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Successful Recruiting Strategies Include Sourcing

May 15, 2019 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Sourcing is one of the most critical aspects of any successful recruiting strategy.  A study done by Lever of over four million candidates found that sourcing is one of the most effective ways to hire. On average, one in every 72 sourced candidates is hired compared to one in every 152 applicants from well-written posts.  But sourcing can do more than find you candidates on LinkedIn or job boards.  Its primary job is to find the under-the-radar, high-quality candidates that no one else is reaching out to. I’m talking about that purple squirrel riding a unicorn kind of candidate that has the potential to be your next Superman or Wonder Woman.

Sourcing candidates can take 13 hours or more out of every recruiter’s week but there are so many tools and so much information out there that it can be intimidating to figure out the best tools/methods for you. That’s where RecruitDC’s Sourcing Innovation Lab comes in.

I’m going to show you some of the best tools and methods for sourcing along with some general tips that can help your overall process. We’ll touch on job posting, Boolean search strings, LinkedIn, Chrome extensions, and websites to find candidates along with their contact information.  My goal is for everyone in attendance to learn some new ways to find candidates.

So get your tickets for RecruitDC’s Spring event on Thursday, May 23 2019 here and bring any sourcing questions you have. I’m looking forward to seeing you all there. J

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events

Time Management in Talent Acquisition

May 10, 2019 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

From the Roman poet Horace’s famous phrase, Carpe Diem, to the modern concepts of Work-Life balance time is our most precious resource. People have been looking for ways to better manage their time for as long as time has been measured. Despite the myriad of technological advances, the constant influx of information in our brave new digital world leaves us as pressed for time as ever. And as the lines between work and home have blurred, time stressors have become the most common and insidious of all job stress factors. In fact, significant correlation exists between time stress and job dissatisfaction, tension, perceived threat, and other factors. For Talent Acquisition professionals, with our need for rapid, consistent multi-channel communications, the problems are even worse.

So, what can we do about it?

If you were looking for a silver bullet, I’m sorry to disappoint you there isn’t one. Hiring Managers, Supervisors and Candidates are likely to demand more of your time than you have available to give. And your inbox is going to continue to fill up like a vampire at a blood bank. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing you can do.  

You’ll have to begin with a little introspection. What’s really important to you? What are you prepared to sacrifice to get it? This will help you determine how you should be spending your time. Presumably, at least some portion of that will be allocated to work, either as a direct facilitator of joy, or a means to an end. Now look at your work and repeat the exercise. We often spend our time based on habit, or in avoidance of difficult or unpleasant tasks. If we don’t take the time to determine what really matters in our lives and our careers, any attempt to manage our time cannot be properly directed to the desired outcomes.

Once you have determined your priorities, you can begin to dig in to using your time effectively. Effective time management means being able to distinguish between what is important, and what is merely urgent. The US Forest Service created the Smokey Bear advertising campaign emphasizing the important issue of wildfire prevention, rather than simply allocating that funding to the urgent business of fighting fires. Next, consciously seek to apply your time and effort to important matters, not just urgent ones. Will revising your applicant flow in your ATS or responding to an email on a candidate’s status yield you greater long-term results? Effective time management means that you must know your desired outcomes and focus on achievement rather than methods. Best of all, effective time management, along with well thought out priorities empowers you to say “no” when others would place unnecessary demands on your time.

If you can manage your time effectively, you can begin to layer in efficiency. Efficient time management is more about eliminating inefficiency than anything else. For example, people tend to do things they like to do, before things they don’t like to do, even if accomplishing the unpleasant task first will make all subsequent tasks easier. Once you are managing time effectively, you can begin to optimize for efficiency.  

Filed Under: Blog, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events

Join Me at RecruitDC to Learn about Community Management

May 5, 2019 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

RecruitDC 2019 is right around the corner- have you bought your ticket yet?

 To quote Anne-Marie (which is really to say ‘To quote Nelly’,)

“If you want to go and take a ride with me…

studying the impacts of community

Hey, show me the productivity!”

 I may have paraphrased somewhere in there.  Don’t worry, I will not rap during my session (she repeats to herself over and over again in her head – You are welcome.)  What I will do is discuss the building blocks of community in the workplace. We’ll address the key elements that bring value to community building for your business (retention and productivity), how to strategize around community management initiatives at your company, identifying metrics to support community growth, and discuss external resources to get you started.  I’ll also run through community engagement opportunities that have been successful for me in the past and how to tailor opportunities to your communities.

 You’ve hired the top talent, but your job isn’t over.  Building a community and encouraging employee engagement is the responsibility of the entire community.  It doesn’t rest in the hands of HR or TA or Operations alone. By capitalizing on the relationships you’ve built through the recruiting process, you can build the foundation to a strong and lasting community.  

Join me on May 23rd at RecruitDC 2019 and find out more about Corralling Your Community.

Filed Under: Blog, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events

Fall 2017 Speaker Preview: Celebrating Local Company Cultures

November 14, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Lauryn Sargent

I’m really excited to speak at recruitDC on December 7th where I’ll talk about three different story-based recruitment marketing campaigns for Dell, Sodexo and CVS Health.

Over my thirteen years in the DC talent space, I’ve seen our local employers care more and more about giving positive work experiences to their team… and they have the proof (employee stories) to back it up. In this post I want to celebrate them! Here are two DC companies who use stories to showcase their unique culture.

Visionist is a government contractor in Columbia, Maryland that’s unlike any other. When we interviewed their team, we were struck by how being on “the bench” between projects is actually an opportunity to stretch professionally. And one team member asked to continue the training he started in between projects:

“I was on the bench for about a month before going on program. In that month I was working on R&D projects at Visionist HQ and I really enjoyed it. I was learning every single day and it was amazing. Once I got on program I was working with entirely different technology. I wanted to stay sharp on what I was working on at Visionist HQ as well, so I asked the leadership if I could come back and they said, ‘Absolutely.’ I was really appreciative that I could learn two different things (simultaneously).”

Even though the employees we interviewed couldn’t talk specifics about what the team actually does every day, we were able to get a clear sense of culture because we heard so many stories about what the organization does for their employees. Three themes emerged based on the stories told from people in analyst to executive levels: a sense of purpose in the work they’re doing to defend our nation, a strong culture of innovation, and how they put employees first (even before clients). The first story in this video is a personal story from one of the founders about why Visionist:

Even though they are a small government contractor with a modest budget, Visionist bought targeted Facebook ads and each video was viewed over 5,000 times. Even better: candidates in and outside of the industry told the CEO they only applied because they were looking for a company with a strong culture and felt they found it after watching the videos. One candidate said they never even considered working in government consulting before learning about Visionist.

Frontpoint is a Virginia-based company dedicated to the safety and security of people and their homes.  

When we sat down with the Frontpoint team, one thing was very clear: values from Day 1 still show up in Year 10. One of Frontpoint’s core values is building trust. In this video, Aaron, one of the founders, tells the story of how he treated their very first customer:

Stories Inc has been lucky to not only work with, but learn from, DC-area companies like The Motley Fool, The Menkiti Group and Keller Williams Capital Properties, Visionist, Frontpoint, MBP and New Light Technologies… all companies who care immensely about building strong cultures and have the stories to back it up. And these are just the ones we’ve worked with — not representative of all the great DC area companies providing great growth experiences for their employees. Are you working somewhere you love? Leave your own story in the comments! And I hope to see you in December!

Lauryn Sargent is a cofounder at Stories Incorporated, a recruitment marketing content creation agency based on employee stories. Along with the Stories team, she has collaborated with some of the most people progressive companies in the world to develop powerful and authentic employer branding and recruitment marketing content. She has spoken at NACE, Social Recruiting Strategies, and Employer Branding Strategies conferences, instructing audiences on how to create story-based content to educate and engage potential candidates. 

Prior to starting Stories, she was a talent acquisition manager for a publicly traded company and recruited for Fortune 500 companies as well as growing entrepreneurial environments.

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: culture, employment branding, recruitDC, recruitment marketing

Session Preview – The Art of Seductive Sourcing

May 22, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Kevin Crews

Searching for candidates on the Internet can be A) Very Rewarding, B) Very Time Consuming, C) Very Easy, D) Very Frustrating, or E) All of the above? The answer is: F) It depends. It depends on your knowledge, skills, and abilities on how and where you find the candidates. If you know the secrets, it can be a very rewarding and easy experience or at least, as “easy” as recruiting can get. Even if you do it right, it is still a difficult process that takes a concentrated effort from all parties involved. But, you often feel that it is “easier” because you have the knowledge that gives you the confidence that “this can be accomplished.”

