In our industry, there is no bigger elephant in the room than the Job Description.  Yes, they are poorly written, but that’s just the start.  Even the most well written job description will not solve the problem. 

To understand why, you must take a step back and look at the big picture.

What is a Job Description?  In short, it is an advertisement.  In fact, it is the primary instrument used by organizations to advertise their job opportunities. Yet, for no reason other than tradition, job descriptions are not treated like other advertisements.

Creating a Job Description Advertisement

To create a Job Advertisement, you need to treat your unique job opportunity like a product.  As with product advertising, steps include: 

1. Identify your target audience
2. Identify benefits (not features and functions)
3. Maximize reach, frequency, and impact

Every job opportunity has a compelling story.  No matter the title, it is the right job for someone.  You need to identify your target audience and understand what benefits that audience will find compelling. 
Why will this job make someone happy? 

• Life-style
• Unique culture
• Personal fulfillment
• Rewards to help achieve personal goals

Having identified your target audience and compelling story, you are now ready to send your message to the masses.

Advertising Success = Reach x Frequency x Impact

It is always nice to simplify a complex operation into a little formula. Of course, it’s easier said than done. To understand the formula, we will start with definitions:

• Reach is the number of unique individuals exposed to a particular advertisement over a certain period of time.  To maximize reach, identify key channels such as job boards, social sites, or career fairs.  Also, you can capture the most number of candidates interested in your brand by creating a talent community.  The best tool to do this is find.ly.
• Frequency is the average number of times a person is exposed to your advertisement.  To maximize frequency, you must reengage candidates interested in your brand.  This is best accomplished using CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) tools. Some of the more popular applications include Jobvite Source, Avature, First Advantage, and Jobs2Web.
• Impact is the effectiveness of the advertisement. A campaign with an effective message will deliver impact by increasing the percentage of viewers who will respond to your “call to action.”

Measuring Reach and Impact

If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter account, you should take advantage of the “Job Analytics” tool to help measure the reach and impact of your job postings.  It will give you statistics across all of your job postings and on an individual job basis.

To access the tool, select menu item “Reports” and then “Job Analytics”.  To measure “Reach”, select one of your jobs.  On the right side of the screen, you will see the Activity Summary section.

In this example, we first posted the job on March 9th and it has been viewed by 658 people.  That is our “Reach” number.  It is interesting to note the gradual decline in views since it was first posted.  We can look at how many people responded to the “call-to-action” (apply here…) by clicking on the “Applies” tab.  With 80 people having applied to the job, we can calculate that our “Impact” is 12%.

The Job Analytics tool has many other features.  If you don’t currently use it, spending time to learn will return great dividends.

More on the Subject

To learn more about the subject of Job Descriptions Advertising and Business to Talent (“B2T”) Marketing, see our white paper, “Tips from the Mad Men”.  You can access our white papers here: 

http://www.allegisgroupservices.com/thought-leadership/white-papers.aspx

Parting Question

We will reveal the final piece of the puzzle in a future blog posting.  Until then, we ask this question and invite your comments.

What is the difference between a real advertisement and a traditional job advertisement?

Can you believe it’s already time to come up with a New Year’s resolution again?  Personal resolutions come and go, especially if they contain the word “gym,” but commitments you make for organizational change can’t slip.  Does your recruiting department need a New Year’s resolution?   Not sure?  Ask which model most accurately describes your recruiting department?

Reactive recruiting

Holistic recruiting

• Anticipates talent needs based on workforce planning    
• Talent network oriented
• Sustained talent pipeline for difficult jobs 
• Short time to fill

The biggest difference between these two models is in the result.   Reactive recruiting attracts people who need a job.  Holistic recruiting attracts high potential employees with the skills and career goals that match the trajectory of your organization.

These steps will help your recruiting department adopt a more holistic approach in 2012 and beyond:

1. Workforce Planning

Workforce planning must start at the leadership level.  The purpose is to align the workforce with the organization’s objectives and growth plans.  It is a complex subject that cannot be fully outlined in this space, but the key elements that will affect your Talent Acquisition strategy are:

• Build a competency model for each title/function
• Measure your current staff against that model
• Perform a gap analysis

Too often, competency models focus only on skills, but it should also include knowledge and attributes relevant to your culture.  For example, someone might have the right skills for a job but their work ethic does not fit your performance culture.

