Recruiting the Brand

In the annals of corporate retail brands the name 'Air Jordan' resonates.  The iconic basketball shoes named after the legendary NBA star Michael Jordan have endured for over 25 years.Air Jordan I

The first pair of Air Jordans debuted in 1985 and immediately became a market sensation, racking up tremendous sales and spawning dozens of updated versions, which Nike continues to release today.

Fast forward to 2009, MJ the legend is out of the game, but his and the Air Jordan brand's influence on the game continues, sometimes in unexpected and not so positive ways.

Jordan's son Marcus, himself also a basketball player was recruited to play college basketball at the University of Central Florida (UCF).  Marcus accepted the scholarship offer from UCF and is set to begin his college basketball career this Fall.

There was one stipulation from Marcus (and the Jordan family), he would be allowed to wear a current version of the NIke Air Jordan brand shoes for practices and games.  Seems like a reasonable request, if your dad is Michael Jordan you probably should wear Air Jordan gear.  You have to promote the family brand, right?

But the folks at UCF have run into a little problem. The school has a $3,000,000 deal with the rival shoe company Adidas that stipulates that all UCF athletes will compete in Adidas clothing and shoes. The company and UCF are in negotiations to resolve these issues, but as of yet have not reached an agreement.

Marcus, naturally insists one wearing the Air Jordans, and while it is likely that the worst outcome is that UCF will have to pay for all the apparel and shoes for its teams for one year (the current contract with Adidas is set to expire in 2010), there could be more significant repercussions, as Nike has not shown interest in taking over the school's contract which could leave UCF left out of the lucrative 'shoe sponsorship' game for some time.

Whether it is a college recruiting an athlete or a company recruiting a new employee, everyone entering the organization brings with them their experiences, their skills, and more and more their 'personal brand'.  While in the corporate recruiting world, you are not likely to have a candidate demanding to were a particular shoe, it is increasingly likely that a candidate may have a 'brand' of some kind.  Their brand may be expressed with a blog, website, an event they sponsor or speak at, an online radio show, or even some 'on the side' work they do.

Managing the tension and potential conflict between candidates (and even employees) personal activities and brands and the goals and brands of the organization is likely to become a more important skill for companies and managers.  When you are recruiting a new candidate into the organization be aware of their brand and how that might impact the potential employment relationship. 

If the employee has a personal blog, will you encourage them to continue? Or will you try and absorb the blog and ask the employee to 're-brand' to serve more direct company goals?

If they have a personal Facebook fan page or Twitter accounts with thousands of fans and followers will you try to 'co-opt' this for company benefit?

If the candidate or employee is well-known and speaks at multiple events will you support that, or immediately get caught up in attendance, vacation, and expense policies?

Individuals are forced to be far less reliant on organizations for stable employment that many simply must establish their own personal professional identies.  How well companies manage this tension going forward could be a significant factor in attracting and leveraging top talent.

While you ponder these questions - a look back at a classic Air Jordan promo:

HCI Webcast - Tell the Story with Technology

Later on this afternoon I have the great pleasure to co-present an Human Capital Institute Webcast - 'Tell the Story with Technology'.  The webcast is scheduled for Thursday, May 14 at 1:00 pm EDT.

My co-presenter is Jessica Wagner, a former student and now an HR Manager at Klein Steel in Greece, NY.

Jessica gave a great presentation on the innovative use of technology in recruiting by the US Army in my last HR Technology class.

The presentation was so powerful in class, that I tweeted about it the next morning and Amy Lewis from HCI saw the update and was interested, and ultimately this led to the scheduling of this webcast.

For anyone who is interested on the details of how this came about - I blogged about it here.

The Army does some incredible things with technology, and while the webcast platform will not allow us to fully demonstrate the 'coolness' of their approach, I will leave you with an example of what the Army is doing with technology here:  

So if you have a chance at 1:00 PM EDT, stop by, the Webcast is free, just a simple HCI Registration (also free) is needed to view the presentation.

Thanks again, Amy, and HCI for giving myself and Jessica the opportunity to present to your members today.

The Survey Says

Recently, my organization launched a survey of hiring managers and search committee participants that use our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to enter and approve job vacancies, post the vacancies to our corporate job site, and review applications and candidate documents.Flickr - jacorbett70

As we sort of expected, the initial results are less than stellar. Some highlights:

On 'Ease of Use and Navigation', 65% of respondents rated the ATS either 'Below Average' or 'Extremely Poor'.

For 'Overall Look and Feel', 48% of respondents rated the ATS either 'Below Average' or 'Extremely Poor'.

But in answering the question, 'I am getting sufficient qualified candidates for my vacancies', 65% either 'Agreed' or 'Strongly Agreed', with only 24% disagreeing strongly or mildly with the statement.

There are also lots of interesting comments, ranging from the simple, 'I hate it', to the witty, 'I would rather have candidates apply by carrier pigeon'.  There are some positive comments as well, mostly having to do with having all candidate information and documents stored in a central repository and the fact that some internal administrative tasks are now a bit easier.

The survey will stay open for several more days, so it may be premature to draw final conclusions yet, but I think the overall trends and tone of the responses are clear.  But what is not clear to me is what, if anything we should do. 

A majority of users don't like the system, the look and feel, layout etc., but the same respondents indicate that for the most part we are attracting plenty of qualified candidates.  We are making hires.

And since the ATS is a ERP-based package application, there is only so much we can do easily and inexpensively to try and re-architect it to address many of the user concerns. 

