TalentVine - Combining Old and New

Quick - what source has consistently been demonstrated to be most organization's best source of good, qualified candidates?

No, it is not Craigslist.

Of course it is employee referrals. But you knew that.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Here is another question - what has been for the last two or so years been the most talked about, dissected, and analyzed development in corporate recruiting?

No, it is still not Craigslist.

It's 'Social Recruiting'.  Broadly defined as leveraging the wide variety of social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (as well as others), to advertise jobs, define and communicate the employer brand, to develop communities of potential candidates, and to help build a robust pipeline of talent.

But unlike employee referrals that have a track record of delivering good candidates and high performing employees, in many respects the jury is still out on social recruiting. Just as many well-made arguments can be made advocating its adoption as a necessity for the modern recruiter as can be made that is not much more than a fad, and the buzz will eventually wear off, and recruiters will return their focus to strategies that have previously been shown to work effectively.

Like employee referral programs.

What I like about TalentVine, a new product from SelectMinds, is that it builds upon and improves a traditional employee referral program by introducing highly configurable and powerful integration with social networks.  

Essentially here is how the solution works:

1. Available positions are scraped from the company website (or other sources) into TalentVine.

2. Automated and ad-hoc email notifications are sent to current employees informing them of specific jobs that they may want to refer to their friends and business contacts. For example recruiters can forward engineering jobs to all or some of the company's engineers, or send an email with links and information about a particularly important or 'hard to fill' job to the entire organization.

3. Simple, yet powerful integration with the three big social networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter enables employees to share job opportunities to some or even all of their contacts. TalentVine possesses internal logic to help an employee try and find the 'best fit' for the position from among the employee's social network contacts.

4. Candidate details are captured in TalentVine - contacts that see the referral can click the unique, trackable link, see the job details in TalentVine, and either choose to apply, or even forward to some of their contacts. Recruiters can see the history of a referral as it progresses from and through social networking chains.

5. Referral program management is supported.  Companies can configure the referral bonus amounts and ensure that top referrers and sources are identified.

6. Tracking - TalentVine keeps track of the referrals sent, referrals forwarded, links clicked, and applications received.  Insights can be gleaned as to the most effective referrers and the networks likely to produce the best candidates.

Throughout the solution, the navigation links and visual cues are interesting and well-designed.  Large and attractive design elements add to an easy and almost fun user experience.  In fact, of the numerous enterprise and corporate systems I have seen lately, TalentVine looks and feels the least 'enterprisey'. That is a strength. 

Organizations that are looking for methods to strengthen their existing referral programs, or seeking ways to empower more of the organization's employees to tap into their personal and professional networks would be advised to take a look at TalentVine. Combining a classic and successful recruiting approach with the latest capabilities and potential of leveraging social networks for recruiting is an innovative and interesting combination.

Stand out by following all the rules

Disclaimer - I am not a recruiter, career coach, resume writer, and claim no expertise of any kind on the job search process.  

But something that I see and read quite a bit about that is related to the job search process makes me wonder. It is the seemingly standard resume advice that more or less goes like this:

1. Recruiters and HR staff will examine your resume for less than one minute before making a screening decision. I have even heard this is more like 30 seconds.

2. You should have a cover letter, but there is a pretty high likelihood no one will read it.

3. But in case someone reads it, it better offer a compelling reason for the Recruiter to read your resume. Except of course if the Recruiter follows the process that many of them seem to adopt, that is to head straight to the resume before reading the cover letter. So mostly the cover letter is intended to convince someone to do something they have already done.  

It would be funny if the cover letter said something like: 'Thanks for reading my resume, you must have been impressed since you are now reading this cover letter.  Let me tell you a bit more about how fabulous I am.'

4. But here is the one 'truism' that for some reason bothers me the most - the common advice to not do anything different, unusual, or out of the ordinary on the resume itself. No images, logos, strange or different colors or fonts.  No cutting-edge design at all that might distract or annoy the hiring pro. Keep the the typical formula, plain white paper, two pages max, 10pt Times New Roman font, nice clean bullet points of your major accomplishments, etc.

In other words, make sure your resume looks exactly like every other one in the pile or in the recruiter's overstuffed e-mail inbox.

The Evil HR Lady wrote about this issue, referring to a online service called Vizual Resume that offers a collection of interesting and different templates for the creation of more distinctive resumes. Other similar services like VisualCV also offer options to create more visually appealing, engaging, and perhaps more compelling documents and testaments to someone's skills, background, and capabilities. And there is at least one iPhone App for resume building and transmitting.

Is the advice to genericize all the design elements of the resume the best to give and for job seekers to follow? In an incredibly difficult job market, where competition for positions in many fields and regions is historically high? Whatever you do candidate, don't do anything to make your resume stand out from anyone elses.

Sure, playing it safe with format, design, or interactive elements won't rule a candidate out in a competitive search process, but it won't make anyone's qualifications stand out from the rest either.

Am I way off the track on this? Maybe some real recruiting pros can set me straight as to why the standard advice seems to have the effect of making it all the more difficult to get noticed.

Why has the technical revolution that has impacted and dramatically changed almost every aspect of the workplace had such a difficult time disrupting the classic resume?

Sex, Religion, and a Colossally Bad Hiring Process

Let's say you have an important, executive level role to fill in your organization.  It is the kind of job that does not come open all that often in your organization, or even among your competitors.  Legendary Marquette coach Al McGuire

It is a really attractive position - internally and externally prestigious, well-compensated, remarkably stable and secure, and offers the right candidate room and opportunity to materially influence outcomes at the organization and quite possibly in the industry at large.

