About three years ago a wrote a post with the above title on the Digital Recruiting blog. You can read it here. Just to give some context, at the time LinkedIn had only just hit 1 million members in the UK and it was nowhere near as well known as it is today! Lots of people have also said the same thing with this excellent post from Hung Lee being just one example of this kind of thinking
I’ve just spotted this post on Mashable a part of which I’ve pasted in below
LinkedIn will launch a button for employers’ websites called “Apply With LinkedIn” that allows job candidates to submit their LinkedIn profiles as resumes, according to a report.
Twitter and Google have both launched new buttons this week, and now it seems LinkedIn will also introduce a new way for third-party sites to integrate its services as well.
A “source briefed on the feature” told GigaOm that the new feature, which will be displayed alongside job descriptions on partner sites, will launch later this month.
Aside from making it easier for candidates to apply for jobs, the plugin uses applicants’ data to automatically sort candidates for the employer. If a company wants more than a LinkedIn profile to vet candidates, it can use additional questions from a template (i.e. Are you willing to relocate?), add customized questions or request a cover letter. Submissions can be sent to an email address, a URL or JavaScript callback.
So definitely time to reopen the debate, what do people think? Will it catch on? Will recruiters be prepared to move with the technology or do old habits just not die? Will this effect the way people write their LinkedIn profiles and in so doing reduce its power as a non recruitment networking tool? What does this mean for Job Boards?
So many questions and I’m sure lots of opinions to go with them. There is one thing I’m sure of though, if it happens as reported this is a very significant move!
Graduate recruitment has always been of great professional interest to me, in fact my first ever digital recruitment project was creating the strategy and project managing the build for Siemens first ever graduate recruitment site in 1999. What has always frustrated me though is the lack of progressive thinking from many employers in their approach to recruiting graduates. Uptake of new technologies has, with a few notable exceptions, always been incredibly slow and in my opinion much of the overall thinking that goes into corporate graduate recruiting strategies is outdated and in danger of fast becoming irrelevant. A bold sweeping statement I know but let me explain what I mean.
A few months ago I was at a conference and asked two graduate recruitment managers from two very well known blue chips why they only focused their recruitment efforts on a small number of specific universities and how they choose these institutions in the first place. The first graduate recruiter told me that they only wanted the best graduates so focused only on the best universities. So far perhaps so logical, however when I pressed the point and asked what criteria they used for selecting which universities were the best, I was told that they didn’t have any criteria they just targeted the same universities every year because they were ones they always target. The second graduate recruiter gave pretty much the same answer but at least added some slightly more enlightened insight by saying they would like to broaden their number of target institutions but were worried about diluting their brand by not being able to maintain the same level of high quality, high touch campus presence.
I can understand why the target institution thinking was important even in the recent past. With so many universities and students out there and graduate recruiters relying on traditional communication strategies, it was important for them to build these kinds of filters into the process to maximize their resources in order to get the best results. However things change and behaviors should evolve.
In Clay Shirky’s excellent book Cognitive Surplus he describes how human beings are often forced to take on board behaviors that can become the established way of doing things but are actually unnatural to the brain and quickly change when technology develops to replace them. His example is remembering phone numbers and although all of us over a certain age developed strategies for remembering lots of these long numbers, we quickly abandoned them when mobile phone address books became ubiquitous. I feel very strongly that this kind of shift needs to happen in the minds of graduate recruiters. The old filters, strategies and ways of doing things need to change quickly as there are two major forces that are dictating the need for huge change in the future.
The first of these is the market itself. With the onset of £9000 tuition fees and the current high levels of graduate unemployment, it is inevitable that companies should be thinking about their future talent strategies in a different way. If employers still want to attract the best young talent in the years to come targeting the same old universities with the same old methods isn’t the way forward. The people who can afford to go on to further study in the future are likely to prioritise proximity, affordability and flexibility as key criteria in their choice of institution rather than previous reputation. That is if they decide to go to University at all! There will be a massive fragmentation in the market and I don’t believe using the strategic shortcut of targeting specific institutions is going to deliver the required results.