If you look in “traditional” places on the Internet, you might receive “traditional” results. Looking exactly where your competition is looking, is most likely getting you the same results as always. The demand for superstar candidates is at an all-time high but the supply of top candidates is at an all-time low (due to the baby-boomers retiring and other economics). This results in the fact that it has never been more difficult to get the right people in the right jobs for the right price.

By using proven Internet sourcing strategies, recruiters often feel that they have conquered the web. Candidates are hidden in plain sight all over the Internet, but if you don’t know how and where to search for them, they remain well hidden in what most uneducated sourcers/recruiters feel is the deep dark unexplored world wide web.

However, there is a solution. How many of these phrases resonate with you? Social Media. Mobile Recruiting. Boolean. XRay. Image Searching. Video Searching. Blogging for Candidates. Twitter Lists. Search Is Back. Google Alerts. Wayback Machine. If those sound like your everyday sourcing strategies, then you have probably mastered the concept of looking for purple squirrels on the Internet, and your requisitions are getting filled faster than ever with high quality individuals. If those words are Greek to you from a sourcing/recruiting perspective, then help is on the way. Learning these techniques from the pros will put you in the driver’s seat, knowing that tomorrow’s recruiting challenges are achievable.

Cohesively connecting both social media and mobile technology is crucial to a company’s success in today’s competitive recruitment marketplace. Companies need to engage and attract candidates in order to stay ahead of the competition. From a candidate’s perspective, it’s an expectation to be able to communicate and interact with prospective employers via social and mobile platforms. By using all of these strategies, it will not allow you to recruit with your eyes closed, but instead, keep your eyes closed at night.

Don’t miss Kevin’s session on May 25th at recruitDC’s Spring 2017 conference!

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Boolean, Kevin Crews, sourcing

Why recruitDC Matters To Me

May 19, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Audra Knight

I was rather nervous the first time I attended recruitDC. Now, let me clear here – I knew I was going to learn a lot at RecruitDC in 2016, but what I didn’t expect was the friendships that would come out of attending the conference.

For me, it was great to catch up with some old friends like Katrina Collier, Jo Weech, Kerri Noone and some other great DC people who make our industry and community so special. As for new friends, I ended up at a meal with one of my favorite podcasters, the Mad Scientist of Online Recruiting Chris Russell. Not surprisingly, we’ve kept in touch and I have learned so much about HR Tech from him over the past year. It was also at this event that I first met Chris Kurtz, whom I now consider one of my best friends and someone I am so thankful to have in my life. Derek Zeller taught me that you should always celebrate who you are, and he continues to blow me away with his recruiting knowledge and writing skills, even from the other side of the country in Portland. As a side note, the most surprising aspect of any connection I made while I was there was the valuable parenting advice that I got from Lorne Epstein. I bet he doesn’t even remember but it has really helped me. Hat tip to you, Lorne. 

This year I’m returning to recruitDC, and by far, the learning is again a strong pull for me. The event covers everything from sourcing to closing the candidate, which we can always use a refresher on.

In my presentation, I will be sharing why and how personal branding will benefit everyone in recruitment. Candidates are researching us online just as we are researching them, and trust me, the cost of a bad online presence is high. Don’t believe me? Just check out the hashtag #RecruiterFail. I I most certainly appreciate that we are all super busy, so what you’ll see from me is a few easy tips and tricks to put in action in no time.

Beyond the learning, I am really looking forward to another chance to meet new people and make new recruiting friends. Here are my “pro tips” for networking at this event:

  • Arrive early and have breakfast with the other early risers like me.
  • Don’t work during the breaks. You might not get another chance to meet the great people around you.
  • At lunch, sit with people you don’t know. Confort Zones are to be avoided at conferences!
  • Meet all the sponsors. We wouldn’t have this great event without them and you just make have something in common.
  • Listen more than you talk – so important to relationship building at every stage.
  • Most important, stay for the networking party from 4:00 on as that’s where the real friendships happen.

See you next week!

RecruitDC 2016 – One old friend and one new friend

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Audra Knight, employment branding, networking, recruitDC

Welcome Back To recruitDC, Matt Charney!

May 10, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

We’re excited to welcome Matt Charney back to recruitDC this May, and he has pulled together a great closing keynote, with some great information to share with attendees. Always one to look past what’s shiny on the surface, and well-known for calling things “as they are”, Matt will bring a fresh perspective to some important topics in the Talent Acquisition space. This presentation will take a look at some of the biggest trends and emerging technologies impacting recruiting and hiring today. It’s a must-attend whether you are running a desk, or managing a division of recruiters.

