A few weeks back I posted about mobile being my new top priority. I’m therefore delighted to announce that MetaShift has collaborated with mobile recruiting legend Dave Martin (aka @mobile_dave) to produce a free white paper on the topic.
You can download our free Guide to Mobile Recruiting now by following this link
The aim of the guide is to be as user friendly and practical as possible while hopefully informing the debate round what I feel will be one of the key topics for 2012.
7 comments | tags: Digital Recruitment, Matt Alder, mobile recruiting | posted in Mobile Recruiting
Now that was a long blog break! No particular reason for it either, I wasn’t kidnapped by Monster and forced to write a nice article about BeKnown as ransom (see my last post) nor unfortunately did I spend the summer sitting on a beach drinking ridiculously named but reassuringly expensive cocktails. I’m back blogging again now though and thought it might be worth giving my verdict on a few things that have been going on over the summer.
Google +
Firstly I suppose I should say something about Google +. I like the interface but I absolutely hate the ridiculous bandwagon-jumping link baiting hype that has accompanied it. The Quora stuff at the beginning of the year was bad enough but some of the complete rubbish that has been written about Google + (some of it recruitment related) is really clouding the water when it comes to any actual usefulness the platform might have. Yes Google+ does have some nice functionality but if that is your USP then it is easily copied. This is exactly what Facebook has done in the last week or so and in so doing has graphically illustrated that functionality alone will never make Google+ a Facebook killer.
Google’s actual USPs are its reach into the Gmail user base and an implied role in SEO. This it what has driven its growth and is also why there is very little content and engagement on there. At the end of the day while people may join multiple networks they will only invest their time in places where their friends / target audience hang out. Google+ might get some traction in certain niches in the short term but will take a very long time to go mainstream, if indeed it ever does
My Verdict – Relentlessly overhyped, will have relevance moving forward but it is too early to say what that will be
Be Known
I know that I promised an in-depth review in my last post and I’m sorry if I’m disappointing anyone by not doing one. While I still think this is an incredibly significant move by Monster there really isn’t very much to review at the moment. In some ways I think the situation is similar to Google+, lots of people are joining, with Monster leveraging its enormous existing audience to drive this, but there is very little actually going on.
The “commercial talent community” space is an interesting and evolving one but platforms like BeKnown and Branchout have yet to prove that users join for any other reason than to look at job postings. As it stands BeKnown is just another platform for job distribution and little else. That said though its mention (albeit just on a slide) in the recent F8 conference and partnership with Facebook to be one of the first new social apps could be very interesting indeed!
My Verdict – A Red Herring for now but watch this space!
The LinkedIn Apply Button
I’ve blogged about this before but it seems that lots of people got distracted by a summer long argument about the “death of the CV” that was quite frankly pointless. I really wish a lot of this black or white 140 characters powered thinking would just go away. Ninety percent of the time in has no foundation in the current realities employers are facing.
In an attempt to get closer to the reality of the situation I spoke to LinkedIn’s EMEA Marketing Director, Laurence Bret-Stern, earlier in September. When I asked her about the CV vs Profile debate she pointed out that thousands of companies have already voted with their feet and have installed the LinkedIn apply button! She also intriguingly hinted that there was much more to come as LinkedIn becomes an ever more open platform to “connect professionals with opportunities more efficiently and effectively”
I really feel this is the most under commented on story from the whole summer. Not only has LinkedIn launched an apply button but a significant number employers are now actively using it which, despite their user growth, is not an achievement Google+ or BeKnown can currently match.
My Verdict – The game changer of the summer and I’m amazed no one seems to have noticed!
5 comments | tags: Digital Recruitment, Facebook, Matt Alder, Monster, social recruiting, socialrecruiting | posted in Uncategorized
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!
11 comments | tags: Digital Recruitment, Future Talent, Futurology, Graduate Recruitment, Matt Alder, socialrecruiting | posted in Uncategorized
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.”
9 comments | tags: case study, Digital Recruitment, Matt Alder, social recruiting, socialrecruiting, Unilever | posted in Social Recruiting around the world, Uncategorized
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…
Happy New Year Everyone!
15 comments | tags: Digital Recruitment, disruption, Futurology, Matt Alder, predictions, socialrecruiting | posted in Uncategorized
First of all this isn’t another generic all job boards are doomed blog post. I wanted to put some recent thoughts I’ve had in writing that I truly believe represent the issues job boards are facing or about to face. My credentials to do this are 12 years experience of working with job boards in the UK market as opposed to mere speculative opinion!
This post starts about 10 years ago. Back then I was one of the few professional buyers of job board space in the UK and my day was always a whirlwind of presentations from new job board launches. Some of sites don’t exist anymore; many more of them are now mainstays of the UK market. The one thing they all had in common though was innovation. Everyone was going to change recruitment for good, everyone had a new and interesting model, everyone was a disruptive force in a recruitment space that was over priced, old fashioned and out of touch with jobseeker and client needs.
Business models and market share were established and the job boards did indeed change recruitment, not as quickly or by as much as the initial optimism suggested but they were a truly disruptive force. However the dot com bubble bursting, a relatively small UK internet audience (back then anyway) and limitations in technology did take the edge off a lot of the promised innovation
Fast forward ten years and Job Boards are indeed a dominant force. With this though have come severe product commoditisation and a rather alarming establishment mindset that is personified by the frequently heard mantra – “but there will always be job boards”.
There in lies my issue because it’s not true; job boards have no more right to exist than the traditional publishers they have slowly been displacing. Don’t believe me? Then ask anyone over about 35 and if they think about it they’ll remember a significant period of their career when job boards just didn’t exist. The industry is far too young to have such a “you’ll never cope without us” attitude
Ten years later I’ve moved on as well, I don’t buy job board space anymore but nevertheless as a consultant to the industry I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu. Once more a series of wide eyed keen young start ups are seeking me out for advice and presenting business models designed to disrupt the recruitment status quo. This time the perceived status quo aren’t traditional publishers it’s the job boards themselves. Then there is LinkedIn probably the biggest potential disruptive force in our space that I’ve ever seen. Any job board owner who says it isn’t a threat to their business is either lying or hasn’t thought about it deeply enough.
Add in the embryonic force of social recruiting that is seeing progressive clients proactively undertaking activity with the aim of reducing or even eliminating their job board spend and you’ve got a heady mix of forces that should give job boards all the motivation they need to innovate and take their offerings to the next level.
What absolutely amazes me though is that with a few very notable exceptions (keen market observers will spot them!) this innovation isn’t happening. It seems to me that most job boards are expending all their energy either denying that there any threats to their model or doing whatever they can to maintain the status quo and in so doing are potentially taking their business models into a commoditised death spiral
I’m not writing all of this because I want to see job boards disappear in fact quite the opposite. I truly believe that they have a small but significant window of opportunity to innovate and thrive. Once the window closes though I’m afraid there will be no way back. So this is my challenge to the job board industry, put more of your energy into planning for the future and make me eat my words by creating some innovative disruptive business models that will drive the industry forward. I know you can do it because I still remember the year 2000 and how we’ve all been in the same position before. This time though the audience, technology and timing are all perfect……
23 comments | tags: disruption, Job Board, LinkedIn, Matt Alder, predictions, recruiting, Recruitment, social recruiting | posted in Uncategorized
Well the debate is well and truly up and running now. You can’t open Twitter these days without seeing the full range of opinion…”everyone must implement social recruiting now”,” social recruiting is a dangerous fad”,” social recruiting doesn’t exist”, “lets just call it recruiting”, “ get your recruiters off twitter and back on the phone”, “get your recruiters off the phone and on Twitter”, “Job boards are dead”, “job boards aren’t dead” etc etc etc.
Now while this debate can be interesting it is just that, debate and speculation. It is also debate that deals almost exclusively in generalisations and exists in an echo chamber that still hasn’t reached the mainstream although it is edging ever closer.
I’m bored with it and I’m not playing anymore
So what am I focusing on?
Well you only have to look at the utterly astonishing rate of social media adoption across diverse demographics to see that we are living through a communication and networking revolution, if you want to debate that then I’m sorry I’m not listening just have another look at the figures. The real question for me is how this revolution is actually being felt in the parts of recruitment space it has reached. I’m not interested in generalised debate based on people’s own self interest, alleged guru status or guess work, I’m interested in what is actually happening.
That’s why I’ve been collecting case studies on this blog. I’ve recently identified another four strategic social recruiting examples that I will write up at some point and have some emerging work coming through from my own clients. As well as looking at the actual social strategies these progressive companies have successfully (and yes they are successful) adopted, my major fascination is how they were actually implemented within the context of that company’s individual organisation and culture. Despite what the Twitter generalisation merchants would have you believe, my experience of working with hundreds of companies over the years has told me that each one operates in a unique way. So there are actually two different things going on here and two different areas in which to learn from those companies that are already up and running with social recruitment. Firstly what are they doing that works and secondly how did they get to do it within their company in the first place.
You might be the most networked knowledgeable Twitter user in the world but you aren’t going to get anywhere strategically if your company is still banning access to Twitter. There are going to be a number of strategic stages of development to get through before you can be another Microsoft or Best Buy. Moreover you might never get there but you might get somewhere else just as interesting
Although every company is different I believe that modeling those that are successful in this space in detail will give those that haven’t figured things out yet a series of potential maps that might just get them further on their inevitable social journey. In fact, with some help from some very clever people, I’ve already started this modeling process
So that’s what I’m focusing on and I’m already very excited by what I’m seeing. If you are interested in working with me then take a look at the MetaShift site and let’s talk because in the end talking is what this is all about
11 comments | tags: Matt Alder, social recruiting, socialrecruiting | posted in Uncategorized
The debate on the future of Job Boards seems to become more polarized by the day. Depending on your viewpoint / agenda it seems you should either believe they are going to suffer a painful death and all shut down tomorrow or carry on regardless effortlessly circumventing the massive digital changes that are effecting every other industry so dramatically. History should teach us that changes in the recruitment industry are never so black and white but instead always come in a million shades of grey.
With all of this in mind I’ve been pondering recently what the future might actually hold and some recent experiences are indicating the emergence of a massively disruptive trend.
As anyone who has properly experimented with social media will tell you, it’s all about conversations. It’s all about connecting, listening and engaging and the ability to do this on an enormous scale offers the glimpse of a brave new world for recruitment. Emerging “conventional” wisdom says that bulk feeding jobs into Twitter is at best missing the point and at worst cynical spam. While I strongly agree with the “conversations” viewpoint I would now argue that Twitter job feeds are not necessarily mutually exclusive. After all following someone’s Twitter feed is an opt in choice and it is impossible to spam users on Twitter if they are not following you. The flip-side of this though is that not many people will want to follow an automated job feed, making its potential reach distinctly unimpressive
However a few weeks back I became aware of a fascinating paradox. While I was doing a project for a big corporate employer they started experimenting with an automated Twitter job feed. Expectations were low and the number of followers the Twitter stream attracted was even lower! It soon became clear though that something very unexpected was happening. Despite only having 50 followers the Twitter account started generating over 200 quality CVs / resumes a week. Since then I’ve found numerous other corporates and job boards who are experiencing the same thing and keeping it to themselves as a kind of “dirty secret”. Before anyone starts thinking this has got anything to do with brand or employer brand it’s also worth noting that a lot of these feeds are anonymous!
So what’s happening? Well in addition to being an excellent tool for conversations, Twitter is also an open platform that it is very easy to get content into and out of. While people may not be following job feeds directly, they are obviously using Twitter to search for jobs somehow. This may be via general search engines like Twitter Search, via vertical ones such as Twitterjobsearch or by other means. While we may not be exactly sure how these quality candidates are accessing the jobs, the evidence that they are doing so and in numbers is pretty strong.
