I recently recorded a video with Jared Woods and these are the notes I prepared for the recording.

Explain sourcing as a channel, and how it differs from traditional recruitment?

We see proactive sourcing as a philosophy as well as a process. Traditional recruitment is static, reactive and focussed on live requisitions. Proactive sourcing is dynamic, ongoing, about relationships, community and the future. At Peerlo, we execute a multi-channelled sourcing strategy, which includes talent attraction and talent sourcing tactics.

Can you explain your view on social media and how it compliments sourcing?

Social Media has increased our ability to have conversations with people and build relationships. Relationships are at the core of everything we do here at Peerlo and social media (like the telephone) is another tool we use to connect with talent, clients and potential customers. The development of social software and subsequently social networks have made a huge impact on our ability to identify talent. With so much date freely available on the public web sourcing as a profession will continue grow in Australia - at this point there are not many people that are very knowledgeable and have strong skills in this area and we are lucky to have three in our team already.

Can you explain the ethos behind your approach?

Our absolute focus right now is on building talent communities within the industry areas we currently operate in, and I mean true communities not lists of people linked to a job record that you can push emails to every week and call it a talent pool. I mean communities where members are united by a common interest and we delivery value to these communities other than jobs, we facilitate and participate in conversations and we share our knowledge. Our vision is to be the constant in their career.

Tell us a little about the Peerlo team?

Our team has been purposely build so that each individual member can play a specific role in executing our sourcing strategy. We have Talent Attraction, Sourcing, Recruiting and BD capability set up as a unit to execute search campaigns, consulting assignments or deliver knowledge.

We have been very lucky to attract some high profile industry people to Peerlo and I think that’s largely because we are trying to innovate and try things people haven’t tried before and we are a “Social” business in every sense of the word

What are your Top 5 tips for businesses looking to improve their ability to attract and engage talent?

1.    Social Media is not a silver bullet, it’s just another set of tools to help you communicate with people and build relationships.

2.    Businesses should open up and not be afraid of letting people in …. who knows something great may just get out!

3.    Share what you know, it builds your personal and company brand.

4.    Blog… have a voice and let people know what you stand for.

5.    Don’t forget the telephone and coffee… they are still very effective tools when trying to build relationships.

Here’s the video:

HR In Black And White - Riges Younan from Jared Woods on Vimeo.

We’re really excited to announce that Dan Nuroo will be joining Peerlo!

Dan comes to us from DWS Advanced Business Solutions, where he was National Recruitment Manager for eight years.  Dan’s been in the recruitment game for fourteen years (veteran!) and has experience on the agency side, including his own, and working internally.  To say he knows the IT space is an understatement, and Dan’s skills and knowledge mean that Peerlo will be expanding our executive recruitment/search & selection arm further into the heady world of Information Technology.  Although with all of the social media lovers we already have here… we knew it was only a matter of time!

Dan is a great addition to Peerlo, and we’re looking forward to the changes ahead.  Kelly in particular is looking forward to another father on the team with little ones, because she *really* doesn’t hear enough about babies at the moment

Dan, you need to decide if you’re a PC or a Mac man so we can get ordering your gear!  Welcome on board.

The recently released Jobvite 2010 Social Recruiting Report shows some intriguing insights into the current mindset of recruiting professionals.

The report states that 73.3% of respondents “use social networks or social media to support their recruitment efforts”, with LinkedIn coming out as the race winner for platform/technology used most. And as Jobvite makes clear, the runners up (Facebook, Twitter etc) have increased dramatically in usage since the first report back in 2008. It seems the message is getting across. More and more organisations are seeing the benefits of using these technologies, and I think we can see that in practise. Growing numbers of organisation sponsored groups on LinkedIn, branded Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages… essentially, more ‘official’ presence.