The second force driving the future is the ways in which the social web and social technologies are enhancing the way people communicate. I recently did some work for one of the more forward thinking graduate employers and what became really clear quickly is that today’s students are keen to enter into a relationship with potential employers early if there some kind of payoff for them (this doesn’t have to necessarily be an eventual job offer either). They also have a genuine desire to self organise and support each other in their job hunt. Add in the fact that they are most connected generation on the planet and it is fairly clear that the traditional graduate brochures, posters and flat websites aren’t going to provide the collaborative brand experience they are looking for.
I think this all points to a clear view of the future and if employers think about this strategically they can actually offset these forces against each other. Fragmentation in the geographic distribution of talent isn’t as much of a problem if companies have a properly thought out social engagement strategy. I believe that finally we have the basis for employers to provide the same high quality person-to-person experience online as they have done on campus in the past. The social web offers the chance of one-to-many and peer-to-peer dialogues in a way that the “virtual careers fairs” of the past never could.
It’s great to see some brands already experimenting with this and I’ve previously blogged about some great work from Unilever here and Deloitte here. However more employers need to be looking at this area closely. There is a learning curve to go through and I wholeheartedly believe that the first movers now will be securing the best talent for years to come. Whatever happens though it surely must be time to finally kill off the graduate brochure once and for all!
I’ve had a lot of feedback on my recent mobile recruiting post and I’m going to write a proper follow up pretty soon to collate some of these views as well as the additional thinking I’ve been doing. In meantime though one interesting by-product has been a couple of invitations to review some new apps in the space. I’m not normally a review type blogger but I thought I would make an exception as I have such a big interest in everything that is happening in mobile recruitment.
Having already taken a look at employers and the iPhone with a review of the PepsiCo iPhone app for the Mobile Recruiting News site, I thought I should turn my attention to Job Boards and the iPad. So I accepted the invitation from Monster to take a look at their new iPad app, which launches this week.
I have to say that I was quite cynical. I really feel strongly that app based recruitment has to integrate with the features of the device it has been made for. If it doesn’t then I don’t see the point of using an app when an appropriately optimized web site would do the same thing. So the main question for me was going to be whether Monster’s app made the most of unique environment of the iPad.
So what did I think? Well I was pleasantly surprised! The first thing that strikes you when opening the app is the importance Monster has placed on user centered design. The app not only looks great but is also incredibly user friendly in terms of how the information scrolls and presents itself perfectly for the iPad’s screen size.
At this point it is worth pointing out that to get the full benefit of the app you need log in and you can do this either via an existing Monster account or one you can create on the iPad itself. Personally I don’t have an issue with this and I’m not sure many users would either. Logging in and registering with an app is pretty much the norm these days if there is a high value information exchange taking place.
Once logged in you can do pretty much everything you can do on the Monster site with the added benefit of geo-location based job searching. You can’t change your stored CVs but you can create custom cover letters and in most cases apply for a job directly from the app.
Mobile recruitment still has a very long way to go and often runs the risk of being either tokenistic or faddish in terms of implementation. What I like about the Monster iPad app is that it delivers an experience that I think iPad users will really appreciate as being unique to their device. Monster hasn’t tried to over complicate things and I think as a first effort it works really well.
Perfect for conducting a job hunt while sitting in a coffee shop away from prying eyes and snooping IT departments in the office!
Well done to Monster for putting the user first and I’ll be very interested to see how the other job boards respond
Well it’s been quite a year for live events so far, climaxing with the excellent TRU London a couple of weeks back. I’m not going to write anything more about TRU as there are already so many excellent blog posts out there, you can see most of them aggregated here.
During the recent Social Media Week I gave a brief presentation in which I looked at some of the emerging characteristics and definitions of social recruiting. I first tried to define the term 18 months or so ago and wanted to revisit my thoughts based on what I was seeing in the marketplace now.
The presentation was actually filmed and I’ve embedded it below but I thought it was also worth summarizing the key points for those of you who don’t have a spare 14 minutes to watch the full video!
Social Recruiting is a concept not a defined technique
This is a really key point for me. Social Recruiting isn’t a clearly defined approach or set of tactics it is a concept and set of ideas loosely based on using the social parts of the web for talent attraction and recruitment. This sounds fairly straightforward but it can actually be quite difficult to grasp in practice. I’m forever seeing people debating and arguing about “social recruiting” and it will often turn out that the source of their conflicting opinions is the fact they are actually both talking about completely different things!
So what are employers actually doing in this space? Well based on what I’ve seen from companies so far, “social recruiting” activity seems to be falling broadly into these three categories.
