Just to highlight that direct recruiting isn't as daunting as some people think, I have produced a guide called Direct Recruiting: 5 Top Tips for Success to demonstrate that using different channels can really add value to recruiting staff directly. It provides tips on using five different direct channels to hire staff.
Talent has been confirmed as the main focus for HR Managers for 2008, according to a survey by Taleo. It is not just about recruiting better staff, but also retaining the good staff that you already have. With attrition rates at over 18%, it is likely that as am employer you could lose one in five of your staff. It would make sense to really focus on retaining as many of your existing staff, and therefore limit your need for recruitment!
In order of importance in the survey, it showed that staff (existing or new) issues occupied the top 3 positions:
This won't come as any surprise to businesses will it?
Lets be straight about one thing, job seekers look at many job opportunities, and will consider many different jobs. So why on earth would they look at on line adverts that are just boring job descriptions? Many companies still insist on just placing these boring items on their career sites and expect job seekers to be excited by them. That is just such a big mistake - job seekers want to 'be sold' an opportunity, and be told the benefits (ever heard of the feature and benefit sell?) to them. They also need to be able to say to themselves (or out loud should they feel the need!), "that looks a great job, I am going to apply today!". Get it now? You should be selling your jobs not telling people about them. You only need to show them the full job description when you have the interest of the job seeker - by then they are an interested party and then they will want more information.
This makes a massive difference to the performance of adverts, whether on a career site or on an online job board. Generally speaking, if you write an add and it doesn't excite you as the writer, then you can sure that it won't excite the reader, so write it again.
After the last post on LinkedIn for business, I thought it would be worth exploring further the two biggest social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace alongside LinkedIn.
What you need to do first is to establish what your goals of social networking are - business or pleasure. If you are trying to utilise web 2.0 into an internet marketing strategy then LinkedIn is really the only way forward, as it is less frivolous and more focused on the business world. It will enable you to further your business connections, finding new clients, identifying new employee targets and enabling you to liaise with other like minded people.
Continue reading "So, LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace for business?" »
My guess is that unless people have been living in the jungle for the last two years, then they will certainly heard of the phenomenon that is social networking. The likes of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo - the three largest in the UK, are not really great for business networking, but there is one that is, and if you don't already know it it is called LinkedIn.
Direct recruiting simply has to be part of a recruitment strategy for companies, and can even be built into a recruitment process. The great thing about Linkedin is that it is focused on business people, and it is a superb way of identifying passive candidates. It is very easy to get started, you just need to get invited in and then you can start building your own network. If you want to get started just email me and I will send you an invite. The sourcing guru Lou Adler has produced these 10 great tips for using LinkedIn to find passive candidates.
Continue reading "LinkedIn - 10 great tips on getting started." »
Microsoft have a great informative jobsblog, one of the ways that they do their direct recruiting. They have produced this recruiting blog that showcases jobs, people who work at Microsoft and more importantly how to get a job at Microsoft. It is a good simple site that is very effective of showing prospective employees all you need to know about joining Microsoft.
Simple and informative are the two main words that spring to mind!
If you don't already get it, then you need to understand that companies should be using blogs for business. Better Business Blogging explains below why a business blog can be very beneficial. As we have mentioned elsewhere , business blogs are also very cost effective. Blogs help to differentiate and personalise your company, and by using it to promote your services, products or jobs, you will build a level of trust and value into your business. Also, companies both large and small can use blogs as a marketing tool, and it gives a range of benefits to companies of different sizes.
So what are the benefits of a business blog? They are:
To be able to let Google recruit staff for your business, you obviously need to have your jobs online in the first place, but that's a different story. You then you need to understand that most people find things on the internet by using search engines - they are inherently lazy and just won't put the url's in!! Ten years ago Google had no users, today it has over three quarters of the UK search traffic (see below). People will use a search engine to find your products, services or your jobs.
Therefore,it stands to reason that with so much market share in the UK, you have to make sure that you have made sure you are doing everything you can, to make the Google spiders like your website. So how do you do that?
Continue reading "So why is Google so important to your recruiting strategy?" »
Many people have asked me about Jobinablog.com and asked why I have used the blog format for the product. There are of course many reasons but for business they have become an essential tool to talk to your public, whether they be job seekers or customers. Back in May 2005, BusinessWeek wrote an article, 'Blogs will change your business', and in it there is an interesting paragraph:
“Go ahead and belly ache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they are simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they are going to shake up just about every business – including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barrelling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They are pre-requisite.”
They got it spot on didn't they?
When you are have your career site or job pages up and running there are some simple yet very effective ways of communicating with both your job seeker readership and your existing employees. These three methods are key to making your site a success.
1.RSS
You will no doubt have seen this on many websites - it is called RSS (or Really Simple Syndication), and it is a direct feed to the post, page, website etc that contains your latest jobs or news items. It means that job seekers can subscribe to your career site, using an RSS reader, and never miss the latest jobs or news that you post on the site.
Continue reading "RSS, Newsletters and Private Social Networks" »
