We live in an age of digital noise and distraction. How can you be sure you are getting the attention necessary to persuade the right people to join your company? Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a number of presentations and webinars on the concept of “Talent Attention” as I’m finding it is becoming more and more of an issue for employers all over the world.
This week’s episode is a recording of a webinar I did last week and in the presentation I talk about:
• The Talent Attention problem and why it is getting worse
• Why it is easy to blame the tools but actually we need to think about Talent Acquisition in a different way
• A metaphor to illustrate what recruiters often get wrong when attempting to get the attention of potential hires
• The complexity problem
• A simple model that can help you radically improve your strategy and ensure you get the attention of the right talent
I hope you enjoy this departure from the normal podcast style, next week’s episode will revert back to the normal interview format.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Working Films. Working Films is a full scale film and video company with a leading reputation for showcasing natural and engaging storytelling through film. From producing cost effective recruitment videos to full scale employer branding films, their work reflects passion for producing film about people and their work, along with powerful stories that engage with your target audiences. To find out more about how Working Films can help you with your video content strategy and employer branding, please visit www.workingfilms.co.uk. working films telling the stories about your people and their work.
Matt Alder [00:01:03]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 57 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I wanted to give you something a bit different in this episode. Over the last few weeks I presented at a few events on a concept that I’m calling Talent Attention. I think it’s something that all employers should be considering. I recorded my presentation as a live webinar last week and I wanted to share it with all of you podcast listeners. So my guest this week is me and here are my thoughts on Talent Attention.
Matt Alder [00:01:40]:
Hi everyone and thank you very much for joining me for the webinar this afternoon. The topic is Talent Attention and I’m going to talk you through some some thoughts and some case studies and some ideas that have around this. So just to start off, for those of you who might not know me, my name is Matt Alder. I’m a Talent acquisition and innovation consultant working for my own consultancy, Metashift. I’m also a podcaster and I produce and host the Recruiting Future podcast and every week I do an interview with someone working somewhere in Talent acquisition to find out what their view is on recruitment innovation. Some of the people that I work with, I work with large corporates, SMEs and also produce some content for various recruitment tech companies. So the webinar today, just before I set up what the context is and what we’re going to talk about, I really want to get across the concept of exceptional talent now, particularly in such disruptive global times as we’re now living in. I think it’s really important that everyone has a really focused definition of the talent that they’re looking for now. The concept of exceptional talent comes from a book that I’m currently writing which will be coming out next year, co authoring it with Mervyn Dinnen, HR Analyst. And for that book we’re defining exceptional talent as being people who possess the skills, attitude, flexibility and development Potential that can help businesses grow and evolve. So whenever I’m talking about talent attention during this webinar, I’m really talking about this kind of talent and attracting this kind of talent to your organization. Which is I’m sure something that many, if not all of you are seeking to do.
So to give a bit of context on the webinar, the idea behind this came from a few weeks ago I presented at a great industry event called RecFest. And this presentation that I’m about to give you was part of a silent disco style presentation session where there were two of us talking on stage and the entire audience were wearing headphones and basically half of them were tuned into me, half of them were tuned into John Hull from Carillion, the other speaker. And really it gave people the opportunity to listen to two presentations at once. So I’m going to come back to that format in a second because it’s actually quite important in terms of a metaphor I want to give you for talent attention. So in a couple of minutes time I’m going to ask you to use your imaginations and imagine you’re in this position listening on headphones. But we’ll come, we’ll come back to that and talk more about it a little bit later on.
So attention. What’s the problem? The problem is our attention spans are rapidly decreasing. Even if I can get my words out now, googling the average attention span of a human, as you can imagine, lots of different results come up. But really the average in terms of the scientific studies that I was looking at seemed to between be between 9 and 13 seconds. So we’re a couple of minutes into the webinar. So if you’re still listening, congratulations, you have an attention span that is longer than, longer than average. So when you couple that with the, the world of digital distraction that we’re now, that we’re now living in, it becomes, it becomes a real problem for you guys to get the attention of the talent that you need to join your business. Think of all of the, the messages that your with in someone’s digital world and how do you actually get your recruitment message out there in a way that’s going to grab the attention of those people? Particularly hard to find exceptional talent. Now I hear lots of talk from lots of people that I work with and speak to that they’re feeling the old ways of getting people’s attention. You know, the old advertising weeks, the old advertising techniques aren’t working as well as they as well as they did now. Conversely, I also talk to a Lot of people who say they are still working and they’re still a fairly essential part of someone’s talent attraction strategy.