From NGOs to Fortune 500 companies to Mom and Pop shops, we will look across markets, industries and specialties to identify what talent leaders can do today to compete – and win – the top talent of tomorrow. Matt will discuss the real issues that really matter to real recruiters, and focus on identifying what’s really new and what’s really next. He’s going to encourage ditching the buzzwords and fluff for a data driven look into the changing world of work – and what that means for the work of HR and recruiting.

Here’s what you can expect to take away from Matt’s session:

  • How to follow the trail of venture capital and influx of cash to determine which startups are being built to last, which categories of technology and tools are the hottest segments of the talent business, and how recruiters can stay ahead by staying on top of the bigger business picture without a whole lot of work (or any special knowledge).

  • What the future of work looks like after on boarding, and how the blended workforce and gig economy models, coupled with a rise in knowledge work, globalization and remote workers, are already shaping the way companies hire, and what the upending of the traditional social contract means for traditional recruiting and Human Relations. 

  • How to build a business case for talent acquisition to get the resources required to recruit the talent you need, and how to work with internal stakeholders and employees to tie talent acquisition efforts directly to bottom line results. We’ll talk about how to make friends, influence hiring managers and finally make your people the greatest asset in the business – only with the P/L to prove it.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Still need tickets?

Buy them here before they sell out!

Filed Under: DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Conference, HRTech, Matt Charney, recruitDC event, recruiting

Thank You, recruitDC

May 5, 2017 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Pete Radloff

I’ve been very lucky in my career. Luck played a part in how I even got into recruiting. It played a part in my having some of the best mentors and teachers that you could ask for over the course of a career. Because of my appreciation for all of this luck, I’ve always wanted to pay it forward, to use a phrase. Turns out, I wouldn’t have to wait long.

In 2010, I attended the first ever recruitDC, at Wooly Mammoth Theatre in D.C.. I lucky enough be asked to be on a panel about sourcing tools and techniques with some people that I greatly admired. And while I knew a good number of the attendees, I met so many people there, that it was hard to keep track of everyone. I would later find out through various conversations with people, some years later, that they had also been in attendance. It was a whirlwind event, but one that I took away a great deal from.

I walked out of the first recruitDC conference feeling as though I had just been handed the keys to the kingdom. I had innumerable new tricks to apply to my sourcing and recruiting, and new (to me) tools to test out. I was in a bit of recruiting-geek heaven, and to borrow a phrase from my friend Stacy, “I knew I had found my people”. I knew that for as long as there were more of these, I’d be one of the first to buy tickets. After all, as much as I wanted to attend national conferences, there was never a budget for that. And up until now, I hadn’t seen anything with that depth of content at an event at a local level. Hooked.

I was invited to join the Board of Directors for recruitDC in 2011. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to help shape and grow an organization I was very fond of. Heck, I’d get to work with Bob Corlett again. That in and of itself was enough to make me say yes. It turns out, that I got so much more out of it than I had ever expected. To be honest, I’ve been on the Board for longer than I’ve been at any job. and in that time, we’ve accomplished a lot.  

Fast forward to now, my last event as a Board member of recruitDC. I’m not one for sappy good-byes, but I cannot stress enough how thankful I am for the opportunity to have been on this great ride. I’m proud to call each of the board members – past, present & newly elected – a good friend. I’m emboldened by the mix of new and familiar faces at each and every conference. I’ve always believed that a connected community is a strong community, and the recruiting & sourcing community in DC is one of the strongest that I know of. 

May 25th is just around the corner. And, in a bittersweet way, I’m really looking forward to this event. The sessions are filled with great information and we’ve pulled together a strong mix of talent from the D.C. area and the country.

To those who haven’t yet come to recruitDC, or are on the fence:

Find a reason to come to the conference. It is worth the investment of time to grow and expand your network – just ask anyone who has come to a recruitDC event before. Don’t expect one day to solve all your recruiting & problems, but rather let it add to the body of knowledge that goes with you wherever you go. And no matter what happens professionally, your community is still there. And the reqs on your desk? They will still be there tomorrow too, but maybe you’ll have some better tools and tactics to fill them with. 

I hope to see you there on May 25th, and hope that your experience with recruitDC is as meaningful to you as it is to me.  And that is due to the community. 

