The Undercover Recruiter

How to Build an Active Candidate Sourcing Strategy [6 Key Tips]

When it comes to candidate sourcing, the conversation of passive vs active candidates feels like it’s been done to death. As Greg Savage pointed out in his blog post “There’s no such thing as a passive candidate”, there are no passive or active candidates…there are just candidates. Most people, if offered a great job would be open to listening to what you have to say.

The question should really be; does your business have a passive or an active sourcing strategy?

Don Charlton, the CEO and Founder of The Resumator, outlined some great tips and tricks in a recent webinar about building active sourcing strategies.

How do you know if your sourcing strategy is passive? Well ask yourself some of these question:

Do you post jobs as standard on job boards or LinkedIn and just wait for candidates to apply?
Are you or your recruiters spending their days trawling through hundreds of average CV’s with no time to actively source candidates and/or build talent pipelines and communities?
Do you tweet a job once and then if there’s no response, decide that it doesn’t really work?
Do the candidates in your recruitment database just sit there whilst more and more are added?

If you answered yes to most of these questions, then yes you have a passive sourcing strategy!

Being a passive organisation when it comes to sourcing great talent, is never going to provide you with the best outcome or hit the mark at hiring the best in the business. You’ll always be hiring the best candidates out the talent that saw your ad but not the best talent in the market.

Here are 6 ways to ensure that your sourcing strategy is ACTIVE and that people… namely candidates, are talking about you, your business and your jobs! [Read more...]

Suzanne Chadwick

Suzanne is the Digital & Sourcing Innovation Manager for HudsonRPO, AsiaPac ~ Working with organisations to develop targeted sourcing, social recruiting & engagement strategies to meet business needs.

Filed Under: Employer Branding, Hiring, Recruitment, Social Media, Social Recruiting, Sourcing Tagged With: candidate, candidates sourcing, Employer Branding, how to build a sourcing strategy, How-To, Networking, recruitment, social recruiting, Sourcing, sourcing strategies

How to Share Your Jobs on Social Media [Top Automation Tools]

For most recruiters these days, it’s important to maintain at least a LinkedIn or Twitter presence. However there is no doubt that managing multiple ACTIVE social media accounts is time consuming. Sharing open jobs across different sites with regular updates can often take so much time that there’s not enough opportunity to engage and talk to the people within your network, much less pick up the phone and call people.

Although you should never automate all of your social media activities, automating some aspects can help make your online efforts more efficient and effective in the long run.

The simplest way to automate your social profiles with your latest job posts is by using RSS feeds. RSS is simply a format for delivering regularly changing web content without asking users to visit the website regularly or signing up to a newsletter. Most websites will have an RSS feed functionality built-in. If you’re unsure, just look for the orange button with the radiating white lines. The functionality is not just for candidates who want to subscribe to the latest jobs from your company, but can also be used to supercharge your recruitment initiatives. [Read more...]

Maebellyne Ventura

Maebellyne Ventura is a digital marketing professional within the recruitment industry. She is also one of the founders of Clever Biscuit, a young start-up creating simple and innovative products. Follow Maebellyne on Twitter @Maebellyne.

Filed Under: LinkedIn, Productivity, Social Media, Social Recruiting, Twitter, Uncategorised Tagged With: How-To, LinkedIn, Recruiter, social recruiting, tips, Twitter

Beginner’s Guide to FREE Social Media Monitoring Tools

For a significant amount of money, there’s a raft of social media monitoring/listening tools that are currently available. However, if you are a small brand with a limited budget, what options are available to you? Outlined below are several free online monitoring tools available in the market.

What exactly does social media or brand monitoring entail? Simply put, this involves scouring the internet for any mentions or links regarding your tool, brand or service with the intent of addressing any concerns or questions that your users might have as well as an opportunity to gather valuable insight.

To effectively monitor your brand online, you must pick the most relevant keywords applicable to you. This is easy enough if you have called your company or service something quite unique, however you also need to be aware of any dimunitive forms or other keywords that users tend to use online in association with your brand. For example, the Haloid company were the first people to introduce a desktop copier into the market which took off with great success. If they only monitored the keyword “Haloid” they would have missed the fact that most of their consumers actually referred to them as “Xerox”, after their most popular product. (They later changed the company name from Haloid to Xerox.)

We at Clever Biscuit launched a free recruitment sourcing tool a few months ago called Recruitin. To monitor the online chatter following our launch, I monitored 4 keywords, “recruitin”, “#recruitin” and “recruitin.net”, as well as our company name “CleverBiscuit”. It’s important to note that for a word like “recruitin” there will be a significant amount of noise as it is often used instead of “recruiting”. Hence, you need to be aware of the different contexts that your keywords will appear in and recognise which ones apply specifically to you.

