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.
A recruiter typically has a collection of requisitions she is responsible for. In most companies, it’s usually an unmanageable number (at least to the recruiter). So in the morning, she may come in and open her ATS (applicant tracking system) and start looking at what resumes came in for what position (requisition) overnight. She’s human, so while scanning resumes, she might be distracted by her boss popping by, a tweet or a phone call. That means some resumes get the six-second glance, some get 30. There’s no guarantee of fairness — it’s absolutely impossible. And if she already has enough candidates interviewing, she might barely glance, if at all, at new resumes.
The internet. For all its beauty and brawn, it’s like candy to a kid. There’s always room for more. Unless you’re managing a personal brand, meaning, you’re calling yourself an expert and purport to be the “industry’s leading…” or the “foremost expert on….” The field in which we work, human resources, has it’s share of experts—from recruiting to Gen Y to organizational design. But for every expert, there’s an online personal brand and many of them are painfully obvious.
