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• The Perfect Recruitment Video

  Dr. John Sullivan has written an extensive post on the use and value of recruiting videos for finding good talent. I should have written that post! But kudos to Dr. Sullivan for putting it all out there.

  The big question he asks is this, “With the power of video increasing, and the value of traditional recruitment options diminishing, why hasn’t video become more readily used?”

  I think there are multiple reasons, all related to one another:

  1. People don’t know how to create video. People know how to write content and take photos, but video production is more of a mystery. Sure, people know how to pick up a video camera and film something, but they don’t feel ready to take professional recruitment videos.
  2. People think it’s expensive. Creating a video is more expensive than writing text or taking photos. That’s very true. But at the same time, people think it’s too expensive to do, and that’s not true. We’ve worked with many companies to produce videos including Domainer, Freshbooks and Xobni, and none of those videos cost thousands of dollars. Granted, each company had to put some work into it, but with some effort and freelance videographers, these videos were completely doable for a reasonable price.
  3. People think videos take too long to make. Videos do take longer to produce than writing a job posting and throwing it on a job board. That’s absolutely true. And depending on the scale of the video you’re producing, you might get into script writing, etc. and that can be time consuming. But the beauty of a video is that it lasts forever. Job posts disappear in 30 days from a job board, and you have to renew — but videos can last much longer and provide residual, long tail value. This is especially true if you distribute the video intelligently across multiple video sites like YouTube, blip.tv, etc.

     As well, there are ways of producing videos more quickly (and for even less money than a job posting!) You won’t get a very unique video, it might be some still images with voice over in video format, but it can still be effective at providing a rich media experience to candidates.

  4. People are too focused on perfection. I think Dr. Sullivan points this out nicely, “Videos don’t have to be perfect.” (I’m paraphrasing.) I’ve had numerous conversations with employers about how their brand message has to be perfect in the video. And the quality has to be ultra-high too (it has to be high, but you don’t need it to be HD-quality!) The result of this fear - of losing some amount of control and quality over the brand messaging - leads people to demand perfection. And with perfection comes added time, cost and ultimately, inaction.

  Recruitment videos shouldn’t be commercials.

  They’re not perfectly scripted, beautifully perfect, ultra-high quality commercial videos; they’re meant to give people an “inside peek” at a company. The more “real”, the better. The more honest and authentic, the better.

  If someone stumbles on a word during a recruitment video, that’s OK. If the camera shakes a bit, that’s OK. Heck, depending on the type of company, and the brand you’re trying to project, a bit of stumbling and shaking might be perfect!

  Take all the reasons above and summarize them — you end up with employers’ fears that videos won’t be perfect and represent them exactly the way they want in a perfectly controlled environment. And that’s a shame, because no company is perfect, and the result of over-edited and over-polished videos is that they get stripped of real character, spirit and honesty. Guess what? Character, spirit and honest is precisely what candidates want.

  What should employers do?

  For starters, dip a toe into video. Get a camera and try some things out. Don’t worry about perfection. Have some fun. Let employees get involved - don’t make it a “top down” project. Explore your company’s voice. You won’t release every video into the wild, but you’ll learn very quickly what works and doesn’t, and what the “real story” is behind your company. Once you’ve got that real story, promote the heck out of it.

  

  

  August 27th, 2008 · No comments
• Standout Jobs a Finalist in Red Herring Top 50

  Today, Standout Jobs was announced as a finalist for the Red Herring Top 50 in Canada award celebrating the most innovative and promising (private) companies in Canada.

  It’s great to be considered a finalist amongst so many amazing companies. I won’t list them all here (there’s 100 I believe) but if you follow the technology scene in Canada you’ll recognize many of the names. The list goes beyond Web 2.0 startups and includes a lot of companies in other areas of technology, including manufacturing, semiconductors, etc. It’s quite a diverse list of companies, covering various industries and areas.

  Red Herring is putting on an event from September 15-17 which focuses on technology and innovation in Canada. They’ll be naming the Top 50 winners there.

  

  

  August 27th, 2008 · No comments
• How Do You Treat Rejected Candidates?

  HRMToday has a very interesting and amusing story about a rejected candidate that was eventually hired and became a star player. It’s a great anecdote and reminder of a couple things:

  1. We reject too easily.
  2. We always benefit by treating people well.

  Quick Resume Rejections

  The fact is, when resumes start coming in, companies reject quickly. In some cases they have to, because they don’t have the time to really explore each resume. Criteria get setup to reject people quickly - it might be typos in a resume, or missing the magic number of years experience that the job required. I don’t think we can eliminate rejection criteria, although stories like this do give us pause to reflect on whether we owe it to ourselves, as employers, to look at each candidate a bit more thoroughly. I wonder how many more star employees are missed because of hasty rejections?