1) Twitter

If your brand has a social media presence, Twitter.com is generally the first place you will look at to find out what people are saying about you. You can monitor keywords using the search function and scan all tweets that contain the keywords you need. Twitter will allow you to save your searches and even embed the stream on a webpage. As you look through your search results, make sure you have selected “All” tweets to see all the results as the default setting will only show the top tweets.

2) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is probably the easiest way of monitoring several streams of keywords simultaneously. By connecting your Twitter and Google+ account, you can assign a search term for each stream and monitor the feed accordingly. It’s up to you how you organise your keyword streams but the easiest way would be to create one tab for each social network and then create one stream for each keyword. Hootsuite currently allows upto 10 streams per tab.

From your Hootsuit dashboard you can then respond to any status updates that you want by replying to the posters, retweeting them or simply following them. You can also gather insight into which users are influential, judging by how many times their posts are retweeted or shared.

3) LinkedIn Signal

Using LinkedIn Signal, you can search all user updates for mentions of your brand or keywords. From the search bar, all you need to do is select “Updates” from the dropdown menu and you’re on your way. As with other sites, LinkedIn will allow you to saved your serch for future use as well as applying filters to narrow down your results.

In the screenshot below, you will see that the results contain updates that link to Recruitin.net directly as well as a link to any blog posts that mentioned our tool which have been shared on the network.

The results will also show you if anyone within an individuals’s network has liked or shared an update about you. This is especially useful information as you can use this to generate leads and establish connections with individuals who have already bought into you brand.

Within the results you can also see if people have shared a story about you within a particular LinkedIn group that you may not have known about. In most cases, you can easily access the group and the specific discussion around your brand. Depending on the nature of the group you should try to join it and establish a direct connection with your users who can provide more feedback and insight.

4) Topsy

Topsy is a free tool that offers social insight. By searching for your brand keyword or domain, Topsy will show you status updates or tweets that mention you or link to your domain from different onlince sources. You can then set up an email alert or RSS feed subscribing to the latest search results.

Bloggers will typically promote articles they have written using Twitter. Topsy scans those tweets and then leads you to the original blog post talking about your brand. By following the post, you can join the conversation in the comments section or simply add it to your press cuttings for future reference.

It is generally difficult to scan Facebook for mentions of your brand in the updates as most people will keep their statuses private or only accessible by their friends. However, there is a significant number of people who cross-post their updates between Facebook and Twitter. Topsy will also lead you to those Facebook pages where possible.

Alternatively, you can also use Topsy to monitor how many people are tweeting about your company’s blogposts or domain and group them accordingly for ease of use. From the screenshot below, you can see that the most recent tweet containing “http://recruitin.net” was from 2 days ago and that to date, the link has been shared on the network 224 times. Topsy will also highlight individuals who are “influential” within the network.

You can also use Topsy to scan Google+ although the tool is still currently in beta mode.

5) Google Alerts

Possibly the simplest alert system there is. You can subscribe to Google Alerts which will send you updates via email from the web, news, blogs, etc. that mention or point to your keywords. You can easily manage the number of sources and frequency of the updates you receive. Alternatively, you can always opt to receive the updates via RSS.

6) Google Analytics

For Recruitin, people generally share the link to the tool within their network as opposed to simply mentioning the name in passing. If people are purposely sharing your website, you can simply go into your Google Analytics account and from the list of referring sources, find out where people are sharing your web address.

By following the links, you might find new blogs or forums that link directly to your site and consequently support your offsite SEO strategy.

7) Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz

If you don’t have access to your domain’s Google Analytics account you can use Open Site Explorer to check what sites are linking to your company domain. You can search up to 3 domains per day for free and by filtering the results for inbound links to you root domain, you will see how many sites are linking to you. You can then simply follow the links to find out what they are being used for and consequently, what they are saying about you.

8. Google Search

Finally, nothing beats a traditional Google search of your brand or company name. It’s a manual and laborious task to search through the dozens of pages that appear in the search results. However, by going through the list of results one by one, you might find a niche forum or site mentioning you which you otherwise would not have known about. This is especially helpful if your product appeals to a spcecific group who are not active on large social networks.

This is just a broad overview of tools available to monitor your brand’s online presence. Generally, each social network or forum will allow you to search within the site for occurrences of your keyword or brand name. It’s up to you to decide how relevant this is to your strategy and whether there is any value in following the conversations within smaller networks.

Remember that social media monitoring is just that, monitoring online conversations. The primary goal is to gather insight about how people perceive your brand or utilise your services. Unless there is an intrinsic value in joining a conversation that you did not facilitate yourself, it is probably best not to jump in aggressively. Respond according to the nature of the conversation. After all, it only takes one knee-jerk response to an unfavourable comment or an unflattering blogpost to unravel your entire social media strategy and plunge you into a media disaster.