So…thanks recruitDC. 

P.S.  – Click to buy tickets

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, DC Area Conferences, recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: Community, Conference, recruiting, sourcing

HRCI Credits For Fall 2016 Event

December 1, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

Many people have inquired about the HRCI credits for the Fall 2016 event. We’re happy to share those with our attendees. 

 

In order to receive the code for HRCI credits, please email us and we’ll be happy to send it to you.

Email recruitDC

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: HRCI Credits, recruitDC event

Session Recap – Maren Hogan – Employer Branding for Dirty Jobs

November 28, 2016 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

ed. note: Because there was so much information to capture in Maren’s presentation on November 17th, we wanted to make sure that we could provide you with some more details. Enjoy! 

 

So many times, we find ourselves listening to how one giant company with an abundance of ping pong tables and fat jack stock options found itself on the receiving end of tons of lovely Glassdoor reviews and adoring candidates.

I am happy for those companies of course and I won’t lie and say that building a recruitment marketing strategy for them isn’t super fun. I mean, who doesn’t want to work for a company with free dry cleaning and a rock climbing wall?

At the very least, many companies in the service sector are offering things that many companies simply can’t compete with:

  • WFH days or telecommuting
  • Flat hierarchies
  • Or a pleasant work environment

While these are nice to have, there are many places where people have to work to continue to push our economy forward, that are dirty, nasty, and downright boring. You can’t have a ping pong table in a slaughterhouse and you can’t work from home if you’re a forklift driver. You can’t have a flat hierarchy if you work for a government contracting agency that spends ALL its time trying to figure out if you’re a SQL Programmer II or III.

I always tell my employees when they come to work for me that it’s going to be hard. And not a little bit hard like selling jeans, or Oreos or marketing a sports drink, but really freaking hard, like selling a quarter of a million dollar HRIS to every person in the org it touches; from the daily user to the person writing the check. THAT’S hard.

Just like B2B marketing is straight up harder than B2C marketing, recruitment marketing is harder when the sell is harder. How could the sale be hard? Here are some common difficult to market jobs or workplaces:

Unsafe or hazardous working conditions. While we’re no longer living in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, there are still jobs that are inherently dangerous. They may surprise you!

  • Airline Pilots
  • Fishers and Fishing Workers
  • Loggers
  • Roofers
  • Trash Collectors
  • Farmers
  • Structural Iron and Steel Workers
  • Drivers/Truck Drivers
  • Electrical Power Installers
  • Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs

How about gross jobs or dirty jobs?

Many of those same jobs fall onto this list. Trash collectors, preppers at a nail salon, working the kill floor at a slaughterhouse, working with industrial dyes. You name it!  These are jobs that lack an intrinsic value proposition, or do they? More on that later.

Then there are boring jobs. Data entry, call service centers, and of course, sometimes recruiting for government or cleared jobs fall into this category.

Finally, you have places that are hard to recruit TO:

It boggles the mind that we spend all our time at conferences trying to figure out how to solve the competition issues in Silicon Valley when many of us are recruiting for jobs and locations that look nothing like it. I’m from Omaha, and at the same time as everyone I meet at this conference gives me a blank stare when I tell them that, our city and state currently have an unemployment rate of 3.6%.

Now that we’ve determined what these jobs look like, let’s talk about HOW to build a brand and a marketing strategy to recruit for them. As we’ve already determined, these jobs have to be filled, so let’s fill them!

Find Your Value

Well, it starts with the value proposition. I know I mentioned earlier that these jobs often don’t have an intrinsic or obvious value proposition, but they do have one.

For example, a trash collector may seem like a job I would never want to do, but for someone, having their afternoons free, physical activity, the chance to be outdoors and more, are all benefits.

No matter how difficult it is, determine the values your job will potentially give applicants. A blog post by RJ Morris, discusses how he successful did this during his time recruiting for a light industrial firm.

Early in my career, I took a turn doing light industrial contract recruiting. Temp work for lots of warehouse workers, forklift drivers, mechanics, etc. Physically demanding, low wages…these were tough gigs, and recruiting for them was a bear.

Boiler room environment, fast pace, demanding clients, low margins, high tempers.  “Hey, R. J., we need a third shift warehouse tech, three week assignment, starting tonight at 11 pm. Go get em.”

All of the jobs were hard to successfully recruit for, but by far, the worst job we worked on was to place folks at a food color company. The company’s model was to bring temporary employees in before offering them full time roles, and their first job was in the color mixing area. It was appropriately nicknamed the “Blender.”

