Next Practices

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 available on Amazon. Click here to place your order.

What’s the Visitor Experience on Your Corporate Career Site?

A recent survey by Beyond.com found that 75 percent of recruiters view today’s job seekers as unqualified. That’s simply not true. What may be true is that 75 percent of the job seekers who visit today’s corporate career sites are unqualified. And, there’s reason for that.

Most corporate career sites have the look and feel of a store. It’s as if they’re shouting “Hey, we’re a buyer of labor, you’re a seller of labor; let’s do a deal!”

It’s a very transactional experience. And, it’s exactly what active job seekers want. But, that’s the problem.

Now, before you rise up in righteous indignation, there are obviously qualified candidates among the active job seeker population. However, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, at any point in time, just 16 percent of the workforce is actively in transition.

So, a corporate career site designed with the look and feel of as a store is basically irrelevant to more than four-fifths of the workforce. And simple mathematics tells you there are significantly more qualified prospects among that much larger population.

So, how do you design a corporate career site for the 84 percent of the workforce who are not actively looking for a job? Give them the experience of visiting a farm.

Transforming a Store into a Farm

A corporate career site designed as a farm uses its content, features and functionality to nurture relationships with passive prospects. It still offers employment opportunities, but those openings are presented in a context that is different from that of a store in two very important ways:

• First, visitors are treated as colleagues, not customers (or supplicants for work)

and

• Second, the focus is on helping visitors succeed in their careers, not simply apply for a job.

How do you deliver such a look and feel? You have to redesign your site to give it three key attributes.

Personalization Avoid sending the subliminal message that you see all visitors as “generic candidates” by providing individual homes or specialized channels for each career field in your workforce. That way, when a prospect enters your site, they aren’t subjected to a boilerplate experience, but one that is tailored to them.

Career Content Avoid treating passive prospects as job seekers – they aren’t. As I explain in my book, The Career Activist Republic, they are best described as career activists. Their goal isn’t to look for a job, but to advance their careers. For that reason:

The content in each personalization channel should be written with the vocabulary and the interests of those who work in that career field.
• The majority of the content should focus on the principles and practices of successful career self-management, not job search.
• Job postings should be written as electronic sales brochures, not position descriptions that are a cure for insomnia.

Dialogue Make sure your site doesn’t talk at visitors, but instead engages them in a conversation. That conversation can be developed using blogs, chats, discussion forums, even question and answer features as long as the interactions give visitors the sense that they are actually dealing with another human and not some faceless corporate department or worse a machine.

For many individuals, their first in-depth experience with an employer is on its corporate career site. So, ask yourself this: would you rather be greeted by a site that treats you as a commodity to be bought or one that treats you as person worth getting to know.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

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.

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 Sourcing Handbook

Shally Steckerl has a worldwide reputation as the guru of online sourcing – a true expert in uncovering and engaging the hardest-to-find and most-determinedly-passive high caliber talent. Now, you can know what he knows by purchasing his one-of-a-kind Talent Sourcing and Recruitment Handbook.

The detailed and up-to-the-minute information contained in this reference is invaluable to anyone in the talent acquisition industry, regardless of experience level. This book will answer your thorniest questions, give you a cornucopia of resources and make your recruitment journey as serene as it is successful.

Whether you’re a one-person operation or manage a staff, this book is essential reading for understanding the trends that are shaping the future of the talent acquisition industry.

Here’s what one recruitment leader has said about the book:

“Shally Steckerl has written a wonderful book that demystifies the recruitment process and breaks it down into an easy to understand combination of specific steps and strategies. His ability to deal with the little things that plague recruiters (“What exactly is the best Boolean search string to find this particular type of candidate”) to the higher level strategic questions (“How do I best position the value of our recruiting team to my business leaders?”) serves as a one-stop shop for anyone trying to figure out how to both recruit as an individual or to create an effective recruiting center within your organization”.-Steve Miranda, Managing Director – Cornell University Center for Advanced HR Studies (CAHRS) and ILR School Executive Education, former VPHR of SHRM

To get your discounted copy of the Talent Sourcing and Recruitment Handbook, click here to reach the book at Amazon.com.