I have a feeling it is going to come down to a basic decision between spending time and resources on this 'problem' versus pursuing other initiatives that actually may be more impactful to the organization.

Do we need to 'fix' a system many users don't like, if the end result, finding qualified candidates and making good hires, is apparently not broken?

'Company Name Jobs' - Search!

You are in HR or a hiring manager for the XYZ Company. When was the last time you did a simple Google search for 'XYZ Jobs' or 'XYZ Careers'? Don't lie, I will bet you have not done a search like that for quite a while.  If you haven't for some time, go ahead right now and do the search, I'll wait here until you get back.

Okay, good.  What did you find?  Hopefully for you, your corporate jobs site came back at the top, or at least in the first two or three results on the first page. If your site is nowhere to be found, or is buried in the list and not easily recognizable as your jobs site, you have already, perhaps quite unwittingly put up the first hurdle for your applicants. 

Here is a simple example of two really large organizations, FedEx and UPS, and how they rank with 'Company Name Jobs' searches.

First, take a look at what you find when searching for 'FedEx Jobs'

The link most job seekers are after, is the fifth result down, does not have much descriptive information to clue in the job seeker that it indeed, is the main corporate jobs page. It also has a long and confusing URL that has FedEx's ATS vendor's name (HodesIQ) embedded in the string. Altogether not intuitive and not applicant friendly.

Compare that result to the same search for one of FedEx's main competitors for business and for talent, UPS:

The main corporate job site is the first result, a simple tag line that makes it totally clear what the applicant will find there, and there are sub-links to important parts of the site clearly laid out (Application Center, Job Search).  This is exactly the result you are looking for with a simple Google search on 'Company Jobs'.

The interesting thing is after you find the main careers site for both of these companies, they are really very similar.  They both have the expected employee video testimonials, sections with 'Life at' content, reasonably simple search and application procedures.

They are pretty decent, save for the fact that one of them, UPS, is much, much easier to find quickly in Google search, and the other FedEx is not easy to find at all.

 If you are like most, you spend quite a bit of time on your Corporate Jobs pages, making sure your instructions are clear, your links to benefits information and job listings are working, and maybe even making sure you have some nice employee testimonials and perhaps some cool video.  You may have even partnered with a slick new ATS vendor that has enabled 'social sharing' so visitors to your site can easily share a job listing with their Facebook friends, or LinkedIn contacts, or maybe even send a Tweet with the listing out to everyone's favorite social network, Twitter.

But before you do all that, take a quick look at the simple Google search I described above.  You may be spending time, effort, and budget on sites and systems that many job seekers will have trouble finding.

And if your results are more like FedEx and less like UPS, then do another Google search, for 'Search Engine Optimization', don't worry, you will get tons of hits on that - I promise.

Friend? Follower? Job Opportunity?

It seems like everyone is talking about how organizations can and should be trying to leverage social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter,  particularly for recruiting.  Many professional and corporate recruiters have written reams of white papers, given webinars, and created podcasts that aim to educate organizations on the most effective use of these platforms. But the truth is many corporate recruiters are still not familiar with these tools, and are not utilizing them in their recruiting processes.

Recently a pair of Applicant Tracking System (ATS) vendors announced tighter integration with their platforms and the social networking platforms.  This integration can make it easier for 'slower-moving' recruiting organizations to begin to harness the social networking and social media space.

The first is Jobvite. Jobvite has implemented support for corporate users of the ATS or visitors to the company jobs page to send job information and invitations to apply for specific jobs to contacts in their external social networks.  Similar to the familiar 'Share this' widgets that appear on most blogs and websites, a job listing in Jobvite includes a 'send Jobvite' widget that allows the user to search through Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, e-mail contacts, and also to Twitter, either as a broadcast JobVite via Tivoupdate, or a Direct Message to a follower. 

Another really innovative vendor in this space is Jobs2Web.  Recently I attended a webinar that described in detail how Best Buy has partnered with Jobs2Web to create a different, and better applicant experience.

Jobs posted on a Jobs2Web powered site can also be shared with job seekers E-mail, IM, and social networking contacts.  The 'sharing' widgets are remarkably robust, covering e-mail, IM, social networking, social bookmarking (think Delicious and Digg), as well as most of the popular blogging platforms.  This deep, rich and native integration from the corporate

Jobs2Web via Best Buy

 job site through to numerous and extensive 'public' social platforms is a truly breakthrough piece of technology. Jobvite and Jobs2Web have both delivered impressive functionality that delivers on the true potential of social media and the desire of many HR and recruiting professionals to better leverage this space.

This native integration from these two relatively smaller vendors underscores and emphasizes the significant functional deficiencies in many of the more established enterprise systems, particularly the ATS modules of the major ERP vendors. For example, the ATS module of Oracle's E-business suite, iRecruitment, does not offer social integration, RSS feeds, or support native social bookmarking.  The 'breakthrough' capability is the ability to manually enter a friend's email address to forward a link. 

This was 'cutting-edge' in 2002 maybe, but today it is incredibly substandard.

JobVite and Jobs2Web represent some of the most progressive and innovative functionality in this space, and I would encourage any one looking to improve or enhance their corporate recruitment systems to give them a long look.

Maybe that next Facebook update you see will be a job opportunity from a friend, instead of a friend request from that guy/girl from High School you only half remember.

Update : This 'Tell a Friend' widget from SocialTwist is the same one the is used by JobVite and Jobs2Web on their platforms to enable 'social sharing'.