Last week, Indeed.com announced the launch of “company pages”.  Simply put, these are free profiles that provide employers with a new way to promote their company and job openings to job seekers on Indeed.

I had a chance to catch up with Chris Hyams, VP of Product for Indeed, and he shared the following:

“Our goal at Indeed is to help job seekers find the perfect job. With Indeed Company Pages, job seekers can now find out what it’s like to work for millions of companies. Company Pages also give employers a new way to promote their workplace and jobs to 60 million job seekers.”

Employers can claim and customize their pages with company information, logos, and links to their website and social profiles.  Company Pages will also make it easier for job seekers to find information about prospective employers and view their jobs.

For more information, and to see examples of employer Company Pages, please visit Indeed’s Blog.

Today, Bullhorn released data which found that Facebook is just not where recruiters are finding candidates. The report presents key findings and benchmark data pulled from the Bullhorn Reach user network of over 35,000 recruiters.  What’s the outcome? LinkedIn is KING.

I had a chance to connect with Art Papas, Bullhorn’s President and CEO to discuss the findings.  Here’s what he shared:

“What we are exposing is a disconnect in the social recruiting space, between where job seekers think they will find a job and where they’re actually much more likely to find one. “We think that this information will help recruiters connect with candidates more successfully on social media.”

Bullhorn measured LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter’s frequency of usage by recruiters and their effectiveness for sourcing candidates and found that LinkedIn is blowing away the competition in terms of job views and applications. Even Twitter (Twitter!) is ahead of Facebook in these metrics.  A few examples include:

• For job applications, LinkedIn is driving almost nine times more applications than Facebook and three times more than Twitter.
• Twitter drives almost twice as many job views per job as Facebook and three times more applications per job.
• A Twitter follower is almost 3 times more likely to apply to a job posting than a LinkedIn connection and 8 times more likely to apply than a Facebook friend.
• Facebook is the network least connected to by recruiters, with only 10% using it in combination with LinkedIn for recruiting

Included below is the infographic on how recruiters are using social media.  Click here for the free 2012 Social Recruiting Report from Bullhorn.

Recruiters that lead the way use competitive intelligence to position and drive influence with their hiring leaders.

And sure, while the best researchers have as many cell phones and numbers as they do accents for making calls, there are a lot of other ways to gather information quickly and cost effectively (usually free). While this list is focused on recruiting, it can be used in almost any research function.  Here are 20 powerful competitive intelligence tools you can use in recruiting:

• The Free Library:  A great source for articles and information on your competitors. You can browse by date, author, category and name.  A quick example – I typed in the company Wells Fargo, and instantly came across information about a reorganization which included information about a new structure (including some names and titles).  There are a lot of opportunities with this tool – this is just one quick example.

• BoardTracker:  This powerful tool has near real-time monitoring with over 2 billion (yes billion) in-depth discussion posts from hundreds of thousands of forums and millions of users.  You can get advanced alerts & tracking options with alerts by email, twitter, SMS, RSS, etc. Another popular option is BoardReader

• Google Alerts: Keep up to date instantly with what your competitors are doing, and have the results delivered to your email or set up as RSS feeds.  Customize your alert to include specific people, press releases, financial information, etc.  The opportunities with google alerts are endless.

• SocialMention:  Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, individuals, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, or a competitor.  This can be a powerful tool, and includes exporting features as well.

• LinkedIn:  For starters, follow your competitors pages.   Check their employees updates, track a companies new hires, promotions, people that have left, where they have gone, press releases, research org charts, etc.  If you aren’t taking advantage of everything LinkedIn has to offer, start with this one first for recruiting.

• Glassdoor:  Research companies, jobs, salary information, awards, and as of last week – inside connections.

• copernic AGENT:  Simply put, Copernic Agent is the best meta search engine that queries several search engines and aggregate the results to give you the best search results.Copernic Agent gives you the ability to search deeper into the Web and to get relevant, high quality results grouped into categories..

