Resources
Recruiting
3 min read
Top 10 Ways to Build a Referral Pipeline
For many recruiting teams, building a candidate pipeline from scratch can be daunting. This is where referrals come in helping to bridge the gap and save you time and energy in your recruiting process. The question is, what is the best way to build a referral pipeline? Here are our top 10 ideas to build a referral pipeline that will continue to yield results in both the short and long term. 1. Incentivize Your Employees In a recent study by Careerbuilder, they noted that 82% of employers rated employee referrals above all other referrals and generating the best return on investment. We have also seen that employers also note that an internal referral can reduce their cost per hire by 3k on average.* Overwhelming support shows that employee referrals are of incredible value. The best way to continue to encourage these referrals in your pipeline is with a healthy incentive program that includes a generous monetary carrot. 2. Hone your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) Your Employee Value Proposition all comes down to messaging and your brand. People want to know that they are selling/referring to others. Your brand message should be authentic, easy to understand and personable. Hone your message and value proposition so that you communication stream to the market and to your top referrers is crystal clear. 3. Make It Simple No matter the source of your referral, don’t make the process difficult. Invest in technology and systems that create a seamless, mobile-friendly submission process. Less is more. Remove obstacles in the referral process and watch your submissions soar. 4. Support Mobile-First Recruiting In line with making your referral process simple is the next greatest step- making all of your recruiting and content messaging mobile-first. Our lives are on the go and in the moment. A mobile-first recruiting strategy includes partnering with vendors that share this same philosophy and have created user-friendly mobile applications to streamline your referral process. 5. Communicate Frequently Communicate often and on a frequent basis. Depending on your needs, this could be 5 times a week and others once a week. Figure out what works best for you, but keep it fresh and frequent. One of the best ways to reach your referrers and build the pipeline is through a strategic texting strategy. We know that more people check text than any other medium of communication. Start here and then grow. 6. Personal Touch While it’s great to have a lofty and relatable employment brand, people want to know what’s in it for them. Allow your messaging, your email and text campaigns, and your social strategy to relate to your ideal candidate persona. Make it as personal as possible when reaching out. While the person you reached out to may not be the best fit, they will be more likely to refer a person within their network to you that is the perfect fit. 7. Tap Former Employees While research shows that employee referrals are the pinnacle of a quality hire, the next in line would be your former employees. Harnessing the vast networks of your alumni who have lived and breathed the roles and the culture is crucial. Create alumni networking groups and allow them to work on your behalf to submit candidates that are more than likely a solid fit. 8. Energize Your Talent Community Members Whether you have built a talent community through social, a CRM or a job board, don’t let the opportunity pass you by to truly energize your talent community. Put them in action. Not all members of your talent community will be your next hire, but someone in their network will be. Share content to your community that is easy to share through text or social networks. Share content not just about jobs, but your culture and other relevant events that are happening. 9. Attend Events with High ROI If you have been recruiting for some time you have come to realize that not all events are created equal. When planning your event strategy have your referral pipeline strategy in mind. Focus only on events that members of your talent community, your employees and their networks or alumni may attend. Plan to attend events that increase your ROI by focusing on content management of the event and the communication strategy afterward. 10. Get and Give Feedback Your referral pipeline is living, breathing, ever-changing and developing. To feed its development is to actively gain feedback from those that refer and at the same time give feedback in return. No matter the source of the referral, the goal is a quality hire. Without honest and transparent two-way feedback the pipeline may begin to deteriorate. Be open to all feedback and alter your course accordingly.
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Recruitment Marketing
2 min read
Talent Network Content Tips for Employers
Recently a startling statistic* came to light about employers’ content marketing efforts. Just 5% of Fortune 500 employers with a talent network send actual content (e.g., something other than job openings). That’s not the right way to lure potential applicants. People who sign up to talent networks want more information about your company, your industry and your culture. It’s a chance for employers to nurture relationships, build up their employment brand and be seen as an employer of choice. A jobs only strategy is not going to accomplish those goals. The problem stems from the fact that most talent acquisition departments are not trained content marketers. But, if you regularly collect contact info from those who haven’t applied yet, you need to use a variety of content tactics to encourage them to engage and apply. The good news is that companies are have lots of content to tap into, you just need to know where to look and set up a calendar to help guide your efforts. We’re not saying you need to create 1,000 word blog posts…simple, bite sized nuggets will do the trick. First let’s look at some general guidelines to follow. Your content should be conversational in nature. Keep it informal and authentic. Brevity is your friend. Keep it short, so it is easy to consume. Be visual. Images and video clips are attention getters. Have a call to action to learn more or apply. With those rules in mind, here’s a list of content ideas that should be part of your regular publishing across your email campaigns and social media channels. Promotions and New Hires Show off employees who are being promoted so you can highlight people who are progressing throughout their career and finding advancement with your organization. Candidates want to know that their next employer will offer opportunities to learn and grow professionally. Similarly, it’s also a great idea to welcome your new hires as part of an onboarding strategy. Take a picture of them and welcome them to the team via your social media (after getting their permission of course). It demonstrates that you represent a dynamic organization and provides you a stead drip of content to fuel interest from other prospects. Important Industry News Keep your candidates informed on important news and events happening in your industry. Become a resource for their career and keep them up to date on how your company’s activities fit within those trends. Tips on Applying Let candidates in on how to apply and what to expect after they do. The more you can prep them for how your hiring process works, the more thoughtful and professional your organization will look. If your application process looks accessible and well organized, top talent will apply. If it looks like a dehumanized black hole, they won’t. Also, offer them tips on how to impress as they interview with you. Insurance giant GEICO does a good job at this. Employee Spotlights Ask your star employees to answer some questions about their experiences with your organization and use that as content. Integrate their answers into short stories on your career site and let your candidates read about the people they will be working with. Reasons to Work There From perks to benefits to culture, every company has something about them that is unique. Use that as talking points for why you should work there. Do a quick survey of your employees and ask them what their favorite aspect of working at your company is. Their responses can then be used as content pieces to attract new talent. Finally, don’t be afraid to show off your employees in action through video and pictures. Today’s candidates, especially the next generation, love visual content. So, be sure to show off your office environment to help them get a peek inside. *Source: Smashfly
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2 min read
Proof You Need to Adopt Text Recruiting Now
Many traditional communication channels that recruiters rely on have become dramatically less effective for reaching potential new hires in the past few years. As a recruiter, you have probably already seen that it has gotten much harder to establish first contact with candidates and to maintain contact over the course of the hiring process. We built Emissary because we believe text recruiting is a much better way to reach candidates in many instances. And, our customers see proof everyday that it works (texts typically have 95%+ open rates). But, many other indicators and outside sources point in the same direction. Below are several statistics that demonstrate why employers need to adopt texting as a primary recruiting method. Americans Only Answer Half of All Calls They Receive on their Mobile Phones Hiya, a scam call protection firm found that only 52 percent of all calls Americans receive on their phones are answered, which means that almost half of calls are sent to voicemail. And when the call comes from an unidentified number, the statistic rises with more than three in four (76%) calls going unanswered. Robocalls Are Becoming Pervasive According to new data from First Orion, a call protection company, the amount of junk calls will reach 46% by mid-year 2019. By the end of this year, that amount is projected to finally cross the halfway point, meaning that half of all calls will be spam. Scammers have also shifted almost completely to mobile. In 2017, 17% of scam and spam calls were to cell phones; now the number is at 69%, according to First Orion. InMails are Becoming Less Effective Although email continues to be important, with 38% of recruiters ranking it as the preferred outreach method, Linkedin inMails (13%) have dropped to 3rd place in the recent recruiting automation survey conducted by Entelo – a significant decrease since 2018’s report (30%). Even sponsored InMails only average 25%-45% open rates according to LinkedIn. Email Open Rates are in Decline According to a 2018 survey by Hubspot, which examined 25 million emails across 28 industries, the average open rate across all industries was 32%. That means 68% of targets never see the message, let alone take action! According to another survey by Mailchimp, Recruitment and Staffing emails have an average open rate of 19.33%, notably worse performance vs. other industries. Click through rates, the best measure of real candidate engagement, are painfully low as well. The same Mailchimp survey stated that emails have a click through rate (CTR) of just 1.81%. If your candidates are not responding to your calls, emails or InMails, then give some serious thought to the data points above and consider the ROI of a text recruiting platform. Every employer needs to make their messaging more accessible. Texting is the answer to filling your talent pipeline faster and more efficiently. Schedule a demo with us and find out how text recruiting can help you communicate more efficiently.
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Recruiting
2 min read
How Recruiters Can Avoid Being Ghosted
If you recruit today you’ve probably noticed that “ ghosting” may be creeping into your hiring process by candidates who consider themselves in charge due to a tight labor market. A recent Washington Post article highlighted that candidates are blowing off interviews and workers are turning into no-shows, unable to be contacted further. It’s especially problematic in lower wage positions. For years, candidates had been on the receiving end of this issue but now the tables have turned on hiring organizations. Until the job market shifts, candidates know they are in demand and will continue this behavior. The question now is what can you do about it. For companies there are things you can do to minimize the chances of being ghosted. You’ll need to take a hard look at your hiring process and tighten up loose ends to make it more candidate friendly. Here’s five ways to do that. Tell Them Where They Stand Let Candidates know where they are in the recruiting process (and what to expect). Though keeping candidates in the loop can be time consuming there are some software solutions to help automate this. Many applicant tracking systems have built in reminder emails you can use to provide feedback to candidates as they progress through your process. Go beyond the standard “Thank you for applying” response by telling them what to expect next. By detailing what will happen to their application once they apply you can make the process more transparent. Give them a time frame for their resume review and tell them what lies ahead. Constant communication is key and text recruiting reminders would serve you well to implement. Make a Point to Follow Up If a candidate goes dark on you send a reminder email or text but don’t be pushy about it. Share a piece of content about your industry that they would find interesting. By adding value to your conversation you may be able to grab their attention. Or go a step further by adding phrases like “2nd Attempt” or “I’m concerned” to the subject line or opening sentence. This tactic works well in sales so it should also help you get a response if they realize you are wondering about them. Make It About Them If your candidates are ghosting you after the interview you may need to look at that phase of your hiring. Be sure you are asking about their career goals and how they might align with your career advancement possibilities. Make it clear that you have their long term interest in mind as they proceed throughout the interview process. The more invested you are in them, the more they will care about communicating with you. Establish Clear Timelines When it comes to making an offer to a candidate have both your recruiter and hiring manager follow through. The recruiter should extend the offer via phone followed by an email with the official offer letter. The offer letter should have a clear timeline of the deadline for which the candidate must make a decision. Once accepted, have the hiring manager place a call to the candidate to welcome them to the team and set expectations for the start date. Fill the Cracks Every major employer has candidates that fall through the cracks. It is still a common problem in the job search process. Most Applicant Tracking Systems allow you to see if a candidate has been “touched”. Dedicate a time each week to review new applications and avoid the dreaded resume black hole. Every candidate that takes the time to apply deserves an acknowledgement that they have submitted their application properly along with a yes or no vote at some point for moving forward. One recruiter we know goes a step further. Stacy Zapar, a third party recruiter in California does her own “Friday Feedback Blitz” when she sets aside a few hours each Friday afternoon to update every candidate in her pipeline on where they stand. Ghosting is likely to continue in the job market until some kind of economic downturn hits. But by focusing on the tips above, your company can avoid being a victim of this new trend.
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Recruiting
2 min read
The Golden Rules of Rejecting Candidates
Here’s a statement that won’t get much argument. Recruiters hate sending rejection emails and candidates hate getting them. It’s no wonder then that most companies don’t pay much attention to this important recruiting chore. But with a little thought and effort your company can easily improve the rejection process in order to change that dynamic. By implementing a more refined workflow you can actually help turn those you can’t hire into allies while letting them down gently. The last thing you’ll want is for them to head to Glassdoor and leave a rant after you say No. Those candidates could actually become a candidate in the future and/or a customer, therefore how you reject them matters if you want to keep them coming back. So here’s four golden rules to add value to the dreaded rejection email process. Ignore them at your peril. Time It Right When it comes to sending mass rejection emails, those should be sent no earlier than 24-48 hours after applying. Let a day or two pass so that it appears some thought was put into their application. If you are rejecting a candidate who did a phone interview, let them know as soon as possible. The same goes for anyone you interviewed in person. Respect their time and don’t make them wait, you might be impeding their job search if you do. Be Honest, But Not Too Honest When you have candidates who take the time to come to an interview it is best to contact them by phone within a day or two. Let them know you chose another candidate but give them as much feedback as you can to help them understand why. Honest feedback is valuable to them. But don’t make it too personal. Tell them it was more because “another candidate performed better” for example. Thank them again for their time and if they are a good candidate be sure to connect with them on LinkedIn. Have Multiple Email Templates When Johnson & Johnson revamped their hiring process a few years ago, they actually took a hard look at their candidate communications including the rejection email templates in their recruiting software. They rewrote them into nine different templates for certain types of candidates depending on how far they got in the process and which department they were hiring for. So for example, create a general mass rejection email and one for shortlisted candidates that sounds more personable. Get Their Feedback Want to improve your overall recruitment process? Survey each candidate afterwards and find out where things can be improved. Send them a short survey (4-5 questions max) using a free tool like Google Forms or perhaps a paid service like what Survey Monkey offers. Send a candidate feedback survey about a week after the rejection note and your department will learn where improvements can be made. Understanding that rejection has a long-term impact on hiring and employer brand is the mark of a good recruiting department. You can’t hire everyone who applies, but you can let them down by being respectful of their time and effort. So think about revamping your rejection process and adding a bit of humanity to it. Your candidates will thank you.
Continue readingRecruiting
3 min read
Attracting the Next Generation Workforce, Gen Z
Believe it or not, most millennials are now in their late 20s and 30s. While recruiting Millennials is still a priority in human resources, most are now past their entry-level roles. Today, a new generation, Generation Z, is beginning to enter the workforce. And employers should know what appeals to them in order to convince them to come work for you. Generation Z is anyone born beginning in 1995. On the verge of entering the workforce, research says that Generation Z differs in surprising ways from their Millennial predecessors. It’s very important that company’s understand this group’s attitudes toward work and life when recruiting them. Not only do they make up the largest segment of the U.S. population (26 percent), but they are also the most diverse generation in U.S. history. Having been the first to grow up in a true digital world, they also have the shortest attention span. According to recent research from Universum, which surveyed approximately 50,000 respondents born between 1996 and 2000 across 46 countries, many of this generation would consider joining the workforce directly out of high school. While only 15 percent said that they were likely to do so, 47 percent stated they would consider it while 60 percent said they would be open to employers offering education in their field in lieu of a college degree. Top factors to consider for attracting Gen Z Meaningful work. Because of the tight job market, Gen Z has more options than previous generations. They are looking to have a meaningful impact in the world and are more focused on opportunities for innovation and flexibility, rather than stability. They value transparency and seek out organizations that place a priority on making a positive impact on society. They also look for autonomy, leadership opportunities, dedication to a cause and the chance to be creative. Your company should provide Gen Z the opportunity to use their personal drive, technology skills, brand awareness and desire for a purpose in a way that aligns with the mission of the company, profitability, and operations. You should also add more transparency to your hiring process. Entrepreneurship. While college was almost a certainty for Gen X and Millennials, Gen Z grew up with parents still carrying student loan debt, during a national recession, and in an economic climate where entrepreneurship is often a necessity. Employers can benefit from Gen Z’s desire to take their success into their own hands by providing competitive work environments along with showing how each employee’s individual role contributes to the company’s overall success. Creating a culture of learning and development is just as important for Gen Z as for Millennials. They are interested in hearing how a company plans to invest in furthering their skills and career, rather than what you can do for them today. It’s also not uncommon for many Gen Z’s to have a side gig. Visuals and social appeal. Gen Z is the first true generation of digital natives. It’s likely they had Instagram and Snapchat accounts as preteens, but they’re not big fans of Facebook, and are less likely than Millennials to respond to recruiter interaction on social channels. They are also a highly visual generation that is accustomed to being marketed to. You might consider adding more visual alternatives to traditional job ads – YouTube videos, active Snapchat accounts, and Instagram stories that provide a look into what it’s like to work for your company while selling the specific position by showing its contribution to your industry. Many experts say Instagram is like their visual version of Glassdoor. Cool technology. This generation also appreciates and expects to be working with good technology as part of the candidate and employee experience. From Textrecruit alternatives to onboarding, this audience wants that easy smartphone experience when it comes to their new role. Gen Z in Service Industry Roles Hospitality, restaurants and retail stores, are recruiting Gen Z more than others. These industries will need to adapt in order to engage a generation that checks their smartphones before getting out of bed. Retail and restaurant employers will need to consider using digital channels (think mobile apps) for communication, task and performance management. Flexibility in scheduling is key in order to fill open positions and reduce turnover. Gen Z employees will quickly move on if there isn’t a digital solution in place. Restaurant and retail managers can also reward employee efforts and successes with badges, points and direct feedback. These employee engagement programs will appeal to Gen Z’s expectation of individual support and recognition. Acknowledgement of a job well done provides valuable motivation for hourly employees and encourages future performance. The message here is simple. Go digital with Gen Z. This workforce segment wants to be able to access information 24/7 and won’t wait for a phone call (Hint: start texting). Your brand and culture must be able to support this ‘plugged in’ mentality for recruiting them, or they’ll quickly move on to something else.
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Recruiting
3 min read
Tips for Adopting a Recruitment Marketing Mindset
Recruiting leaders need to think more like marketers. Similar to marketing a product or service, today’s recruiting teams must focus on specific ad campaigns to reach the most qualified candidate audience by using a multi-channel job marketing approach. After all, every other employer is fighting for the same talent so how will your company stand out? Your focus should be on attracting, engaging, and developing candidates who haven’t yet applied to a job, using your unique employer value proposition to turn them into applicants. This type of conversion is inherently not a skillset most recruiting teams have, therefore you need to bring in more marketing experts to fill out your staff. We’d recommend hiring a Recruitment Marketing Manager and perhaps even a copywriter to help craft your messaging. Their first order of business should be defining your target personas. Personas are a blueprint designed to help you understand your ideal candidates. These identities, once you have them down on paper, will help you develop relevant and useful recruitment marketing content designed for that target audience. You’ll probably require several personas – one for entry-level candidates, another for management, and still more for specific jobs like customer service, engineer or developer. Think of them as a reverse job description. All of the personas you develop should include elements of top talent, but it will be helpful if you have those which focus on your hiring managers’ experience and skills wish list for their team members. Include information about who these candidates are in real life. Include passive candidates in these personas and show where they go for development, community, and social networking. Ask your team what types of TV shows and entertainment do they consume? What types of schools or trade licenses would they have? Where do they tend to hang out in real life and online? The answers to those questions will help you better target those individuals. Planning Your Recruitment Marketing Campaign Once you’ve found your top candidate, you should focus on these areas when building your recruitment marketing campaigns: Job Descriptions. Start to think of your JD’s as landing pages. That is how a marketer sees them. Are they optimized for converting clicks into applies? Do they make it easy for the seeker to apply quickly? The best way to optimize is by allowing them to apply right on the page, or at the very least start the apply process by entering a name and email. You might even add in text reminders that will send them a link to the job so they can apply later. If you are going to pay for traffic to these pages it is imperative you optimize them for conversions. Use Tech to Target. Targeted outreach via social media as well as programmatic job ad offerings will help you optimize your ad spend. After finding where your top choices spend their time, you can target them through Social media. For instance we’ve heard Twitter is good for advertising to sales people. While Facebook is better for blue collar and entry level workers. One way to make your ad campaign successful is to highlight the training and development programs your company offers to employees. Remind them what makes working for you different/special. A/B test your campaigns. Marketers always test to determine which messages and pages are working best. Measure to determine which ads work best, as well as the best email messages and subject lines for candidate outreach and social messages. Then, rinse and repeat for each campaign. Let data be your guide. Leverage the press. PR outreach through press releases, interviews, awards, and other milestones is a great way to improve your recruitment marketing efforts. If you aren’t ready to hire in-house PR staff or a marketer dedicated to working on outreach, assign an HR team member the job of maintaining and building media contact lists and communicating with them regularly.Your company PR should reach out to job seekers, recruiters, career experts, and HR influencers. Share the work your company has been doing with others who are interested in hearing about new career sites and successful strategies to attract talent. There are lots of great career and recruiting podcasts out there, those shows can be great for spreading your hiring message! Use your career site to provide helpful information about life at your firm. Your career site is a key part of branding and attracting candidates to your job postings. It’s a place to shape your message. So it should be more than just a page with job listings. It should be designed to move candidates into your recruitment funnel. Add content such as employee stores, FAQs and include LOTS of images and video. The career site should be mainly a visual experience. Graphics/imagery. Having a graphic designer on staff or on loan from your marketing department will be extremely useful. Use video testimonials, custom images, and real world pics of your employees in action. Use header images and profile photos on social media and make accounts available to employees and recruiters for increased branding. Wrap It Up If you haven’t spent much time or resources on defining your employer brand, you’ better get started. Your employer brand messaging (which includes job postings) shouldn’t cover what your company is most proud of; rather, it should be targeted towards the candidate in terms of ‘what’s in it for them’ if they come to work for you. Additionally, there should be frequent measurements of your employer brand strength, including its impact on job applications, and your efforts adapted for continuous improvement. Implementing a recruiting marketing approach for recruitment will bring about changes in your employer branding, prospect attrition, and scale of candidate outreach. A successful recruitment marketing approach will result in a reduction in your low impact recruiting tasks, allowing your company to focus on recruiting top quality hires and innovators that may not respond to standard hiring methods. Focusing on data-driven decision making tools, such as KPIs and A/B testing, that provides you with the ability to make decisions based on hard data regarding employer branding, recruitment advertising and job posting placement.
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3 min read
7 Rules for Texting your Candidates
Timing is everything. While this is true for many things in life, it is especially so when searching for talent. Timing can be the difference between getting the attention of talented prospects and bringing them into your hiring pool or getting ignored by the best candidates. For many in talent acquisition, text message recruiting is the key to perfect timing. Unlike email and voice messaging, texting allows instant and simultaneous communication. The conversation is more personalized and makes the candidate feel more important. Both passive and active job seekers increasingly prefer using a mobile device to pursue job opportunities, so texting can put you in the middle of the action for both. It is also an essential part of confirming appointments, organizing details, and sending timely follow-ups. How to text candidates is really just a matter of common sense. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple. The very best of us can get caught up in the flurry of it all and make mistakes, especially during high volume periods. But much like breathing, a good recruiter must sometimes be conscious of it in order to go back to doing it naturally. Here are a few rules to help you along the way. Ask permission A common ideology in many organizations is “better to ask forgiveness than permission.” But that often doesn’t work when texting with candidates because there might not be any forgiveness if you don’t ask permission first. Once you’ve made a verbal connection with a prospect, it’s best to ask permission to text. If the candidate agrees, you can then inquire if the candidate has any preferences for time and frequency of texts. Unless the candidate has reason to expect to hear from you, unsolicited texts should be avoided. If the candidate has previously stated a preference for receiving texts from your company, you can help your cause by introducing yourself by name and title before getting permission to go forward with this particular engagement. If your company has a legal department it would be prudent to run your text recruiting ideas through them first. Keep it short Text messaging is by nature a short, crisp medium. Make your words count and get straight to the point. Avoid long paragraphs, small talk, line breaks, empty phrases, and unnecessary punctuation. Also never leave a candidate wondering whether they should expect additional follow-up or information from you. Instead, make it clear to the candidate when a texting session is concluded. Set their expectations. Be professional Text recruiting is also informal by nature, but that doesn’t mean you should lower your standards. How you communicate with candidates often sets the tone for their entire experience. Avoid the temptation to use internet jargon, little known acronyms in an attempt to appear casual. Emojis, smileys, or bitmoji’s are ok but only if used sparingly at the right moment, like a ‘thumbs up’ for saying yes. And never reply to a text with, “K” (or “k”). Regular abbreviations are fine where appropriate, as long as the communication remains professional in manner and diction. Be appropriate Texting is perfect for confirming candidate availability and appointment times, providing directions, and following up. It is also convenient for delivering pressing messages or getting in touch with a candidate who doesn’t reply to emails or voice messages. All of these tasks can be done faster by text than email and help optimize your recruiters time management. Stay away from asking questions that require anything more than a yes/no or simple multiple-choice answer. If it’s difficult to do by email, it’s way too difficult for texting. Keep your text recruiting sessions within normal business hours in the candidate’s time zone, though early evening is also a good time to catch them after work. Be tactful When texting candidates, remember that they’ve invited you into their personal communication space and always treat it as a privilege. Avoid texting anything too heavy or deep, such as something that contains strong emotion or weighty content. A decision not to move forward with a candidate should be communicated via email or, even better, a phone call. It is in very bad taste to notify a candidate of this decision through a text message, and you and your organization are better than that. A proper rejection is worth more than a text so be sure to do it right, otherwise they may head to Glassdoor and leave a negative review. Be prompt One main reason job seekers like text messaging is the ability to conduct business quickly, so your best to deliver on that with candidates. When you feel overwhelmed, remember that efficient hiring, effective communication, and managing expectations are the fundamentals of your job. If you aren’t able to respond immediately, don’t mention your back-to-back meetings or complain to a candidate about how busy you are. Instead, acknowledge receiving the candidate’s text while conveying that you will respond fully by a certain time. Be yourself The fact that you’ve been allowed into a candidate’s personal communication space means that you’ve done a lot of things right. Be confident in yourself and in what your organization can offer the candidate. Avoid boring HR operations talk and instead just be yourself. That’s what got you invited into that space in the first place. After all, recruiting is still a human process, people still hire people. Text recruiting just makes it more efficient.
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Recruiting
2 min read
Rethinking Your Hard To Fill Positions
Hard to fill positions, no matter what kind, put a lot of stress on companies. The lack of talent puts an unequal amount of pressure on existing employers or managers to take up the slack and all you are left with is stressed out workers longing for additional help. As a recruiter, your goal is to fill your roles as quickly as possible but today’s tight job market has other plans for that. There are no magic bullets here. Recruiting for these jobs is a grind so employers must take a consistent and persistent approach to make any headway. If what you have been doing is not producing results, it’s time to rethink your attempts to fill these roles. First, you must realize that this requires resources in the form of manpower and money. With that said, here are some tips and tricks to try. Social Recruiting Most employers still do a poor job of recruiting on social media’s “big 3” channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. A lot of them just post some jobs which is the opposite of what you should be doing. There are two tracks to take when it comes to social recruiting: sourcing and interesting content. Sourcing across these 3 main sites takes time and effort but it can prove to be a great way to reach those hard to find candidates. Tools like Hiretual allow you to search Facebook profile data and a simple boolean string can easily search profiles on Twitter or Instagram. Looking for a “Data Scientist”? No problem, Instagram has those [click here]. When it comes to content, companies need to get more visual with what they post. Show candidates what it is like to work there, show off your employees in action and give insights into your culture and benefits. Express in visual images and video why someone would want to work there. Employee Referrals How good is your company at getting employee referrals? Are you maximizing that effort internally? For example, the team at SHYFT Analytics in Boston gets over 50% of their hires through referrals. They do that by aggressively marketing their jobs internally and go so far as to put up TV monitors in the office advertising current openings. Referrals are a great way to increase applicants just be sure to maximize that program to your existing workforce. Revamp Your Job Descriptions If your job postings contain phrases like “Job Duties” and “Requirements” it’s time to rewrite them into an advertisement that sells the job. Our best advice is to hire a copywriter off a site like Fiverr to come up with some new templates you can use that sell your company mission and offer reasons why a candidate should choose to work there. There are way too many bland and uninspiring job postings online. Rethinking how you word them will enable you to stand out among your competition. Get Visual The web is a visual place so if you are still publishing text only job ads it’s time to rethink that strategy. Today’s candidates would rather see images and video embedded in job listings especially if they are looking at it on a mobile phone. Consider creating short 2 minute videos for your evergreen jobs and embed it in those job postings. You can use Youtube to host them or if you don’t want ads to appear try using Vimeo as an alternative. If you can’t do a video, create a nice cover image that sits at the top of the job description so it becomes the first thing a candidate sees when they click on your job. Geofencing Geofencing allows advertisers to target specific locations like a mall or hospital. Ads are shown on apps people use or websites they visit. Those apps/or sites cookie those users so they know where they are (but not who they are). Companies like WorkHere.com based in Indianapolis, are pioneering geofencing for recruiting. They are seeing solid results especially for entry level, healthcare and retail type roles with this kind of job targeting. — Hard to fill jobs require a well thought out strategy and willingness to try new tactics. We hope this post gave you some new ideas. Get creative when it comes to filling them. The employers who do a better job at making their jobs stand out will be the ones who get the hire they need.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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