In this episode Matt Alder talks to Adam Gordon MD of Social Media Search
Talent Communities have always been a controversial topic in Social Recruiting. There is always a lot of talk about them but case studies that prove whether they are actually effective can be hard to find.
In this interview Matt and Adam discuss the three main reasons talent communities fail and how employers can optimize their community recruitment approach for success. Adam gives a number of examples of talent communities that have succeeded and outlines how he feels this area of recruiting can develop in the future.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:40]:
Hi and welcome to episode 12 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I started working with social media for recruitment eight years ago and almost ever since there’s been controversy and debate around the idea of talent communities. Lots of people want to offer advice to employers on how to build talent communities, but very few people can back this up with successful case studies and a track record in doing so. It’s not surprising then that most employers I speak to think talent communities are a complete waste of their time. This is why I wanted to interview this week’s guest, Adam Gordon from Social Media Search. Adam and his team have a huge amount of experience running successful talent community recruitment initiatives for a diverse range of clients. Is the perfect person to put the case forward for talent communities and explain how employers can make them work.
Matt Alder [00:01:33]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My interviewee today is Adam Gordon from Social Media Search. Adam, would you like to introduce yourself?
Adam Gordon [00:01:47]:
Yes, certainly. So I started in recruitment back in 2009, worked as a recruitment consultant for three years in the good old days. Over the last 15, 16 years, I have continued to work closely with the industry, have asked people in terms of recruitment marketing as well as at PwC, working as a consultant on employee engagement and initiatives like that, and having kept close to what’s going on, I have noticed a lot of different changes and mostly for the good. And in 2009 I created a business called Social Media Search designed to help employers to do more direct sourcing because of a couple of different key principles. So the first is that obviously the world’s a more transparent place. You can find people online much more than you could in the past. And the second is if you get your approach right and you can build relationships with them, then you can turn almost anybody into a candidate within about 48 hours of getting that approach and getting it right. Most large businesses have got most of the capability to be able to do this and we provide service on the bits when they don’t quite know how to do it or they maybe don’t have the time to do it themselves.
Matt Alder [00:03:22]:
Okay, that’s cool. I’ve sort of, I’d heard of your business in the past and then we sort of met a few months ago and you sort of talked me through a bit more about the kind of work that you did. And what struck me is that in the last four or five years there’s been a huge amount of conference talk and articles written about talent communities and community based recruitment and all the wonderful things that you can do with social media in this, in this kind of space. But there aren’t many examples out there. There aren’t many people who are talking about doing it, who are actually doing it. And it’s something that you guys are doing. And you know, I thought it was really interesting from that perspective. So tell us a bit about the talent community, the sort of relationship nurturing that you guys actually do.
Adam Gordon [00:04:12]:
Okay. So I started using social media in about 2004. And the reason I did that was because I read an article which is entirely unrelated to what we’re talking about. But Lily Allen was talking about how she had built up a million followers on MySpace before she even had a record contract.
Matt Alder [00:04:35]:
Okay.
Adam Gordon [00:04:36]:
And I just thought that is a wonderful, wonderful sort of objective that all sorts of different businesses could follow in terms of that audience building and creating engagement and creating conversation with people that they want as part of their community. And when I worked at PwC, I was applying a number of the kind of techniques that Lily Allen talked about in this article. I think it was in the Sunday Times. And I started talking to prospective customers via LinkedIn, for example, and I built up a methodology for how you do it effectively. I also started studying a lot around NLP and defective communication. And through a combination of these different things, I created some of the methodologies that we use in social media search still today. And one of those was around creating communities. So when we create communities for our clients, we work through a 30 point plan. That 30 point plan I formalized in 2010 and I keep talking to my colleague any about updating that because we’ve actually probably got about 50 different elements that we now consider when we’re creating community. I’m going to talk quickly about the sort of must not do things because these are the reasons, these are the three reasons why communities normally fail.
Matt Alder [00:06:09]:
Okay.
Adam Gordon [00:06:10]:
So the first is because businesses normally over brand their communities. So if I’m interested in, if I’m working for Pepsi and I’m interested in jobs at Coca Cola, I’m not going to join the community on LinkedIn called Jobs @ Coca Cola because I don’t want my boss to see that I’ve joined it. I don’t necessarily want anybody else in that community to see that I’ve joined it. And I certainly don’t want to bump into my colleagues there.
Matt Alder [00:06:42]:
No, absolutely.
Adam Gordon [00:06:43]:
I may, however, join a community put together by people at Coca Cola which is about, you know, how to get ahead in your FMCG career or something like that. Something that’s issues based. It’s not highly branded. It’s maybe at second glance that actually is people at Coca Cola that are behind that. So reversing that. The biggest problem that businesses make is they put together communities which have got their name, their logo all over it. It’s full of their employer branding. And actually the very best candidates just aren’t going to come and take part in that. That’s an advertising thing. And people don’t like being advertised to or marketed to on social media. Okay, so that’s the first reason. The second reason is that businesses put together these wonderful communities, but they do nothing about actually going out and finding people to come and join it.
Matt Alder [00:07:39]:
Okay, so kind of expecting people just to turn up because they’ve come up with a catchy name or something like that.
Adam Gordon [00:07:45]:
Exactly. Build it and they will come. Just doesn’t work if you’re richer brands, and it might, but most people aren’t, it just doesn’t work. So you’ve really got to go out and, you know, find all of the people that you might recruit now or in the future, that’s what we call your total addressable market, and physically bring them into your community. So that’s the second reason why communities fail, is that businesses don’t do enough research and member recruitment on LinkedIn as an example, LinkedIn groups are probably the most common form of communities online, which listeners will know about. Big issue around LinkedIn group invites, for example, is you can’t customize that invitation message. So you can’t give the three or four hot reasons why everybody in your token addressable market needs to come and join that community. So, you know, you need to think about how you’re going to do this in a more creative way. Possibly sending out an email before sending the invite directly from the LinkedIn system might be a better way of doing it, for example.
Matt Alder [00:08:52]:
Okay.
Adam Gordon [00:08:54]:
The third reason why communities normally fail is because businesses regularly fail to put together a robust content schedule. So they don’t necessarily involve enough stakeholders in actually contributing to that content. They don’t necessarily put Together a calendar so that they’re following that schedule and they’re making sure that every single week there’s, or even every day potentially there’s new things happening there. They don’t create that variance in content. So often it’s kind of broadcast only rather than participation. And they don’t necessarily consider different ways that people want to engage with them. They rarely include offline elements to that community. And so there’s all sorts of elements to do with content that many businesses fail to actually consider, but straightforward. The number one biggest problem is not putting together a robust content schedule. So they’re the three reasons why communities fail. In terms of some of the kinds of key things that you can do to make sure your community is going to succeed. The first thing is to make sure that the name of that community has got at least two. But if you can find three reasons why people should join in the name of the community, people are much, much more likely to come and join. So one of the best communities that we put together, for example, is called Economic Development under the UK Coalition Government. Okay, it doesn’t sound like a catchy, obviously it doesn’t roll off the tongue quickly, but when the members got, when the invitees got that message to say we’d like to invite you to join, they saw economic development and they all worked in economic development and they thought, okay, that’s relevant to me.
Matt Alder [00:10:54]:
Okay, perfect.
Adam Gordon [00:10:56]:
They saw UK and thought, wow, right. So it’s not an American thing or a French thing or a Japanese thing, it’s four people in the uk, that’s me. So that’s relevant to me. And then the third one, which was the clincher was under the coalition Government, which, and we sent out the invites probably about a week after the UK coalition government was formed in 2010. So major hot topic. And we sent out 350 invites and about 300 people came and joined. That was a massive, massive success based on a number of different factors. But one of the big ones was people told us, when I saw the name of the community, I knew immediately it was for somebody like me. Yeah, the second really, really important one is that the person you use to be the owner of that community needs to be somebody that is senior within your organization, somebody that’s considered an expert, somebody that people are going to be flattered to have received that invitation to join from. So it’s another big mistake that businesses make is they put together a community and no matter how good the framework for that community is, they make the owner, you know, an in House, talent acquisition partner, or on the kind of marketing side, they’ll make it a digital marketing executive.
Matt Alder [00:12:23]:
Yes, of course, yeah.
Adam Gordon [00:12:24]:
Can see immediately based on that they know what that person’s objectives are based on their job title, but they know immediately that that’s got a recruitment purpose to it and that could switch people off. So there’s a host of different things that you need to consider and it’s a very, very, very. Creating communities is a very, very easy thing to do, but to create something that’s powerful, sustainable, and it’s going to help you start conversations with the people that you want to talk to, which is not the people that are looking at your adverts on total jobs, it’s the people who are absolutely not looking at the adverts on total jobs. No offense to total jobs or people applying for jobs there. You want to be talking to your total addressable market, which is the people that are high performing in their current job and they’re probably not looking externally at the mom. So you need to create a way of initiating conversation with them that doesn’t start with, how do you fancy this job?