The type of position that you have to hire for very carefully, since it is in the kind of field that while there may not be hundreds of qualified candidates, there will be quite a few, and all of them will bring long histories of achievement and success with them, and many if not most will also possess reams of background material for potential review.

You quickly realize the the complexity, importance, and visibility of this hire requires you to take some 'extra' precautions - you engage an external search firm to assist in the identification and screening of potential candidates, you enlist a large internal hiring committee to gather input and advice from a wide set of perspectives,  and at one point, after the search was about one year underway, essentially scrap everything and started all over, having determined that the 'perfect' candidate had not been identified.

So finally after about a two-year vetting process, you finally find the 'right' candidate.  A candidate that brings the background, experience, and (hopefully) the right blend of 'soft' skills, you know that intangible but essential blend of attitude, initiative, and collaborative spirit that would make him or her absolutely the best possible choice. The candidate passes the external screening process, gains the support and recommendation of the internal hiring committee, and ultimately is blessed by the highest leaders of the organization and receives and accepts an employment offer.

What could possibly go wrong at this point, with all the time, effort, smart people involved in the process, and 'public' nature of the position and search?

Exhibit A - Marquette University (a Catholic, Jesuit university 'dedicated to serving God by serving our students and contributing to the advancement of knowledge' (from www.marquette.edu), and the search for a new Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences.

In this search, only after the offer was issued did things get interesting.

Here is the quick recap from what I could piece togther:

1. Marquette spends two years searching, screening, vetting, interviewing, and finally finding the 'right' candidate for the Dean position.  A long time for sure, but not completely out of the realm of possibility for these kinds of searches. 

2. The candidate, and now the prospective new Dean, is Seattle University Professor of Sociology Jodi O'Brien, a scholar whose research focuses on gender and sexuality issues. 

3. After some external pressure and influence (allegedly) - Marquette rescinds the job offer citing the sudden discovery of some candidate writings the are 'inconsistent' with the Marquette culture. So sudden in the fact that the expensive, two-year long search process either did not uncover the writings, or even more troubling that they were not actually considered prior to the offer being given.  

We are not talking about random Tweets or blog posts here, but published scholarship that is incredibly easy to find and in fact, are documented on Professor O'Brien's resume. Some Marquette students express their outrage.

4. Marquette now has entered what appear to be settlement talks with Professor O'Brien in hopes that the negotiations will (according to O'Brien), "take into account not only the harm done to me personally and professionally, but also acknowledges this situation as a learning opportunity for the Marquette community". 

And the cynic in me thinks the 'learning opportunity' may involve cutting a nice-sized 'we really messed this thing up, please now go away' check.

Forget if you can the sex and religion angle to this, and think about the more universal lesson from the Marquette debacle.  If you need two years, have to spend buckets of cash, and engage dozens of internal and external experts and you still can't figure out the candidate does not match your culture, then you either don't have any idea what you culture is (or want it to be), or you do know what it is and you just don't care. 

But being unable to accurately screen and hire for cultural fit will come back to get you, maybe not in as public and embarrassing a way as in the Marquette example, but perhaps at least in an embarrassing 70s leisure suit kind of way.

 

Jobvite Share

Today Jobvite released its latest offering in the increasingly important market for solutions that assist and enable more effective social recruiting.  

The new service, called Jobvite Share, provides corporate recruiters, third party staffing pros, or internal human resources professionals several new capabilities for more efficient sharing of advertised open positions on the popular social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The solution offers an easy way for anyone, from recruiters to hiring managers to CEOs, to distribute and target any job openings on social networks, increase employee referrals, and track in real-time the value of any job advertisement or placement on-line.  Jobvite Share makes it quick and easy for any employer to harness the power of the social web to find the right talent at no additional cost.

From the Jobvite press release:

With Jobvite Share, anyone with a position to fill can easily enter a job URL, and Jobvite will create a custom, trackable listing for that job, regardless of where distributed on the web. It can then automatically be sent to targeted contacts in email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and shared anywhere on the Web. Jobvite Share puts powerful, real-time metrics in the hands of employers of all sizes to see what works – and what doesn’t work – in their job marketing and distribution – all free of charge.

Users start on the Jobvite Share launch page, then enter the URL of the online job advertisement on their corporate job site, and quickly generate up to 5 unique trackable links that can be shared on the social web, via Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.  

From there, recruiters can track and label multiple links to see results for each source in real-time. Jobvite Share provides the metrics needed to see what works – and what does not – in job marketing and distribution, including views, clicks, forwards and clicks to apply; all metrics are tracked by individual channel (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email) and can follow referrals as they spread across the web

In addition to helping manage the promotion and facilitated sharing of job openings to recruiters and employees social networks, Jobvite Share also provides a matching algorithm between the job description content and the characteristics of one's social network contacts that can be applied to more closely and precisely identify the best potential referrals for the position.  Basically, you have 794 Facebook friends, but Jobvite Share is smart enough to suggest the three that are a close match to the job description.

And the best thing about Jobvite Share? , the cost - free.  Yes, you read that correctly, free.  Five trackable unique URLs, automated contact matching criteria, and simple yet informative metrics on your social sharing efforts, all for free?  Yep.  And that is pretty cool.

Look, it is dirt simple to post your open jobs on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.  But once you post the jobs out on the social networks you start to wonder about the effectiveness and the impact of those efforts. With this new offering from Jobvite, you can not only easily post your openings on the social web, but you can additionally monitor what channels are working and what ones are not.  And with metrics, contact matching capability, and visibility to which channels are working, Jobvite Share seems like a natural fit for both those organizations that are just starting out in social recruiting and those that have been experimenting for some time, but have not yet figured out the sweet spot.

For more information about Jobvite Share - check out their site - Jobvite Share.

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: