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'.

When you rely on technology...

be sure the technology is reliable.

Backstory - our hosted, ERP-based e-recruiting front-end and applicant tracking system has been rejecting all candidate document uploads for about four days now.

That's right, no resumes, cover letters, recommendations, etc.  Worse still, the error message EVERY candidate sees is 'Your document could not be uploaded, it has a virus'. 

Just great.  Not only are we turning away and turning off scores of candidates (although in this economy they may come back anyway), we are scaring the crap out of them that their own systems may be infected.

When you rely so heavily on third-party, hosted or SaaS solutions, particularly for your public-facing applications, you better be confident in their reliability, the vendor or host's ability to respond quickly to a problem, and your own capability and actions plans to mitigate and deal with the fallout.

Hold your vendor's to their obligations for uptime and issue resolution. When they fail, make sure they prove to you how they will ensure it won't happen again. If they can't prove to you they won't continue to let you down, then take your business somewhere else.

How many good candidates are we losing right now?

Corporate Recruiting Site Shootout

This week in my HR Technology class we conducted the extremely subjective and un-scientific First Annual Corporate Recruiting Site shootout.

The contestants were:

Hyatt Hotels - Explore Hyatt

ConAgra Foods - Careers

Kraft - Jobs

Neiman Marcus - Careers

The class was split up into groups of three or four, and asked to find, then evaluate the company's job site on several criteria:

1. Ease of use

2. Ability to find information on company values and culture

3. Presence of real employee testimonials

4. Interactivity and 'connection'

5. Overall experience

Each group took about 20 minutes or so to find, then dive in to their assigned company to get a feel for the job site and make some observations.  Each group then presented their company's site to the class, highlighting the good and bad points they found.

Some key observations:

Three of the four sites presented the prospective candidate some difficulty in either finding open jobs, navigating various aspects of the site, or learning about the company culture.

Two of the sites presented fairly serious errors, some 'Page not found' or some instability in the browser as a result of way too much Flash content trying to execute.

One of the sites revealed a jarring distinction from a fairly well-done and slick 'corporate info' section, to a stark, ugly 'Applicant Tracking System' front page.  Honestly, if not for one tiny logo on the page, the 'job search' page could have been from any random company.

Of the four corporate sites reviewed, ConAgra Foods was the clear winner.  The navigation was clean, the information was easily found, there was content in all the key areas, job families, employee testimonials, etc.  In addition, other aspects of the ConAgra site were informative and entertaining, likely inceasing the time spent by prospects with the site.

The job seach process was simple and error free.

Great job ConAgra Foods.

Perhaps companies should do more 'real user' testing of their corporate job sites, I would imagine the folks from Hyatt, Neiman Marcus, and Kraft may be surprised to find out what real candidates may think.

Technology and Recruiting in 2 hours

I have been thinking about what should be the main points to emphasize for a class module on the impact and effect of technology on corporate recruiting. 

Flickr - Thewmatt

Do the 'old-school' jobs sites like Monster and Careerbuilder still really matter?  This week I listened to Penelope Trunk from Brazen Careerist state the Gen 'Y' candidate/prospect will never get interested in your job from a Monster job posting.  So how to attract those candidates?

So is it really all about mining LinkedIn for passive candidates and setting up shop in Facebook and maybe placing a few well-connected tweets on TwitHire?  I think I have heard the 'Ernst & Young Facebook page' story about a dozen times now, is that really the only good example of effective corporate recruiting on Facebook there is?

And from the internal processing perspective, is Taleo still to be considered the market leader, considering all the bad news lately? Do the other Talent Management vendors have any chance of growing in the Recruting space?  Is it worth spending class time on the some of the newer solutions like JobVite or VoiceScreener?

If you had two hours or so to enlighten a (mostly) captive audience on the impact, current state, and trends in technology for recruiting what would you focus on?

Aside - thanks Alltop for adding me to HR.alltop.com!

Recruiting and Twitter

 

A student asked me about how companies are using Twitter for recruiting. There are really several differennt aspects of using Twitter for recruiting that I see for the corporate or professional recruiter:

Communicating or Advertising your opening

1. Straight up adverts - Tweet something like 'Hi - we are looking for a Java developer - details here -  www.job.comp.com. This might be the least effective method, but it has an advantage of being quick, simple, and free. Realistically, the success of this approach depends in large part, to the maturity and size of your Twitter network, which I will expand upon in a follow up post.

2.Use TwitHire to generate your job posting tweet. TwitHire gives you a simple form where you fill in Job Title, company name and URL to the job, then posts the Tweet directly to Twitter from your Twitter account.  The nice thing about using TwitHire is the Tweets are readily identifiable as Job posts. Here is an example (click on the image to see it full size):

3. If your Corporate Job Site or other recruiting site (like Monster) can generate an RSS feed, you can use Twitterfeed to 'push' the new job postings via RSS directly to your Twitter account, or to a dedicated 'Company Jobs' Twitter account. Each time a new posting is made on the source site, a new Tweet will be sent with a link to the job advertisement.

Using your Network on Twitter

4.Simply Tweet - 'Hey, I am looking to hire a few great engineers, contact me if you are interested'.  Leveraging the folks who already follow you on Twitter can give you a great source of candidates. Again, the size and maturity of your network is key here.

Using Twitter Search

5. Twitter Search can be a useful way of uncovering potential candidates, or at a minimum contacts that you may be able to network with to build your Twitter reach.  Twitter search is just that, the ability to search the public steam of Tweets for words or phrases. Here is an example I found searching for the words 'job' and 'java' (click on the image to see it full size):

Twitter is fast becoming an important resource for recruiters, particularly ones recruiting in technical and graphical design fields. 

What are some other creative ways you can leverage Twitter in your recruiting?