• Google Plus:  Google Plus can be used as a source to find information on companies and employees.  Not only are companies establishing their brand pages on the site, but individuals are sharing content about companies that have not decided to have a presence on Google Plus. Like with any other site, you might be surprised with what you can find in a short amount of time.

• Twitter:  Are you following your competitors and all their employees on twitter? How about the people that the competition is following? Are you leveraging twitter lists? What lists do they use or subscribe to?

• Bureau of Labor Statistics:  There is a significant amount of data available from the BLS that can be valuable information when used in recruiting and research.  If you haven’t visited the site in awhile, I’d recommend taking a look at what’s available.

• Twitter Search:  Twitter search is the #2 search engine.  Are you tracking what you should be? Some obvious choices include competitor names, news, and relevant keywords.  Use the advance search feature for even more options.

• Wikipedia:  What’s out there about your competitors? Check out the business intelligence possibilities with one company’s search results on the Wikipedia site – for Target Corporation.

• Job Descriptions:  Do a quick search on job boards for competitive intelligence jobs to see what other methods or sources companies look for when hiring these professionals – it may give you some other ideas.

• Indeed:  Yes, you can find jobs on indeed and see what jobs your competitors are hiring for, but don’t forget other Indeed tools including hiring trends, their online forums, and salary research.

• Slideshare:  Which of their employees are presenting? Where? What’s being published? Tap into this information with a couple of searches on the site, and you’ll quickly see what’s possible.

• Google Finance:  If your competitor is publicly traded, you can perform a search in Google Finance, where you can review income statements, latest news stories and blog posts about competitors and their business data.

• CI Radar: Automatically uncover competitor presentations, research, competitive analysis, etc. Documents can be automatically collected, filtered, and scored for relevancy based on your industry/market.

• Research firms: If you don’t have the resources, you can always rely on a research firm to provide you with information including names, numbers, organizational charts, etc.

• Company & Industry Information: Some of the best sources of information for competitive intelligence can be found in annual reports, analyst coverage, and industry analysis.

• Your employees, references, and candidates: They all sounds obvious, yet don’t forget about them. We’re hiring people everyday, and they can supply the most relevant information quickly – or put you in touch with someone who can.

A list of 20 tools can be overwhelming and it can take some time to look through and decide what makes sense for you to use.  I’d recommend starting out by putting together a simple strategy. Then, start with the easy ones – that provide results sent directly to you.  Also, carving out a couple of 30 minute blocks of time in a week can help to.  It’s a small investment (time), compared to the return.

What other tools do you use for competitive intelligence?

I had a chance to catch up with Glassdoor to learn more about the launch of Inside Connections and Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO shared the following:

 “Friends and family are the most trusted resource for career advice, and with Glassdoor’s Inside Connections, we are bringing together who you know with what you need to know about jobs and companies. Inside Connections allows job seekers to leverage their Facebook network to uncover where they have an ‘in’ at specific companies to help them land the right job”.   said Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO of Glassdoor. “

Learn more about Inside Connections via the brief Glassdoor YouTube video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can download the Glassdoor Inside Connections .pdf overview or visit the Glassdoor site for more information.

Through the evolution of recruiting and online channels, little has changed.  Sure, SEO is more important today than it was back then given candidates online search behaviors and having a social presence matters more now. (or does it)?  What hasn’t changed much through all of the change the effectiveness of these channels – and the candidate experience.

I recently had the opportunity to spend part of a day with a dozen other corporate recruiting leaders and we discussed the experience and results from online recruiting (while these results may or may not be comparative to yours there was representation from a variety of industries and company sizes).

Here are 6 of the key online recruiting topics / trends discussed:

• Candidates really don’t care that much about all of the shiny objects talked about by the experts.  They just want to quickly be able to find a job, a streamlined application process, communication, and to be treated with basic courtesy and respect throughout the process.  Sorry, they don’t care about following you on twitter or liking your page on facebook.
• Job boards, social channels, and aggregator sites have the highest number of visit to hire ratios, and the lowest “qualified” ratios, and the lowest “interview” ratios.  The reality is these are part of most recruiting strategies – and they have a place.  How big of a place and how they are deployed depends on your organization.
• More Resume’s come from the large job boards compared to other online sources.
• The interview to hire ratio is better for niche job boards compared to the big ones.
• Candidates coming from search engines have a higher likelihood to complete the application process once they click apply compared to the other online channels.
• The average of corporate career site visitor to apply ratios was between 10%-20%.  This had the largest variance compared to the other trends – by industry.

