One of the most important things digital publishers can do to maintain and grow their audience is to know who their readers are, know what type of content they’re seeking and stick to that type of content. While it might seem obvious, using that strategy for deciding on site content consistently will let your audience know you’re serious about catering to their area of interest, rather than trying to interest a broader readership.

“I make it very clear to my guest and regular bloggers who the prime target audience is and that topics should always be related to recruiting and employer branding,” says Jacco Valkenburg, founder of the Global Recruiting Roundtable. “Career coaches and job seekers will find a lot of interesting market information and tips, too, but I try, and prefer, to publish articles for this audience on other platforms and websites.”

Using this philosophy, Jacco has been able to turn both the Global Recruiting Roundtable and his Dutch blog, RecruitingRoundtable.nl, into some of the leading resources on recruiting news and information in the world.

Jacco is an international recruitment expert, trainer and author of three bestselling books about recruiting and LinkedIn (over 25,000 copies sold). He has extensive experience in global recruitment strategies and execution spanning numerous countries for leading companies. Here, he offers insight on how he’s managed to place his brand at the forefront of the recruiting industry.

Can you tell us the story behind Global Recruiting Roundtable?

I’ve been always very active online and was actively engaging with other recruiters on blogs and social media and loved exchanging ideas and tips. In 2007, I decided to start blogging on a popular recruitment blog in The Netherlands.

As I really enjoyed writing about my experience in recruiting, and getting feedback and response from others, I quickly launched my own (Dutch) blog RecruitingRoundtable.nl. It became one of the most popular recruitment blogs in the Netherlands, and I am proud that we have approximately 75,000 page views each month, which are viewed by 20,000 unique visitors who want to be informed about the labor market, e-HRM, recruitment and selection. Together with a group of regular and guest bloggers, we focus on news, case studies, practical how-to’s, trends and much more in the field of online recruitment.

As I wanted to reach a larger and more international audience, I also created the blog GlobalRecruitingRoundtable.com.

Who should be checking out your site?

The target audience is primarily recruitment professionals. That could be (corporate or agency) recruiters, HR professionals/managers or hiring managers.

What have been the best tools you’ve found for growing the audience to your site?

Organic search is responsible for 60 percent of the traffic, so optimizing content for search engines is essential, and we always put some extra effort in that. Another (related) tactic is to publish only unique content on the blog to ensure that people have to come to this site.

What digital marketing strategies have you tried and found to be less effective?

Facebook and LinkedIn, and very recently Twitter, have paid options to boost your content to a target audience. I’ve tried it, but because these costs are high and there’s no clear benefit or business goal, I’ve stopped doing it.

What role has social media played in growing your brand?

Social media is great for getting traffic (16 percent) and immediate engagement with my audience. Quite often the discussion is not on this blog but in a LinkedIn group or via Twitter. A strong social media presence and unique content strengthen each other.

How has LinkedIn changed the way businesses not only recruit, but also market themselves?

Until 2010, LinkedIn absolutely didn’t want to be associated with job boards or be known as a popular spot for recruiters. To the outside world they were a professional network site only and used the tagline “This isn’t networking – it’s what networking should be.”

But their professional solutions for recruiters became the most important revenue for them, so they slowly embraced the idea and their big fat hairy audacious goal is nowadays “digitally mapping the global economy to connect talent with opportunity at massive scale.”

Their innovative technology has really set them apart from any other product or solution in recruiting. I’ve used LinkedIn since 2004 for recruiting purposes and remember that when I gave my first workshop that year about LinkedIn, I was sure this was the future of recruiting.

How do you think freelancers – web designers, bloggers, etc. – should be using social media to promote their brand and find more work?

Networking – in other words, gaining personal contact with people in your professional field – is the way to find new work. This is not new. But online social networks are the ideal tool for raising your profile and building and maintaining your network.

Social media are a great extension of existing social networks, which so many freelancers depend on. And if done the right way it can give a boost to your personal brand online with a potential great reach beyond that 24/7.

What digital innovations or trends are you most excited about when it comes to not only recruiting, but also building brand awareness?

The mobile (re-)evolution! The traditional recruiting processes will move away from “Apply,” which require candidates to enter lengthy only application forms, mandatory uploading of a resume and motivation letter and using a Desktop PC, to one-click “Tell Me More” options that are mobile-friendly. Recruiting will become even more social. Soon recruiters will start pick up the phone again.

This article was first published on Mediashower.com by Susan Jennings on 11/05/2014.

LinkedIn Delivers High Quality and Quantity of Applicants

When taking into consideration the quality and quantity of applicants each job board delivers, as well as the cost of these job boards, LinkedIn and Indeed are the forerunners. Recruiters report that LinkedIn delivers by far the highest-quality applicants at a medium cost—as well as a high quantity of applicants, second only to Indeed (and not by much).

LinkedIn Delivers the Highest Quality of Applicants

We asked recruiters to rate the quality level of the applicants they receive through each job board. According to our survey, the majority (40 percent) of recruiters note that LinkedIn delivers “high-quality” applicants.

Quality of Applicants

The runners-up, CareerBuilder and Indeed, were described as delivering “high-quality” job candidates by only 17 and 13 percent of recruiters, respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, Monster, Craigslist and Glassdoor delivered the fewest “high-quality” candidates.

Indeed Delivers the Highest Quantity of Applicants

Another key consideration needed to determine a job board’s worth: How many applicants does it deliver? When we asked recruiters to rate each job board in terms of how many candidates they received from it, Indeed came in first place, with 30 percent of recruiters saying the site delivers a “high quantity” of applicants. In second place, with 27 percent, was LinkedIn.

Quantity of Applicants

In terms of quantity, Monster was a much closer runner-up than when delivering quality candidates. Twenty-four percent of respondents said that Monster delivered a “high quantity” of candidates, compared to just 8 percent giving the job board high ratings for “high-quality” candidates.

Craigslist Is the Least Expensive Job Board Option

Of course, one of the most crucial components when choosing which job boards to invest in is cost. We asked recruiters to rate each job board as “low cost,” “medium cost” or “high cost.” Craigslist was the least expensive of the job boards, with 42 percent of recruiters noting that the site was “low cost.” In second place was Indeed, with 29 percent.

Recruiters seemed torn on their rating of LinkedIn’s cost, with an almost equal percentage of recruiters rating the site as “low” (21 percent), “medium” (23 percent) and “high cost” (23 percent). This may be due to the different plans offered to recruiters by LinkedIn—monthly plans can vary from free all the way up to $899 per month.

Job Board Costs

Most Effective Board Varies by Job Level

In addition to asking recruiters to rank these job boards based on the quantity and quality of applicants delivered, as well as the overall price, we asked for their opinion on how effective each job board was for recruiting jobs of varying levels of responsibility.

As it turns out, according to the recruiters who took the survey, Indeed, CareerBuilder and Craigslist are most effective for recruiting candidates for entry-level positions.

Key findings:

• Entry-Level Positions: Indeed is most effective

Moving up in levels of responsibility, recruiters noted that LinkedIn and Indeed were the most effective job boards when seeking candidates for mid- and senior-level positions.

• Mid-Level Positions: LinkedIn is most effective

But while LinkedIn and Indeed were rated similarly in their effectiveness when recruiting for mid-level positions, when it came to senior-level positions, LinkedIn jumped ahead. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said LinkedIn was “very effective” for recruiting for senior-level positions, compared to just 11 percent rating Indeed as “very effective” for sourcing senior-level candidates.

• Senior-Level Positions: LinkedIn is most effective too

Meanwhile, recruiters noted that Craigslist was the least effective for recruiting candidates for positions at higher levels of responsibility. In fact, 33 percent of recruiters noted that this particular job board was “not effective” for recruiting senior-level positions, while 52 percent did not even use Craigslist to recruit for these types of positions.

