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.
Next Practices
Best Practices get a lot of attention in recruiting. They’re the tried and proven techniques we hear so much about at conferences and on blogs. But stop and think about what they represent: they’re practices honed in the past. If the world wasn’t changing very much, that would be O.K., but in today’s (and tomorrow’s) radically different talent market, a different approach is needed. I call it Next Practices.
Next Practices are sourcing and recruiting techniques that fly in the face of both habit and conventional wisdom. They tap into recent research about adult behavior on the Web and implement a better wisdom for applying it to talent acquisition. For example:
- Recruitment Advertising. The conventional wisdom is that job postings are simply ads placed on the Web. In fact, some even refer to them as online classified advertising. The Next Practice for job postings, however, incorporates a better wisdom. In recognition of today’s highly interactive world, it calls for a “social job posting” – one that avoids the one-way expression of “requirements and responsibilities” and instead engages the reader in a virtual conversation about “what’s in it for them”.
- Corporate Career Sites. The conventional wisdom is that these sites should be designed to facilitate the job applications of active job seekers. It’s a very transactional experience, not unlike visiting a store. The Next Practice for corporate career sites, in contrast, transforms the experience into that of “careersteading” at a farm. It focuses the site’s content, features and functionality on nurturing relationships with all visitors, but especially with the passive prospects who are often looking for a place to call home for their career.
- The Candidate Experience. The conventional wisdom is that candidates must be treated more courteously and professionally during the recruiting process. While that’s certainly true, the candidate experience actually begins much earlier – with the employer’s communication of its employment brand. For that reason, the Next Practice in optimizing the candidate experience focuses on developing a brand that creates the right expectation for top talent and then on making that expectation come true during the recruiting process.
Doing Better Than Best Practices
It should come as no surprise that there are several challenges to implementing Next Practices. First, they’re new and require an investment of time to learn, and time is a precious resource for recruiters. Second, they represent a different way of doing things so can feel a bit strange or even uncomfortable at first. And third, because they’re new and different, they can cause an adverse reaction among those who want to keep recruiting the old fashioned way.
How can you overcome these challenges?
Implementing Next Practices is much like managing the shift from calculators to computers. For those who didn’t experience that transition, two factors became immediately clear: first, it took courage to make the move – after all, despite their ubiquity today, computers were a leap into the unknown when they were first introduced. And second, the shift was as much a cultural issue as it was a change in technology – people would organize and work differently than they had in the past.
Therefore, it’s best to acknowledge right up front that adopting Next Practices represents a significant shift in recruiter activity and culture, but one that is warranted by the nature of the challenge. Not only is it getting harder to compete for top performers as the economy improves, but doing so is made even more demanding by their morphing behaviors and preferences. To put a point on it, what top performers want and expect from recruiters is radically different today from it was even three years ago. The recruiters who adapt to this reality and adopt Next Practices will capture an unfair share of the best talent – the definition of victory in today’s and tomorrow’s War for Talent. Those who don’t will be forced to scramble for whatever talent is left.
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.
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
then the WEDDLE’s Directory is for you!
To order, click here.