  Treat Rejected Candidates Well

  You rarely win by treating people poorly. You almost always win by treating people fairly and respectfully. The HRMToday article points out a few reasons why rejection letters are often vague. I understand these points, and I wouldn’t expect most employers to provide detailed rejection letters. Fact is, too many employers don’t even bother with rejection letters at all. Even the simple step of saying, Thanks, but no thanks is too time consuming and difficult for a lot of employers. And that’s a very bad thing.

  I’ve had numerous experiences where I’ve rejected candidates via email only to have them email me back and say, “Thank you. Most companies never respond at all. I appreciate that.” It’s never led me to hire anyone that I’ve rejected, but at least I’m more confident in the idea that the candidate had a decent candidate experience with me as an employer.

  People Talk

  I don’t have the statistics in front of me, but rest assured that people who have a bad experience with your company talk a lot more than those who have a good experience. This is common knowledge when it comes to sales & marketing departments, but too few companies think about this from an HR perspective.

  Treat someone poorly through the application and recruitment process and they’ll talk. More than that, they’re less likely to buy from you. So now you’ve tarnished your corporate brand because your recruitment process sucked. That’s ridiculous, and so easy to fix.

  Just Communicate

  HR is really about sales and marketing. And you can’t market or sell effectively without communication.

  Communication is easy. It’s natural for most of us (we are human after all!) but HR is too often caught up in the day-to-day exercise of “processing applicants.” If that’s all HR is about - moving people through the recruitment process like cattle - then you can be sure that candidates will get frustrated. They’ll tell others. And your corporate and employer brand are tarnished.

  Rejecting candidates is hard. I feel bad when I do it, but you’ll always reject more than you hire. Given that fact, HR should focus on policies that ensure a positive candidate experience for rejected candidates. It starts with simple communication, and can go beyond that.

  For example, could you offer an Amazon.com gift certificate to thank applicants for applying? Or maybe a discount at your store? Or better yet, think viral, and see if you can’t give rejected applicants something they can share with friends … even if they were rejected for employment, they’ll have reasons to speak positively about you to others. That will lead to an improved brand overall, and might lead to new candidates too.

  

  

  August 25th, 2008 · No comments
• Tips on Finding a Job on the Aaron Brazell Show

  On Saturday, August 16th at 9pm EDT I’ll be a guest on the Aaron Brazell Show talking about how to find a job, the state of the economy and other interesting things around social media and leveraging it in the world of employment.

  

  You can listen in (and participate) live here: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/22406.

  You can also subscribe via iTunes.

  Aaron Brazell is a social media guru and most recently was the Director of Technology at b5media.

  The show itself (if you look through the archives) is an eclectic mix of social media, politics, current events and more. There have been quite a few interesting and diverse guests, hopefully I can hold my own!

  

  

  August 14th, 2008 · No comments
• Effective Candidate Source Tracking

  Knowing the source of candidates during the application process isn’t always straightforward. If you’re only posting a job to a couple of job boards it might be easy to understand the ROI from those boards — but what happens when your job finds itself on many more boards, gets picked up properly by Google, bounces through people’s email boxes because of referrals, etc.? It’s not easy to understand how candidates are getting to you and applying…

  Standout Jobs has always tracked referrers, although it’s certainly not an exact science. When possible, we’ll show you the source of each applicant, which makes it very easy to get a sense of where people are coming from, and gauge the effectiveness of your job marketing campaigns.

  Google continues to drive a good number of candidates to our customers’ career sites and jobs. The number of applicants coming through Google is increasing (and we’re seeing very interesting results from other search engines too.) At the end of the day, it’s clear that people are searching on Google for job opportunities. This trend is only going to increase, and it will become more and more critical for employers to be strongly represented in search results.

  With that in mind, we’ve added “Search Term Tracking” to our Source / Referrer tracking. Now when someone comes from Google, you’ll actually be able to see what they searched for — which starts to provide some very interesting data on what people are searching for when looking for jobs, and also how they’re finding you.

  Here’s a screenshot highlighting a Google search that led a candidate to a company’s career site.

  

  Of course, there are more search engines than Google out there, and certainly a ton of job boards with search features. So we’ve made it possible to track the search terms on those as well. If someone is coming to you from Indeed, we’ll show you what they searched. Or SimplyHired, Live, a few niche job boards and more.

