Forty-one percent of jobseekers looked for their job while in bed, says Claire Alloway, marketing manager at Jobvite. That’s a good indicator of how recruiting—and the deadly sins of recruiting—have changed. Alloway and Danielle Durante, marketing coordinator at Glassdoor, offered their recruiting sins during a recent webinar sponsored by Glassdoor. Here’s what they had to say.
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To put it simply, the job seekers of today have changed. For one, job seekers are likely to change jobs every 3 or 4 years. Additionally, the availability of mobile technology has drastically changed the way that recruiting works. Glassdoor presented a snapshot of the situation by showing where job seekers are when they look for jobs:
- 41% looked for jobs while in bed.
- 38% were in a car.
- 36% searched jobs while at a restaurant.
- 30% looked while in the bathroom.
- 18% actually visited brick and mortar businesses.
With only 18 percent of job seekers looking where traditional recruiting takes place, it’s clear that traditional recruiting has to change as well. Let’s take a look at those seven sins of recruiting.
1. I usually just find them and forget them!
If you want to keep a potential hire engaged, you need to stay on top of the process. The old days of just finding a few people, making a phone call, and then stepping aside no longer works. Glassdoor states that “66% of social media users expect a response within a day. If you want a good candidate experience, you need to do better than a standard response.” Applicants expect to be informed of where they stand in the process, even if that means being told they didn’t get the job.
Need to sell your recruiting strategy to management? Start on Wednesday, September 30, 2015, with a new interactive webinar, Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives. Learn More.
2. I’m supposed to track that?
Being blasé about recordkeeping is hardly new. But when it comes to recruiting, you can really drop the ball when you don’t keep records or track the process. Why? Because when you track your candidates, you have good intelligence on where to apply your funds. Similarly, it’s easier to see what parts of the process might be lacking and to suss how to make those aspects better. When you are looking for a good return on investment, it helps if you can put your resources where they matter most while simultaneously shoring up weaknesses in your process.
3. I have enough prospective candidates today, so why feed the funnel?
Concerning this point, Durante stated, “Jobs are hard because we are relying on the unreliable end-user to determine success.” Indeed, even the best of candidates are not a sure thing, and you never know whether he or she will accept an offer. How can you claim that you have enough candidates for a job when it’s entirely possible that every single one of them won’t work out? The answer is, you can’t.
Durante continues, “Never be caught flatfooted.” It’s too easy to think you have everything squared away, only to realize last minute you haven’t got anyone left at all. On the flip side, over-preparing never hurts. If you find extra candidates and nurture their experience, you can always try to use those people for future openings. If you never call them back or dodge their attempts to find out where they stand, that candidate is burned for good.
Glassdoor recommends using social media to find the best candidates. It states that “nearly 2 in 3 say their employer does not (or know how to) use social media to promote job openings, and nearly 3 in 4 say their employer does not (or know how to) promote their employment brand on social media.” This is just another way employers are failing to feed the funnel, especially when you consider that Glassdoor says “79% of candidates are likely to use social media in their job search.” Make sure you are using social media in your recruitment strategy.
Need your executives to back your latest recruiting strategy? Join us Wednesday, September 30, 2015, for a new interactive webinar, Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives. Earn 1 hour in HRCI Recertification Credit and 1 hour in SHRM Professional Development Credit. Register Now.
4. Who needs PR? Our employment brand is fine.
Your employment brand represents everything about your company. If it stinks, you won’t be able to make the most of your recruiting work. In order to improve and/or maintain your employment brand, Glassdoor suggests making use of “brand ambassadors.” These can be anyone in your company, or even every employee you already have, and their purpose is to offer, publically, a slice of the life at your company to anyone else who will listen.
Glassdoor suggests making the most of your brand ambassadors when you:
- Encourage your employees to get on social media to share pictures, stories, and comments about the culture at your company—such transparency helps job seekers feel confident about your company.
- Make certain that your employees know how important your employment brand is and how important they are in transmitting that message.
- Offer incentives for employees that do particularly well when it comes to sharing the employment brand.
- Train your employees about your employment brand so they have a clear understanding of what message they should be sharing.
- Create a system that makes it easy for employees and job seekers alike to access your employment brand, especially via social media.
Glassdoor says that if you follow these steps you can take advantage of the fact that referrals by employees are a primary source of excellent candidates. Additionally, the information age has made it very easy for people to learn how your company really functions. By using brand ambassadors, you can make it easier for people to see how your company operates straight from the source.
5. I’m sticking with the old-school approach: scouring the Web for résumés. It’s worked before.
Old habits can be hard to break. Glassdoor reminds us that it’s very important to constantly move forward and to never stop learning. The world constantly changes, and if you don’t change with it, your bag of recruiting tricks simply won’t work anymore. When looking for a technical solution, Glassdoor has a few suggestions:
- Find a program that specifically focuses on recruiting, not something that is just part of a general HR suite. By using software and resources that are specifically focused on recruiting, you pay only for the functionality you want.
- Make sure anything you purchase has an intuitive interface. It takes less time to master such a service, and once one person in your company knows how to use the program, he or she can easily train others.
- Try to find software that integrates with your other platforms. In this way you can connect your related systems (such as your HR management software) with your recruiting software, making the most of both.
It might take a while for some of the new solutions available to recruiters to work, and some experimentation and patience is required.
Tomorrow, sins number 6 and 7, plus an introduction to a new interactive webinar, Talking Recruiting to Management: How to Get the C-Suite on Board with Your Strategic Recruiting Initiatives.