By regularly checking in on the onine conversations around your brand, it would make it easier to avoid a media disaster as well as making sure that your brand is truly engaged beyond just maintaining a set of social media profiles.

photos by: shawncampbell & meneame comunicacions, sl

Maebellyne Ventura

Filed Under: Branding, Business, Employer Branding, Google, LinkedIn, Reputation, Social Media Tagged With: alerts, analytics, Google, How-To, online branding, online reputation, recruitment agency, Social Media, tips, Twitter

How to Sell Yourself Effectively in an Interview

sell yourself interviews It is easy to have a casual attitude towards interviews, particularly if you have attended many in the past. However, you may find this isn’t working anymore. Why?

The jobs market has changed drastically since the recession forcing recruitment to take a new form. Of course, CVs are still the backbone of any job application, but there are also ways in which to stand out amongst other candidates when it comes to your interview. First impressions count and you will get a very small window to show off what you can offer.

This is why it’s important now more than ever to learn how to ‘sell yourself’ as effectively as you can. Think of it as if you were selling a product to a customer in a store. Remember to keep in mind what you are selling, who you are selling to, and what the unique selling point is.

What are you selling?

Remember that in this situation it is yourself that is the product up for grabs. You want to highlight your strengths to maximise the conversion rate, like you would do if you were selling an item on eBay.

So, how do you make yourself look as good as possible? Firstly ensure that you have the correct qualifications needed for the position. It is true that more employers are looking for people with experience, but for many academic careers, a minimum educational level is a must. If you don’t have the formal qualifications to argue that you’re knowledgeable on a topic, why do you think you’d be good for this position? Make sure you have adequate experience to make up for this.

Alternatively, turn to the internet. There is a wealth of free information online, so although you may not have the means to attend an education establishment, it doesn’t mean you can’t advance your knowledge.

In terms of experience, get out there and get some! It’s important to bear in mind that employers will consider your past performances as an indication of your potential future accomplishments.

Phil McCabe of the Forum of Private Business lobby group has stated that the education system doesn’t produce the right level of work-ready young people.

More than one million 16-24 year olds are now unemployed in Britain and study after study has shown that employers would rather hire someone with some work experience under their belts, than a degree.

If you’re new to the jobs market, try some unpaid work experience. The fact that you have sacrificed your time and money to advance your career prospects speaks volumes to an employer. They don’t always want the finished package. They want someone who will develop and grow within a company. If this is you, state it explicitly in an interview. The employer will be impressed at your straightforward approach and willingness to progress.

What’s most important to a company is proven results. Whether you get this from a previous job or from an unpaid internship, it doesn’t matter. Better yourself, not just for the interview, but for you career in the long term.

Who are you selling to?

Make sure you research the market you are looking to enter. The majority of interviews fails due to a lack of preparation or because of nerves. Kill two birds with one stone here by over-preparing. If you are well researched, you will come across as more confident.

Also think about how you match up against their criteria? Is it a small business? If so, they may want someone who can multi-task and take on more responsibilities from the beginning.

If there is a minimum requirement for the position, then it would be necessary to make sure you pay attention. Recruiters prefer when their instructions are followed. Saying this, if you feel you have ways to make up for a lack of experience, for example, make this clear in your covering letter, and it’s worth a shot.

One way to stand out in your interview is through questions. Look through the job description and other company literature to find relevant questions you could ask.

This shows enthusiasm and confidence. If you ask about the company’s plans, it shows you are thinking about long term plans. Furthermore, asking questions in reference to their website, or business strategy, or press they have received, is evidence that you’ve done your home, and makes a fantastic first impression. You’d be amazed how many people don’t research prior to interviews. Make sure you’re not one of them.

What’s the USP?

Put yourself in the position of the interviewee. What is it that you offer that someone else can’t? They might see a large number of candidates in one day, so find a way to be memorable, whilst professional.

When discussing experience, you don’t always have to reference an employment example. Perhaps an unusual hobby of yours has given you some desirable skills for the job.

There are three Ps to think about when it comes to your USP: Performance (what have you achieved so far in your career?), Potential (what are you capable of in the future?), and Perseverance (enthusiasm can speak volumes).

Go through these prior to the interview and think of evidence where you have shown these traits. If you have any documentation or a portfolio to back it up, always bring it with you.

But most of all, relax and be yourself. Just because the situation is formal, doesn’t mean you can’t be cheerful. Most people are so nervous, showing your smiley bubbly side could be the easy solutions to stand out amongst the crowds.

Guest post written by Bev James from The Coaching Academy.

photo by: gcoldironjr2003

Guest Blogger

This post is written by a guest blogger. If you are interested in submitting a guest post, check out our Guest Post Guidelines - we look forward to hearing from you!

Filed Under: Interview Tips Tagged With: How-To, interview, Interviewing tips, interviews