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:
- Job Posting
- 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 due out on Amazon later this month, but you can preorder it now and be one of the first to receive it. Click here to place your order.
Talent Whispering
With all of the talk these days about social recruiting, you’d think there would be a good understanding of how best to communicate with high caliber prospects online. The low yields now being reported from such interactions, however, indicate that much of our messaging isn’t having its intended impact. That’s why we need to adopt the art of talent whispering.
High caliber prospects are almost always employed and too busy to consider a new job. In fact, a recent survey of employed workers by CareerBuilder.com found that just 21 percent of the respondents expected to make a move in the next 1-2 years. That’s far below the historical norm for this stage in a recovery.
No less important, top prospects receive so many communications from recruiters, they often see such messages as spam. They do glance briefly at these emails and InMails, but then, more often than not, they hit the Delete button and forget about them.
How can you ensure that your communications are better received? Change the nature of the experience they provide.
Instead of communicating as a recruiter reaching out to a prospective new hire, transform the experience of reading your message into that of one colleague talking to another. Make your prospects feel as if you and they are coworkers.
Why? Because top talent listened to their mother. What was the first lesson your mother taught you? Don’t speak to strangers, right? Top prospects aren’t going to trust something as important as a change in their career to someone whose message – no matter how politely expressed – has the feel of a business transaction with a faceless buyer of talent.
On the other hand, a top prospect will read and respond to a message from a recruiter, if the recruiter is seen as a “virtual colleague” – a person the prospect may not know but at least can trust. The recruiter isn’t considered a stranger because the message experience convinces the prospect that the recruiter has the prospect’s best interests at heart. And, the best way to develop such an experience is by whispering.
Message Like a Virtual Colleague
Talent whispering uses online messages to create a conversation between virtual colleagues. It avoids organizational and transactional terms – the most notorious being “Requirements” and “Responsibilities” – and instead has an informal feel that describes an opening as it might be discussed by two professionals talking to one another.
Such conversations typically answer the following five questions about the advantages the job offers to whoever takes it:
- What will they get to do?
- What will they get to learn/
- What will they get to accomplish?
- With whom will they get to work?
- How will they be recognized and rewarded?
Since colleagues don’t (usually) talk at one another, however, you should also use a second technique to encourage the prospect to feel as if they and you are actually engaged in a collegial conversation. As each question is answered in your message, subliminally hand the conversation back to them by asking a question.
For example, after explaining that an opening offers them the opportunity to work with acknowledged leaders in their field, you might insert the following in your message: Would your career benefit from teaming up with some of the top performers in your profession? Such a question preserves the conversational tone of the message and helps to keep the prospect engaged.
Talent whispering changes the paradigm of online messaging to top talent. It transforms the experience from a transactional interaction between strangers to a supportive conversation among colleagues. That creates more interest and engagement among your prospects and ultimately more applications to your openings.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
2014 User’s Choice Award Winners
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.
A One-of-a-Kind Recruitment Tool
WEDDLE’s Directory of Employment Web Sites is a one-of-a-kind database of job boards, social media sites, career portals, aggregators, employment-related search engines, job ad distribution companies, recruitment blogs and other recruiter resources. Its 9,000+ entries are organized by occupational field, industry, geographic focus and other specializations (e.g., diversity, veterans).
If you want to:
- Develop a pinpoint targeting strategy for your recruitment advertising,
- Identify the best social media sites for connecting with top talent,
- Improve the quality of the applicants you source online,
- Sell products and services to job boards and other employment Web-sites
- Sell products and services to job boards and other employment Web-sites
then the WEDDLE’s Directory is for you!