Date: Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern / 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Cost: Free
Who should attend: Talent Acquisition Directors and Managers, Corporate and Agency Recruiters; HR Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers; Social Media Managers

Register:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/999653250

Currently, over 85% of companies are using social media for recruiting on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. For a successful social recruiting strategy, it’s important to select the right mix of tools that deliver maximum ROI.

Join Jindrich Liska, CEO of Jobmagic, and learn how Jobmagic’s social media recruiting platform saves you time, money and frustration, while filling your positions and reinforcing your brand.

In this webinar you will learn how Jobmagic can help you to:

• Tap into 750M+ engaged users on Facebook, the largest social network in the world.
• Embed career videos and other interactive brand features in your job postings.
• Empower your employees to drive referral hires.
• Enable recruiters to efficiently leverage their social networks.
• Reach candidates on 300+ social networks with social media optimized job postings.
• Automatically publish jobs to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Accelerate the growth of your qualified top talent pool.

Learn how most admired employers such as Walt Disney, VMware and TJX Companies leverage Jobmagic to hire the best talent. Jobmagic all-in-one platform includes referral hiring, talent network management, automated job publishing and crowdsourcing. Jobmagic is used by companies of all sizes from Fortune 500 to startups, across all industries and by direct employers as well as staffing firms.

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/999653250

Advanced social media tools enable iCIMS’ customers to quickly and easily promote job openings on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

iCIMS, the second largest provider of Software-as-a-Service talent acquisition solutions, has announced a partnership with Jobmagic, a market leader in social recruiting. This partnership solidifies iCIMS’ recruitment marketing practices, bringing enhanced candidate management offerings to the organizations’ 880+ global customer base across three solutions: recruitment marketing, applicant tracking and onboarding solutions.

The platform enables customers to attract and hire high quality candidates from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and several hundred other social networks through the iCIMS Recruitment Marketing solution. There are more than 600 million active users on Facebook and 175 million registered users on Twitter, with 95 million tweets written per day.

“iCIMS’ partnership with Jobmagic is tremendous and marks the evolution of iCIMS’ Candidate Management offering,” said iCIMS’ Chief Strategic Officer Susan Vitale. “We’re thrilled to provide our customer base with the opportunity to accelerate their candidate management practices with social media tools that have the ability to take HR programs to the next level and improve bottom line ROI.”

“Social media has opened the way for companies to recruit unique talent at lower cost per hire,” said Jindrich Liska, chief executive officer of Jobmagic. “Partnering with iCIMS gives customers the competitive advantage of recruiting high quality talent fast.”

The integrated Jobmagic and iCIMS offering enables companies to leverage social media in an easy and cost-efficient way:

• Social media optimized job postings reach large audience on all social networks and the Web.
• Interactive features such as a career video maximizes engagement with company brand and increases the number of applications.
• Fully automated, intelligent scheduler optimizes publishing times for the highest visibility of job openings.
• Deeply branded microsite with advanced search capabilities reaches qualified candidates directly on social media.
• Recruiter and enterprise applications enable referral recruiting on both personal and corporate level.

The iCIMS/Jobmagic relationship enables customers to be competitive, creative and cost-effective as they source, hire and retain top talent. Clients who leverage iCIMS’ platform powered up with Jobmagic’s tools recognize financial savings as well as reporting benefits to the integrated product offering. Offering tools that manage all ends of the talent lifecycle, iCIMS’ Candidate Management and Employee Management Packages are crucial in determining long term strategies and managing all stages of the employee lifecycle including individual solutions for Recruitment Marketing, Onboarding, and Employee Data Management.

I was reading an article on ERE over the weekend by Cyndy Trivella of NAS that got me thinking.  She was taking a look at adoption of social media by larger corporations – speculating why some of them were dragging their feet, and then laying out 5 steps she thinks companies need to go through to make the plunge. I like this line: “I liken this entire process to being on a diet. Even though you know you need one, no one can make you adopt change if you’re not ready.”

