Making the Right Hire

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Any recruiter knows that hiring the right person can be difficult, and hiring the wrong person can be costly. From re-investing time in reviewing resumes and conducting interviews, to spending more money on advertisements, plus the cost of training, having to re-hire for a position that was inadequately filled, can be a huge burden on an organization. An article posted on Smart Planet notes that 69% of employers admit to having suffered from bad hires over the past year. 41% of these companies estimated the cost of the bad hire to be over $25,000.

Adverse affects of bad hires include lack of productivity, increased costs for recruiting, fewer sales, legal issues, a negative impact on the morale of employees as well as a negative impact on clients.

So how do you avoid bad hires? Some employers note the importance of not rushing the process, while others express how essential it is to check references. In some instances, a decreased workforce of recruiters leads to a problematic system of hiring. In this instance, you may need to get creative with how you evaluate potential candidates and ensure that the right hire is made. Check out this video which features Heineken’s unique hiring initiative that netted a successful hire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ftu3NbivE

Is it Ethical To Research Candidates Online?

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This is an age when a growing number of available candidates for many job positions have a significant presence on a variety of social media sites. The press increasingly takes note of issues of recruitment, hiring and privacy related to this development. At the same time, it points out that many recruiter human resource departments are grappling with how to best use these new tools.

At least two ethical issues are immediately identified when discussing recruitment and social media. The first is how not to become an abuser by spamming the market with opportunities and listings. The second issue deals with deciding where to draw the line in the ethical use of social media to screen candidates and prospects.

It is this latter issue that generates stories of young people losing out on opportunities because of online indiscretions. Some recruiters have allegedly asked potential employees for passwords to personal social media accounts. It is clear that the evolving issue requires the establishment of reasonable boundaries. What is not yet clear is where those boundaries will be drawn.

It is generally agreed that gross indiscretions on largely public sites are fair game. Anyone wanting to be considered a responsible candidate for most positions should understand that such postings and information are highly prejudicial. Appropriate discretion is the first rule that should apply to any social media information. In fact, the more public and sensitive the prospective position, the more such discretion is required.

Drawing the Lines

A second emerging question is the redefinition of what is and is not considered an indiscretion. Using LinkedIn and Facebook to access relative experience and background is to be expected. Going to private postings related to vacations and family gatherings is a direction that many now question, again with the truly gross indiscretion exception.

A third immediate area of concern is the question of the right to access non-public areas of social media. Some employers come down on both sides of this issue, depending on the specific position being considered. The candidate always has the right to refuse what is considered an invasion of privacy, but what if it costs being considered for the position?

There is no question that the issues related to the ethics of recruiting and social media are under scrutiny. Anyone in the business or dealing with human resources will increasingly have to decide what rules apply in their approach to the profession relative to social media.

Facebook vs. LinkedIn

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Recruiting and retaining top talent requires a keen understanding of the forces that drive your business as well as your potential hires. In today’s market, it’s simply not enough to go the traditional route to attract candidates. As Forbes recently reported, professional networking sites like LinkedIn are growing at an extraordinary rate. Ignoring social networking as a recruitment tool can mean missing out on a pool of young, eager, educated talent. But how do you successfully navigate various networking platforms and tie them in to your tried and trusted recruitment strategies?

New Insights, New Features

For starters, you’ll need to differentiate between two of the largest social networking giants. While Facebook has traditionally been a site where friends and family connect to share informal insights into their daily lives, the site currently has 1 billion users, making it a major communication outlet for businesses looking to draw potential hires and customers to their brand. In addition, a recently released study by Facebook may urge its users to start using the site as a networking tool. Facebook researchers Moira Burke and Robert Kraut found that users with strong ties who frequent the site regularly recommend job openings via messaging and chat channels. These findings indicate that Facebook may be a valuable tool to spread job opportunities through an already established network or close friends and colleagues.

On the other hand, LinkedIn has always been geared towards professionals looking to network. Most recently, LinkedIn announced a new search feature that will allow businesses and candidates to search for their next professional connection. HR professionals looking to use LinkedIn can now search for specific attributes and qualifications, allowing them to target potential candidates in less time.

Social media is becoming an increasingly powerful tool in our personal and professional lives. With new features and growing insight into the workings of our digital identities, HR professionals have more leverage than ever before to make connections between talented professionals and growing industries.