Which job board serves your needs?

There are many job boards available, but not all will serve your company’s specific needs. Questions regarding the quantity and quality of candidates they deliver, their cost and what types of positions you’re recruiting for should help you determine which job board is best for your needs.

According to the recruiters who took the survey, LinkedIn and Indeed are the most affordable and effective options for recruiting mid- to senior-level employees. Both of these job boards ranked well when it came to delivering a high quality and quantity of applicants at a mid-range price point.

When it comes to entry-level positions, Indeed, again, was most effective. However, CareerBuilder and Craigslist tied for second place. Of these two options, recruiters noted that Craigslist was considerably more affordable.

[slideshare id=36037590&doc=comparison-of-best-job-boards-for-recruiting-dollar-140618172314-phpapp02]

Methodology: This research was conducted by HR technology firm Software Advice, as well as the Recruiting Process Outsourcing Association and The National Human Resources Association to collect 150 responses via email invite from human resources recruiters in the U.S. and Canada in early June 2014. Software Advice has no financial relationship with any of these organizations, and all responses were obtained in a fair and anonymous manner.

Note: this article was originally published on LinkedIn. Read or follow my latest posts on LinkedIn.

Some people strongly believe that LinkedIn members with more endorsements get higher ranked in search results. That may seem logical but LinkedIn uses proprietary algorithms to rank and order the results, so relevance is based on a variety of factors.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating so there’s only one way to find out: testing! For this purpose I’ve run a test on the keyword “coaching” and location Netherlands. On the first page I only got results of people who are in my 2nd degree network, so the network degree is something they all have in common.

Here are the top 10 results, in order of search rank including the number of endorsements and other metrics, out of 183,368 results for coaching.

LinkedIn Search Results Metrics

Notes: The number represents the count of keyword matches in that specific field. People can have more than 1 current job and employer listed (which is the case in this top 10). Keyword density is the number of keywords, divided by other words in a LinkedIn profile.

Do you see a correlation between the number of endorsements and search rank? I don’t, it’s a random order. If it was a logical ordered list #8 should end up above #3. And if Skills and Endorsements really matter, #6 should not end up in the top 10 of 183,368 results for coaching!

This search result is consistent with other searches I’ve performed in the past. Try it yourself. I’ve never seen a “logical” search result order on LinkedIn. Sometimes people that are further away in my online network, end up higher in the search results.

In fact there is not one dominant metric on this list. Having said that, the number 1 search result scores high on almost every metric. But you can still make it to the top 10 without a Skill, and thus endorsements, listed on your profile. So I think it’s fair to conclude that the number of endorsements doesn’t matter. Search engines and their algorithms have always been a mystery, and that is a good thing to avoid easy shortcuts for people to exploit it.

If you want to rank high in the search results of LinkedIn, a closer measure would be the number of views your profile gets. So write a LinkedIn profile with your target audience in mind, not a search engine!

Note: this article was originally published on LinkedIn. Read or follow my latest posts on LinkedIn.

Often I get asked, “Can you recommend a good recruitment system for our organisation“, without giving any additional information. That’s like asking do you know a good car/ book/ restaurant/ movie for me, but you don’t know the person very well. So this question is impossible to answer if you don’t know whom it’s for, what the current situation is, why they have a problem, how they want to solve it, and when and where they want it.

Having said that, more and more I’m implementing free applicant tracking systems (ATS) at my clients, who don’t use an ATS at this moment, or are in the process of buying one. It’s a great way of getting started and its get them used to automating the recruiting process with a lot of quick wins.

But if all options are open, I do favour solutions that can be customised or configured in many different ways. Of course the first question my client will ask is: “why should we pay for an ATS when there are so many free(mium) solutions available?”.

