November 20, 2006

Think SEO isn't important to online recruiting?

If you are one of those people (and most of you are) that thinks that SEO isn't important to your online recruiting strategy...think again.

Matthew Martone's blog post about changes to Google's AdWords Landing Page Quality Rankings (from this Google Article) blew me away. In it, he says:

"Well optimized career site landing pages have an even greater opportunity to be visible and attract the less-active and passive job seekers using the Search Engines.

Poorly optimized career site landing pages, which is very common, will result in even more missed opportunities to attract job seekers and convert them to applicants."

He even includes some recommendations on optimising your pages...

I highly recommend that people begin looking at SEO in the HR and recruiting world...

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 09:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

Do you work with fools?

I just found the greatest blog site, iWorkWithFools.com - Anonymously Share Work Related Stories where you can anonymously submit stories about the idiots that you work with and have them posted for the world to see!

God I wish I'd had this at the last place I worked.

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April 05, 2006

i'm in the press!

Our PR firm put out a press release on my appointment at Euro RSCG Riley in a UK based online recruiting magazine called OnRec.

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February 15, 2006

Wanna see a great recruiting site?

Ogilvy Graduate Recruiting hires a group of 15 graduates each year and gives them an 18-month "360 degree" experience of Ogilvy's business in three different areas.

Sounds like an excellent training program. But why would a top new graduate want to join forces with Ogilvy instead of another great advertising firm?

Well, according to the site, Ogilvy....

- is thinking bigger than every other advertising agency
- will make you one of the best trained graduates in the industry
- you'll get to work on more brands than with other training schemes
- Ogilvy's training is recognized as the best in the industry

Is that enough to make you choose Ogilvy over the competition? For some, perhaps... but these claims are pretty hard to quantify aside from pointing to industry magazines, word-of-mouth, or testimonials from (most likely former Ogilvy) advertising professionals and/or clients...

So why does a graduate choose a new employer? Let's look at who they are...

Today's graduates are made up mostly of a generation being called the "Millennials" (born between 1980 and 2000). In an excellent article by Claire Raines of Generations at Work, called "Managing Millennials", this generation will bring an entirely new and radically different approach to their careers.

According to Raines, their characteristics include:

- Confident
- Hopeful
- Goal- and achievement-oriented
- Civic-minded
- Inclusive

She went on to list 6 Principles of Millennial Management

1. You be the leader. This generation has grown up with structure and supervision, with parents who were role models. The “You be the parent” TV commercials are right on. Millennials are looking for leaders with honesty and integrity. It’s not that they don’t want to be leaders themselves, they’d just like some great role models first.
2. Challenge me. Millennials want learning opportunities. They want to be assigned to projects they can learn from. A recent Randstad employee survey found that “trying new things” was the most popular item. They’re looking for growth, development, a career path.
3. Let me work with friends. Millennials say they want to work with people they click with. They like being friends with coworkers. Employers who provide for the social aspects of work will find those efforts well rewarded by this newest cohort. Some companies are even interviewing and hiring groups of friends.
4. Let's have fun. A little humor, a bit of silliness, even a little irreverence will make your work environment more attractive.
5. Respect me. “Treat our ideas respectfully,” they ask, “even though we haven’t been around a long time.”
6. Be flexible. The busiest generation ever isn’t going to give up its activities just because of jobs. A rigid schedule is a sure-fire way to lose your Millennial employees.

What does all of this have to do with the Ogilvy site? Well, I think it's a great recruitment site because it speaks directly to this generation. It combines a lot of talk about what Ogilvy is and how serious Ogilvy takes its business. It dispells myths about the experience of working at Ogilvy, and it does so from the perspective of the graduate. It is not a bunch of corporate speak about "Our organization was founded back in.... we are one of the largest and most reputable... blah blah blah"

In fact, what they did was turn their graduate recruiting site into an almost "reality" style blog of life at Ogilvy from the perspective of the graduates. They spend equal amounts of time talking about the myriad brands they get to work on at Ogilvy and the big names they get to sit around the boardroom table with. Which helps the goal-oriented, ambitious prospects see that they will not just be at the bottom of the food-chain. It also shows the personality.

An excerpt from one of the entries called "What Ogilvy isn't"

"It's not just another grad scheme. This won't be six weeks of dullo training then being left to fend for yourself. You'll get to work in three different communications companies in 18 months which will make you the best trained graduates in the communication business. You won't be on your own either. There'll be fifteen of you (gotta like those odds) which, if it's like my intake will mean a lot of laughs, always someone to have a drink with at the bar (did I mention the office has a bar?) and plenty of embarrassing stories.

If you'd like to find out more about these embarrassing stories (and see the photos) please feel free to have a good look around. All the bits and pieces are written by Ogilvy graduates so you should get a pretty good feel for what it's all about. Apparently this is working life..."

Unlike professional candidates, graduates have two questions they want answered when they visit an employment site...

1. What is it like to work for ___________?

and

2. What is it like to work, period (full stop, for my UK readers)?

Ogilvy's site is so great because it answers both and has fun doing so...

A study by Y2M: Youth Media + Marketing Networks polled 1500 college graduates about their job searching habits and found that 7 in 10 of them (69%) posted their resume online, citing major job boards like Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder as the places to post their resumes in increasing numbers over the last several years (2002-2005).

So if they are all going to the Web to find their next employer, what will your site say to them?

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 07:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 20, 2005

The Jobseeker of the Future...

In this great post by my friend Dave Lefkow at Jobster, my first Recruitment Marketing related post has been inspired.

