Parallel HR » Branding

Job Seekers Show the Way for Forward-Thinking Employers

Chuck Loeher — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:46:07 +0000

Want to recruit top candidates? Start imitating them.

A recent study conducted by CareerBuilder and Inavero indicates that over the past several years, job seekers have developed a highly complex, multi-faceted approach to the job search, in which they utilize today’s sophisticated technology to their advantage. According to the study, job seekers today now utilize five specific methods to ultimately find their next job:

Search engines to find company, industry and job-specific information.
Vertical sites (such as job boards and aggregators) for jobs that fit their qualifications and have a great company behind them.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to post and share content.
Corporate and career sites to find relevant news and information about specific companies.
User-generated content sites such as Glassdoor.com to get a better sense of what it’s really like to work for a company.

As evidenced in the Inavero study, job seekers today are accelerating their efforts, using the opportunities they find on job boards as the starting-off point of a more in-depth search to find the opportunities – and the companies – that are right for them. It’s time for employers to do the same. By taking a cue from job seekers and applying this efficient, proactive approach to their candidate searches, employers can create a more efficient, effective recruiting process. Five things today’s job seekers can teach employers:

Go mobile: The fact that over 300 million Americans use mobile phones today – and that mobile searches are up 130 percent over the past year – indicates a significant shift in the way people search for information. Not only are job seekers utilizing multiple channels to search for jobs (as shown above), but they’re also using doing so – increasingly – from their mobile devices. This shift in behavior opens up a huge opportunity for companies to reach job seekers anywhere, at any time of day. One of the smartest things you can do now to prepare your organization for long-term success in capturing talent is to mobilize your careers website.
Clean up your online reputation: Well aware that companies now check social media to screen candidates, the smartest job seekers proactively make an effort to clean up their social presence. Companies need to do the same. Thanks to the information available through social media and search engines, companies are more transparent than they’ve ever been. Job seekers can easily get information about a company’s organizational culture, the experience of working there, and what other employees think about the brand. Thanks to the vast reach of social media, companies also have the opportunity – and the need – to see what people are saying about them (on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, for example), become more robust in their employment branding efforts, and reach job seekers at every touch point.

You Can Talk and Listen at the Same Time

Kristin Clifford — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:56:07 +0000

Many companies are making great strides in social media recruiting. This is good – social media is an excellent place to find passive and active candidates, and connect with them on a more personal level. In addition to talking on social media, are you listening? Listening is a key strategy for engaging with individuals on social media. In order to maximize the benefit, you should follow these steps to listen efficiently.

Comb through reviews on social media and job feedback sites. In addition to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, sites like Jobitorial (formerly Jobvent) and Glassdoor can help you figure out if your employment branding strategies are working. Jobitorial and Glassdoor feature anonymous reviews of your company from employees and potential employees. Jobitorial offers employee perspectives, and Glassdoor gets further in-depth by including salary information, interview feedback and more. Both sites offer rankings one through five.
Look for negative and positive patterns. Do employees consistently feel that the benefits are great? Do they think the interview process was lengthy and cumbersome? Are the salaries fair? Track these patterns and make adjustments internally, if needed and feasible. To be even more strategic, check in on specific dates and update your spreadsheet or tracking document to see how things have changed.

Make Your Company the Star of the Show with CareerBuilder’s New E-Book

Mary Lorenz — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:10:36 +0000

Recently, CareerBuilder released its new e-book,Streaming Talent: Using Online Video to Create a Virtual Candidate Experience, Differentiate Your Company and Recruit Top Talent. Video may have killed the radio star, but don’t judge it too harshly. When it comes to recruitment, more employers are finding that video is an increasingly powerful resource. Online video is the fastest growing medium for consuming content, and companies are investing in video to help them attract better candidates, brand themselves as an employer of choice, differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a more efficient recruiting process.

Killer Branding: Recruiters Without a Personal Brand Risk Extinction

Michelle Spellerberg — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:24:31 +0000

The digital beast has arrived, and it is eating recruiters like foodies ferociously eat edamame while waiting for sushi. Only the best recruiters have discovered the importance of two-way communications and long-term relationships. Just filling an open req may keep you in your job today, but it is not going to get you that promotion [...]