It makes sense to raise this question so let me share you my response by comparing a free ATS Qandidate.com with a premium solution, Lumesse Talentlink. The latter which is listed as one of the leading suppliers in the Gartner Magic Quadrant Talent Management Suites.

Free versus Premium ATS

Here are the most important differences between these 2 ATS solutions:

Note: this list is by far complete as both solutions, especially Lumesse, offers a lot more functionalities. But the basic requirements to support and improve a recruiting process are covered here.

There is a (nearly) perfect ATS for every company

At this moment Qandidate.com is running within a small (110 people) government organisation and fits their needs perfect, with no intention to change this. Lumesse Talentlink is favoured by a large international (5000 people) technical organisation with the ambition for a state-of-the-art recruiting process. They are also using Qandidate.com at this moment as a temporary solution to avoid Outlook Recruiting.

Are you using a free or premium ATS? If so, why did you choose for this solution? Let’s share your thoughts and ideas!

Image: Qandidate.com

Note: this article was originally published on LinkedIn. Read or follow my latest posts on LinkedIn.

What are the 3 most important recruitment analytics? A great question as it forces you think about the things that really matter in recruiting. The answer must be sought in recruiting KPI’s, metrics or analytics that uncover the dollar impact or Return On Investment (ROI).

If you are thinking about purchasing a new ATS, will this result in faster, better and / or lower costs in hiring? For an international organisation that hires 500 new staff each year the answer will likely be yes, for a small company that hires 5 people per year probably not. Paying for a LinkedIn Recruiter seat? Manually posting jobs or automate the distribution of job postings? The ROI will probably be positive, if you use it extensively.

There is nothing more important than demonstrating the (dollar) impact of your recruitment actions. The 3 most important aspects that really matter to your business and have the biggest impact are quality, speed and costs – or better: yield or revenue – of new hires.

#1 Quality of hire.

There are many metrics related to the quality of hire. Is your new hire evaluated as a top performer? Great! But be careful to interpret this data as it cannot be seen in isolation. If a candidate is an top performer, has low retention, and an ambassador for your organisation, the ROI of this hire will be high. However if a top performer stays for only a few months, the end result (ROI) is poor. Recruitment analytics, big data and predictive analyses can provide great insight in what it takes to hire top performers.

#2 Delivering on recruiting i.e. speed of hire.

There is a strong correlation between speed, quality and costs in recruiting. A faster hiring process will result in higher quality candidates at (often) lower costs. And the cost of an empty seat can be high, especially in business critical positions.

Fact: better performing organisations move 1.6 times faster from the un-official opening of a position to approving that position (source: 2012 BCG/WFPMA analysis).

#3 Benchmarking out-of-pocket recruiting costs.

Relatively easy to measure and, if benchmarked against direct competitors, gives an indication in the performance of high-quality and low cost sources such as employee referrals, internal promotions and direct sourcing.

But same as before, cost-per-hire or the performance of low-cost high-quality sources cannot be seen in isolation. Example: if you competitor hires 60% via employee referrals and your organisation 30% (which is pretty good), your competitor is more likely to be a ‘magnet’ for talent.

In short, everything you can measure is, or should, be related to ROI and provide insight in how quality, speed and costs (or yield) can be improved. Recruiting is an HR function with the highest impact on revenue growth and profit margin, and we need to prove this.

A short history of the Online Job Application Form

One of the first things I try to change or improve is the online job application form when I get my hands on an old Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Too often someone has digitalised an even older recruitment process, in the days when we were still pushing paper resumes from one desk to another, and created an online job application form that is so long it will discourage most potential candidates to apply (if lucky, only 30% finish submitting a job application form).

For example, why is everybody still asking to fill in a field with a street name? That question was useful 15+ years ago, when you send someone a confirmation or rejection letter by post. Nowadays you don’t need to know that kind of information until you hire someone. So why ask ALL applicants to fill in this detail at the start of the application process?