Imagine fifteen workers, mixing powdered and liquid colors in huge vats with long oar-like paddles, twelve hour shifts at a time. The powdered color floated through the air everywhere. At the end of the shift, the guys (all were guys) had semi-permanent tie dyed tattoos.

These were industrial strength food dyes, used to make the different colors of Skittles, for example. Apparently, when you worked with them for twelve hour days, they also dyed skin.

It took a guy 30 minutes of scrubbing with Lava Soap to get the stains off.

He started with a 55% voluntary attrition rate. How did he turn it around? By asking who was already successful in the position. Morris looked at the numbers and realized that after 3 months, attrition dipped to 12% and then after one year, it was a mere 5%. So he started asking questions:

  • Why would anyone want to work in this job?
  • What’s the benefit to the employee?
  • What types of people will respond to that offering and where can we find them?  

He spent time at the company, interviewing new and tenured employees and found out that if you HAD the chutzpah to stick around, you stuck around for good. Did it make his job easier? No. But the numbers kept getting better. The company had realized their value proposition was to promise a better future, if you could make it today:

Come in, get along, work hard, don’t whine and you’ll get rewarded.  If you complained too much or did not get along with your Blender Buddies, you were out. If you lasted six months, the company offered you a full time role, including benefits and a decent raise.   Most importantly, employees rotated out of the Blender after one year.  No more blue arms and orange ears.  We just found the value proposition.

At Red Branch Media, we did something similar with a survey project with a large pharmaceutical company. While the company was an employer of choice in their HQ city, they wanted to compete for scientists near Harvard and Stanford, meaning the tactics they’d used as “the only game in town” before were going to be less effective. Plus, their pay was going to be less competitive in these areas.

To find out what types of people were successful in the role, we surveyed employees at all levels of the company to determine what made them successful, both inside and outside the company. And, while I am generally not one for anecdotal data, we did dive deep to find out what made them happy. The values rang through loud and clear, from sales people who had never set foot in HQ, to those who were safely ensconced within the building. We used those values and articulated them throughout the recruitment marketing campaigns. For these people, it wasn’t about big money, or even the benefits, it was about making a difference in people’s lives through medication.

Find Your Value

TO DO:

  • Survey Employees
  • Ask Questions
  • Create a Value Prop for THAT Job
  • Make Positives out of Negatives

Get Your Values Straight

I have no control over what people offer by way of compensation, or how they treat employees or contractors once they’re brought on board. However, I do know when a company cannot offer benefits like work from home or a
short commute, or even a safe or pleasant working environment, there are ways to reward them internally. As a recruiting professional, you can make a case for why employers should explore wellness programs, revamp their bonus structure or offer other benefits to workers who can’t have the more traditional stuff.

For example, an owner of a warehouse that packs and ships unconventional and risque items tries to foster a family atmosphere in the office and warehouse and buys his 11 employees lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays. Plus his company offers raises, health insurance and an informal atmosphere where employees can dress as they wish and listen to the radio all day.

Ask yourself, your employer, or your client if there is something you can do to offset some of the negative brand equity of working that gross, ugly or dirty job.

Get Your Values Straight

TO DO:

  • Find Ways to Make It Up To Them
  • Highlight In Postings
  • Be an Advocate
  • Find the ROI

Find Your Audience

Much of this is standard but keep new audiences in mind. The average age of a government employee is 47 years old, but over one-third of the current job market consists of Millennials, and they are expected to make up 46% of the working population by 2020. These statistics are already affecting the pool of cleared candidates, so being prepared to hire and manage a younger workforce is key.

Now, how do we get these kids to pass a security clearance? Present it as a challenge.

Millennials are more likely to be drawn to challenges that have tangible results, which includes successfully navigating the vetting process of security clearance. When communicating with younger workers, highlight the specific skills needed to make it through the clearance process, encourage them to rise to the challenge, and remind them that the reward is an in-demand clearance status. Also, giving current college students an opportunity to intern with your company allows you to gauge the skills of individual candidates and can give you confidence that a costly clearance sponsorship will be worth the time and investment.

–Olivia Landau

If you’re not already, seek out passive candidates, competitive candidates and of course, veteran candidates. While these are great networks to tap into for cleared jobs, they can also be useful for jobs that are less than ideal.