The interesting statistic is intended spend. Jobvite say that almost 50% of hiring companies plan to invest more in social recruiting. This clearly leads the charge against sourcing channels such as corporate careers site (28.8%), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (23%) and Employee Referral Programs (19.8%). The actual costs associated with social recruiting Are manageable, especially when initially ‘dipping the toe in the water’, as most technologies offer cost effective or free solutions. Effective candidate sourcing can be completed on a free LinkedIn account, Facebook doesn’t charge me for a Page with the basics, and anyone can set up an account and tweet on behalf of a brand.

While it’s inspiring to see organisations committing recruiting budgets to embrace social recruiting, I wonder if the focus is all on the bright shiny new object on the room. For example, in the same report, employers state that the quality of candidates who come through Referral Programs is second to none. And this isn’t news: we know that referred candidates have a lower time to hire, they’re more likely to fit the culture of your organisation, and they have a much lower attrition rate than candidates sourced through other channels. So why is there so much appetite to spend on social recruiting?

It’s really important for organisations to step back and look at their sourcing channels strategically. Which channels really get the best candidates? As a company, have we got the basics right before we jump into the social recruiting pool? If I am advising a client on their Souring Strategy, it’s always front of mind to ensure that the most effective channels are focused on first. An organisation that wants to get right into the social recruiting scene needs to have an effective Referral or Alumni program first – we can prove the effectiveness of these programs far more conclusively. Sort out our priorities before we spend those hard-earned budget dollars on what this report tells us  tell us are our fourth highest quality candidates.

Social Recruiting is important, effective, and relevant. However, it’s not our first priority in an effective and strategic multi-channel sourcing model. It’s a channel which allows us to attract and engage talent, but we need to think about how we define talent, and what we’re attracting them to.

I was first introduced to the whole concept of crowdsourcing when I read James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of the Crowds“. He essentially claims that “large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant — better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future”.

Firstly, I want to distinguish between crowdsourcing and outsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is when a task, process or activity is outsourced to a group or community of people.

Outsourcing is when a task, process or activity is outsourced to a third party, this could be a supplier, a contractor or consultant. Typically you have one point of contact.

Let’s look at a few examples of how the “Crowd” can be used in recruiting.

Developing Position Descriptions

US company Best Buy (a retailer of technology and entertainment products) posted a position for a Senior Manager of Emerging Media Marketing. The qualifications included one year of active blogging experience, a preferred graduate degree, and a 250+ followers on Twitter. Yep, the number of followers you have on Twitter has now found its way into job descriptions.  This post spawned a number of related blog posts and dozens of re-tweets and conversations which ultimately led to the more complete description of the role and (obviously) enormous distribution of the job for Best Buy.

Use the crowd and the network-effect for Direct Referral Recruiting via Social Sites

Twitter

They are people who see Twitter only as a marketing & communication tool, and use it to build brand and push out content. There are many benefits of being on Twitter, from a recruiting perspective I have used the tool to build an online network and participate in conversations - with a community of passive talent and industry thought leaders. Mostly recently I noticed an interesting use of Twitter by Adcorp (an Australian Marketing Communications agency) with their quest to replace an employee called Brie.  The @replacebrie Twitter handle was created and the employee was tweeting “day in the life” posts, and talking about some of the daily task she performed, for example “Coordinating talent for a photo/video shoot on Thursday. #adcorp“.  It will be interesting to see if Adcorp were able to hire someone directly through this account.

LinkedIn

With over 1 million professionals in Australia and close to 70 million worldwide, LinkedIn has become the default platform for professionals online.  As John Campagnino, Accenture’s head of global recruiting puts it “You’d better be on the web. To put a sharper point on it: If you don’t have a profile on Linkedln, you’re nowhere”. In an article for Fortune magazine, Campagnino also stated that he “plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media.” He went on to say “This is the future of recruiting for our company”. Recently, LinkedIn has released new functionality in their Groups area that enables more conversation to take place “similar to offline face-to-face professional interactions“. One way that recruiters can use this new functionality would be to request referrals from talent in their community, post updates or company announcements on projects they are working on and to stimulate a discussion around the human capital requirements the project will have in the future. People can respond to messages and status updates publicly or they can respond privately in the event they want to refer a candidate: preferring to maintain the privacy of the individual’s details.