The biggest problem, and frustrations for job seekers, with the first ATS was that everyone wanted the job applicant to fill in as much information as possible, so the recruiter could easily search and filter at a later stage. The promise by the ATS-vendor was that, by building your own corporate cv database, you could reduce the use of recruitment agencies, saving you time and money. Afterall, are the best candidates not the ones who already showed an interest in your company?

Nice theory, but in practice corporate HR and recruiters didn’t use the cv-database. They only used the ATS too automatically post a job to as many jobboards as possible. And they created lenghty online job application forms because that was what HR wanted and the ATS-vendor could build (and adviced to do).

Image from taleosucks.blogspot.nl

The future of Online Job Application Forms

Luckily the ATS-technology got smarter with cv-extraction software and more “intelligent” search possibilities. And the online job application forms changed with it, from 7 pages to 1 form.

But what has remained is that a traditional resume is mandatory to finish your job application.

That is about to change. The future of job applications is much more personal and tailor made. Not an One-Size-Fits-All recruitment process. But an online assessment, test or virtual reality simulation prior submitting an application, for jobs where you can expect a high response. And an easy “Call me later” option for candidates that are high in demand.

Recruiting for high in demand positions is much more about personal connections and relations, engagement, interactions and an easy way to respond. That’s a big change from the traditional and transactional apply process that is used by many, if not all, large corporate organisations today.

But it must change. And it will change. The big enabler for this change are mobile devices, in combination with the use of social media. People read emails and check their favorite online social network 15 times a day on their smartphones. An direct “instant” application for jobs from mobile phones will soon become mainstream. If you are serious about improving the application ratio to maximise your job marketing efforts, it will be essential that you provide more options to respond.

Organisations and recruiting agencies that have launched a responsive (mobile) website already started to implement various ways to respond or apply. It forced them to re-think the current job application process and provide alternative ways to respond. A few examples:

1. Simple online job application forms (with minimum required fields)
2. Forward Job (to an email-address)
3. Send-Me-A-Link (to receive an apply link)
4. Call the recruiter (with a click on a button)
5. Call-me-back option (leaving a phone number)
6. Live video interviews
7. Asynchronous video interviews
8. Apply With LinkedIn/Indeed/Dropbox profile

More and more firms are accepting an online profile, usually a LinkedIn profile, to begin the hiring process. This opens the door to many passive job seekers who are not in job search mode and don’t have an up-to-date resume ready, or who look at the job on their mobile device. In the future a job application will be just a click on a button, without the need to fill in an job application form.

Are you ready for the future?

Recruitment via Google Glass

• Meeting alerts
• Interview preparation
• Check LinkedIn profile candidate
• Setup group interview via Google Hangout
• Record interview
• Schedule follow-up meeting

Onboarding via Google Glass

• Route planner
• Check on boarding and orientation
• Connect with your co-colleagues
• Take a picture of your new work place
• Share the picture with your online friends
• Search for local restaurant

What do you think. Are you going to buy Google Glass? Are you going to use it for Recruiting or Onboarding? How could we use it more?

Creating a Facebook career page specifically for recruitment purposes is obvious. However, more importantly, it can be very useful to measure your performance on social media and to compare yourself against the competition using an objective benchmark that includes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as engagement.

The Social Recruitment Monitor website (launched in October, 2012) displays these KPIs, in which engagement and interaction are crucial parts of the algorithm behind the SRM Index – the performance indicator on which all channels are being ranked to. Currently, around 800 Facebook career pages from fifteen different regions are being tracked on a weekly basis. All social statistics, derived from the Monitor, of the global Facebook career pages over the last year have been analyzed. In what way has Facebook developed as a social recruitment channel? The Social Recruitment Monitor provides the answers. Based on our research there are three major insights we would like to share:

• The average engagement ratio increased by 32%. Engagement on Facebook is an important aspect since higher engagement will increase the visibility of your updates. As employers have noticed that Facebook is an effective channel for their employer branding and recruitment efforts, it’s not surprising to see that they try to engage more with their continuously growing audience.
• 15% More updates by employers on their Facebook pages. Hence, organizations generate more content for their Facebook career pages, resulting in an average growth of 15% when it comes to the average amount of updates.
• The average fan base increased with more than 250%. The increased amount of updates and the extra engagement efforts of the employers have in return a positive effect on the Facebook users. More and more users are getting used to interact with organizations via social media and become aware of the added value of ‘likes’.

Based on these numbers, one can conclude that the usage of Facebook as an employer branding and recruitment channel grew rapidly. In addition Facebook users also got used to engage with (potential) future employers. Will Facebook continue to grow at the same pace in the coming twelve months?

Have you implemented something similar on your website?

In this series of advanced sourcing tips for Recruiters, I show some well-known and lesser-known search techniques and strategies.

Tip 4: Smart searching with more relevant keywords

Semantic search technology goes beyond traditional searching by using keywords. It recognizes synonyms, common typing errors and relevance of experience (recent experience gives a higher score).

With most search engines, like Google and LinkedIn are using, you can only find exactly what you’re looking because they hardly make use of semantic search technology. So if you search the keyword JAVA then you just get results with that word in it, However J2EE is a synonym for JAVA (J2EE stands for Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and in the Netherlands alone, you can find 450 profiles which contain the word J2EE but not the word JAVA!

More synonyms = more relevant search results

If you want to get more relevant search results, then you must work with synonyms. As an IT recruiter you are probably already aware of a few synonyms for Java, but have you thought also about the next 20?

1. Java Web Start
2. IntelliJ IDEA
3. Eclipse
4. JDBC
5. Maven
6. NetBeans
7. Mockito
8. JAXB
9. Tomcat
10. JPA
11. Servlets
12. Ant
13. JAX-WS
14. JSP
15. EJB
16. Java
17. Maven2
18. JNI
19. GWT
20. Acegi

These skills come from the dynamic knowledge base of LinkedIn: Skills. This page can be found via the webpage http://www.linkedin.com/skills (note: you won’t find this page anymore via a menu). The good news is that LinkedIn Skills contains tens of thousands of these dynamic lists of relevant keywords. If you’ve always wondered what you could do with these Skills pages, then you have found the answer to your question!

Example: searching with 20 relevant JAVA skills

Let’s move ahead with the example where we search for JAVA knowledge. Searching with the keyword JAVA in the Dutch LinkedIn profiles you’ll find 28,768 results. Adding only the word J2EE in your keyword, the number of search results rises to 29,218 (450 profiles more or +1.5%).

If you’re a bit handy with a text editor, you can quickly create boolean search assignments with the help of the lists in LinkedIn Skills e.g.:

J2EE OR “Java Web Start” OR “IntelliJ IDEA” OR “Eclipse” OR “JDBC” OR “Maven” OR “NetBeans” OR “Mockito” OR “JAXB” OR “Tomcat” OR “JPA” OR “Servlets” OR “Ant” OR “JAX-WS” OR “JSP” OR “EJB” OR “Java” OR “Maven2″ OR “JNI” OR “GWT” OR “Acegi”

It will cost you only 30 seconds extra to create this extensive boolean search string. If you run this query, you come to a total of 31.988 results. That are 3215 or +11% more profiles than your competitors have seen and approached!

Optimise this boolean search

This technique has the disadvantage that you quickly introduce false-positive results. The skill Maven is for example often used by Social Media Consultants. So be aware of that and remove such a keyword that produces an excess of false results. Also note that LinkedIn ‘only’ allows a boolean search string of up to 1,300 characters (half an A4).

Do you have any questions or suggestions for a search? Or do you want to share a handy sourcing tip? Let us know and we will include them in this series about advanced sourcing techniques!