Co-presenting on Linkedin Recruitment at the Social Recruitment Workshop (London, Wednesday 26th June 2010)

Last Wednesday I was invited to co-present at the Social Recruitment Workshop in London that was arranged by Peter Gold from Hirestrategies. It was the first event of this scale that Peter had put on, as he normally focuses on running events with one main speaker (himself). Co-ordinating 20-25 so called Online Recruitment experts was never going to be easy but the day went pretty much to schedule as far as I can see.

As for the day, it had an interesting mix of both in-house recruiters and agency recruiters (who were referred to as “3^rd party recruiters” no one likes to use the term “agency” anymore for some reason!). These two parties were split of into two rooms within their designated groups with each presenter delivering their session twice in the day. This meant I only got to see half the presenters but what I saw was useful for me and I was meant to be one of the experts.

The day started with Mark Williams (Mr Linkedin) delivering a presentation on how Recruiters should be using Linkedin, ably assisted by my good self as his co-presenter, which is a nice way of saying “laptop monkey”. Mark has a very intimate knowledge of Linkedin even down into the number of characters you can add in each field. He spent a reasonable amount of time explaining how to setup your individual and company profile to market yourself correctly and be optimised in searches. For example, if a candidate looks to find a recruiter within their sector they might just put “SAP Recruiter” into Linkedin and see who comes up top. The summary to this is there are lots of ways to optimise your profile but it’s a balancing act between stuffing it full of terms and still having a well written professional profile that will encourage candidates and clients to contact you. All in all an interesting area that I have to admit to have overlooked in my Linkedin Webinars that focus on how to market your vacancies, find and approach relevant people.

Linkedin was followed by Andy Headworth from Sirona Consulting (AKA Mr Twitter/Worthing Crocman) running a session on Twitter. The first attempt at which was delivered without internet, after some technical difficulties. Not an easy task. Peter had made a big emphasis that the event should be about doing (delegates were encouraged to bring laptops and most did) rather that presenting so “death by powerpoint” was frowned upon. So with no powerpoint notes and no internet Andy had to just talk for about 40 minutes. In an ironic twist 90% of his delegates had no issues with connecting to the wireless internet.

Anyone that knows Andy will appreciate that a 40 min ramble would normally not be a problem for him, and after a little bit of a ca-fuffle he was in his flow and providing insight into more and more twitter applications, twitter etiquette and general usage as a recruiter. Andy knows his stuff in this area without doubt and whilst I believe for some companies Twitter is a useful communication channel I doubt most 3^rd party/agency recruiters are going to see a real return for them fully embracing it. Yes you can easily distribute your vacancies in a automated fashion via this channel, you can search bios and tweets to find candidates but will you see the benefits by investing 30-60 minutes per day to market your personal recruitment brand with original thought provoking content?

So the day was a big success for Peter and the feedback from the delegates I spoke with was very positive. It will be interesting to see where Peter goes from here and how much larger this event gets. There is a lot of other events in this space many of which are paid for conference type events, but Peter has shown it can be done and done well for free, so we all await the update on whether he will be booking out the O2 Arena for next year? I have already started working on my rider!

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Posting Jobs to your Linkedin Profile via the BlogLink Application

On May 25th we will be launching our Career Site product with a free days training for interested parties. We plan to build careers sites that are closely integrated with Social Media and able to distribute our client's vacancies automatically to Twitter and Facebook as well as Job Board Aggregators such as Indeed and Trovit. The aim being to distribute vacancies onto as many relevant mediums as possible with zero effort required from them. But what about Linkedin?

Well if you post vacancies on Linkedin ($195 a posting) then they will show up in your linkedin profile.


They will also show up on your company page.
As part of the research, we were keen to devise a way of having your latest jobs feed into your profile so that anyone viewing your profile can leap straight to your careers site if a vacancy catches their eye. Once again this is a long range tactic that will eventually pay off so you don't want to have to keep updating / tweaking your profile. Keep the input (your time) to a minimum, then you are under less pressure to deliver a quantifiable output (hires/applications).

Step 1 - Get an RSS feed from your Applicant Tracking Software Vendor (Recruitment Software)

If you don't have an ATS provider then you will probably not be able to take advantage of this method. But we use Hireserve and I would recommend them highly (we like them so much we actually partnered with them to sell their products to our clients).

Our RSS feed is: http://jobs.easywebrecruitment.com/rss.xml

Step 2 -Add the RSS feed as a listed website under "MyRSS Feed"

Select to edit your profile. Then select to edit the websites that are listed under your profile.


Then choose "MyRSS Feed" and input your RSS feed.


Step 3 - Viola!

Your vacancies will automatically appear in your profile.



Those of you who are very clever will realise that although this method does work there is a small problem in that our RSS feed is not listing our most recent roles but its listing them alphabetically. Do not fret. Your RSS feed should be able to list them in date order, we have already raised this with Hireserve and a quick fix will be in place soon.

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will show you the second half of this strategy including how to get your vacancies automatically listing in your company page for zero effort. Watch this space....

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Posting Jobs in Linkedin Groups for FREE

This is the second in a series of posts about distributing your vacancies throughout Linkedin. The final post in this series will be tomorrow when I will show you how to have your vacancies automatically feed into your Linkedin Profile. If you are interested in this subject matter, I run a free weekly webinar on recruiting via Linkedin.

When you join Linkedin you have the option to search for and join relevant groups. Usually centered around specific industries or skill-sets, these groups can be an excellent way to tap into a large population of both active and passive candidates.

Some examples of Linkedin groups...

Linked:HR (#1 Human Resources Group)

• Created: September 19, 2007
• Type: Networking Group
• Access: This group is open to everyone
• Members: 272,754

CREATIVE DESIGN PROS

• Created: June 13, 2008
• Type: Professional Group
• Members: 23,677

Most groups have an open door policy, but it's worth checking out any you'd like to join thoroughly beforehand. You should also pay particular attention to your Group Settings, when you sign up. You want probably want to make sure that group members are able to contact you directly, people who see your advert might apply online if you add a link, but in my experience they will probably reach out and send you a message to check out their profile and give them a call. So you must leave the door open for them to message you. I generally set my group settings so that I do not receive announcements and updates on discussions (see image below).

The Jobs Tab

Linkedin now allows group administrators to add an area to each group where group members can post jobs for free. I cannot be 100% on the origin of this idea but it probably came about by the high number of jobs being posted as discussions within Linkedin groups. Not all groups will carry a jobs section, it's down to the preference of each group's administrator, but if they do then it's the ideal way to post your vacancy, and another opportunity to use the bit.ly links discussed in yesterdays post.

Predicting Success

Posting a job within a group is very simple, see the example below.

However you might want to research the potential of your groups to perform on your roles. This is done by searching for people but focusing it on one group at a time. Imagine you recruit sales professionals within the IT industry for UK based roles, you might have joined some of the largest IT, Sales and IT Sales groups on linkedin. You can search within these groups after you have joined them to get some ideas of how many relevant sales professionals within the UK are members of these groups. It is not always the best groups that deliver the most relevant people.

So my advice in summary is:
a) Join lots of groups that you think might be relevant (you can join up to 50).
b) Once you are a member do a people search of members of each group and determine whether each group is worth staying a member of.
c) Produce a hit list of your top groups and always post your jobs in them.
d) Monitor the Bit.ly metrics to confirm that your audience is paying attention and track any applicants that apply via this medium.

Posting a job within a group does not take long, which is good as you will probably not be overloaded with enquiries. Similar to your status update, it's a strategy where you have to play the long game to get the results.

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Status Updates

We put a lot of effort into searching the millions of profiles found on linkedin when we're recruiting for those more demanding roles. It's a topic I've spoken about on this blog before and cover in depth in my Linkedin Training Webinars, but what about the other side of the coin? What can be done to help candidates searching Linkedin for job opportunities to find your vacancy?

This week I'm going to take a look at some quick and easy methods you can use to get your vacancy in front of the right people. Starting with an area of your Linkedin profile that most visitors see first, your status update.

Updating the status on your linkedin profile is a quick and easy way to immediately broadcast a vacancy to the Linkedin network. Simply log in to linkedin and fill in your status update box (see above) to immediately broadcast your vacancy. This displays in the network activity section on the homepage of your connections and in the email update they receive from Linkedin.

Making it easy for applicants to apply is a key issue, and ideally you want to provide a link that will take them somewhere they can both get more information on the role, and apply online with the minimum of fuss. While your hands might be tied slightly by where your vacancy has been posted, the link provides a great opportunity to implement a little "meta-analytics" and see how people are reacting to your post.

Using Bit.ly

What is bit.ly? bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier (useful for the limited space of a status update).

Producing a bit.ly link is easy and can be done in seconds at bit.ly, sign up to a free account and you will also be able to track the number of hits your link receives and where they come from.

If your link is getting a large number of hits you'll know that you have a great opportunity to grow your network in that area, widening the audience for future vacancies. Of course the ultimate metric is "did you hire from this method" but as this method is one that take seconds and delivers a relevant candidate occasionally, you will likely have to do it over an over again until you get a hire. 


This is why bit.ly is important, because the potential of success with this method largely depends on the strength and relevance of your network. If you are advertising a Software Developer role when your network is full of bankers the chance of success is greatly reduced and will largely depend on them referring your status update on to their network or to someone they know (see here to see how Linkedin is encouraging its network to share). Bit.ly will give you a good indication as to whether anyone is actually clicking on your update.

Tomorrow, I will show you how to post jobs within groups, a simple but effective strategy to get your jobs in front of the right people for FREE.

On Saturday, I will finish this little series of blogs by showing you how to get your jobs to dynamically update in your profile via the BlogLink application. So you profile automatically shows your organisations latest roles (see example below).

Latest Improvements to our Advert Optimisation

We've blogged previously about the importance of choosing the right job title for your advert, and nobody takes more care or researches this more thoroughly than our resource team at Easy Web. To give you a quick example, you might think that placing an advert for a customer advisor to work in a contact centre is perfectly sound, but by changing the title to Customer Service and referring to a call centre rather than contact centre you will increase potential traffic by a massive amount





Our attitude to job boards has always been one of maximum (worthwhile) coverage, and now we're bringing the optimisation of our adverts in line with that. Because we run 4 week long campaigns we're able to vary the keywords we use across those 4 weeks, capturing traffic from not just the most popular search terms, but also those terms that are slightly less popular.

In yesterday's post, I talked about how introducing more emotive, exciting terms can make your adverts titles STAND OUT and more appealing. The negative side to these titles is their poor optimisation. Throughout our four week campaigns we will now be utilising both STAND OUT and standard job titles where we deem them suitable. This should help ensure that we are appealing to all parts of the market and attracting the most relevant candidates.

We've also made other improvements to the way we structure our adverts, some of which we'd like to keep close to our chest, but one I will share with you is the repetition of the keyword based title at the beginning of the article. What difference does that make I hear you ask? On most job boards, not a great deal, but on one major job board in particular, it's a heavily weighted factor in their search algorithm, highlighting again the need for a bit of extra research before you post your advert.

Recruiting for Learning and Development Jobs by Analysing Data from Google, Linkedin and Monster

We're currently recruiting for a Learning and Development Officer for a company in the West Midlands, a position that raises some interesting issues when recruiting online, not because of the requirements of the position, but because of the title.

If you were placing a local press advert then the exact phrasing of the title would be less of an issue, any permutation of L&D would likely be understood by suitable candidates, but when you write content to be placed online it's not just the readers comprehension you have to take into account. You need to be sure that you are using a term that is being searched for.

Like all our roles, we conduct some serious research before we build our advert to make sure we're attracting the audience our client needs, and what seems the obvious answer is not always the best approach to take.

So how do we figure out the best approach for a role like this? A quick search for similar roles swiftly confirms that the "officer" part of the title is by far and away the most commonly used description of people in similar roles, but there are a few ways to phrase the term Learning and Development, making getting it right a key factor in successful advertising of the position.

Some research into the title...

Linkedin:

3236 “learning & development” in job title in UK:

Same for “learning and development”

577 for L&D

101 for “L & D”

Google search:

Monster:

Monster – “L&D” within job title search – 6 results

Monster - "Learning & Development" – 14 results

(It's worth noting that Monster's search engine will treat "&" the same way as "and", but this is not necessarily the case with all job boards).

If all the adverts and job titles we found had a common abbreviation (as is the case with HR roles) then we could safely decide on the phrase to use, but as you can see from the results, a significant portion of adverts and job titles are using terms other than the most common.

In a scenario like this there is really only one solution, to vary your job title across multiple adverts and reduce the risk that your advert will not be found by suitable candidates.

Using STAND OUT Job Titles in Your Job Board Advertising

Yesterday I blogged about some of the more "interesting" job titles people have referenced on their linkedin profiles.

Some searching this morning showed me there are some people looking for Ninja’s to join their team. This appears to be an attempt by start-up web companies to make their vacancies more “sexy”. The search results below from a major job board aggregator show that these unconventional titles may not be the most prevalent, but are definitely being used:

Indeed UK – 2 results for Whiz

Indeed UK –0 results for Ninja, but 82 in the US

Indeed UK – 5 results for fanatic

Indeed UK – 98 results for guru

Indeed UK –609 results for expert

(Expert's not really that wacky, but it helps put the numbers into perspective)

You're probably wondering now whether that last position you advertised could have benefited from a more "individual" title. Let's take a look at the pros and cons of this approach. On the positive side your advert is definitely going to stand out from the crowd, and an emotive title like "Javascript Ninja" is just the thing to get potential candidates excited, you could have the most boring position in the world ready to be filled, but who's not going to get at least a little excited when you tell them they're going to be a ninja!

As far as down sides go, you will be very poorly optimised for applicants searching for alternative traditional job titles such as “JavaScript developer”. However, people searching for just the JavaScript stand a good chance of seeing your role. Clearly no one is going to search for “JavaScript ninja”, as demonstrated by a couple of quick keyword searches using Google's keyword tool.