It got me thinking. Her last step is about ROI. That’s important. My question (and I’m not quibbling with the article, I happen to agree with it, just expanding a bit) is: do you know what your goal is? Social media’s a great venue for discussion, conversation, recruiting, inbound marketing, etc all, but what do you want to get out of it? Are you looking to burnish your employment brand & increase candidate pipeline? Drive employee referrals? Communicate with your talent pool? All of the above? Whatever it is, make sure you have a solid handle on your metrics from the start. Then track it. If your CFO approaches you and says “Why are you spending money on this?”, it’s a good idea to be able to speak the language of business with him: numbers. Show a rise in traffic, reputation, etc, and you’re good. Tell him “well, we can’t measure it, but everyone’s on it so we should be too” might get you a more negative response.

Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern / 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Cost: Free
Who should attend: Corporate and Agency Recruiters; HR Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers

Register Here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/828962123

Social media created an entire spectrum of new approaches for recruiting the best passive and active candidates. Companies large and small are quickly building their proprietary talent communities on Facebook, tweeting their jobs to multiple Twitter accounts, and searching profiles on LinkedIn. The number of company Facebook pages just surpassed 1.5 million mark and more than 10 million people connect to these pages a day.

The key to the successful social media recruiting strategy is to select the right mix of tools that delivers the maximum ROI across all social media channels.

In this webinar you will learn:

• How to power all your job postings with social media.
• How to accelerate the growth of your talent community.
• How to build and maximize visibility of your social media brand.
• How to automatically publish your jobs to your Facebook profiles and pages.
• How to distribute your jobs to Twitter and LinkedIn contacts and groups.
• How to efficiently leverage your social media footprint in referral hiring.
• How to manage your social media presence effectively.

This Webinar is sponsored by Jobmagic, a social media recruiting platform for automatic job publishing to social media sites, referral hiring and profile-based matching.

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/828962123

I was talking to a group of job seekers yesterday, at a Massachusetts One-Stop Career Centers yesterday (great resource, btw, if you’re looking for work or even considering a move – not your mom parents’ unemployment office by any means). Group ranged from Office Managers to IT Managers to Operations Directors. They were – understandably – very interested in how to connect with jobs. One big take-away as a recruiter is how frustrated applicants are by the proverbial “black hole”. They resent having to spend an hour applying to a job, and never hearing back. One of them said: “I’d even love to just hear a ‘no’. ANYTHING’s better than nothing.”

So – a solution: personalize your job postings. Put a face behind the role. Part of what Jobmagic offers is the ability to do this effortlessly, with our Social Media Enabled Job Postings.

Why open yourself up like that? Simple: you’ll stand out, and build great relationships with the candidate pool. Instead of an anonymous “Click Here to Apply”, they’ll feel there’s a live person, a partner they can connect with. One click and they can apply to the recruiter – even if they don’t fit the role at hand, they’re now in your circle of talent. Sometime, you may have work for them.  On top of that – it builds your brand as a professional in the recruiting field.

How’s it work:

• Express Apply: one click and their resume is on it’s way to you. Which is good: under the traditional model, 1/3 of applicants quit the application process because it’s too much bother.
• Ask the Recruiter: Employment branding matters. You’re a big part of it – get yourself out there, it’ll do you good.
• Social Media Profiles: Candidates will ask to join your network. Which is a lot easier than chasing them.
• Connect to Facebook: Facebook is the hub for the digital lives of most people. Your company’s brand needs to be there – and, so does your career site. Allow job seekers easily connect to your company on Facebook. We’ll create that presence as well as a micro-site of your career site. Fully searchable. Deeply branded.
• Sharing: One of the benefits of social media is sharing information. Jobmagic job postings are native to social media and set up to be shared. As a matter of fact, Jobmagic postings are shared 7 – 10x more than traditional postings. Consider this “tell your friends” feature.

So, what are you waiting for? Come get social.

I was thinking about the line from Field of Dreams “If you build it, they will come”.  For those of you too young to remember (or if you were living under a rock in the late 80′s/ early 90′s), the line refers to a ghostly voice instructing Kevin Costner’s character to build a baseball field in his corn field.  Which somehow summons the Chicago Black Sox (who happen to be dead – no, it’s not a zombie mashup, although that would have been kind of cool).  The point is, he built something amazing, and a whole team full of talent showed up.

Here’s my question: if you’ve build an amazing company/ product/ ball field in your cornfield, who’s going to make sure the team hears about it? They may be wandering around in the corn, but not know they way – or even be aware you exist.  You need the pull that Costner’s field had: something so desirable, so magical, that they couldn’t help themselves.  Get a great employment brand going, and the birds in the cornfield will be singing your praises. And that, my friend, will be how they know enough to come join your team.