Matt Alder [00:13:22]:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Which seems to be the way that most people try and recruit in social media. Well, you kind of mentioned economic development there. What types of jobs or types of positions have you found this kind of community approach most effective for? Does it work across the board or are there a particular areas where it might be particularly successful?
Adam Gordon [00:13:48]:
So it does work across the board, although, and I’ll give some specific examples in a minute, it does work across the board, although you, you massively need to tailor your approach according to who you’re trying to talk to. So if you’re hsbc, for example, and you want to create a community which is based on diversity because you want to attract more people from ethnic backgrounds and more females to your top 300 jobs, then you need to make sure that there’s a significant offline element to it. You need to make sure that it comes across as very, very high level, discreet content that is, you know, strategic. You need to do a variety of different things. And probably a standalone community that doesn’t sit on LinkedIn, for example, is the right way to do that. You might want to find some top journalist or some other top, you know, industry commentator to act as the figurehead for the community, for example, okay, so that it’s more of a sponsored type of a feeling. It works very, very well for what I call the Michael Page market. So that’s jobs of between say 20 and 100,000 pounds in offices. LinkedIn is probably the place for that. And then we’re in the process of putting something together for one of the big leisure businesses, which is aimed at kitchen managers. And that’s probably going to be a Facebook thing. So the key thing to consider, suppose is your audience, where are they? And go to your audience, don’t put things together and then invite them to come and join something new where they’re not going to be. A really interesting example would be a number of law firms that I know. They’ve traditionally put together their Facebook pages and they’ve talked their graduate programs there and some of them are starting to move towards LinkedIn as being their favorite channel because they know that the fastest growing demographic on LinkedIn is undergraduates and they know that a lot of them are actually starting to use that to gain insights into future employers. So I think the key thing is to consider where are those people and if that demographic isn’t online, there’s a different way of doing it. But for almost all professions I can think of, there is a way of creating a powerful virtual community.
Matt Alder [00:16:41]:
Cool. I think that’s really, that’s really interesting insight and I think that the, the audience thing and the most appropriate platform incredibly important. So what’s kind of next with your methodology? How are you sort of developing this, how is this sort of community based engagement and recruitment sort of moving forward for the future?
Adam Gordon [00:17:08]:
So we’ve been doing this kind of work around community since 2009, but. But quite significantly since 2010 and over that period not a huge amount has changed, except for every time we build a community we get another insight and we apply that into the methodology for the next one. However, there is one big development that we’re in the process of making that we’ve been making since February this year. We really. I consider talent acquisition as a discipline or direct sourcing as a discipline to be almost identical to sales and marketing in a B2B context. Now one of the big things in the B2B sales world over the last 10 years has been the shift towards buyers who don’t have an awful lot of information about that company or that product or that service. And really needing to talk to sales teams very early on in the process of deciding whether or not they’re going to buy that to a situation now in 2015 where there is an abundance of information. And Gartner claims that by 2018, 2020, 80% of buying decisions will have been made before somebody’s actually spoken to anybody at that business. They’re going to buy that service or product from. Okay, thinking about that in terms of talent acquisition, it provides social media provides exactly the same opportunity as well as the same challenge. So although the world is more transparent and you can find your total addressable market online, they are probably more discerning than they ever were and they’re probably much less likely to actually respond to your initial outreach at LinkedIn or at Twitter or wherever else it might be, or your email to them. Until they’ve gone and taken a look at your firm’s website and the careers pages and they’ve gone and found the hiring manager and taken a look at whether or not they want to work for that person. And they’ve gone and reviewed your Glassdoor profile.
Matt Alder [00:19:35]:
Absolutely.