  

  

  As companies expand their job marketing efforts - leveraging SEO (search engine optimization), different job boards (large job boards and niche job boards), job aggregators (Indeed, SimplyHired), etc. - it will become more and more important to understand what’s working and what’s not working. And it’s not just about driving traffic, it’s about who is converting, from where and why…and ultimately the quality of candidates applying and where they came from, which allows employers to really understand the value of their job marketing initiatives.

  

  

  August 13th, 2008 · No comments
• Tech Company ADS Uses Career Site to Reach Top Talent

  Founded in 2000 and based in Winter Park, Fl, Atlantic Dominion Solutions (ADS) is a cutting-edge web development firm creating software applications for companies with requirements off-the-shelf solutions can’t address. ADS’ specialty is Ruby and Rails, and advanced computer languages used to program scalable, database-backed applications for organizations of all sizes. As a custom development shop, ADS writes user-centric applications that are deployed quickly and scaled for massive traffic while still being maintained with minimal time and effort. ADS also provides Flex development, web design, and online business strategy.

  CHALLENGE

  ADS is a ‘boutique’ development shop. The developers they hire are experts in their respective fields. Once on board, ADS developers are continually challenged to improve their skills by keeping up with the latest in web development, applying new Rails applications to business problems, blogging about their experiences, and making “screencasts” and “how-to” videos detailing their work.

  As an early stage but growing company, ADS already develops for some of the biggest corporations in the world. Finding talent capable of delivering custom software on time and budget at that level is a continuous challenge, especially given ADS’ location in Florida, well outside of the ”traditional” regional software development hotspots in the U.S. To make it more attractive as an employer, one of the perks ADS offers is a distributed, work from home environment for its team. Although convenient for the employees, the distributed team environment means finding the right cultural fit is as important as finding employees with the right skill set.

  “Success with the job boards was hit and miss,” said Robert Dempsey, founder and CEO, ADS. “We would get people directly emailing resumes to the company and they’d get lost, or fall off the radar while we were involved in a project. Managing the process was very difficult and frustrating. We had better results with recruiters, but outsourcing is expensive. Agencies which source the type of specialized developers we need typically charge 20 to 30 percent of a hire’s salary.”

  SOLUTION

  Dempsey turned to Standout Jobs after watching an introductory video about the company on YouTube. Dempsey quickly created a full Standout Jobs web site showcasing ADS to potential developer candidates from around the world.

  After only fifteen minutes of work ADS had an entire site devoted to branding its openings and company culture. ADS listed its jobs, perks, recent press hits, buzz about the company from around the Web, a Q&A section and even a video starring the employees.

  “One of the great things about Standout Jobs is the ability to pick and choose which job boards we want to advertise on, and manage the process from one central spot. High-value candidates are pulled from relevant locations around the web and brought directly to the ADS career web site,” continued Dempsey. “Some boards are paid and others are free but what’s important to me is the ability to work them from the Standout Jobs control panel. Everything is handled from one spot by the software. That saves me time, which is better used on my clients’ projects.”

  RESULTS

  Using Standout Jobs, ADS has already hired one great Ruby on Rails developer. Typically this would have cost ADS more than $10,000 in recruiter fees, money which can now go back into the business. Additionally, the hired employee immediately began generating revenue.

  Dempsey is enthusiastic about the effect Standout Jobs will have on his future hiring, “I can invite other people from around the company to review applicants’ resumes and profiles,” he said. “I can’t emphasize how important it is to me to be able to manage the entire process from one central location. It’s awesome. We can customize the job web site with anything we want without having to do any specialized development on it ourselves. And, I can have the rest of my team vet potential hires for cultural fit. Using Standout Jobs my company looks like the great place it is to work. No typical web ad or recruiter can convey that feeling to a candidate, and that’s priceless.”

  View the ADS Career Site >>

  

  

  August 11th, 2008 · No comments
• Standout Jobs Adds Search Capabilities to Candidate Tracking System

  A quick feature update for the Standout Jobs employment branding and job marketing platform — you can now search through candidates that have applied. We’ve wanted to add this feature for awhile, because we have a lot of customers who have hundreds of applications, and the need to search through those candidates is important.

  Here’s a screenshot of the basic search. You can search by inputting any string of text (and use double quotes to make the search terms inclusive). The results are extremely quick, and it searches through candidates’ names, cover letters, resumes, other attached files, and any comments that you and your team leave on candidates’ applications. So it’s very thorough in terms of the searching and results it will bring back.