Push
The most visible approaches are, I would argue, just old fashioned web 1.0 tactics that involve pushing job postings and other content into social channels to take advantage both of the large audience and any possible viral effect. This could include everything from broadcasting jobs via Twitter to running more structured digital recruitment advertising in Facebook. Purists might scoff that companies are missing the point and that this isn’t what social media should be about but this is counter balanced by the successes many advertisers and “broadcasters” are achieving. Either way though the quality of content and thought behind the output needs to improve considerably if any of their current success is to continue.
Pull
If Push looks a bit like advertising then pull looks very much like good old fashioned recruiting. As well as being many other things, LinkedIn is the biggest user generated database of talent anywhere in the world and as such has given many employers the platform to really move forward with their direct sourcing strategy. In a recruitment market where it is hard to persuade top talent to make a move and recruiters are often inundated with response to their traditional digital talent attraction methods, social sourcing has offered the opportunity to advertise less and engage more with the right people at the right time on a one to one basis.
Genuinely Social
While push and pull tactics certainly seem to be both valid and successful, I can’t help but feel though that employers who are not extending their activity to genuinely social conversational based methods, are missing out on the true power of social media. Also as employer reputation and brand become ever more important, taking part in “the conversation” will become vital.
Here are some of the areas where I’m seeing companies being genuinely social.
Peer to Peer Recruitment
A key area that social really enables. Allows companies to use their own employees as brand advocates and give potential hires a unique perspective into the culture of the area of the company they are thinking of joining
Referral Schemes
I’ve written about these before here and here. Most recruitment has always come from referrals. Difficult to do but once employers can find effective ways of extending their referral schemes to properly tap into the digital social and professional graphs of their employees, this will be huge
Talent Communities
There is currently lots of debate about whether some of these are proper communities or are actually just socially sourced lists of names. Where ever the thinking goes though there will definitely be a role for the genuine community in certain sectors of the marketplace, especially in areas like graduate recruitment
Reputation and Brand
Not necessarily a specific recruitment tactic but nevertheless incredibly important strategically. Somewhere a conversation is taking place that will effect your reputation as an employer. It could be positive it could be negative but the key question companies should be asking themselves is “do we know about it?” and “are we influencing it?”
The video of my presentation and the short accompanying slide deck are embedded below:
In 2002 the Recruitment Sales Director of eminent national newspaper took me out to lunch to show me their new “WAP” recruitment site. After an hour of him frantically pushing the buttons on his funky Nokia phone (which looked a bit like a brick) he gave up trying to connect saying the immortal and strangely familiar words – “It was working fine this morning”. Then, with the benefit of the short-term memory capability possessed only by media sales professionals and goldfish, he proceeded to tell me WAP was the future and next year would be the “Year of Mobile Recruitment”. I told him he was talking rubbish, he told me I lacked vision.
Every year since then I’ve had at least one similar meeting, SMS Advertising, Text Back Services, Short Codes, MMS, GPRS, 2G, I’ve been there had the lunch, bought the T-Shirt and been very underwhelmed by their eventual non effect on the recruitment industry.
I’ve also personally tried to help this revolution take place. Back in 2005 my team were experimenting with SMS advertising for the Met Police and we also ran an edgy mobile campaign for Sainsbury’s that ended up upsetting the Daily Mail (proving mobile was good for something!). Like everything else I’ve seen touted as the next big thing in mobile recruitment though they were just short lived fads that didn’t change anything.
At this point I have to be clear I believe that not only is recruitment going to go mobile but also that the job seekers out there are already demanding it. The arrival and growing uptake of smartphones has finally taken the technological barriers away. We also have to consider how mobile is already supporting the “traditional” recruitment process. SMS is so embedded into the UK business and social psyche, we tend to forget that we’ve actually been doing the kind of “mobile recruiting” our peers in the US are currently debating, for years!
So what’s the problem? Why am I so sure 2011 isn’t the year of mobile? Well there is a vital link in the chain still missing and no one is focusing on it. We know there are huge amounts of mobile traffic out there and all the major job boards are reporting a massive uplift in visits from smart phones. However I don’t think feeding this demand with yet more “me to” job search apps is the answer. Giving mobile job seekers access to even more mostly poorly written job ads with no opportunity to find out more, get context or take action just seems like madness!