Adam Gordon [00:19:35]:
And with, with a pinch of salt, they’ve decided whether or not, you know, those comments are valid. And so because of that, I think it means that, you know, compared to 10 years ago, in house talent acquisition teams are again, they’re getting to talk to candidates a lot, lot later in their decision making process. So because of that, it’s really important to try and look for ways of building relationships with candidates before they are actually starting to look for opportunities and to generate goodwill and to inspire them as early as you possibly can. So we’ve taken some of the concepts from the B2B sales world and we’re applying them into recruitment now. So if you create, for example, a host of great content and you score that content according to what you think it means, when somebody is requesting that content, when they’re going to look at that webpage, when they’ve asked to take part in that webinar, or they’ve asked to have a full copy of that report, then you can start to gain some real insights into whether or not you think that candidate is actually looking for an opportunity or not. And if you’re able to access their email address to send that data to, then you can start to using search engine marketing cookie type software, you can identify whether or not they are considering a move, whether they considered your business, whether they’ve been looking at specific jobs and you can gain major insights into where you think that individual is in their decision making. So here’s an example, okay, If I’m a life sciences business recruiting scientists across the whole of the uk, then I would go and find all of those scientists that I might recruit. I’d put them into my pipeline, I’d maybe get connected with them on social media, I’d maybe bring them into my virtual communities, I would start to share content with them. And I’d share summary content and with a call to action, which is if you want a full copy of this market report on what’s going on in life sciences, then send me an email and I’ll forward it to you. When they start interacting with that kind of content, we start to know, well, they’re industry focused and that’s great. When they then start to request our content, which is the top 10 ways of getting ahead in your career as a scientist or how I made it to the top from, you know, the Chief Scientist at AstraZeneca or you know, those types of more career focused items, you know, that they’re starting to think about or they are career focused.
Matt Alder [00:22:53]:
Yeah.
Adam Gordon [00:22:53]:
Which makes us feel, yeah, that’s probably a really good candidate. When they start to request top 10 tips for that interview, how to present your CV and make sure it’s compelling, how to network your way into a great new job and you know, that type of content, then we know at that point, absolutely, this person’s about to start or have started looking for opportunities. So as I say, using the cookie based element of the software, you know, you can keep, you can monitor signals which tell you when you know those individuals are absolutely starting to look for an opportunity. It’s like, it’s like having a nest full of all those scientists and it’s, you know, getting an alert which tells you which eggs are about to hatch so that you can go to those eggs, you know, just before they hatch and you can talk to them before your competitors can or anything else that wants to recruit them can. So this is by far the most exciting kind of new development in terms of what we’re applying to our talent acquisition type work. And you know, of the 20 or so businesses that are either piloting this with us or have I have spoken to about it, not one of them’s heard of a more accurate way of actually identifying who’s ready for a move. And I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. There might be something but from my research I can’t find any other way of doing it.
Matt Alder [00:24:23]:
Yeah, I’ve not. I mean it’s basically inbound marketing and marketing automation for employer branding and recruitment basically. And I think it’s, it’s a fantastic idea and I’ve yet to see, you know, anyone else actually sort of put it into practice. So it should be a very interesting. Yes, some very interesting projects for you there.
Adam Gordon [00:24:43]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And we’re looking at doing this for a major London bank in the cyber security world as a mansion mentioned for a major leisure business, for head chefs, for a life sciences company, for scientists and sales professionals, for private equity business who are looking for, who invest in mainly tech firms who are always looking for product marketers and for web developers. And so, you know, yeah, we can, if we can find them online, we can bring them into our candidate generation management system. And yeah, we can start to really help those businesses to fast track the amount of, you know, the amount of calls or emails they need to do to actually get candidates saying that they’re interested. So here’s an example of where it works really, really well. One business we know, it’s one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and they’re 100% direct sourcing in the EMEA region over the last two years. Which great. They’re very proud of that. But they still have to talk to larger number of people than they would like to get that shortlist together.
Matt Alder [00:26:04]:
Okay.
Adam Gordon [00:26:05]:
So they don’t have any insight, even though they’ve got visibility on who everybody is. You know, they basically have to go A to Z and talk to the all, talk to them all in order to understand which ones are potentially interested in move at any one stage. They don’t want to have to do that. They want the insight and to be able to know who’s going to be, you know, the warm calls right now. And so, you know, it’s a really, really good way of shortening the time taken to actually get your shortlist together.
Matt Alder [00:26:39]:
Fantastic. I look forward to hearing much more about it when you’ve got sort of more results coming. Coming, coming through. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Adam Gordon [00:26:48]:
Great. Thank you very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:26:50]:
That was Adam Gordon giving us his unique insight into talent communities. I just want to end this week’s show by saying a big thank you to everyone who’s been listening to the podcast, as well as the current sponsors Reconverse. All of your support is very, very much appreciated. If you have any feedback on or want to appear as a guest on a future episode, please feel free to email me@mattashift.co.uk you can subscribe to the podcast in itunes and Stitcher or any good podcast app. My current favorites are downc, iPhones and Pocket casts for androids. You can also listen to past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. thanks again for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