  

  You can also do a slightly more advanced search, specifying the Status and Job. Here’s a screenshot for that:

  

  So there you have it — it’s now possible to search through applications at lightning speed to find the candidates you’re looking for. Enjoy!

  Note: The names you see are fake. We’re not revealing any personal / private data in these screenshots.

  

  

  August 6th, 2008 · No comments
• What are the Big Trends in Recruiting for 2009?

  HR is an industry in considerable flux. Lots of new startups. The bigger companies evolving their strategies. And HR Departments getting up-to-speed on the latest technologies and opportunities in social media and social networking. Out of all the components that make up a business, I’d say that Human Resources is changing the most and has the most room to grow.

  That makes for exciting times, and recently I read Dr. John Sullivan’s thoughts on trends in corporate recruiting for 2009. It’s a great list, and you can clearly see how HR has been moving over the last few years.

  Many of the trends described are precisely the things we saw happening in HR. They led us to formulate our arguments for Standout Jobs, and I think speak well to the opportunities that exist for us and others in the space. I wanted to highlight a few:

  1. Upgrading employment branding. Dr. Sullivan writes, “Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your ‘green’ brand, and countering your ‘negative’ employment brand.”

     I refer to Google a lot when speaking to prospects, customers, investors, etc. They’re the pinnacle of employment branding. They recognized very early on that they had to tell a great story about themselves to attract the best talent. Truth is a lot of companies offer similar perks to Google, but they don’t tell their story well enough. And this problem is exacerbated for smaller organizations that don’t have the resources of Google (or other large enterprises).

  2. Using employee blogs for recruiting. Dr. Sullivan notes, “A practice that is finally beginning to enter the mainstream is employee blogging to support recruiting efforts. The very best firms use blogs not just to spread their message but also to answer questions and to make their company appear more ‘real’ and approachable.”

     Almost every team member at Standout Jobs blogs. Those that don’t are harassed constantly. I know for a fact that our company profile has increased due to our employees blogging, even if they’re not blogging for Standout Jobs or about the company. In the near future I can see us having employees blog specifically about the company and our products. This is great for customer service; because prospects and clients will see us out there communicating. And it’s not hard to do either. Companies need to get past their fears of what employees might say, develop reasonable policies and get writing!

  3. Revitalizing corporate jobs page. Dr. Sullivan writes, “Recruiting managers are beginning to understand that pitifully dull and dated websites drive away innovators. Focus areas include providing personalized information to the visitor, Flash video integration, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Q&As.”

     Regardless of the technology or features of a corporate career site, at the end of the day if it’s dull, boring and lifeless, you’ll lose candidates, and probably the best ones. If there’s no way for candidates to interact, you’ll lose people. If the only action a candidate can take is to apply, you’ll lose people. Forcing a prospect to make a spot decision on whether they should apply or not, without giving them other means to build a relationship is bad news.

     Technologies will change. Features will change. But the basic premise that you need a great-looking and useful career site will not. Here’s a great snippet from one of our recent case studies of HCI, a recruitment firm that uses Standout Jobs to hire for their own needs:

     Hogan notes the candidates coming through the Standout Jobs portal present themselves differently from those coming from other sources. “It’s really obvious that they want to learn more about HCI’s business. They’re better versed, more web savvy, more apt to do the things necessary to brand themselves better to us after seeing the professional level of the HCI site. When our offers are given, people are more likely to accept. Standout Jobs has helped us achieve an overall more polished brand and that makes a difference in the mind of the candidate when weighing offers.”

  4. Using a CRM model for hiring. Dr. Sullivan says, “I’ve been touting the values of the CRM (customer relationship management) model for years. More firms are beginning to understand the value of improving the experience at each ‘touch point’ with the candidate. Key focus areas include relationship recruiting, automated applicant profiling, automated event calendaring, and robust lifecycle metrics.”

     CRM for hiring makes sense because HR is all about people. Employers are people. Candidates are people. Processing applicants as if they were cattle doesn’t help anyone. Employers can’t find the best talent and candidates can’t find the best companies. One of, if not the biggest pain point for candidates is the dreaded “Application Blackhole” — where they apply for a job, never to hear a single peep from the employers. That frustrates candidates to no end, and you can be sure they tell plenty of others about that negative experience.

     CRM for hiring in my mind is about simple communication. Just communicate. Use tools that allow you to communicate more effectively as employers. I’ve spoken to some companies that will always email every candidate, even the ones they’re rejecting. They’ll often hear back from the rejected candidate, along the lines of, “I’m sorry this isn’t a good fit, but thank you SO MUCH for the email back.”

