Recruiting successfully in the digital era

This excellent insight by recruitment professional Ariana Shahbazi looks at the opportunities for finding the right candidates for roles online, the candidates expectations of your brand and online experience and ultimately how to pull it all together in some very simple steps. It takes onboard some key digital principles and strategies (applied to recruitment specifically) and leveraging data and analytics to show you the opportunities and the risks. The following content is unedited and published as received.

Maybe Ariana, the next post could be from a candidates perspective? What makes individuals stand out in a highly competitive and increasingly noisy online space? What part does good old, first hand relationships play? What should we expect online profiles to achieve?

Enjoy!

Recruiting successfully in the digital era, by Ariana Shahbazi

Although we do see employers who still advertise jobs in regional newspapers, the majority realise that online is where the candidates are. After all, almost anyone under the age of 50 has at some point posted or applied to a job via a job board or LinkedIn.

Many companies we meet have tried to leverage the web for recruitment, but few succeed and finding quality employees remains one of the region’s biggest challenges. What are they doing wrong?

The recruitment mix

There is no silver bullet for finding and hiring the right people. Rather, it’s a mix of a few key elements: recruitment know-how, flexible technology and astute marketing.

Yes, marketing. It is actually one of the most overlooked aspects of recruitment.
You can have a great team of recruiters, powerful talent acquisition software and still get a lot of poor quality CVs. Maybe it’s because nobody knows you exist and even less people know you are hiring. Or maybe it’s because you are not sending out the right message to the individuals you are looking for. Either way, you need to examine this component of the mix more closely.

The online shopping analogy

In this digital age, it’s easy to reach a lot of different people in one go: marketing departments do it all the time. The key is to have a strategy and the tools to set it in motion. Think of recruitment as online shopping: you need to generate awareness of your product, engage potential customers on your website with compelling content, provide a good user experience and make sure they convert.

“Come out, wherever you are”

Look at all the places where potential applicants could be looking and advertise there. Get the attention of the right audience.

So if you are looking for an experienced individual who already has a job with the competitor, posting on a job board or participating in a career fair will probably not give you a very high return. However, targeted advertising on Linkedin and your own career site, posting on a professional forum where he/she might be looking or activating your employees’ networks will. Some employers do SEO and Adwords, others will use Facebook, it all depends on the target. Once you know who you are looking for and where to look for them, you roll out your candidate marketing plan and drive these people to your website.

Avoid the Bounce

What happens when candidates land on your website?

Simple, there are 4 things that a potential applicant can do:

• Leave (the dreaded “Bounce”)
• Apply (now or later)
• Tell someone about a job
• Subscribe to a job alert for future jobs

Here are some important tips to ensure the right people don’t bounce off your website:

Don’t send them to a website that says “send your CVs to recruiter@company.com”. That would be like doing an Adwords campaign and sending leads to a poorly designed website. Instead, put yourself in the shoes of the type of person you are looking for. Why would a top candidate send their valuable CV to a generic email address?

If you are thinking “We post vacancies on our website and have a little form with a CV-upload button, that should work,” think again. If Amazon had a list of books in alphabetical order and an “input your credit card number” form, what would happen? They would get a lot of “junk” transactions and discourage real buyers to complete their transaction. When applied to recruitment, this means you are making it far too easy for everyone to apply and you’re not making the process very relevant to the good candidates. And when you have too many applications, unless you have a sophisticated recruitment system, you will not be able to identify the good ones.

If you are serious about attracting top talent, show it. Get a proper career site where you actually promote what it’s like to be employed by your company. Use employee testimonials, talk about all the corporate events, show photos or a video of your company, talk about the benefits, show them what a great workplace your company is, and present a stream of job opportunities that are relevant to them. Remember, it’s like a shopping website: deliver compelling content. This is what ALL successful employers do.

Have a job alert functionality on your website. If you are an employed and experienced professional, you may go to the competitor’s career site once a year to check out opportunities. If you see no appropriate positions, you leave…unless you are encouraged to subscribe to a job alert. Ensure that all your vacancies pages are easy to share via email and social media.

Keep them engaged

Finally, when good individuals do apply, keep them engaged. Ask skill questions they can relate to, send an email when their application has been submitted, give them status updates, don’t make them feel like their CV has gone into an abyss. This and things like scheduling and conducting interviews are so easy to do online nowadays. There are so many good web-based solutions, employers really have no excuse. An organisation that masters all these digital tools will deliver a superior candidate experience and give top candidates a positive image of the company before they even walk through the door.

In a nutshell

The web is the best way to find candidates and build a talent database, regardless the geography and sector. However, it requires a very structured approach and the right tools, just like marketing and sales.

Unfortunately, most recruitment departments don’t have marketing expertise, nor do they have the time, because many still don’t have the proper tools to automatically screen and manage CVs – but that’s another problem. As for marketing departments, most don’t have recruitment on top of their priority list because they are too busy selling products and services. Add technology to the equation and you bring on further complexity because IT probably has a lot of other projects to handle.

Bringing these 3 functions together and making them work in tandem seems too challenging for the majority of organisations…yet digital recruitment cannot be successful without this. In the end, this is probably why so many companies still struggle to find the right people.

About the author:

Ariana Shahbazi is the Marketing Communications Director at Cazar, the leading recruitment marketing and talent acquisition technology provider in the Middle East and Asia. She has 12 years of experience in the online space. At Cazar, she has the opportunity to see the impact digital marketing has on recruitment amongst top employers in the region. The company works with some of the biggest organisations in the Middle East, including Al Futtaim, Jumeirah Group, DP World and Alshaya. It helps organisations leverage technology and the web so they can autonomously recruit top talent when they need it. If you’d like to speak to her about how digital strategies and the right technology can help your recruitment function, email (Ariana@cazar.com) or connect  with her.

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Social Media and the Long Term Relationship – By Wayne Denner

 

Socialmedia Relationships- Whats their value?

Wayne Denner contributed this piece for DigitalArabia. Thanks Wayne for the excellent perspective on social and relationship building. So much of what you say is where many brands go wrong, particularly thinking that earned & owned media, such as social channels can be bought, sustainably. Even if advocates can be bought, they are never long lasting….

Shukran Wayne, and we look forward to many more!

Recently I did a quick audit on the pages which I liked on Facebook over the
past number of months and was surprised with some of my findings. Many of
the pages which I had in-fact ‘Liked’ I had done, without really much care; liking
them just for the sake of liking a page or perhaps because someone had sent me
an invite to do so. I suspect this has been the case for many of us. What was
even more interesting was the messages which these business page owners
have been sending out to me, their potential consumer. Mostly the same old
sales messages which had just washed over me. As our exposure to marketing
online increases via social networking channels, in particular Facebook, surely
it’s worth considering the effect, if any the message is having. Are businesses
engaging in this activity, experiencing any actual ROI?

If we step back in time, say 12 years ago, most of us should be able to remember
the Internet was a much different place in terms of digital marketing and online
advertising. Back then advertising such as banner advertisements and email
marketing were pretty much all we were exposed to.

Lets, for a second, take a look at email marketing and how for many of us,
our inboxes are being consumed by vast amounts of none relevant messages,
which we aren’t remotely interested in. For me, and I’m sure for many, the
sheer amount of junk mail received can be somewhat over whelming to say
the least, so much so, we select and delete without even opening. So let’s look
at long term relationship which businesses want with their clients. Are they
really happening? Are the messages and advertisements simply washing over
us? as they hit our inbox or display on screen. As marketers we are constantly
searching and seeking out new ways to create channels in which to target
consumers; but perhaps it’s a step back which is needed to really look at the
message which we are sending to our customers, standing in their shoes and
looking with their eyes.

Just as with our interactions offline we need to learn to forge and build
relationships with our customers online for our campaigns to really be effective.

Building relationships with customers is the crucial and critical component
which needs to be at the core of every campaign. This takes time, time to
research and learn what your customer wants, listening first is key.
Those brands, businesses that build relationships with their followers, fans or
within their community are the ones who stand to benefit.

I come across way too many businesses that see Social Media and Digital
Marketing as a quick fix towards marketing efforts. For most businesses there
is no real gain in Social Media in the short term but those businesses that stick
with it, build relationships and engage with their followers, fans or community
online will see a real boost in their bottom line. As a businesses when a person
likes your page engage with them as you would a real customer, take time to get
to know them, listen to them and personalise your relationship. Following these
steps should make the purchase pattern happen a lot easier as apposed to hitting
them up with an offer or a discount as soon as they like your page.

Let’s be clear ‘Long Term Relationships built either offline or online equal Long
Term Business and Returning Customers’.

About Wayne Denner

digital_arabia_wayne_denner

Wayne Denner is a leading digital marketing professional and lecturer.

With over 14 years experience in traditional & digital marketing, Wayne has planned and developed successful campaigns for clients across the UK and Ireland, including Diageo, Carphone Warehouse, Specsavers, Drinkaware.co.uk, Orange, Armagh City & District Council, Invest NI, Newry & Mourne District Council and O2.

He has been at the forefront of the rapidly-changing digital marketing industry for over a decade and is an expert on emerging trends including social engagement, online reputation management, branding media, web 2.0 & e-commerce platforms.

Wayne also lectures on the Chartered Institute of Marketing program on Digital Marketing Essentials & Integrating Digital Media & Branding and is currently writing a book on the subject.

Follow him on Twitter @waynedenner