I was reading a great post by Mark Williams (aka Mr. LinkedIn) about the impact of the rise of the internet on recruiting.  His perspective: the ease of finding candidate’s via keyword matches through search engine strings has eroded what had once been one of the core skills of recruiters.

What’s the skill? Knowing your candidates.

This may seem trite to younger recruiters (egads I feel old all the sudden… btw, this is Martin – hi).  Mark’s got a serious point, though, and you it’s one that can impact your ability to succeed, up market as well as down.  If you started out when the name of the game was high-volume hiring (ie, real-estate boom times), and learned to lean solely on sourcing via the Web after you had a job order in hand, you may well be suffering now.  Here’s why: recruiters can still make money in a down market.  The trick is that your value prop has to be deeper than “I can get you 20 Java developers with Hadoop on their resume”.  You need to sell impact.

Impact – in a recruiter-to-client context – boils down to this: every placement you make should be someone who impacts the success of the client more than anyone else they could have hired.  In a down market like we’re in now, every hire becomes massively critical because companies need to get maximum value from every investment they make.  If you approach a client (or prospect) and can honestly say: “I know someone who is best-of-breed at [insert title here], is having a major impact at their current employer, but is passively looking. They’re not open to just anything, but we have a fantastic relationship and they’ve asked me to contact them if I know of something particularly interesting. Should I give them a ring about you?”  they’re probably going to say yes.

You don’t get to sell that type of relationship unless you can deliver on it. You don’t build that type of relationship through sourcing. You build it (get this) by building it. Proactively.  By getting to know the person, gaining their trust, and staying in touch without being a pest.

This is probably one of the best parts of social media from a recruiter’s perspective: you can build those relationships much more quickly than I could back when I started (ie: phone + blue cards + pen), and maintain them at a much more efficient level. Automatic birthday reminders. The ability to quickly comment on someone’s status. Sharing jobs to your network. Growing your proprietary talent community.  On and on.

Know thy candidate, people.

From a Skype conversation Jindrich and I had about a candidate…
[5:29:49 PM] Jindrich Liska: Love the post!
[5:29:52 PM] Martin Burns: Cool!
[5:30:06 PM] Martin Burns: Just sent you a guy on LinkedIn – don’t know him, but he’s interested in the job
[5:30:09 PM] Martin Burns: sales, that is
[5:30:48 PM] Jindrich Liska: Thanks! the  magic of social media – the way it was meant to be
[5:31:19 PM] Martin Burns: absolutely. I put up a post on LinkedIn that fed to Twitter & Facebook.
[5:31:31 PM] Martin Burns: One of my followers retweeted
[5:31:37 PM] Martin Burns: He reached to me on Twitter
[5:31:45 PM] Martin Burns: And then sent me his LinkedIn profile
[5:32:01 PM] Martin Burns: And we’re talking about him on Skype
[5:32:02 PM] Martin Burns: awesome

Anyone who’s been involved in hiring – from either the candidate, or the recruiting side of things – has at some point encountered a shared frustration: “Why is this so (expletives removed) hard?”

It shouldn’t be.  From what I’m told, it used to be as simple as walking into a store with the help wanted sign in hand and saying you were their new clerk, or going with Uncle Wally to his club and meeting your new boss.  Kind of like a scene from Mad Men, minus the smoldering looks and innuendos.  Granted, those were the days when you’d work at that company until you retired with the gold (likely plated, but still…) watch.  Lower turnover meant companies could spend less time constantly interviewing, and the same went for their employees.

The downside was that you could get stuck – either with a job you hated, or a sub-par employee.  The new economy changed that – for better and for worse.  The upside is mobility.  The downside is… mobility. Constant job posting. Dialing candidate after candidate.  Applicants complaining of black holes when they sent their resumes in.

Soooo…. huzzah for social media. The days of clubby networking meetings, or just walking in the door with that sign in your hand may be gone, but Web 2.0 has brought the best part of that spirit back. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are returning recruiting back to what it should be: conversations with interesting people about opportunities.  Only the clubs are international, and the meeting rooms are everywhere & can include anyone.

Social clubs on steroids, in other words.