As far as I’m concerned we will move no further forward until employers make their corporate career sites and application processes work properly for mobile. This year won’t be the year of mobile because at the moment most employers aren’t even thinking about it.
At a recent conference I asked an audience of over 200 in-house recruitment professionals how many of them knew what their recruitment website looked like on a iPhone, only one person put their hand up! At the same conference someone told me I was an idiot because “people are not interested in applying for jobs on their mobile phones”. My answer would be how do we know that if we’re currently not giving them the chance to do it!
So do I lack vision, am I an idiot, have I just pointed out the elephant in the room or do I just have a different definition of Mobile Recruitment to everyone else?
I’ve been slightly disappointed lately with the quality of Social Recruiting case studies coming through and this is why I haven’t featured any on the blog for a while. Although some great work is being done, many organizations are just focusing on “social job distribution” and in so doing are missing many of the key advantages that social is bringing to recruitment. With this in mind I was delighted, while doing some work for them just before Christmas, to get an insight into how Unilever are setting about making their UK graduate recruitment properly social.
Before going into the detail of the tactics and channels Unilever are using, it is important to reflect on the strategic thinking and resource planning round their social tag line “By Grads for Grads”. Unilever has recognized that to be effective in the social space they have to have a genuinely authentic conversation with their graduate audience rather than talking at them as the majority of graduate recruiters still seem to do. Instead of using an advertising agency to “manage” their activity Unilever have put together a digital team of previous graduate recruits to run the social channels and be responsible for answering questions while keeping the conversation flowing.
Having current grads help recruit the next year’s intake is nothing new but Unilever are one of the few companies I’ve come across using social technologies to extend the reach of such an initiative. By putting such a resource in place I feel Unilever are in a fantastic position to be transparent about any gap between their employer brand perception and their employer brand reality.
The execution of the strategy runs mainly across Facebook and Twitter. There has also been the recent addition of a growing YouTube channel of video content. It’s great to see an employer really thinking about the importance of conversations and while the content does play an important role, Unilever aren’t blindly taking assets from their website and dumping it onto Facebook in the same way some of their competitors do!
As this is a fairly new initiative it is slightly early to be able to analyze the results. This is also an evolving strategy rather than a one off campaign and more sophisticated measurement techniques are currently being put in place to assess the true long term value of the approach.
Stella Maerker who helps run the digital graduate team has this to say about the success of the campaign:
“We can see a steady increase of followers and fans. Click through rates from the social media pages to the careers website and vice versa prove growing traffic. Applicants will be asked about our social media pages during application process. The real success will be number of successful graduates that got attracted to Unilever by interacting with current grads online!”
While I’m sure some purists (if you can have such a thing in a brand new field!) might criticize the comparatively low number of followers I think this is actually irrelevant at this stage of an ongoing initiative. Unilever have gone for a quality rather than quantity approach and the time spend considering their long term strategy and allocating dedicated internal resources are bound to pay dividends in the long term as social becomes their most important channel for graduate recruitment.
There are of course huge challenges in applying this kind of approach to a broader selection of Unilever’s recruitment activity but Unilever are committed to doing soon. As their Global Resourcing Director Paul Maxin says:
“Digital and social media is a key enabler to the way Unilever builds an engagement based approach to our employment brand equity. We’ll continue to integrate it, providing candidate-centric platforms that build advocacy of our employment brand and scale the approach both regionally and globally.”
When I started working in online marketing back in the late nineties, one of the things that was stopping it becoming a mainstream activity was a lack of reliable and meaningful metrics. These days the sophistication of some of the measurement tools available is almost mind blowing and the online advertising market has grown accordingly to be worth literally billions.
What is worth remembering though is that these tools had to start somewhere and in the early days they could only measure things that were of little use to someone marketing a product or trying to attract talent. This was a vital stage though as today’s sophistication owes its existence to these early blunt instruments. It taught me that any technology revolution will also contain a great deal of evolution. We would never have been able measure conversions, purchases, repeat purchases or job applications if we hadn’t previously conquered and disregarded measuring hits and visits!
