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.

Social media is a new communication channel which requires new tools for targeted content delivery. On the Web, we would SEO our job postings to get the attention of the right candidates. We would optimize them with keywords, smart URLs, and other techniques to push them to the top of the search results.

On Social Media, the job postings are not found via keyword searching. They are found by sharing, liking, recommending and by other viral actions. To get the attention of the right candidates on social media, job posting needs to be made viral to easily “travel” through social media. Job postings needs to be social media optimized (SMO) to deliver results.

We identified and implemented in Jobmagic the seven steps to make job postings Social Media Optimized:

Social Media-Native Postings – Job postings show natively in Facebook®. People live on Facebook; keeping candidates on Facebook increases the rate of applications by 30–50 %.

Time – Social media brought a new dimension to talent sourcing, the time-line. When and how often you publish has significant importance in attracting the right talent. The fully automated Intelligent Scheduler™ publishes jobs at times when people pay most attention.

Content – Rich content encourages sharing into referral networks. Job postings optimized through Jobmagic’s platform feature a complete company social media footprint, private career micro-site, talent network sign-up and deep employment branding.

Sharing – One-click sharing enables high sharing rates across 300 social media networks.

Engagement – Embedded interactive features such as a company’s YouTube channel and blog increase engagement and make the employment brand memorable.

Visibility – Jobmagic publishes jobs to all social media destinations (e.g. Facebook tab and wall, LinkedIn® status, Twitter account). In addition, the platform uses semantic matching and advanced filtering to send automatic job notifications to well-suited candidates.

Personalization – Personalization gives recruiters powerful competitive advantage in attracting the right talent. Jobmagic’s job postings feature recruiters’ social media profiles and a blog, area of expertise, personalized micro-site and a direct messaging link: “Ask the Recruiter^TM.”

Frank Herbert opened his classic “Dune” with this line: “A beginning is a delicate time.”  That applies to recruiting all the time.  There are few roles out there that require meeting strangers on such a regular basis. In this, and in other areas, we are close cousins to sales people.

It used to be fairly standard. You had a phone, a job order, and some means of keeping notes.  You’d get comfortable with the job order, and compare it to your stack of candidates (back when I started, that was a literal stack – of paper). You’d reach out to the closest matches, discuss the role, and either present them to the client if it made sense, or get referrals from them of people who might be better fits. You’d also be calling people who weren’t active, but that you had some contact with in the past, and asking similar questions. The second bit – the referrals – meant introducing yourself to a lot of strangers.

This still goes on – now it’s a database of people you keep track of, and the way you talk to your network may be as much by phone as it is electronic (from e-mail to DMing on Twitter, etc). The key thing is, when it’s not over the phone or in person, how personal your introduction becomes.  If you approach a stranger and invite them to join one of your social networks, do you use the script that was left in by the service (because, “[a stranger] would like to be in your network” sounds so compelling)? If you don’t, give yourself a pat on the back. If you use the generic intro, stop that.  Seriously – you’re losing a golden time to make a good impression, and increasing your chances of them actually accepting the invite.  Which is kinda the point of the invite going out. Don’t lose all that sourcing time because you didn’t want to spend a minute personalizing.

Now: what about Twitter? It’s easy to follow someone there. If their network’s big enough, they won’t even notice the follow.  Does it make sense to let them know?

That’s murkier. Hardly anyone does it, and it might seem a bit presumptuous, but as a way to get someone’s eyes on you it’s pretty good.  As social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), says: “You should only follow people who you trust, you think are interesting, or that you learn from”.  A quick note to that affect (ie, I think you’re interesting and would like to hear what you have to say) can have high-impact. There’s also a decent chance they’ll follow you back.  Which means they’ll see those nifty social media enabled job postings you’re getting out there…. and spread them across their Twitterverse…

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