So I think we should be thinking about this differently. It’s very, very easy to blame the tools here, but actually, I want you to think about this in a different way. So here’s my little metaphor. So I want you to imagine yourselves listening to me in a crowd of 400 people wearing a set of headphones. Now, what I did, what I said to the audience who were, who were listening, was to look at the people who were listening to the other presentation. Now, on the headphones we were using, there were blue lights and there were green lights. So it was very, very easy to see who was listening to the other presentation. And I said to the people in the audience, I want you to imagine that the people listening, the people with the green lights in their headphones listening to the other presentation, are the talent that you want to attract. And we looked at the problems of some of the techniques that recruiters and recruitment marketers use to do that. So the first thing I suggested that we could do to get the attention of the people who weren’t, who were listening to something else was to poke them in the back. Now, if that happened, you can imagine how annoyed they would be. Their attention is entirely focused on something else, focused on something that they have made a conscious decision to focus it on. And they have a recruiter or recruitment marketeer poking them in the back to try and get their attention. Now, to me, that is the equivalent of spam. So when you’re sending unsolicited emails to people on LinkedIn, when blasting job postings out into social media if they’re not done properly, that’s just what it feels like. It feels like you’re being poked in the back by a recruiter.
The second thing I asked the audience to do was to stand up. So they all stood up. Now, if you weren’t listening to my presentation and you were fully focused on someone else’s presentation, it would get your attention if everyone else on the table stood up. But you would be very confused as to why it’s happened. And as soon as they sat down again, you just, you know, you, you would, you would lose your attention and you focus back on what you’re back on what you’re doing. Now that, to me, is an example of some of the gimmicks we sometimes use to get people’s. To get people’s attention. We’re getting people’s attention, but it’s not quality Attention, it’s very, very short lived attention. And then the final part of the metaphor I suggested, I, I suggested people thought about what happened. If people were so intrigued by what was going on in the other presentation, they turn headphones over to listen, to listen to the same presentation, the same presentation as them. Now at this point I managed to achieve a lifetime ambition to actually Rickroll an entire conference. So I actually played the fine tune Never Going to Give youe up by Mr. Rick Astley down the microphone at that point. Now if you just turned on, you’re going to get Rick Astley and you’re going to be very confused as to why, as to why that’s happening. And to me that’s what we do to lots of potential candidates. You know, we drag them into a recruitment process, they land on the corporate career site, they can’t find the right page, they can’t find the right message. We have their attention, but we’ve wasted that attention by not, you know, by not giving them the right experience and not, not, not give, not paying attention to the context in which we’ve got their attention.
So metaphor over. I hope you could, I hope you could imagine what that was like. But really the key points were, you know, attention as spam, attention as gimmicks and actually when you’ve got someone’s attention, what do you do with that attention to have, have the right outcome. So that’s the metaphor. Now one of the problems that also exists today is the level of complexity. So there are so many tools and techniques out there, there are so many people to you about, you know, platforms and technologies and ways of working that can solve this problem. But in some ways they are the problem because they make things even more complicated and even more difficult to understand exactly what you should do to help get the right talent, attention for your organization. So unfortunately, you know, there’s no magic bullet when it comes to, when it comes to technology here. Also I know many of you will be working with multiple stakeholders. You’re working in a climate of uncertainty. Now when I first did this presentation, we were working in a climate of uncertainty. Now I’m doing this presentation, the climate of uncertainty is even more acute. So uncertainty looks like it’s the only certainty that we’re going to be facing in the next coming years and coming months. Also I know that a number of you are under pressure in terms of resource to make, to make this happen.
So good news and bad news. The bad news is in a lot of respects, a lot of respects all these factors are Only going to get worse. The good news is, for the rest of the webinar, I want to give you a model to help you simplify and create a strategy that’s going to help you get the attention of the exceptional talent you need and attract them, recruit them and onboard them into your business and meet your recruitment goals.
So the model has three constituent parts, attention, persuasion and experience. So very briefly I’m going to look at, I’m going to look at them all individually. So attention, getting people’s attention is, it should be the key part of your recruitment marketing and your recruitment advertising. Don’t take attention for granted. That’s my sort of key message there. And as part of that key message, I said that there’s lots of complexity, lots of sophistication that’s coming into recruitment marketing, but actually sometimes doing the simple things properly get you a fantastic result. So there’s a couple of clients I’m working with at the moment who have been trying and failing to sort of fill various roles or series of roles or sometimes even very senior roles within their business. And actually just by stepping back and paying attention to the copy that they were writing in their job ad and really thinking about what would get the attention and engage with their audience, they’ve had amazing results. So I know there are lots of conferences and training courses where people bang on about the importance of good copywriting in recruitment. But it is important, you know, sometimes if you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, are you writing your ad in the right way? Are you using the right kind of messaging? And I think that’s an important factor that sometimes gets overlooked when we get very excited about all of the technologies and tools and shiny new objects that are out there, that are out there in the industry.
