Resources
Recruiting
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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