The head of the interactive department in my company came to me a couple of weeks ago, asking me for some ideas on what the "market" has to say these days about interactive marketing. He and I share a common goal of aiming to be "thought leaders" in our field and hence are always trying to think beyond what's currently out there for the really big ideas that shape the future of recruiting. Dave makes a really great point in his post about getting away from planning based on "best practices" which I agree with and have often mentioned in my own presentations and discussions with clients. The ironic thing about most of the published best practices is that, as Dave says, they basically take a look at everything that everyone has been doing for the last umpteen years and highlights the 15 or 20 most successful tactics and then "they" declare that these are the best practices.

The problem with this approach is that it does not look forward, it looks backward... hence it's kind of counter-intuitive to use "best practices" as inspiration for your next big idea. Best practices are important in that they are the "price of admission" for success in many cases. For example, a recent article on ERExchange.com listed "easy to access job postings" as a "best practice " for your company's Employment web site. But who's honestly going to visit your site and go "Wow, these guys are on the cutting edge of recruiting technology! I was able to get to their job postings in one click!! Oh my god! John!! You HAVE TO SEE THIS!!" Conversely, if you didn't have easy to access job postings, it would significantly damage their experience of your site, because the average job-seeker has come to expect certain things of an employment site...

But that has nothing to do with innovation, does it? That's not going to push the industry forward at all. In fact, I've personally found it kind of ironic that the published lists of best practices for the recruitment industry, tend to come from companies with services or tools that serve the recruiting industry... and surprisingly enough, the "best practices" they espouse tend to very closely match their product or suite of services. (No disrespect meant to any of these authors or to their published ideas, just an observation.). Not to say they have an "ulterior motive" because I've never seen them put a "bad idea" out there as a best practice, but I've seen a few that I didn't think were very innovative.

I have often wanted to do what Dave Lefkow describes, sit down with some real "thinkers" and brainstorm really innovative ideas for the future of recruiting... where money and time were no object and we solved real problems without looking at the "best practices."

I tend to take my inspiration from outside of the online recruiting arena and so as I was brainstorming on the things that "the market" should be thinking about, I landed on a concept I took from "Boxes and Arrows" a great site covering a range of topics including Information Architecture, Experience Design or Interaction Design. There was a post on boxes and arrows by Jason Hobbs about "user journeys" that discussed how good interactive designers and strategists are thinking about a person's entire journey through a site (brand, ad campaign, etc) and thinking about how to best facilitate that experience into a mutually beneficial one - where every click leads to a deeper connection with the content and offers an opportunity to develop a more meaningful relationship with the user by appropriately channeling them through the process with relevant and timely information.

I realized that an important aspect of discovering innovative ways to connect companies with potential talent in this changing world lies in the ability to understand who today's jobseekers are and what the jobseeker's "journey to a new job" is like...

Now, I haven't personally sat down and created a user journey for a site before - so I don't claim to be an expert in this area - but I think that conceptually it could really help drive some new ideas.

Just thinking about today's "experienced professional" - these people are in their late 20s to early 30s with a few years of professional experience under their belts. They are probably likely to be single, so they have a decent amount of disposable income - which means that they have cars, electronic gadgets, high-speed wireless access and so on. The "best practice" approach tends to come from thinking about how all of these factors affect our ability to market what we have to say to them (we can determine that we can deliver a video to them using Flash because they are likely to have the ability to view a Flash movie)... but what about thinking about how they want to receive all of this information (when they are sitting at their computer, would they even be interested in watching a Flash movie or would that be an interruption to their normal way of doing things)? These people also have TiVo, so they don't watch TV like other people do. They have an iPod and may be downloading podcasts. They have a mobile phone that they send photos or small videos to their friends, they send and receive lots of text messages via their telephone and they are probably savvy enough to know how to filter out unwanted emails and pop-up adverstisements from appearing when they don't want to see them.

My point here is that jobseekers are changing. Example: Having a "job agent" feature on your site may seem like a really innovative idea, now people can sign up to receive emails from your site about jobs that match their criteria. But perhaps the person you're trying to hire has already figured out that "creating an agent" does not mean that they are going to be sent relevant job titles... and in fact, maybe they've gone away from it because their inbox was being clogged with emails from too many companies about available jobs. I have agents set up that I just delete the minute they hit my inbox. Now I prefer RSS feeds on my Yahoo! home page.

So perhaps it's time to think about all of the ways in which someone can manage their career in the "interactive age" and adjust our tactics to them instead of thinking of new twists on the same old "best practices."

A couple of concepts that interest me:

Tagging - What if someone could come to your site, look at your available jobs and then place them into their own (job-seeker oriented) categories. So now that Engineer II position is marked by someone as "great entry level opportunity" and that becomes a category that people can use to search for positions that you have available.
Industrial Psychology Based Assessments - I'm interested in this field for 2 reasons: 1) in a "candidate's market" which is where we're headed, people need to be convinced that you are the right environment for them... if you had an expert come in and help you characterize your work environment into information that you could use to help people determine if they are the right cultural fit before they apply and 2) doing this would also aid in retention because people would feel like they got what they signed up for...

I think that it'd be really cool to go to a site where you answered questions, played a game, or participated in some sort of interactive experience and at the end of it you were given feedback on whether or not you were the right match for company XXX. Or a job board that could help you identify companies that were a good match for your personality. All of the pieces are there, and some companies do some of it but nobody does all of it... and yet, if you think about today's professional and how they are using the Web to live their lives - they are all about technology that helps filter out stuff that wastes their time.

Hopefully this post hasn't wasted your time... what else can we do to improve online recruiting? I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by Andrew Spencer at 03:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack