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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

Fall 2015 Speaker Preview: Celinda Appleby

October 26, 2015 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Celinda Appleby

The question I have been getting a TON lately is:  “How to do you come up with campaign/content ideas?”

The short answer, is they come to me at the weirdest times, so I keep lots of notes on my Iphone. I also read  WAY too much and follow news outlets/trends that inspire me. News and Pop Culture seem to bring the most inspiration when I am planning my employer branding/recruitment marketing campaigns.

I know my answer stinks! So I thought I would break this down for you.

Let’s start with the hardest part in campaign creation – Content curation!

If you are just starting out or maybe lacking content at your fingertips, this can be the most challenging portion.  Being new to Oracle, I found content identification to be my Achilles heel very early on. I am of the mindset of using people to tell your story.  I believe that in recruiting, as a job seeker you want to identify with the people behind the brand or even behind the product/service. When I started this employer brand journey, our content was very stagnant. We were using a lot of stock photography and wordy posts using infographics to sell a job or an event. I found us to be broadcasting all the time and not adding value to the community we had cultivated over the years. For example, I couldn’t find any posts that shared employee stories. Or what I could expect when I started working for them. I quickly started making friends and pitching my vision to anyone that would listen, but lucky for you there are many other ways to curate content.

Relationships Matter:

My personal favorite and naturally super easy for me is personal outreach. I get crazy ideas and more often than I like, we don’t have the content just laying around. Thankfully, I have made some great friends here that totally appease my requests. (HUGE thanks to all my “guinea pigs – you mean the world to me!) Usually my idea comes through via email, with very garbled writing and lots of demands followed with emojis. Having made these relationships, my “models” are willing to cut me slack on the request and trust that their best interest is at heart.  That is invaluable and something that I recommend everyone doing. Nothing stings more than hearing, no I am not participating in your crazy idea. 

Company Hashtags:

A lot of our content is employee generated; depending on the visual we will either retweet them or ask them if we can use the picture on our channels. Sometimes we get so excited, we do both. 

 

One of the easiest ways to find this content, if they are not tagging you on the post is to research hashtags. Being a Sourcer, by trade, I love hunting content down. It keeps my brain active, but it can be time consuming to peruse all the channels one by one. I LOVE Tagboard! This site allows you to curate content across multiple media channels researching one hashtag.  You can also use your social media scheduling tool (like Oracle Social, Hootsuite or TweetDeck) to create hashtag streams, that you can “watch” for content.

I love to remind our employees to use the hashtags any chance I get. 

Newsletters:

We also send out a weekly newsletter to our entire Recruiting organization with customizable and socially sharable content. In this email, I take the time to put out a request for content. Our Recruiters are interfacing with employees, hiring managers and new hires ALL the time.  In my opinion they are the pulse to our content strategy and it feels natural to lean on them.  I love having this platform as a FREE way to give the recruiting teams something they can use and also have the opportunity to shamelessly ask for help.

Campaign/Content ideas:

While I can’t brain dump (wish I could) exactly what goes through my mind; I figured showcasing some recent and active campaigns would be most helpful.

 Following trending topics:

I love keeping an eye out on topics that are trending on the internet and all social media sites. I love figuring out how our mission of attracting top talent can align to the trends. And like most of you, I do not always have imagery available that matches the story I want to tell. So it can be an idea that never comes to life or one that takes longer than the trend is alive. Below you will find several that are performing quite well across multiple channels.

#WellnessWednesday

This hashtag and trending topic, aligns well with one of our core values:  “Healthy body – Healthy mind”. 

 We didn’t have content available to go, but were able to curate content quite easily for this campaign, thanks to our Recruiting partners.

 

#ILookLikeanEngineer

I came across a blog post from an Engineer in the Bay Area and I immediately felt compelled to share our story.  In less than 8 hours, we found 9 amazing Engineers across 4 regions that submitted their photos. I added it to a collage maker and shared it. 

 

#MotivationMonday

This idea came from the fact, that who can provide the best advice and motivation to our target audiences? Our resident career experts! Posting our tips leveraging a popular hashtag has really helped generate engagement. The Recruiter shared that the campaign in less than 72 hours gained him more than just internet popularity – he actually connected with qualified candidates.

This post can’t begin to articulate all of the work that goes on behind the scenes. However, I am hoping that being able to see real examples of content that are currently running on our channels and performing well, will share some insights into the content engine that is constantly running in my brain.