The Social Media revolution seems to be going through a very similar evolution. Although some aspects can be measured via existing tools, quite rightly there has been a quest to measure the extra dimensions that social brings to the table. The run away winner so far is the concept of “influence”. The trouble is though the “influence” being measured (followers, retweets, link opens etc etc) currently has very little in common with actual real life influence and persuasion
Why then is this an appeal for calm and not a rant? Well if we appreciated the tools for the blunt instruments they are and as a vital first stage of the development of something actually useful, there is much encouragement. Klout is the emerging tool of choice. It grows more sophisticated by the day, integrates usefully into a number of business tools such as email marketing software and can tell me if someone in my network is well connected. What it can’t currently tell me though is whether that will work to my advantage in terms of them actually influencing someone to take any kind of action that might benefit my objectives.
So this is why I was utterly dismayed by the “influence” competitions that seemed to appear in our industry towards the end of last year. While it might sound impressive to be listed in the top ten recruitment “influencers” on Twitter it means absolutely nothing in the real world. I would argue that Social Media Recruitment influence has yet to be even defined let alone measured and I bet it will have nothing to do with who sends the most tweets!
There is a very long way to go yet and now is a time for patience and open mindedness not bandwagon jumping and ego waving competitions. My message to the Klout score addicts and list junkies is a simple one – Calm down and put your egos away for now. You impress no one and you’re just going to look very stupid in the long run!
It’s the first week of January and all the world’s tech geeks appear to have made a new year’s resolution to talk about nothing else this year other than social answers site Quora.
I’d not used Quora before today but as far as I can see it is a cross between Yahoo Questions, LinkedIn Answers and Wikipedia. So far so useful sounding? Well at least that was what I thought until I tried using it for the first time this morning.
After a whole 30 minutes spent on Quora there are two things I already dislike intensely about it
The Hype
There seems to be a well-worn process if you want your site to get some traction; you pay, bribe or cajole a Silicon Valley “influencer” to tweet about it. As far as I can tell all some of these professional layabouts do is get paid to tweet about things but their effect on Twitter can be quite amazing.
Since a couple of “influencer” tweets recently my stream has been rammed with bandwagon jumping “me to” idiots who seem to have lost all capacity for independent thought. Typical tweets I’ve seen have included “Quora will replace all the tech help forums on the Internet!”, “Not being on Quora is so 2010!” and even The Telegraph has decided to join in by declaring that Quora is going to bigger than Twitter.
My questions to all of them would be firstly, how do you know and secondly have you actually used it? I bet I wouldn’t get many well thought through answers to either of those two, even if I put the questions up on Quora!
I love Twitter most of the time but this kind of thing really does my head in. The fact is most people will have never heard of Quora at this stage let alone used it and that isn’t going to make it bigger than anything at the moment
The User Experience
Talk about the emperor’s new clothes, I think this site would be easier to use if the world’s worst ATS provider had designed it! Being the stubborn early adopter type that I am though I soldiered onwards and managed to find some questions about recruitment and decided to answer one someone had asked about social recruiting. This is where my Quora world completely fell apart. Literally two minutes later one of Quora’s editors marked my answer as “not useful” and it disappeared from view.
Apparently this was because my answer was more of a “comment on the question” than an actually answer. Well I’m sorry Quora I disagree and so did some of the other people answering the same question. It appears though there is no come back or possibility for discussion and my answer remains more or less invisible. It’s only Jan 5th but if I experience a bigger crowdsourcing FAIL than this in 2011 I’ll be amazed. Let me explain why.
According to the Forrester Social Technographics survey only 23% of users of the social web are content creators. This does somewhat limit Quora’s potential universe of contributors and you would of thought they would be nice to them! I can understand the need for some moderation to stop the site becoming unusable like the spamfest that is Yahoo Questions but p*ssing “Creators” off with stupid rules, a ridiculously overbearing style guide and subjective police state style editing doesn’t seem to be a good plan when dealing with what should a valuable audience to them!
In conclusion then it would actually be as stupid for me to write Quora off at this stage as it is for the mindless lemmings to overhype it. In fact if it does become even moderately successful then I can see the sourcing community getting very excited about the chance to source and headhunt subject matter experts as they gather round their particularly niches.
What I will say though is that first impressions are important and my initial experience of Quora has been absolutely awful
So here we are then the first week of the business year, the traditional time for predictions about what this coming year might bring for the recruitment industry. As this is a blog about futurology I obviously have to contribute something but this time I’m going to take a slightly different approach.