Corporate career sites have long been the answer to engaging and converting site visitors to candidates (or applicants).  With all of the technology and targeted search capabilities for job seekers, you’d expect the conversion rates to be higher than 10% on a visit to your site.  Sure, maybe they visited your career site from work and will apply later from home, or they started the online application and left before finishing it – given the redundant and cumbersome process.  Or who knows – it’s a stretch, possibly they were distracted because they had to answer the phone (a recruiter actually called them).

Enter ReTargeter.  The concept isn’t new, and has been used competitively in the B2B and B2C space for years.  How does it work? It’s pretty simple.  Someone visits your web site, and they leave your web site.  Later they surf the web and a service like ReTargeter recaptures their interest to get back to your site via online ads on nearly any site they visit, and voila they come back.

It’s no different in recruiting.  Here are 5 examples to consider – with the goal of serving up unique ads to the following online destinations:

• Corporate Career Site:  Drive traffic back to your careers or job listing pages
• Social Recruiting:  Engage potential candidates via your social channels
• Talent Community:  Easy opt-in via LinkedIn credentials or business card capture (no Resume or user name / password required)
• Referral Network:  Effectively leverage social job sharing via your online channels
• Event Marketing:  Target users from specific geographic areas to attend a campus recruiting event, information session, or career fair

I had a chance to connect with the ReTargeter team and further discuss the benefits and advantages of their service.  Hafez Adel, Director of Marketing at ReTargeter shared, “Getting noticed online is pointless if nobody remembers you. ReTargeter helps brands stand out amidst all of the noise and stay top of mind with customers, even on a small advertising budget”.

Customers have seen up to a 5X increase in conversions, a bounce rate decrease up to 20%, and up to 1500% higher CTR than traditional direct buy ads.  A service like this might make sense to consider given the ease of use, the specific niche targeting possibilities, and a very cost effective model of re-targeting candidates (compared to other online recruiting approaches).

Interested in engaging with ReTargeter? Connect with the team on twitter, facebook, or ReTargeter.com.

Here are the top 5 recruiting #fails of 2011:

• #5 – Twesume:  While twesume was just announced, it’s still 2011.  This is yet another example of a waste of time for both job seekers and recruiters.
• #4 – The Online Recruiting Transformation:  Huh? When you don’t hear about something for a year after it’s announced (or see any results in search engines), it’s a #fail.  This was the case with the .jobs debacle from Direct Employers.
• #3 – Retention:  At the close of 2010 many HR and Recruiting Pros were touting retention as a key focus for 2011, with under-engaged and dis-engaged high performers leaving at record numbers.
• #2 –  Social Jobs Partnership:  There are tens of thousands of pages and apps on facebook already for job seekers.  By adding another job aggregation and search page on facebook in an effort to put people back to work was the answer here from the companies you see listed on the social jobs partnership.
• #1 – Beknown:  Launched in June of this year, Monster.com launched BeKnown on Facebook – and many experts called this a game changer.  AppData shows the app having a consistent decline in usage, and I have yet to hear the word BeKnown in any conversations with job seekers and recruiters on the “you should do this” list.

3 years ago the HRC provided participants notice that there would soon be more stringent qualifications for the 100% ranking.  How has it impacted employers?  Last year, 337 companies earned 100% rankings, and for 2012 the number dropped significantly to 190.

A few examples of the heightened requirements for companies to be ranked as best places to work for LGBT employees include:

• Increased emphasis on health benefits and full inclusion for transgender employees
• Demonstrating consistent organizational competency for LGBT employees
• Public commitment to the LGBT community

The 100% ranking is important for companies looking attract, hire, engage, and retain employees – in addition to gaining market share and support from the LGBT community and their allies.

Invitations to participate in the Corporate Equality Index Ranking are sent to all Fortune 1,000 companies from HRC.  Read the full report and rankings here.

Minutes ago at the LinkedIn TalentConnect Conference the 2011 inaugural Recruiting Award winners were announced live – in front of the nearly 2,000 conference attendees and USTREAM viewers.  The winners were awarded with $5,000 in cash and prizes, in addition to a contribution to a charity of their choice from Talent HQ.

When the awards were announced earlier this year, a unique crowd-sourcing element was the unique element compared to other awards in the industry.  Thousands of votes were submitted online from recruiting practitioners, TalentConnet conference attendees, and the panel of judges.  Rule-based scoring was used in the calculation, ensuring this didn’t turn into a popularity contest.  As an example, in one of the award categories  there was only .20% score differential between 1st and 2nd place.

Congratulations to the 2011 Recruiting Award winners:

Talent Hunter
The nominees were all extreme hunters – and relentless sourcers. They are investigative in nature, and diligent in their approach. Finding a needle in the haystack is second nature to these recruiting pros. This years’ award winner has transformed the sourcing and talent identification process at their company, which has faced an employment brand awareness challenge. This individual’s ability to source talent is a key driver for the companies’ ability to meet aggressive expansion plans.  Congratulations to Angie White from hhgregg, the winner of the 2011 Talent Hunter award.

Recruiting Organization
The competition for the recruiting organization of the year was very close. The award winner has elevated recruiting within their company to a level hardly seen. They have ranked #1 in the past 5 years within their industry – and have positioned recruiting as a competitive advantage. They consistently exceed the aggressive recruiting goals set by their company, and their recruiters are empowered to make decisions. Leaders from this company quote their recruiters ability to aggressively source talent – as a key competitive strength. Congratulations to Kari Cohen and the Renaissance Financial recruiting team for being selected as the 2011 Recruiting Organization of the Year.

Recruiting Innovation
The nominees for the innovation award have focused on setting new boundaries and standards in recruiting. The winner has delivered some exciting results for their company – while creating an engaging approach for candidates. Quotes from job seekers for this company include “I’ve worked for several companies throughout my career and every hiring process is a little different, however, this sets the gold standard.” “What an amazing group of professionals, with great communication and follow-up”. “This is the best recruiting process I’ve ever experienced.” Congratulations to the 2011 Recruiting Innovation Award winner, Stacy Van Meter from Deluxe Corporation.

A special thanks to LinkedIn for hosting the 2011 Recruiting Awards at TalentConnect, and the RecruitingAwards.com sponsors Montage Talent, Checkster, Jobs2Web, and TalentHQ.

The site is approaching 30 billion page views for 2011 as it sets targets on replacing things like Resume’s, business cards and rolodexes with business intelligence.  Some say the powerhouse has transformed recruiting.  How? With the ability to source passive talent at massive scale, with a simple platform.

How do recruiters track all of these high quality prospects and candidates? A CRM, right? Think again. Many corporate recruiting functions still use spreadsheets for sourcing talent.  That’s about to change.  LinkedIn announced a new CRM product today at their annual recruiting event – called Talent Pipeline.  While there is little information about Talent Pipeline currently available, some key takeaways from the announcement include:

• This is for managing prospects, not applicants (save that for the ATS).
• Seamlessly integrated on the LI Recruiter platform.
• Upload contacts and records into Talent Pipeline, regardless of the source.
• LinkedIn will automatically find the contacts LinkedIn record and make the connection, keeping that record in Talent Pipeline updated forever.
• Connects Resumes to the professional graph which gives you great context and information to have conversations with a prospect.
• Includes workflow tools, smart alerts, collaboration features (recruiters and hiring leaders), and reporting.
• Talent Pipeline will be available as a standalone product – or can be used with the core Recruiter product.  The best news of the morning – for users with the core Recruiter product – Talent Pipeline will be free.
• The product will be available for select companies this fall, and will be available broadly in 2012.