  These trends reflect precisely what we’re trying to do at Standout Jobs, particularly for the SMB market that doesn’t have the budget or resources to execute on sophisticated employment branding strategies, etc. It will be very interesting to see how these trends progress into 2009 and what lies ahead for the Human Resources industry.

  

  

  August 5th, 2008 · No comments
• Recruiting Firm HCI Sources its Own People with Standout Jobs

  HCI (Hogan Consulting Inc.) is a recruiting and retention firm based in Omaha, Nebraska. The company is just a year old but has already grown to open a second office in Sandusky, Ohio. HCI has dedicated itself to helping its clients make better use of talent and technology. To do that, HCI developed a stellar recruiting and staffing team; incubated a talent consulting function; assists clients with technology planning and implementation; offers custom training and integration and prides itself on “practicing what they preach” in bringing innovation to the recruiting industry.

  CHALLENGE

  Although HCI’s core business is sourcing talent for its clients, the company hadn’t implemented a solid recruiting strategy of its own. Competing for good people in the upper Midwest is difficult when prospects are constantly drawn to the more traditional technical capitals on the West and East coasts. HCI’s lack of a formalized process for attracting candidates left the family-owned business constantly short-handed during a critical period of rapid growth.

  “We used all the traditional routes,” said Maren Hogan, managing partner, HCI. “The quality of the candidates coming through the job boards alone was all over the map. Many didn’t have the technology experience we needed. You would think a recruiting firm would do a better job of sourcing its own talent, but we didn’t have a really well-developed process for employer branding and vetting candidates.”

  Additionally, HCI lacked a way to brand itself as a strong, established yet cutting edge company in what is traditionally not known as a tech-savvy part of the country. Creating this image was critical to the success of the firm, as competition is tough enough in a down market and HCI is a small player amongst much larger, national competitors.

  SOLUTION

  HCI wanted to brand itself better to prospective employees, establish collaborative internal processes for moving those candidates through the selection process and portray itself as a larger, more established entity. They turned to Standout Jobs, a leading provider of web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts and its employment branding and job marketing platform for help.

  “Standout Jobs is a ‘quick start for employer branding,’” said Hogan. “We were able to get a fully-functional and professional employment portal up in just a few minutes, with no technical knowledge needed. It does a great job of portraying the company’s culture and has attracted much higher quality candidates than we were previously able to find.”

  Hogan’s well read blog “Big O Recruiting” is a staple of the site, as are the company perks and the “Five Reasons to Work at HCI,” all of which help the company attract high-value candidates looking to find a company with a culture and values similar to their own. Internally, HCI’s executive team use Standout Jobs’ collaborative features to discuss and rate candidates as they come through the site.

  RESULTS

  Since starting with the Standout Jobs employment site, HCI has posted four positions resulting in three great hires. The fourth position was later absorbed into another, resulting in a 100 percent successful hire rate using the Standout Jobs site thus far. Further, Hogan and her partners now have a formalized process for vetting candidates.

  We didn’t use any of the paid job boards, but we did use Standout Jobs to automatically post our positions to the free ones. Candidates who clicked our ad were brought directly to the Standout Jobs portal, where they entered the process and we could work with each other internally on determining whether or not they were a great fit.

  Hogan notes the candidates coming through the Standout Jobs portal present themselves differently from those coming from other sources. “It’s really obvious that they want to learn more about HCI’s business. They’re better versed, more web savvy, more apt to do the things necessary to brand themselves better to us after seeing the professional level of the HCI site. When our offers are given, people are more likely to accept. Standout Jobs has helped us achieve an overall more polished brand and that makes a difference in the mind of the candidate when weighing offers.”

  Using Standout Jobs employment branding and job marketing platform has made HCI more competitive in its market, more likely to be the employer a high-value candidate chooses when they have multiple options, and provides the firm with a formalized solution for internally vetting candidates while saving valuable resources.

  

  

  August 4th, 2008 · No comments
• Standout Jobs Featured on The Talent Buzz

  
  The Talent Buzz is a great blog. Written by Jason Buss, a 10+ year veteran of the HR world, The Talent Buzz goes deep into a number of HR issues. Jason’s done an entire series on career sites and their failings, and ways they should be improved. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the blog from the beginning.

  Recently, Standout Jobs was featured on The Talent Buzz.

  It’s an interview I completed with Jason about myself as an entrepreneur and the state of career sites in general. We didn’t talk a great deal about Standout Jobs; Jason was curious about my view of career sites in general, where online recruiting is failing, and what can be done about it.

  I hope you’ll check out the interview and Jason’s blog.

  

  

  July 28th, 2008 · No comments