I don’t think crowdsourcing is the future of recruiting, it’s just another innovative way of executing your talent acquisition strategy. Above are just a few examples of how the crowd can impact the execution of certain recruitment activities. I do believe that using the crowd and the network effect is great for referrals, and investing in building talent communities is a great way to leverage the crowd for recruiting. However, as always we recommend a multi-channeled sourcing strategy that is customised, and highly targeted at the profile of candidate that you’re are trying to attract. So if the person you are trying to find doesn’t hang out on LinkedIn or Twitter, then it doesn’t make any sense for you to build a presence on these platforms if talent acquisition is your main driver.

Let us know if you have any examples where the crowd has been used in recruiting!

Andrea is well known to the sourcing community, being the founder of the Australasian Researchers Network.  Here at Peerlo she’ll be adding to our Talent sourcing capability, and will also take the lead in managing Talent communities for both Peerlo and our clients.  Strategic sourcing and utilising social media as part of CRM strategies for Talent Pool candidates is so important to our key offering, and with Andrea involved we’ll continue to lead in this space.

Andrea comes to us from HRX, where she was Functional Lead for the sourcing team.  Her experience in sourcing and dedicated Internet research techniques, training and certification of new researchers, as well as her role in encouraging innovation, collaboration and most importantly keeping an eye on the trends and goings on in the sourcing and recruitment world fits perfectly into the Peerlo culture, and we can’t wait to have her on board.

Welcome Andrea!  Your shiny new MacBook Pro is awaiting your love!

“Job boards work.  As a sourcing channel for candidates, job boards pull all employers together in the same place, they mostly have a nice and easy process for job seekers to follow, and result in applications from interested parties.  Fantastic!  But it’s really important to note that job boards are only one channel through which new hires can enter a business.

If your business wants to hire the best talent then it’s critical to ensure that your company employs multi-channel sourcing strategies.  There are a multitude of paths to your door; the more aware you are of them, and the more you make these paths accessible, the better results you will have.  However, it’s not clever to open all of the paths all of the time – the most important thing when looking at multi-sourcing is to take a strategic approach.

So many options… so little time, right?  The list is almost endless… do you invest in your employee referral program? Spend your time briefing agencies? Kick-start a corporate alumni? Attend overseas careers fairs in an international sourcing program?  Dip your toe into Social Recruiting?  Invest in a graduate program to nurture your future leaders? All of these are great channels but how do you know where to start?  An ad-hoc approach isn’t going to cut it here.

My advice would be to treat the sourcing of your people as a strategic program in itself.  Have a serious look at what you do now; what your processes are, how candidates and employees feel about your employment brand, and what successes you’re having using the channels you currently do.  How many
of your employees found you on which job board?  And do you know which sourcing channel you’re using is contributing your long-stay hires?

It’s such a powerful thing when you really know your Employment Value Proposition (EVP) and can articulate it through multiple channel branding efforts.

Diagnose, construct the strategy and then implement your programs.  And that includes your use of job boards – strategically using the channels that give you the best returns (quality candidates, shorter time to fill the roles and of course, cost effectiveness).  At the end of the day, the experience people have entering your business has a huge impact on your employment brand, so the more attention you pay it, the better.”

With the use of technology for the screening, matching and sourcing candidates on the rise, increasingly your resume will not be read by a human until after it is read, parsed, and classified by a computer.

So forget about the pretty graphics and nice borders to make your resume look good for the hiring manager or recruiter,  because the software that initially reads your resume can only see this ‘;anf;oasdfpoahs;gasfughv;asdnfg;asubfg;auhd’ (now just in case you are like me, not technical, that’s not software code - that’s just me saying that it’s a mess and will not be read properly by the recruitment software. This is obviously an issue if you are trying to get past first base.