Recruiters from several organizations I spoke with are already experiencing traffic between 5-15% to their career sites, without even trying.  The number jumps to over 20% for most retail brands.

Whether you recruit for a small, medium, or large sized company – many opportunities to integrate mobile into your online recruiting strategy.  The solution, budget, and complexity may vary – but a small simple (non-negotiable) step is to mobile enable your career site.

While there were a lot of statistics thrown around at the event about mobile devices like overall usage, text messaging, apps downloaded, and devices – I’ll skip that and go right to 7 quick takeaways from this recruiting event:

QR Codes:
An easy, quick, and inexpensive win. Have your Recruiters use a QR code on the back of their business card. The destination: Their job listings.

App vs. the web:
There was a considerable amount of conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of building a jobs / career mobile app vs. first focusing on optimizing your career site. Most agree you should first focus on your career site, as you’re already receiving traffic to it from mobile devices – and you want to ensure your pages are optimized.

App pollution:
I’ve talked a lot about job pollution, and the same theory applies to building apps. According to the research presented at the conference, the average candidate applies to many jobs (8 – 15 was the average quoted). Can you imagine candidates downloading 8-15 corporate apps during a job search? Another approach top consider is follow the path taken by PepsiCo, with their mobile app, Possibilities. Shift the focus of the job searh itself to more around candidate engagement. Another great example shared by Doug Berg, Chief Recruiting Geek at Jobs2Webs is to create an app focused on your industry vs. focusing on jobs. For example, a healthcare company providing medical research and information appealing to Doctors and Nurses opens up some new opportunities.  From their you can create a database, and voila, let the recruiting begin.

The dreaded ATS:
Joel Cheesman said it best, “The candidate dilemma, from a mobile experience into ATS hell”.  No ATS has the very basic needs corporate recruiting organizations need related to mobile recruiting. The biggest gap: the apply process. It’s hard to imagine a place where candidates can easy apply from a movie or handheld device.  Another quote from one of the panelists says it all.. “Mobile is introducing a speed at the front end that the back end in recruiting can’t keep up with”.  Start talking to your ATS provider today.

SEO:
Google will soon rank sites higher that are mobile optimized. Only 20% of the Fortune 1000 currently have mobile optimized sites, the number drops further when looking at small to medium sized companies.

Investment:
Less than 1% of marketing budgets are spent on mobile, while nearly all consumers have a mobile device.  The size of the company you recruit for doesn’t really matter.  As I mentioned previously the complexity of the solution may vary, and the larger the company other challenges increase like integration, compliance, global scale, etc.  However, there are very simple, small steps any company can take immediately to ensure candidates don’t have a negative mobile experience while surfing your site.

The Mobile Recruiting Hype:
Is this whole mobile recruiting thing just hype? It doesn’t seem so considering we’ve gone from nearly 0% of traffic from a mobile device to an average of 5%-10% in just the past 12 months (with little effort on the industry).  Mobile recruiting and a mobile experience for candidates should not replace other sourcing and recruiting channels, it should enhance what you currently have.  Considering only 30% of mobile devices are Smartphones, which is expected to exceed 50% in the next 12 months, we’re just getting started.

Every great recruiter knows the best mobile approach is to make use of your calling plan..  Pick up the phone and call a candidate.

Congrats to Michael Marlatt, the creator of mRecruitcamp for a very successful event, and for helping drive some needed change on the recruiting conference scene!

Time to vote!

The nominations are in for our 3 award Categories (Talent Hunter, Recruiting Innovation, and Recruiting Organization of the Year).

Our panel of judges are standing by to weigh in, but their voice doesn’t count as much as yours! Voting runs through October 4th 2011 and there’s over $5,000 in cash and awards at stake.

Winners will be announced live at the upcoming LinkedIn Talent Connect Conference in Las Vegas.

Vote Talent Hunter »

Vote Recruiting Innovation »

Vote Recruiting Organization &#187

Register once, vote for all three. And if you already registered during our nominations you don’t have to re-register!