understand what roles they will be recruiting for and where. The first step is to identify the “foundational” board or boards for the strategy. This will guarantee an influx of candidates and will allow for the support of all kinds of positions throughout the organization. The next step is to identify key niche job boards whose candidate profile is similar to that of your company workforce. For example, a large I.T. company’’s strategy may consist of two foundational boards, one or two I.T. specific boards, an executive recruitment site, and hopefully a diversity site or two. By incorporating the proper mix of general and niche sites into the strategy, you can ensure not only a large candidate pool, but a quality one as well.
4. Streamline sourcing solutions: In order to make an aggressive, multi-site strategy manageable, it is vital that the recruiters are given the tools to allow them to fully utilize the memberships. If a strategy includes 3+ job boards, and a manual posting and sourcing strategy is in place, the postings may appear on two of the boards, usually just one, but rarely on all three. Further, without single-interface sourcing technology, recruiters will almost always migrate to their favorite job board database and use it exclusively. Sure, there are exceptions, but very few. It is important to provide the technology to enable the recruiters to post jobs to multiple job boards from a single interface and also to source resumes from a single interface.
5. Narrowing/Screening Technology: You have now built your home, time for the exterior “extras” that will make it stand out and give it the curbside appeal that you desire. With a steady stream of candidates pouring into your database; chances are, you have several candidates who are an excellent fit for your open job requisition. But how do you find them? Like candidate databases, there are a slew of solutions out there to help screen and narrow the candidate pool. Without this component, you risk severely limiting the number of job requisitions that can be effectively supported by your recruiters, not to mention the risk of “burn out” by those recruiters.

Before throwing your hands up in the air and settling for a few more years in your “track-builder home”, I would strongly suggest that you first step back and look at your blueprints. The difference between a successful Internet recruitment strategy and an unsuccessful one may just be a few subtle changes in your design specifications. Perhaps instead of cutting back on the budget, the answer may just be to slightly increase it. Or, again, it may just be a couple of tweaks. In any case, your “dream home” recruitment strategy may be a lot closer than you realize!