The second one is persuasion. Now persuasion is what recruiters do for a living. And I always think it’s, it’s an interesting, it seems, it was very interesting to me that people who can be very persuasive face to face and very persuasive on the phone and very persuasive on a one to one basis as an industry. You know, our industry is full of these people and we seem to be struggling to translate that into, into a digital format, into a form of digital communication that works on a one to many basis. So employer brand is a key part of persuasion. You know, getting across the essence of what it’s, what it’s like to work there, allowing employees to tell their stories. You know, that to me is a key part of the persuasion dynamic.
I want to point your direction, point you in the direction of a great case study that uses social media employer brand brilliantly for persuasion. It’s the episode of the podcast, it’s podcast episode 45 and it’s an interview that I did with a guy called Chris Ebla, who’s director of Workplace Community, which is a brilliant title in itself, at Chili’s Grill and Bar, which is a, a U.S. chain of restaurants. And if you listen to his case study, he talks about how they’re using Instagram and Twitter and various other platforms and techniques to, to be trans transparent about what it’s like to work at the company to get the excitement that their employees have about going to work out there as a persuasion tool. So lots and lots and lots of different types of digital persuasion tools, but something to really, really think about because I don’t think as an industry we translate our brilliant one to one persuasiveness into a one to many persuasiveness.
The third part of the model which really wraps around everything is experience. Now you can’t go to a conference or turn on a webinar or, you know, open the web these days without someone talking about the importance of candidate experience. But I think it’s much, much broader than that. It’s the total experience you give everyone that you’re, you know, that you’re trying to get the, trying to get the attention of for a very long time. One of my specialties is mobile technology and I used to kind of completely separate mobile recruiting out in my head and then I realized 12 to 18 months ago that actually it’s all part of experience. It’s all part of the candidate experience. If you can’t give your candidates the flexible mobile agile experience they need to receive your messages and be persuaded to work for your organization, then you’re kind of doing this with one hand tied behind your back. So candidate experience critical. But the overall digital experience that you’re giving people when you’re talking to them on a one to many basis is really, absolutely critical. And it’s really worth sort of breaking that down and thinking about it in, you know, thinking about it in terms of process, in terms of detail, in terms of technology, in terms of how that works for you.
So finally, the closing point that I want to make, this is deliberately, you know, a fairly short presentation because I know everyone’s busy and also, you know, it’s a real sort of key message that I want to, that I want to get across. I’ve got lots of other content that explores lots of these themes in much more detail. So please listen to the podcast or get in contact with me if you’d like to know more about some of the concepts that I’ve talked about or hear more case studies about people doing these things in practice. But really, my final point, what should you do? What’s the one thing you can do right now to radically improve the way you get talent attention? And it’s to take a step back and have a helicopter view of everything that’s going on in your talent acquisition strategy and activity and put it through the lens of attention, persuasion and experience. Now, I do a lot of independent audits for employers on how, you know, how their talent acquisition strategies compare to this. And very often when you’re kind of down and doing and delivering and trying to meet the objectives you have as a business and you’ve got lots of different working parts going on, lots of different technologies going on, there can be some quick wins that are really hidden, whether that’s job descriptions or the way candidates flow through the process, or some small tweaks that could make your messaging work better. You know, very often hidden within the complexity of what you’re doing, you know, there’ll be a number of quick wins, medium term wins and long term wins. So however you choose to do that, take a step back and audit what you do and you can move forward from there. So my overriding message through the whole, the whole of this presentation is attention, persuasion and experience. And if, if you pay attention to that, to that, you’ll get the attention of the talent that you need.
Matt Alder [00:19:44]:
I hope you found that interesting. If you want to discuss an independent audit of your talent attraction strategy and activity, then please get in touch with me. You can reach me on mattashift.co.uk you can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search on Recruiting Future. You can find all of the past episodes of the show at www.rfpodcast.com and on that site you can also subscribe to the podcast mailing list. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week with a new guest and I hope you’ll join me.