The 5 Ps of Recruitment Marketing: Part 3 – People

Melissa Murray Balsan — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:14:09 +0000

Regardless of the business, the people involved with producing a product or a service inevitably shape the final outcome. While the nature of a particular business certainly renders some attributes more influential than others, the appearance, attitudes, experience, and beliefs of staff impact the sale of a product. In service-based businesses, like restaurants and retail, the appearance of staff reinforces commitments the company makes to health, safety, and brand position. Uniforms and service standards are just two ways businesses seek to deliver on their brand promise through their agents. These define the claims made by the company – whether it is to be the number one luxury retailer or safest car manufacturer.

A company’s people are often called upon to respond to crisis and serve as a testament to a brand promise. Toyota, who issued recalls of roughly 2.3 million vehicles in January 2010, created a series of videos featuring employees stating their commitment to safety. A number of technicians, engineers, plant employees, and dealers discussed the recall and how they planned to move forward. In another example, Domino’s created “The Pizza Turnaround” documentary featuring actual employees and their reactions to consumer opinions. The project featured people from all departments – from chefs and senior leaders to marketing and product management – who openly addressed criticism uncovered online and in focus groups.

So how do people impact recruitment? The individuals within your organization can be your biggest advocates, or the most compelling deterrent in your pursuit of top talent. Employers tell us that employee referrals are often the number one source of hire, even when the awareness of an employee referral incentive is low. What this tells us is that people are passionate about where they work. So much time is spent at work and whether the experience is good or bad – people talk.

The 5 Ps of Recruitment Marketing: Part 1 – Product

Melissa Murray Balsan — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:16:55 +0000

Editor’s Note: This five-week series is dedicated to examining the five most common Ps of a typical marketing mix and assessing how they relate to recruitment. Today’s post focuses on product; the others - on price, people, placement and promotion - will run in sequential order every Tuesday over the next five weeks. Raise your hand if you remember Marketing 101! If you’re like most talent acquisition professionals, the principles of marketing are hazy. A few Ps here, a DMA or two there. Most recruiters know enough to be dangerous, and it doesn’t matter much for day-to-day talent attraction anyway, right? Think again. Follow the typical marketing mix and apply it to recruitment – you’ll find there are an astounding number of similarities. The techniques used to effectively sell a product or service work just as well in selling a career opportunity. As such, the most successful social recruiters view talent acquisition through a marketing lens. For my next handful of posts, I’d like to focus on the five most common Ps of marketing and tie to them into recruitment. And since each concept holds significant value, it’s only fair to give them the appropriate coverage, breaking tips and exercises into a series that will run over the next five weeks.

Today’s focus: Product

In traditional marketing, a product is the physical good or service offered to a consumer. The attributes of the product are the accompanying benefits the product boasts. These attributes – function, design, packaging, ease of use, and warranty – are weighed against costs to determine if it is desirable for the purchaser. The purchase is influenced by the seller’s overall brand identity and word-of-mouth reputation as well as the influence of other consumers on the customer (e.g. a child may influence a parent’s toy purchase). In recruitment marketing, your product is a job. The attributes of that job – pay, working hours, essential job functions, supervising staff, full time vs. part-time or contract – are all considered by a candidate. The decision to apply for the opportunity is impacted positively or negatively by the company’s employment brand and word-of-mouth opinions of current and former staff. And, like a product, there are influencers in an applicant’s life that factor into the decision to apply for or accept a job offer. For example, the impact on family is considered when a lengthy commute disturbs work-life balance.

People + Content = Social Media Win

Venetta Linas Paris — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:31:43 +0000

The concept of social media is a simple one: people and content. There is nothing new about this. People have been connecting with each other and content since the beginning of time. With the advent of technology, namely the Internet, it should be of no surprise that human beings have taken their desire for interaction to [...]

Employment Branding the Gold Crown Way: Lessons from the Former CMO of Hallmark

Mary Lorenz — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:01:43 +0000

Last month, Jim Welch brought his 25 years of management and leadership expertise to CareerBuilder, hosting a special webinar on employment branding. In Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success (available for full download here), Welch discussed his experience as Chief Marketing Offier of Hallmark, where he played a leading role in the creation and implementation of the company's successful employment brand strategy. Below are some of the major takeaways. "What I've Learned..." Employment Branding Lessons from Industry Expert Jim Welch

Size doesn’t matter. “You can implement a successful employment brand strategy, regardless of your size and also regardless of your budget,” Welch emphasizes from the start. To cap his point, he later offers the following tips to help you develop your employment brand:
- Ask your employees first. Employee surveys are critical for understanding your employment brand as other see it (i.e., as it truly is). Asking questions like, “What single thing do you value most about your company?” and “Would you recommend our company to your friends as a place to work? Why or why not?” will help you find your organization’s critical points of difference.
- Create multiple messages for multiple audiences. The wants and needs of Gen Y workers and Gen X workers differ; therefore, so should your employment branding messages.
- Be a storyteller. “Great employment brands have great stories,” says Welch. Find a way to tell a story about your brand. Gather employee testimonials to post on your careers site and social media pages, for example. Find way out to spread your brand message that is personal and emphasizes that emotional connection (see #2 below).
- Celebrate your brand with your employees. Some ways to do this include hosting employee workshops, during which employees can share stories that they believe represent your company’s employment brand; or hosting a ‘brand week’ with activities that emphasize your organization’s culture and values. In fact…
- Have a year-round calendar of employment branding events and touch points. “Think of it as a marketing calendar you use for clients and customers – but toward both current and employees,” says Welch. Not only will it ensure employment branding remains a priority, it will also help you identify any employment branding gaps.
Emotions trump logic. “We need to move from a transactional decision to an emotional decision,” says Welch, pointing out that some of life’s biggest decisions – including whether to join or leave a company, are emotion-based decisions. Employers need to appeal to that emotional connection in employees. “We don’t just need every brain in the game, we need every brain and heart in the game.”
Your employees are your customers. “Employment branding is really about your total employment experience. It’s also your reputation as an employer.” For many employers, thinking about their employment brand means adopting different mindset – that of employee as customer. Employee loyalty is just as crucial to nurture as customer loyalty.