Before I do anything though it is of course compulsory to have a quick review of the predictions I made last year. You can find them here
Feel free to judge for yourselves but I’d say that I got the recruitment market and social recruiting ones about right. The jury is very much still out on the newspaper one, we’d never heard of the iPad when I made these predictions and it might just change the dynamic but only time and successful mass adoption will tell. The Job Board one looks likes it was way off unfortunately and to the detriment of the industry in my opinion. That said I do have a fairly well informed feeling that there were some back room conversations in 2010 that might see some innovative products being launched this year
So what of 2011? Well rather than putting down any specific predictions I wanted to share some overarching thoughts about change and how it will effect everyone.
I’ve been lucky enough to speak to a huge number of employers in the last few weeks, either via my work with MetaShift or through some of the great events I’ve attended or spoken at. Through some continuing work in the outplacement sector I’ve also been able to speak to and get the opinions of many job seekers across different sectors and at differing levels first hand.
The main thing that comes through in all of these conversations is a very noticeable groundswell of change. Whether it is the growth of direct resourcing, dissatisfaction with the current state of the online recruitment market or a huge shift in how and where people look for jobs there are changes taking place that really do put this industry at a crossroads.
My biggest continuing frustration is that large sectors of the recruitment industry are completely failing to notice and address these fundamental issues. The good news though is I think that finally, with the help of an often used business metaphor, I’ve worked out why.
You see most of the time, in our industry anyway, revolutions are imperceptible unless you are looking straight at them, particularly when some of their effects can be explained away by tough economic times. It’s just like boiling a frog, if you drop it into hot water the frog will jump out, if you put it in cold water and slowly heat it up the frog won’t notice the temperature increase and will boil to death.
If 2010 was the year when the water got a bit tepid, my prediction is that it’ll get a lot more than just lukewarm in 2011.
So whether you are:
- An employer needing to take a careful look at how your online recruitment offering is actually working and/or needing to investigate social media.
- A Job board thinking carefully about how your business needs to evolve in these “tough” times
- An ATS supplier trying to meet the demands of clients widening your portfolio when they also seem to be putting the needs of the candidate further and further down their list of priorities
- A recruitment agency thinking that direct resourcing and social media are fads that won’t effect you
- A recruitment advertising agency betting the farm on “strategic media partnerships” and/or claiming you get social when you’re not even doing social
I’d keep an eye on the temperature of the water this year because you are going to need to start planning change very soon. You should also get in touch with me, I’ve got some ideas that will help…
The thing I hate the most about some of the more ridiculous hype round social recruiting is that sometimes genuinely game changing announcements get lost of the sea of noise. A couple of weeks back there was one such announcement which to date has received very little attention.
Before I talk about what it was and why it’s a potential game changer, lets have a quick recap. Regular readers will know that I consider employee referral recruitment to be the area with the most to benefit from the social media revolution. Social Graph (and professional graphs) is a term that is passing into everyday marketing parlance and over the coming years will also be a familiar term in recruitment. Incidentally for those of you who haven’t yet seen just how interesting mapping your Facebook social graph can be, there is a great app here. This is what mine looks like:
When you bear in mind that each of my connections mapped above will have their own overlapping graph with additional connections who in turn also have their own graph, you can see just how far and wide information about career opportunities could spread when we get this right.
I’m still convinced Facebook plays a key part in this but thus far I’ve yet to see a “referral recruitment” Facebook app that isn’t clunky and spammy. To me referral recruitment on Facebook will be much more about employee advocacy than clever technology and this is something companies need to consider very seriously.
With this in mind I’ve always thought that LinkedIn (which is currently growing at a staggering 1 million uses every 9 days) offers the type of weak ties on a professional level that could really turbo charge referral recruitment if companies could find a way to harness it. Two weeks ago LinkedIn showed there were thinking the same way by announcing the launch of their “Referral Engine” product. To me this is the social recruiting announcement of the year and I’m staggered that I can only find one blog so far that has covered it.
I won’t go into the details of how it works as you can read about it here but here is a demo screen shot
As ever until it has launched we won’t know how good it is, whether it works or whether employers will be able to successful integrate it into their existing referral programs. However it certainly has the potential to be a very big deal indeed. More good news for corporate recruiters and yet more challenging news for agencies!