Here’s what to remember

1. You resume must be in Microsoft Word or (Update) PDF format, Not HTML, WordPerfect or RTF.

2. Looks are deceiving: Plain is good, Fancy is bad. No headers & footers, no graphics, no tables in Word, no fields in Word - and don’t use resume templates particularly resume templates from Microsoft (sorry Gatesy!)

3. Don’t mix font types or size for data, it sounds boring I know but it’s the actual content that is important not the way that the content looks to recruiters and hiring managers.

4. Capitalisation does matter. Don’t use CAPS unless you need to.

5. See what your resume looks like in plain text. Resume systems convert the resumes into plain text and then they read and process plain text.

6. Contact information should comes first. If you want a job, let people know how they can get in touch to speak with you about the job opportunity.

7. Use common header terms to start resume sections eg: [Job Objective] [Education] [Project Experience]

8. Do not use columns or tables for formatting anything.

9. Keep like data in order eg: [Dates] [Company] [Position Title] [Description]

10. Do not combine sections.

11. Always end company names with common company name words. eg Pty Ltd, Inc, LLC, Ltd.

12. Omit page numbers.

13. Put key words into work history descriptions. eg: Business Development, Project Controls, Scheduling, Drafting, Project Management, Mining & Minerals, Energy etc

14. Don’t put references on your resume, EVER.

Hope this helps

We’re pretty excited to have her on board.  Marika has come to us from a previous recruitment career in the IT arena (Senior Consultant at Talent International), with a real interest in jumping in to the Mining & Minerals sector. As she told us in her interview, her family background in the mining industry in South Africa led her here after she decided she was up for something different in her next role.

We’d also like to thank Conor & Sullivan for sharing their mum with us 2 days a week!  Boys, just try and keep the peanut butter off the laptop

Welcome to the team!  Marika is another convert to Twitter since coming on board here - you can find her on @MarikaWebster

In my final post on the Destination Talent/Six Figures report Executive Monitor 2010, I wanted to cover that old chestnut – Social Media and Recruiting.

The report has some interesting stats. 0.8% of executives use social networking sites (like LinkedIn or Facebook) to find & secure a role. Is anyone surprised? I can hear the collective “no” from here… hey, no need to shout!

We’ve posted many times here about the benefits of a social recruiting strategy and the measurable benefits it can bring to both jobseekers and employers. So why so low?

I think it has something to do with the initial purpose of some of these tools. LinkedIn, for example, started as an online address book that updated itself when someone changed their contact details. Clearly we’ve moved onwards and upwards since then, but not everyone is an ‘early adopter’ or an evangelist for new ways to communicate.

Sometimes one of the hardest things about cottoning on to something before the general populous does is that you move past it too fast as well. It’s a well worn story, that of the ‘social media expert’ who just gets tired of espousing the benefits of the technology to more and more fresh faces. It can be a little frustrating, and that’s understandable.

The key here is patience. One of the biggest threats to the ubiquitous-ness (is that a word? I don’t think so) of this type of communication is people (who get it) becoming weary of having to keep explaining. To combat this, I think all ‘social media experts’, or just social media users in general, need to cast their minds back to the questions they came up against when they first dipped a toe in the water.  The parts they were scared of, the best bits and the worst bits. The incredible level of user-ease definitely helps, but to a lot of people this is a whole new world and it requires a little hand holding.

I think it’s important to give people time to absorb this stuff.  Get them excited, give them time to sit ‘off-the-boil’ for a while and let those ideas really sink in.