The One Thing Every Great Leader Must Do

Mary Lorenz — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:07:30 +0000

“One of the things I believe is important to being a true leader is that you connect emotionally to your employees,” says Jim Welch, president and founder of The Growth Leader, Inc. It should come as no surprise that emotional connections are at the forefront of Welch's leadership philosophy. After all, Welch was once Senior Vice-President of Marketing at the company that has built a business around helping people foster emotional connections: Hallmark. Now a principal owner of LeaderFuelNow, LLC and author of the book Grow Now: 8 Essential Steps to Flex Your Leadership Muscles, Welch is a nationally recognized speaker and consultant on the subject of leadership and growth culture. Next month in collaboration with CareerBuilder, Welch will lend his expertise to the masses for a special webinar titled, “Real World Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success.” When I spoke with Welch over the phone recently, he gave me a sneak peek into what he planned to cover in the webinar, including what it means to connect emotionally with your employees, what it means to build a strong employment brand, and why it's essential that great leaders do both. “The need for emotional connection is your brand.” "Emotion" isn't often a word you see in business books; yet in Grow Now - as well as in daily conversations with clients - it is the central topic of discussion. “In the business world, emotion gets a bad rap, but the fact is an emotional connection – whether it be with your customers, your employees or your peers on the team – is critical,” Welch told me. Critical, because without that emotional connection, employees easily become disengaged from their jobs, their leaders and the companies they work for. They have no motivation to put forth more than the minimum amount of effort required of them - and no motivation to stay when better opportunities come along. Thus, today's leaders need to work to ensure that emotional connection is there. That emotional connection, Welch explains, starts with trust. “There has to be a culture of trust created where employees can give feedback…openly and without any reprisal or negative repercussion for their career or personal growth within the company.” He recommends having regular small group meetings - such as monthly roundtable discussions - where employees are not only able, but encouraged to speak candidly about their concerns. Not only do these types of discussions establish trust between employees and leaders, but it’s better for business. After all, issues that are important to employees are important for the organization overall. But because leaders are all too often disconnected from their employees, they fail to get the information they need to make crucial organizational decisions. “As you move up in an organization and get more and more senior, you actually get less and less given to you in a straightforward manner. There’s a real danger that by the time you become CMO or CEO or whatever that you’re too far removed, and you end up making decisions without getting all the answers,” Welch says. For this reason, it’s crucial that leaders have meetings to check in with their employees in order to stay engaged in what’s going on in the organization. “You need to break down through those levels in the organization and talk to the people who are doing the work and out on the frontlines every day and find out what their issues are. And you need to do that in small groups,” he says. Another good practice, Welch says, is simply blocking off time in your calendar each week just to walk around the organization and have conversations with people, something he used to do as chief marketing officer at Hallmark. “I’d talk to administrative assistants, I’d talk to catalog coordinators, whomever, and just ask them open-ended questions like, ‘What are we doing that’s working? What are we doing that’s not working? Is there something we’re not doing that we should start doing?’ And people would really open up.” Welch says the practice not only kept him aware of important organizational issues, but helped him establish connections with his employees as well. “You’ve got to be transparent with people.” “How many times have we heard, ‘Well, people are just happy to have a job right now’? Well, the key part of that sentence is ‘right now,’” Welch says when we get on the subject of succession planning. The recent finding that only 35 percent of companies have a succession plan in place doesn’t surprise Welch, who says in his book that leaders fear succession planning because they want to avoid making promises to top performers and causing average achievers to overreact. And while there may be risk in being transparent with people about succession planning and where they stand in the organization, it’s far more dangerous to stay quiet. “If you don’t talk to people, they assume the worst possible case scenario…People leave an organization because of that.” Failing to discuss succession planning with your employees is especially risky now, when employers are most at risk for losing top performers. “It’s a proven fact that whenever an economy turns around, or whenever an organization goes through change, it’s the top performers who leave first," Welch points out. "At that point, anything you do [to try to keep those employees from leaving] seems disingenuous because you didn’t demonstrate that back when they were ‘lucky just to have a job.’” “Employment branding isn’t nearly as top of mind as it needs to be.” One of the determining factors in retaining that top talent is the strength of one’s employment brand, something that Welch believes employers place far too little emphasis on as a business strategy. While you’d be hard-pressed to find a company that names employment branding as a top priority, he says, the majority of companies do believe that recruiting and retaining top talent is a priority. What many companies fail to understand even today, however, is the connection between these two concepts. An employment brand is essential to be able to recruit and retain top talent. And that entails understanding how you as an employer are perceived through the eyes of employees. According to Welch, the key to retaining great people is to establish connections with them, which only happens when they feel appreciated, that their opinion counts, that they have the freedom to do what they like and the resources to be successful, that they get frequent, valuable feedback from their leaders, and that they have a future with the company. All too often, leaders are too far removed from their employees to know for sure how their employees really feel about them. Assuming simply isn’t enough. “People want to stay with organizations they believe in and they share common values and they connect with their leaders. People leave organizations because they don’t feel emotional connections to the boss and they don’t feel a connection to the organization in total.” Keep reading to learn about the 8 Cs of The Practical Growth Leader

[WEBINAR] “Real World” Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success with Jim Welch

Mary Lorenz — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Your Employment Brand is Your Competitive Edge (You Just Don’t Know It Yet.) When you have a strong employment brand, you don’t have to tell people you’re a great place to work. Your brand says it all for you. Register for our free webinar, hosted by an award-winning employment brand expert: “Real World” Employment Branding: A Blueprint for Success with Jim Welch Date: March 1, 2011 | 2-3 p.m. CST “Real World” Employment Branding will address the following crucial topics:

Why employment branding matters to small businesses
Finding your employment brand Critical Points of Difference
Building your employment brand essence
Activating your small business employment brand message
Creating your employment brand ambassadors
Integrating your small business employment brand delivery strategy

Spots are filling up fast, so register today!