If this trend continues and more and more employers set up free job feeds, we’ll start to see the creation of a what I’d call a “Job Cloud”. Effectively a free Twitter powered open access database of jobs much bigger than the closed databases job boards currently hold and charge for. This is highly disruptive and would certainly dramatically alter the recruitment advertising landscape. Rather than the focus being on the publishing of jobs it would shift to be providing users with the tools to access, find and filter jobs within this “Job Cloud”.
How will this pan out? Well I’m not exactly sure at this stage but I would suspect that as an industry we should start taking companies like Twitterjobsearch and the many other start ups offering Twitter job filtering very seriously indeed. Although they could be an even more radical viewpoint that this will be a concept that is impossible to monetize. If that’s true it would be great news for employers but bad news for the job board industry.
Whatever people might say, two key revenue pillars of the recruitment industry have always been “owning” candidates and “owning” jobs. LinkedIn is already disrupting the candidate ownership space and it looks like Twitter might be about to do the same thing with job advertising
39 comments | tags: Job Board, LinkedIn, Matt Alder, socialrecruiting, twitter | posted in Uncategorized
After dropping subtle and not so subtle hints on Twitter for the last week I’m absolutely delighted to announce the launch of MetaShift, my new consulting business. I’ll be continuing to work for Penna on a consultancy basis but as of next Monday will be taking on my own additional clients and projects. In the true “Beta” nature of modern business this is really only a soft launch at this stage. Over the next few weeks I’ll be working on my proposition, launching the new website and exploring how I can help companies address the challenges of Social Recruiting and the other seismic changes happening in our marketplace. In the meantime I’m delighted to finally be able to talk about my plans!
29 comments | tags: Matt Alder, socialrecruiting | posted in Uncategorized
This article was originally published on Changeboard.com
The recent ban by Portsmouth City Council on their employees accessing social media sites such as Facebook while at work, has provoked much debate in other companies and organisations.
I suspect that a large number of HR departments up and down the country are looking at the issue in more detail than ever. Retailer magnet Theo Paphitus encapsulated the social media detractor’s point of view very well when he said this in a recent interview: “At Ryman, we had to knock this problem on the head about a year ago, when it became obvious that too much staff time was being eaten up by this nonsense”.
What HR departments might be less familiar with though, is the strong case for the integration of social media into the workplace. Tony Hseith of Zappos, has this to say, “If you don’t trust your employees to tweet freely, it’s an employee or leadership issue, not an employee Twitter policy issue” While he might not be as well know in the UK as the Ryman’s Dragon, the recent sale of Zappos to Amazon for the best part of a $1 billion illustrates that he also knows a thing or two about running a successful business. Indeed it’s not a coincidence that Zappos is considered by many as the best place to work in US.
What this tells me is that producing a sensible, successful corporate policy on social media usage is very difficult if you don’t use it yourself. It’s very easy to jump on the bandwagon of negativity if you have no idea what the advantages could be for your department and your company. If you’re struggling for a place to start then it’s well worth considering some of key benefits of social media for the HR profession
Social media is also driving a corporate communications revolution for many organisations. Major CRM systems such as Salesforce.com are integrating Twitter and Facebook so that customers can communicate with companies directly via these channels. Secure network services such as Yammer are making internal communications more informal and useful while social networking and wiki technology are finally dragging the corporate intranet into the 21st century.
The aggressive consistent growth of the social web should be proof in itself that we are dealing with revolution not a fad and progressive companies like Zappos have already integrated it deep into the culture of their business to great success. As similar positive case studies emerge expect the debate to become more balanced and social media to start being seen as the force for corporate good rather than something that should just be banned.
4 comments | tags: Facebook, HR, Matt Alder, Portsmouth CC, socialmedia, socialrecruiting, twitter, Zappos | posted in Uncategorized