So this is for all you experts, mavens and superstars: Teach.  Share. Don’t get tired when someone says ‘but can I delete a negative comment?’. And most importantly, remember that social media (for recruitment at least) will always be one part of a much bigger equation. It will only ever be one of your multiple employment branding channels, or one program in your sourcing strategy, or for a candidate it’s one avenue by which you can find yourself that next big role. In short, it’s not instead of, it’s as well as. And keep telling people about your experiences so they can join us for the ride.

Destination Talent & Six Figures’ report Executive Monitor 2010 contains some interesting information about the views of executives in Australia today, and my second post on the report touches on the stats around executive attitudes to Recruitment Agencies.

In short – it doesn’t look good. Like any industry, recruitment companies can suffer from guilt by association. Operators who sit at the lower end of the scale become viewed as standard, and people who are great at what they do get tarred with the same brush. We’re used to judging people by the danger they may represent, so we tend to hold on to negative perceptions for longer. Yes, the attitude exists for a reason, but one bad apple doesn’t make for a bad orchard. As one survey participant states: “There is a huge gulf in quality amongst recruitment companies. It is hard to find the really good ones. The bad ones drag down perceived quality of the whole sector.”

This is both positive and negative for our industry. Constantly combating negative perceptions can make it hard to win clients. However, it does make it easy to deliver superior performance when the bar is set so low. It’s up to us, as the good performers, to differentiate from the stereotype and show our stakeholders, our candidates and our clients, that we can be relied upon to find solutions to talent problems.

Executives engage with us to supply two things: corporate talent for their organisation, and opportunities and advice for their personal careers. In fact, the report tells us that 38% of those surveyed found a job using a recruitment/search firm. Poor service, on either side of the equation, is amplified by the emotional power of what we do. Executives are passionate about their careers, and that sword cuts both ways.

The fundamental aspect of any relationship is respect. And to me, that’s what differentiates quality talent management from the ‘place and replace’ school. Delivering good service comes down to balancing industry expertise and a depth of understanding about what the executive needs, whether it’s personal or corporate.

As candidates, executives deserve to be managed as assets, not products to fit into an appropriate need. They aren’t talent to be sold. Respecting the needs (and fears) of the executive as a candidate requires empathy and real service. These are people we’re dealing with, and while it’s easy to distil a person down into a resume or skill-set, successfully managing talent means recognising that people’s basic humanity is a huge factor in their work life. Too often consultants forget that what we’re dealing with is not only about experience, skills and culture fit to an organisation… but also ‘my daughter is away on her first school camp’, ‘I need a bigger house because we’ve got one on the way’ and ‘my parents are retiring and moving to the coast’. Respecting that job search is one part of a busy life, and focusing on adding value and relevance to the candidate’s process are simple ways to make that difference.

Executives who engage us as clients will have a whole spectrum of expectations based on experience and their own recruitment efforts. Clear and transparent communication, listening to our clients and frank, regular communication about how the process is going aren’t just added value, but core aspects of building a lasting service relationship. We need to help our clients understand that sourcing talent is a process which requires a careful and considered approach, so that they value our input and expertise. Simple communication, paired with a commercial understanding of the impact this talent can make to the business, covers 90% of the issues most companies have with recruitment agencies.

Another survey participant quoted in the report states that recruitment is “too much about ticking boxes”. Top recruitment professionals are change managers, researchers, project managers, educators and confidants. Whether that’s an individual or a team, it’s a good description of what goes into solving talent problems. Simple respect for our clients and being open about what we do is key to turning negative attitudes around. Each positive experience contributes, and it can elevate excellent operators and quickly expose those who are letting the industry down.

Before the crisis, the talent shortages gave rise to exaggerated fee structures. The argument on which recruiter to use came down to commissions, to percentages, to cost. We have an opportunity now to change this argument from cost to value, and in doing so, repair some of the damage that our reputation has suffered as an industry. There will always be bottom-feeders and dodgy operators, just as there will always be clients who believe the worst of us. With time, and a dedication to becoming a better industry, we can evolve the thinking behind recruitment and talent management from a transactional solution to a trusted partner.