Modeled after Pinterest, Weddles.com offers four channels of information and resources found nowhere else on the Web. And, one of those channels is specifically tailored for those Employers and Recruiters who are determined to find the best talent for their openings!
What’s in the Employers & Recruiters channel at Weddles.com? There are:
- Books & Tools for recruiting & sourcing excellence
- An archive of Next Practice Recruiting Tips
- An Association Directory organized by career field & industry
- Insights on Career Activists – the passive prospects who are so hard to recruit
- And much, much more!
So, make Weddles.com the place where you start your business day! And, encourage your colleagues to join you there, as well.
Next Practice: Stepping Out of the Social Meme
A meme is an element of culture or system of behavior that is passed from one person to another. To describe it in less esoteric terms, it’s simply the practice of following the herd. So, what’s the social meme? It’s the notion in recruiting that the best place to engage passive prospects is on a social media site. That’s a meme gone bad.
The social meme was created and propounded by social media sites and the consultants who make a living advising recruiters on how to use them. Stripped of all its synthetic complexity, it declares that developing relationships with candidates is optimally achieved in public where it can be observed and exploited both by competitors and social media sites – whose business is based on selling access to the very same people you’re trying to recruit. It’s an absurd notion on its face and detrimental to successful talent acquisition in practice.
Now, let’s be clear. I’m not saying social media sites are a bust for recruiting. They aren’t, as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, among others, have proven. But the best way to use such sites isn’t by networking with candidates but by posting jobs on them just as if they were just another job board (which, in actuality, they are).
If you have any doubt about that, check the third quarter financials posted by LinkedIn. Of the $568 million the company booked in that quarter, $344.6 million or 61 percent came from job postings. And that focus on recruitment advertising is accelerating. The 2014 figure was a 45 percent increase over the 2013 figure.
So, why is this absurdity continuing? Because recruiters rightly understand that building relationships with candidates – but especially with passive, high caliber prospects – is the single best way to win the War for Top Talent. But, here’s the rub: as anyone who’s ever been in a relationship knows, forging such a connection with someone is an intimate and delicate business.
The Next Practice
As I’ve noted on more than a few previous occasions, Best Practices are techniques forged in the past for a recruitment market that no longer exists. It’s like searching for talent with a rotary phone. Next Practices, in contrast, are techniques that leverage recent research to find, engage and ultimately recruit top talent … today and into the future.
So, what’s the Next Practice alternative to the social meme? Creating a “careerstead” for talent on your own corporate career site. There’s been plenty of commentary about how Millennials change jobs more frequently than workers in the past, but the same is now true of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. The inconvenient truth is that job duration is shorter, which means almost everyone will move more frequently whether they do it voluntarily or not.
That vagabond-like experience has left many workers searching for a place to call home for their careers. They don’t expect to work at that company for 30 years, but they would like to believe it has their interests at heart throughout that time. That’s what a “careerstead” does – it provides a homestead for people’s careers by providing career-related information, resources and support for prospects – whether or not they are active job seekers.
This line from an old Texas Instruments career site page says it best:
“TI’s Engineer Your Career program is a way for you to begin the process of planning the ideal career – whether you choose to work for TI or another company.”
First, the company has provided information that is helpful to people who aren’t looking for a job – that’s the vast majority of passive, high caliber prospects – as well as those who are. And, second, they’ve provided that information selflessly. What do you want to bet that many of those who read that statement decide to work for TI more than once during their career? Now, that’s a social strategy worth using.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
Next Practices – The Book
Best Practices are so yesterday! They are sourcing and recruiting techniques designed for a time that has passed.
Next Practices are strategies and tactics for winning the real War for the Best Talent – the one you actually face today and will face tomorrow. They modernize your approach to:
- Recruitment Advertising
- Social Recruiting
- Candidate Engagement
- Optimizing the Candidate Experience
- Managing Your Own Recruiting Career
so you maximize your success.
The book is composed of short, straight-to-the-point essays that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes and still transport you to a whole new dimension in the state-of-the art for recruiting and sourcing talent. With titles like Become a Talent Whisperer, Post-Social Recruiting, The Inconvenient Truth of Recruiting and Don’t Post a Job, Advertise Respect, they are sure to entertain and enlighten you.
So, don’t recruit with yesterday’s techniques. Get Next Practices and start recruiting right now with the next generation of recruiting mastery.
The book is available on Amazon. Click here to place your order.
There’s Still Time to Cast Your Ballot
If you’re tired of reading the pundits’ picks for the best employment sites on the Web, here’s the alternative you’ve been looking for.
Each year, WEDDLE’s hosts an online poll for job seekers and recruiters to vote for THEIR picks of the best sites. We call it the User’s Choice Awards.
To see the 2014 winners, click here.
To cast your vote for next year’s winners, click here.
The Recruiting Resources You Deserve
The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Books. Get yours today!
WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. This is the 11th edition of the Guide the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of job boards and social media sites.
The Talent Sourcing & Recruitment Handbook. This is Shally Steckerl’s tell-all guide to his sourcing secrets and cybersleuthing for hard-to-find talent.
WEDDLE’s Guide to Association Web Sites. This book details the recruiting resources and capabilities that are available at the Web-sites of over 3,000 professional and technical associations.
Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.