Striking the Right Recruitment Tone on Social Media

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Social media has become a major facet of our personal and professional lives. Harnessing the power and reach of your business’ presence on multiple social media platforms can help you increase your recruitment efforts and cast a wider net to potential applicants. But how do you strike the right professional tone in a less formal forum?

Pithy, But Professional
The main difference between a traditional job description and the content on social media sites is the length of content. Twitter forces users to post in 140 characters or less and while Facebook allows for longer posts, users tend to prefer content in the 200 character range. This means that your company must get to the heart of your recruitment pitch in very little time. Consider posting the most exciting sentence or two from your latest job description, along with a link to the full posting on your company’s site. Or, use the unique features of visual social media, like Pinterest or Instagram, to share unique insights into your company’s culture. Show your potential hires what a typical workspace in your company looks like by taking care to choose an employee’s space that embodies the type of values you want to promote.

Sharing images of your staff hard at work can also increase interest in joining your team. It’s appropriate to share images or posts that allude to the perks of working in a close-knit office, but take care not to focus on how hard your team plays once the weekend comes around. For businesses, social media can be a chance to communicate the values and vision that drive its products and people. Resist the urge to lower your recruitment efforts to the lowest common denominator, even if you think those types of posts will generate “shares” and “likes.”

Powerful Personalities
If your staff is fairly social media savvy, be sure to highlight their interesting posts, tweets, videos and images. As you work to recruit quality people to your company, you can help this effort by showcasing the already stellar people on your team and communicate your commitment to their success both on and offline.

Facebook Meets SEO: A Love Story

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Here’s a fact: a Facebook webpage is still a webpage. Businesses maintain a Facebook page for the same reason they keep up a traditional website: to attract customers or potential hires. Therefore, it stands to reason they need keep an eye on SEO, too. If a company is invested in their Facebook strategy, they should keep a close watch on its visibility. Paying attention to a few attributes will help boost your Facebook site’s ranking in search engines, and make your new media plan that much more effective.
1. Stay consistent in your naming—your Twitter and LinkedIn account should all sport the same brand name as your Facebook.

2.  Keep current on your content; post at least once a week—more often will get you ranked higher.

3. Upload media to Facebook including images and video.

4. Get your industry keywords up in the “info” and “about” sections of your page.

5. Invest in events—by hosting an event and promoting it through Facebook, you’re adding another indexable element to your page.

Until next time,
Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Surviving the Turkey Nap

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Thanksgiving is over, and with full bellies and lethargic legs, we look towards the future. As the season heats up, don’t fall in the habit of neglecting your hiring strategy. If you’ve taken a traditional approach to recruitment, it’s a great time to flesh out your online and social media plans. The best part: there are a lot of advantages attached to starting today.

The most important thing to remember is that an online hiring campaign isn’t strictly a game of numbers. You’ve furthering your employer brand. You’re increasing engagement. You’re disseminating information about your place of business. To evaluate effectiveness, you need to look at traditional online metrics including page views, landing page visits (if you’ve set up your system that way), and fan/follower counts. Actual conversions or hires remains a solid method to determine whether your campaign is working or not.Until next time,

Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Recruitment Mojo: Small Business Edition

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When you’re a smaller organization, every employee counts. The quality of your hires reflect the quality of your organization. High-powered individuals make for a red-hot organization. As you build out your recruitment strategy, keep in mind these pitfalls and the best way to avoid them.

Go big or go home. You spend all day writing up a beautifully-worded job description, and the following week you receive only 4 resumes. Boo. Creating an attractive workplace starts at home. If you haven’t already, sit down and define the value you provide to employees in the form of an Employer Value Statement, or EVP. Using that as a tool, get the word out through print and online that you’re looking for the next great employee at a great place to work.

Stay ahead of the technology. New technology based around the Internet allows virtual interviews, electronic portfolios, pre-qualifiers even before potential hires arrive at the office. Technology and digital interview tactics allow you create a “short list” of candidates that reduce overhead and narrow down on quality candidates.

Retention, retention, retention. Employee satisfaction extends beyond wages and bonuses. The culture you create at the workplace and affects both retention and productivity for the years your employees call your office home. Work in the concept of flexibility. Find creative ways to reward (and not punish) hard work and keep your base engaged. Good luck!