I have been sharing these very same ideas with my team and they seem to find value in them as they grow their social media content pool.  I know I am somewhat of the elephant in the room, as I have a team that can help bring my ideas to life! But everything I have shared today, can be done very easily using FREE tools, if you have the creativity and time.  Pulling content together should feel like a fun task, vs. going to the dentist. Leveraging real stories and pooling your resources should help with that. 

If you want more inspiration; please follow our employer brand journey! Instagram, Facebook, Twitter

Celinda Appleby is a “wanna be” blogger that is passionate about sourcing, social recruiting and employer branding. She previously held recruiting roles within corporate and agency enterprises. Celinda has over 12 years of recruiting and human resources experience across a broad range of industries including technology, accounting, marketing and government sector. Feel free to connect with Celinda on LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: celinda appleby, culture, employment branding, Instagram, Twitter

Fall 2015 Speaker Preview: Susan LaMotte

October 22, 2015 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

By Susan LaMotte

Do you ever wonder why you’ve been recruiting the same hires for your company and it never gets easier? Or why the strong hires you made a few years ago find their way out the door a few years later? Recruiting challenges are a part of our daily routine as talent acquisition and recruiting professionals. But we often attack them the same way: more advertising, more sourcing, more resources.  As the old saying goes: “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.” 

When I was at Marriott I was passionate about figuring out how to better address age-old problems differently. And while we had a great deal of demographic data on our employees, we didn’t know much about who they were as people. My challenge then? How can you build an employer brand or market to potential hires when you don’t know anything about them? 

Research is a powerful tool. Consumer marketers use it all the time. Every single product you buy is targeted at you directly based on your personality and habits. Consumer marketers use focus groups, ethnography and behavioral analysis to determine how to best reach and influence their target customers. So why don’t we do this in recruiting?

Primarily because it seems different and hard. We’re so used to surveys and town halls. And if someone sells us a platform or web app that can automate it, we’ll buy it. But we can’t change the fact that behind every application, Glassdoor review and LinkedIn profile, there’s a person. A person who thinks, feels, acts and is influenced by so many more things than the last website he was on before he applied for a job.

As part of next month’s RecruitDC keynote, I’m going to show you how research can unlock the powerful influences that drive how your recruits think, feel and act when it comes to jobs. And rather than just talk about it, I want to show you how research really works in recruiting. That’s where you come in. 

As a member of the RecruitDC community, if you’ll take a few minutes to participate in our research, we can show you, live, at the conference, the actual impact of understanding the recruiting “consumer.”  And the bonus is, you’ll learn all about your RecruitDC peers at the same time. 

Maybe it’s time to stop doing what you’ve always done in recruiting.

Start here: https://exaqueo.typeform.com/to/EIkhAV

Susan LaMotte, SPHR got her first W-2 at age 14 and hasn’t been unemployed since. As the founder of exaqueo (ex-ACK-wee-o), she helps companies better compete for talent by building authentic employer brands and powerful talent attraction and retention programs. At exaqueo, Susan’s clients have included Carnival Cruise Lines, Luxottica North America, Four Seasons, MedSolutions, Social Tables and many more. 

Susan’s been doing HR, employer brand and talent acquisition work for almost 20 years. In-house, she’s worked with brands like The Ritz-Carlton, Marriott International, The Home Depot and Arthur Andersen. She’s also worked in university career services and served as a career coach.

Susan has an MBA (Vanderbilt University), an MA in Human Resource Development (The George Washington University) and a BA in PR & Communications (Virginia Tech). She co-founded the nation’s first MBA Human Capital Case Competition at Vanderbilt University where she was a Dean’s Scholar. She also serves on the Board of Advisers for Gloss and Glam.

She lives with her husband and daughter in Old Town, Alexandria and obsesses over football, yoga, wine, travel and getting a decent amount of sleep. You can find her at www.exaqueo.com or @SusanLaMotte.

Filed Under: recruitDC Conference, recruitDC Events Tagged With: culture, Research, Susan LaMotte

How Effective Leaders Produce Results

April 21, 2014 by recruitdc Leave a Comment

A guest post by The RBL Group
leaders

Driving optimal results, developing an efficient workplace culture, and setting the stage for teamwork is all in a day’s work for an effective leader. These office superheroes lead their teams to success while ensuring that every member plays an active role in the process. Ever wonder how they do it? While personal style and workplace culture make it impossible to break their leadership success down to an absolute science, there are certain characteristics of their work that help them along the way. So without further ado, here are five key characteristics that help effective leaders in their ability to produce results. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: communication, culture, Hiring, leaders, leadership

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