2. Interview Planning

The work you put into the competency model feeds into the interview questions that should be covered for each title/function.  Questions should measure specific performance indicators (skills, knowledge, and attributes).   Each interviewer has a specific role based on her/his area of expertise.  Interviewers communicate results on a scorecard; rating candidates based on specific performance indicators.

3. Candidate Sourcing Strategy

Despite the high national unemployment rate, qualified candidates for skilled positions are harder to find than ever.  Whether you are recruiting for an HVAC technician or a Software Architect, a dynamic sourcing strategy is required.  Consider the following to develop your sourcing strategy:

• Identify positions to focus on.  Which positions have the longest time to fill?  Which positions have the highest turnover?  What skills are required?

• Competitive intelligence.  Who are your talent competitors?  What organizations should you target?

• Talent communities.  Where do these people congregate?  What social networks are most often used by target candidates?  Can you expand outreach to additional communities such as diversity, disability or veteran candidates?

• Recruiting channel options.  What is the most effective way to reach candidates?  The channel options are many:

• Job boards such as Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Workopolis
  - Job aggregators such as indeed and simplyhired
  - Search engines such as Google and Bing for “X-Ray searches”
  - Social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter
  - Employee referral programs, a great benefit that helps keep your cost per hire down.
  - Candidate referral tools such as Jobvite and Wildhire
  - Campus recruiting
  - Career fairs
  - Trade associations Many associations will allow you to post your job for free. 

4. Build a Sustained Talent Pipeline

Reducing time-to-fill (TTF) is one of the main benefits of a holistic approach.   The key to reducing TTF is in the development of a true talent pipeline.  Starting from scratch every time a new requisition opens can only lead to frustration.  Holistic recruiting builds a talent pipeline by interacting with talent communities on a sustained basis.  To do this, you need a communication strategy focused on engaging candidates in a two-way dialogue.  It is not about advertising!   Instead, you ask how the talent market currently views your organization and what elements make it a unique and exciting place to work.  You then develop integrated campaigns targeting prospective candidates and former employees.  Candidate Relationship Marketing (CRM) tools such as Avature, Jobvite Source, Find.ly and Jobs2Web can help automate the process. 

5. Recruitment Team of Brand Ambassadors

Recruiters are a quirky bunch and asking them to change is easier said than done.  The transformation from a reactive mindset to a holistic approach requires a significant cultural shift.  Developing a recruitment team of brand ambassadors does not happen overnight.  This struggle has led many organizations to adopt a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) solution.  The best RPO providers have helped clients make the transformation many times over.  It does not require drastic steps and layoffs, just expertise and committed leadership.

In last week’s blog post I made the case for the decline of LinkedIn’s effectiveness. Now that the selling of LinkedIn’s premium services has led to an over-saturation of InMails, recruiters must be more strategic. Here are some suggestions.

STRATEGY

A Recruitment 2.0 strategy requires that companies build and maintain talent communities. A talent community is a network of people engaged in a many-to-many dialogue based on trust and collaboration.  Most often, they are centered on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.  Some examples of tools which can help build talent communities include:

• TalentReef is a tool that helps you compete better for top talent by promoting your employment brand and delivering a better candidate experience using social networks, video, and other rich media. TalentReef has an interesting social recruiter test. Visit TalentReef and take the assessment.
• Find.ly’s “Talent Hive” allows users to follow the careers of people interested in working for their company. The tool helps employers maximize their recruitment investment and dramatically improve their sourcing efficiency. By harnessing all the touch-points employers generate with potential candidates: on their career websites, in job postings on job boards, on Facebook and in other social media and recruitment technology platforms, Find.ly makes candidate interaction and targeting simpler and easier. Learn more about the find.ly Talent Hive.
• Avature is an enterprise CRM built for recruiting. The tool has a highly flexible system that lets users design a multitude of unique programs to enhance their Talent Strategies. Dashboards and Interactive Portals help you to redefine hiring manager relationships and upgrade the candidate experience. Avature harnesses the social web by taking advantage of the explosion of public information. Users can source, connect, and stay connected to the right people. The system features, web 2.0 tools, such as Tags, Journals, Chat, and multiple portals and landing pages, to enhance the user experience.
• Jobs2Web offers a single solution to managing recruiting channels including search engines, social networks, employee referrals, past applicants and recruiter networks. Their Recruitment Marketing Platform strengthens the possibilities from these channels while simplifying the complexity.  With additional Targeted Recruiting Solutions, Jobs2Web helps clients leverage the Platform to meet their unique strategic goals.
• Jobvite is a recruiting platform that delivers real-time recruiting intelligence with web 2.0 technology. Their recruiting software solutions combine traditional hiring methods with the extended reach of today's social networks. 
• WildFire:  integrates with any ATS solution, providing a comprehensive recruitment marketing platform that will help you launch, measure and improve your job web- based job campaigns.

These solutions are effective in sourcing and maintaining a talent community, but they have some weaknesses.  The main issue is that it takes time to build a talent community with the critical mass needed to fill your jobs.  You should not expect to see real returns for several months, at least.   Also, the tools listed above are not free and some are quite expensive.

This leads to the obvious question, what do I do if I have to fill a critical job NOW?   The fastest and most effective results will come from posting your job on professional association web sites.  These are ready made talent communities, so take full advantage of them.

FREE

The best part about these sites is that they are usually free.  If the national organization site charges a fee, try the local chapter.  Here are some examples:

• If you want to find a Project Manager, there is no better place to look than the Project Management Institute.  The national web site charges $395 for a single posting, but it’s free at your local chapter.  For examples, see the San Francisco or New York City chapter.
• If you need to hire a User Interface Designer, there are several good associations to choose from.  Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) charges $100 per posting, but the Austin UPA chapter lets you post for free.  The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) charges $265 per posting, but it is free at the San Francisco and Austin chapters. 
• If you need to hire a Business Continuity Professional, there are a couple of good sites.  Both are free and have a national reach:  The Disaster Recovery Institute and Disaster Recovery Journal.

Just ask a hiring manager what associations candidates are likely to belong to. With a little research, you will be surprised how many free options are available. You can also post job descriptions for free on most LinkedIn Groups, but you will need to be a member of the group first.

We are interested to hear what Association or other niche web sites our readers use to post jobs.  Please let us know in the Comments section and we’ll publish the results at a future date.

LinkedIn is not what is used to be. Its effectiveness as a recruiting tool, measured by response rate per InMail sent, has decreased over time. What is a recruiter to do?

In the wake of LinkedIn's highly successful IPO, it is hard to find anyone who will make a negative statement about the company. In fact, a blogger on Forbes.com even claimed that LinkedIn is about to put job boards (and resumes) out of business. Whether that is true or not, we cannot debate how important the business-oriented social networking site has become to the recruiting world. A recruiting strategy for an experienced/skilled position must certainly start with LinkedIn. No single web site can approach its impact. In fact, according to a recent study by Jobs2Web, Inc., LinkedIn is six times more effective than traditional job boards such as Monster or CareerBuilder.



Given all of the positive press, you might wonder why this blog opened the "not what it used to be" comment. LinkedIn claims communicating through LinkedIn makes you 30 times more likely to get a response. That might have been the case in the past, but I'm skeptical about today. Three years ago, the number of companies and people paying for a premium service such as LinkedIn Recruiter was far lower than the number of premium users today. Back then, it was still kind of cool to get an InMail, so people were more likely to reply. However, based on conversations with candidates, the success LinkedIn has had selling premium services has led to an over-saturation of InMails. They just don't have the same caché anymore. As a result, recruiters get fewer replies. How should a recruiter, who is charged with filling potentially hundreds of jobs, maintain her effectiveness? I put together a strategy and list of tools, both paid and free. Log back on to the AGS blog next week and check out part two of Recruitment Strategy Beyond LinkedIn - Building & Maintaining the Talent Community.

DECLINING EFFECTIVENESS