Signing off for now,
Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Staying Relevant

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Once a ripe garden of opportunity, Facebook has become a haven for spammers who would cloud your walls with offers of weight loss products, cheap online colleges, and, ahem, various pills and medicines for those of the male persuasion. And with some clever solicitors enjoying social media conversion rates as high as 47%, it’s no wonder they’re camping your site and peddling their electronic wares. Don’t let it happen! Here are a couple of tips to keep your messages clear and you boards spam free.

Should you encounter an advertisement on your company’s Facebook wall, the important thing is to take immediate action. You could simply delete the message from your wall, but many spammers will test a site’s responsiveness with a single message before unleashing a wave of spam that could clutter things up. Even a few hours exposure can be effective for a spammer—not to mention the possibility of “friending” your fan base for some one-on-one spamming at a later date.

A distant, much more virulent relative to Facebook spam, solicitations using your blog as a platform have become rampant. Typically, a poster will address a theme in your article before listing a service with associated website, but many don’t even take the time to include that level of detail. On an unmoderated blog, this can get out of hand—fast. One sure-fire solution is to turn on moderation, and only allow comments that an administer approves his or herself. If you’re on WordPress, spend some time learning about plug-ins that allow you to block commentors by IP, shrugging off habitual spammers and sending them back to the untamed, unnoticed wilds of the Internet where they belong.
Thanks for reading,
Buyer Advertising

Hiring Tips for Small Businesses

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

When you’re a smaller organization, every employee counts. The quality of your hires reflect the quality of your organization. High-powered individuals make for a red-hot organization. As you build out your recruitment strategy, keep in mind these pitfalls and the best way to avoid them.

Go big or go home. You spend all day writing up a beautifully-worded job description, and the following week you receive only 4 resumes. Boo. Creating an attractive workplace starts at home. If you haven’t already, sit down and define the value you provide to employees in the form of an Employer Value Statement, or EVP. Using that as a tool, get the word out through print and online that you’re looking for the next great employee at a great place to work.

Stay ahead of the technology. New technology based around the Internet allows virtual interviews, electronic portfolios, pre-qualifiers even before potential hires arrive at the office. Technology and digital interview tactics allow you create a “short list” of candidates that reduce overhead and narrow down on quality candidates.

Retention, retention, retention. Employee satisfaction extends beyond wages and bonuses. The culture you create at the workplace and affects both retention and productivity for the years your employees call your office home. Work in the concept of flexibility. Find creative ways to reward (and not punish) hard work and keep your base engaged. Good luck!

Signing off for now,
Buyer Advertising
www.buyerads.com

Mobile Solutions for Advertising

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Mobile marketing is huge. In fact, if you’ve picked up a cell phone in the last 24 hours, then you’re a potential segment to be tapped. Studies such as a survey by M-Metrics suggest that SMS response rates are in excess of 15%. That means when customers are texting, if clients are talking, there’s an opportunity to gain new business.

Unlike traditional mediums, the most important thing to remember about mobile marketing is this: it’s not a single market channel. There’s a whole micro-universe of utilities and mediums tied in with the mobile world. Here are a few methods to plug into this opportunity-to-be.

Apps. Once only a niche market for Tetris-heads to get their fix, gaming on mobile communication devices has gone mainstream. With the advent of the iPhone, and now the hot-off-the-shelves iPad, the casual consumer has opened up to mobile gaming. Advertising opportunities within these markets include specialty games themed off a company itself (Pizza Hut’s “Pizza Builder”), or advertisements placed cleverly within the virtual world (games like MapleStory and derivatives).

SMS. The goal here is to gain customers by sending out a bulk text messages to consumers. The challenge, of course, is advertising responsibly. The best way to achieve a nice response rate is messaging only to customers who express an interest in your organization, or who indicate a wish to be alerted with job openings, contests, or any special promotions you offer.

Youtube. Whether you’ve developed a catchy commercial or something bizarre enough to spread like wildfire, a mobile medium could work wonders. Thanks to generous storage capacities on new mobile phone devices, videos can be sent and stored entirely on individual devices—meaning there’s plenty of room to spread the next big viral wonder.