A search on Google Keywords tool (a great way to find out what people are searching for), and none of the following were showing a result:

"ninja jobs"
"geek jobs"
"guru jobs"
"expert jobs"
"fanatic jobs"
"ninja jobs"
"whiz jobs"

For niche searches google just reports that there was not enough searches by UK users in the last month to warrant displaying the result.

I'd advise a certain level of care be taken not to adversely effect the search functionality of your advert. Clearly there are candidates out there who consider themselves a fit for these descriptions, but they're never going to be in the majority and there is no guarantee they'll automatically be the cream of the crop.

In tomorrow's blog I'll take a look at the recent changes Easy Web have made to take advantage of these interesting job titles without harming our core search functionality. I'll also walk through how we strike a balance between attractive copy and search optimisation.

Linkedin Recruitment: Sourcing Monkeys, Ninjas & Village Idiots

Social networks can be funny old places, and while Linkedin's professional leanings clearly differentiate it from places like Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, it can also throw up some suprising (and often amusing) search results.

While doing some research for my next round of Linkedin Training Webinars I came across a profile whose current position was "Office skivvy". Now, aside from wondering what their employers position would be on this, it got me curious as to the other "unusual" job titles I might find...

A quick search turned up some amusing results, here are the numbers along with some of my favourites...

169 users with "monkey" in their job title, including the fantastic "Monkey - With delusions of being an Organ Grinder"

32 Ninjas.

14 idiots, including Chief Idiots, Founder Idiots, Big Idiots, Little Idiots and of course, a Village Idiot.

16 Skivvies.

130 Tea Boys & 6 Tea girls.

Now a large percentage of these profiles are very limited and have clearly been set up and forgotten about without the intention of really using the network, but a worrying number are much more complete and seem to have fairly active users. The million dollar question from an employers point of view is whether this admittedly minor trend can be flipped on it's head to make a vacancy stand out from the crowd.

In tomorrow’s posting I will show you how you can use some of the “stand out” job titles like Ninja and Guru to make your advert jump off the page. I will also highlight some of the pitfalls of this technique.

Facebook Plots World Domination – What does it mean for Online Recruitment & Social Recruiting?

I have just finished reading an interesting article, based on a presentation at Facebook’s F8 conference, about how Facebook wants to make social connections as commonplace as hyperlinks. An understandable position for the world’s largest social network to take. But what is interesting is the method they've chosen. They are making it far easier for websites of all sizes to integrate the “like” function into their site. I checked out this article on CNN and found the Facebook thumbs up symbol at the bottom of the article.




So what does this mean for recruitment?

Well I don’t think you will see this thumbs up on Monster just yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out. It does not seem such a logical leap to let your social community know you found a job you like, in the same way that if you read an interesting article, you might want to share this with your network. Your network of friends, colleagues probably have similar interests to you. Do they have the same professional aspirations, skills, experience? Seems less likely. So sharing jobs, will for now stay limited to the one-to-one option of “send this job to a friend”, rather than the one-to-many “share with network” option.

So what does this mean for the future?

Well I think I need to clarify first that I am not an expert on Facebook or Social Recruiting. But the whole point of a blog is to give your opinion and no one really knows how this will pan out.

Here is my best guess.

This move by Facebook is not aimed at recruitment, but the internet in general. That means every site you visit could potentially integrate with facebook. Leaving aside the good/bad argument, this means corporate careers sites, job boards, job board aggregators etc are all potential partners to Facebook in the advancement of its network. I believe the vast majority of recruitment sites will integrate with facebook in some fashion. It may not be a thumbs up, and many Facebook users may not want to involve their Facebook network in their job hunt, but it will be an option and Job Boards in particular will be paying close attention to how this area develops.

Glassdoor.com - Employees & Interviewees Anonymously Rate Your Organisation

Almost the end of the January and my first post of the year, oh dear. Got some ground to make up so expect to see some more posts soon. First I thought I would share Glassdoor with you. The site gives employees a free inside look at 70,000 firms. you can access anonymous reports by people who have (or at least claim to have) been interviewed or worked for these organisations.

There reviews are tend to be posted by fair minded professional types and companies could also use this as a good way to gain some feedback on the salaries, interview process and organisation in general.

However, there are some less professional reviews, this one is my favourite so far based on Somerfield. This is a cracking quote from one former employee "Pros: 10% discount straight from the off on all items in store apart from cigarettes. I was late a lot and they barely noticed (this could also be a con).". Advice to senior mgt "Quit.". Hardly sounds like the ideal employee.

If you are a inhouse recruiter reading this you might be a little worried. However, social media has a habit of promoting the great and exposing the weak. So if you have a great company culture and your staff love the company. Send them an email and ask them to add some feedback.

There are not too many UK reviews so for some profiles one review will be the only review a new employee would see. Best to get in early. If you can get some good reviews then make sure you add a link to your profile on your careers page and into your interview pack so new employees see them.