When we worked with the world’s largest protein company, we quickly realized that behind the fancy pants name, was a string of slaughterhouses located in some of the most remote and boring locations in the world. Which makes sense, you don’t want a slaughterhouse in your backyard now do you?

Anyway, we realized as we were defining our candidate persona, that many of them had things in common with a military recruit. Here’s that persona:

These are often people who grew up in or near a rural environment, wanted a family and valued a college education. The recruitment marketing strategy encompassed many things but military stood out with good reason, as did restaurant managers. We knew those groups also valued similar things, had some overlap in their backgrounds and also understood living in remote locations or third tier towns (bases).

Find Your Audience

TO DO:

  • Identify Audience
  • Build Personas to Speak To
  • Find Overlap

Get Your Channels Together

Recruiting on cleared and niche boards is absolutely a great idea. But when reaching out to millennials for ODD jobs, consider the source. It’s easy to spend a lot of money for very little return when it comes to recruitment advertising. So when you’ve got your buyer persona complete, think about what that person does. When we recruited for plant supervisors at the aforementioned plant, our initial plan included diversity initiatives on campus and mobile phone advertising for internal candidates to promote from the floor. Guess what?

Diversity was NOT going to happen from a gender perspective and having a phone on the kill floor is a fireable offense. Whoops? So what did we end up with?

  • A robust career fair plan supported by social and resources for career centers
  • Meet and greets and curriculum support for their schools of choice
  • Geo-location around universities that had the degree programs they were most likely to recruit from
  • Spotify advertising on study and country station
  • Bathroom advertising…yep
  • Table Tents
  • Lunch Room Announcements
  • Revamped LinkedIn Careers Page
  • Separate Career Site that focused on location benefits

While some of these might seem shockingly old school, it worked! We got all 55 positions filled in 9 months. So, when you think about marketing, even recruitment marketing, think about where your candidates go (college bars, career centers, the lunchroom) what they need to know (which classes to take, how to achieve security clearance, how to interview, any risks associated with the job) and what they are consuming (on-demand streaming content, flyers, facebook, billboards and heaven help me, Snapchat).

Of course, you can also reverse engineer this information. For the guy trying to get workers for his novelty sex toy business, we can safely avoid, say, Christian radio stations or the Panera Bread where your aunt always goes.

Get Your Channels Together

TO DO:

  • Where are they?
  • What do they do?
  • What are they listening to?
  • What are they reading?
  • How can you solve their problem or meet their need?

Be Honest (and Funny!)

Okay, writing job requirements is one thing…and writing job advertisements is an entirely different thing. I always say it’s the difference between a shoe ad in your favorite magazine and the description on the side of the box. Size 7 WIDE Black Heel. The latter is the requirement, the former is the ad. Let’s talk about transparency in advertising. Transparency means you don’t sell a job that’s not there:

 

“Want to work in a dirty and messy warehouse that is full of weird and embarrassing stuff that people buy online?”

vs

“We need a team player to foster warehouse synergy.”

Building out a job description for a gross, dirty or non-glam position means you have to create a clear picture of what it’s going to actually look like. It may not be fun, it may not even be comfortable but if you sell it as something that it isn’t, people will walk.

Realistic job previews, where you honestly tell people what the job entails, will create a condition where more peopl
e will not take the job, but the ones who do will be much more likely to stick around. You need to find the right person for the right job.

–Industrial psychologist Jeffrey Saltzman

Conversely, the people who apply DO want the job, because you’ve stated the risks or downsides right up front! I use this all the time in my own agency, because while we’re a marketing firm, it’s not glamorous. In fact, most days it’s downright boring.

Be Honest (and Funny!)

DOs:

Be honest. If the work is hard, say so. Our work is. It’s nothing like Mad Men. We spend a lot of time typing away at keyboards with our headphones on. I won’t tolerate loads of chit-chat, or sitting on one’s laurels. In fact, one section of our interview process is titled: This is the part where I scare you.

Point out the positives. When I tell people that we’re in a quiet work environment and everything we do is posted on the company intranet, it can scare them. So at the same time, I also focus on how the office is always empty by 5 pm or how we have a company wide eating meeting on Friday. Other plusses people rarely think of? The ability to use your phone on the job, lack of oversight, casual work environment and the chance to create your own schedule.

Create an awesome headline. You don’t have to lie to create a great headline.

“This Sales Job in Dallas is Shagadelic” worked to attract 50 awesome JC students for an entry-sales job for the Yellow Pages when the first Austin Powers movie came out. @LouAdler

Use their motivation as a sales tool. Motivations can be as simple as wanting to be outdoors or as complex as doing one’s patriotic duty. Whatever it is, make sure you use it to weed out undesirables AND pull in those who have a keen sense of what motivates them.

Learn, Do, Become. In RJ’s example in the dyeing factory, one key motivator was the stability and benefits a person would receive if they “ran the gauntlet”. In the case of an RBM medical client, we use things like referrals and leaderboards to encourage people to take new assignments and build their skill base. This has the added bonus of adding performance expectations and goals right in the job ad.

Tell a story. This can be about big goals, overcoming an obstacle or about the prospect’s future path. Whatever it is, it negates the need to discuss the need for a master’s degree or proficiency in thus and such. If you can tell a compelling story about the position or the company, it makes you job recruiting someone there (even if it’s gross or in BFE) that much easier.

Add a step. This may go against everything you’ve ever known to be true. But adding a step can take out the undesirables and loop in those who deserve your first consideration. Start with a quick email and then follow up with a call. While the person may still be in your ATS, at least you know their level of interest if they’ve taken the time to do the extra step (whether it’s email or whatever).

Don’t:

  • Add a laundry list of skills.
  • Use adjectives that can apply to literally anyone. Self starter comes to mind.
  • Add in your generic boilerplate (if you must, at least do so at the bottom)
  • Avoid the obvious with stupid titles
  • Forget to say what makes this job special

When important jobs are advertised cafeteria-style like this, with the garnish being the only differentiator, even the semi-desperate make the decision to apply based on location, job title and the company’s brand name. When they accept these jobs the size of the compensation package then becomes the prime negotiating factor. This is always the case with commodity products in a buyer’s market.

–Lou Adler

A Clear and Present Stranger

Knowing where to advertise is great. Knowing how to advertise is great. Understanding your value prop is also great. But none of these things alone are going to bring people to your door eager to working your terrible, difficult job. So, here are some other things guaranteed to help boost your business.

Career Fairs. It’s not just BEING at career fairs, it’s doing them right. It vexes me when people pay for a booth at a fair and then just make the marketing budget whatever it took Joe from campus recruiting to get there AKA his Hertz budget and a lunch at Applebee’s. For our meatpacking client, we totally rebranded their swag (so it was stuff students would actually keep) and built out a booth that was as informative and approachable as possible. We also use social media, email and referrals to get people to the booth. Once there, we made sure our career site was mobile ready so we could guide them through the process without unnecessary awkwardness.

Poaching. One organization developed 15-second low budget but intriguing commercials to air at a local movie theater near their headquarters.The same organization created a mobile hiring center with a cheap RV to drive to targeted competitors during the lunch hour. You can set a Yelp review to go to your careers page or test the mood at the local watering hole. But poaching in this sense, is legal.

Create puzzles. Creative challenges or contests can help you uncover top talent. But don’t just create a puzzle, put it out there! Think websites, wraps on company cars or billboards. Challenges can include hackathons, photo contests or even trivia. Dyson recently released a challenge hidden inside a recruitment video on its website.

Be Smart. Look you’re recruiting for clearance, high level jobs, and I’m recruiting for loggers, industrial warehouse workers and people who shoot cows in the head. Maybe the Valley can afford to blow off contractors if they mess up, but we’re dealing with a different deck, so make it easy on your prospects.

Make it easy for a candidate to apply, and give them a second shot if they botch an initial contact. I’ve spoken with many recruiters who say they give candidate one chance – if that individual blows off a phone screening or fails to submit the appropriate paperwork, they’re done. That strategy may work in less in-demand industries but if you’re vying for competitive talent you’re going to have to give a little wiggle room. Keep in mind that a passive candidate has anothe
r full time job. If they get pulled into a meeting and miss a phone screening, see that as a sign of their commitment to their work – a skill they will bring to the table with your company.

 

 

Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. She leads Red Branch Media, a consultancy offering marketing strategy and content development. A consistent advocate of next generation marketing techniques, Hogan has built several successful online communities, deployed brand strategies in both the B2B and B2C sectors, and been a prolific contributor of thought leadership in the recruitment and talent space.

Maren’s websites include www.redbranchmedia.com and www.marenated.com

 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: employment branding, Maren Hogan, recruitDC event

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