Brilliant Bill Boorman from Britian

When Recruiting Pied Piper, Bill Boorman suggests you have a look at anything, smart people generally do.  When he tweeted me that British ad agency AndSome had created four ‘brilliant  (Brits like the word brilliant)  social recruiting campaigns for their clients, I checked them out.

Before going further, to simply call AndSome an ad agency, doesn’t really capture it, to say the least.  A view of just the main page of their website immediately illustrates they don’t see themselves as a big agency a la Madmen.  Here are the links and short overview to the four campaigns.  Three of the four are up for industry recognition, three of four use social media to recruit in really innovative ways, and all four are, well…. brilliant.  (Note, I’m sure AndSome has created many more than four campaigns for their clients! These are just the featured ones.)

How we put the social into recruiting…..Runners for ITV – a great campaign for UK TV station ITV.  Runners are the part-time retail sales associates of TV. The client wanted a more committed, wanting-to-progress type of  candidate to strengthen their internal organizational chart.  The multi-faceted campaign complete with competition was unique.  The numbers achieved here are astounding.

How we put the social into recruiting…..Engagement for Paul UK – Paul UK would be the Canadian equivalent of Cob’s Bread or a bakery version of Whole Foods.  The opening sentence in the blog is -

Employee engagement in retail can be seen as the Holy Grail. How do you involve and communicate to a workforce who aren’t sat at a desk and tied to a computer? The development of an internal communications based on the Rubik’s cube (and without social media) is a great read.

How we put the social into recruiting…..StoryLiners at ITV ITV produces Coronation Street and wanted to find story writers to appeal to a changing audience.  A whole new community was born that still exists after the selected candidates started their new job.  Really, talent hub building at its best.

How we put the social into recruiting…Poaching for Zizzi – How a Polaroid has greatly assisted a leading UK restaurant in their direct approach recruiting…or poaching.  (I used to call it mall crawling many decades ago)

Without a doubt not all retailers nor restaurants can afford full campaigns to strengthen their employment brand, internal communications or satisfy their recruiting needs. These campaigns illustrate, however, how engagement is changing the way we achieve results. Many thanks to Bill for the heads up and congratulations to AndSome and their shortlist inclusions for the RAD Awards. I hope you win!

For the few people reading this blog post who aren’t aware, every year the National Retail Federation, the United States’ largest retail association, holds their annual conference in New York in January.

They bill it as Retail’s Big Show, and it really is.  World Class speakers, a gigantic trade show, networking opportunities, the works.  This year was their 100th convention and over 20,000 retail professionals attended.  Yes, 20,000.

Every major retailer participates at some level and, of course, many retail consultants of all stripes attend.  Most of the senior executives attend. I have never attended and regret that and will try to rectify that in 2012.

For those of us unable to attend, however, we were treated to a steady stream of updates on various sessions, seminars, new introductions, etc.  Using blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn either individuals or groups kept those of us back at home well informed.  Many bloggers came home and expanded on what they saw.

Or what they didn’t see.  I read two blog posts that disturbed me from two retail social media connections I admire and respect – Doug Stephens, The Retail Prophet and Carol Spieckerman, a retail genius from the merchandising side. This blog discusses Carol’s view, Doug’s is here .

Carol Spieckerman describes herself as a Retail Speaker, distiller, and activator and I’d say she is a must-follow for all things merchandising, particularly private label, trends, and retail channel challenges.  She tweets as @retailxpert (there is no ‘e’) and her blog for newmarketbuilders, The Right Brain of Retail is must-read for most in the retail vertical. She is considered an expert on Walmart and their strategies. Here’s her bio, she’s a cracker – Carol Spieckerman

Carol went to The Big NRF Show and her first apres-show blog is
here. Carol’s retail focus is not necessarily on the people but here was her observation of the lack of attention paid to what I am calling the Retail Employee Experience.  When you read the blog you’ll see that Carol noticed, like Doug in the previous blog, there was a real lack of seminars, conversations, presentations on the retail employee, whether it was engaging, retaining, recruiting, training, or sourcing him/him.

What she did notice, regarding head office turnover in the buyer category, was enlightening if not downright scary.  Does Target really move their merchants around every two years?  Here are Carol’s takeaways and some of my comments………

Takeaways:

• We’ve been telling our clients for a while that rapid turnover at retailer HQ isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s intentional and often institutionalized.  Really? Intentional? For Goodness sake, why? Every HR principle would go against this decision in terms of employee competence, retention, and development.
• Even if you believe all the grousing that retail isn’t a relationship business anymore, you have to accept that it is a reputation business – and the only way you can secure yours is by building contingency contacts and courting both decision-makers and influencers.
• You have to know your business and your brands inside out because the person across the table may or may not.  Maybe because he/she has only been there for a few months?
• Doors are spinning on both sides of the retail table. Again, why?Don’t let your story get “lost in transition.”

Retail has been slammed over the years for their high turnover largely referring to in-store hourly positions.  The turnover occurred as a result of Retail not being thought of as a Career (certainly in Canada), low wages, long hours, poor training leading to poor performance, non-standard hours, and poorly trained managers plus perhaps and probably – poor hiring practises.  All of those often added up to a poor Retail Employee Experience.  Hopefully some improvement has been made because the overall stratospheric rate of turnover in Retail in North America has been reducing over the years.

But, in a (hopefully) more stable Head Office working environment, why force turnover by constant re-assignment?  The reference in Carol’s blog to a ConAgra Senior Exec who has seen such turnover in his era there, that he joked that ‘If the boss calls, please get his name’ is just sad.

The only reason I can think of to move around Store Management or Buying personnel any sooner than 3-5 years is because its a white-hot category that demands brand-new views constantly or the Store Manager is an expert in new store openings.

We no longer live in a world where it is considered preferable or even beneficial to work for one employer in one job for the majority of a career.  In fact, not only aging baby boomers, but also Generation Y and Z loathe this approach.  But I believe something is wrong when you can’t even get a well-thought out program executed with a Head Office buyer because they have been re-assigned, fired or they quit.

Could anyone help me and my readers with why turnover is forced at these major retail Head Offices?  Target is coming to Canada and I hope they share their two-years-in-a-category position with the buyer candidates before they hire them.

My sincere thanks to Doug and Carol for sharing their observations at NRF’s Big Show.

For the few people reading this blog post who aren’t aware, every year the National Retail Federation, the United States’ largest retail association, holds their annual conference in New York in January.

They bill it as Retail’s Big Show, and it really is.  World Class speakers, a gigantic trade show, networking opportunities, the works.  This year was their 100th convention and over 20,000 retail professionals attended.  Yes, 20,000.

Every major retailer participates at some level and, of course, many retail consultants of all stripes attend.  Most of the senior executives attend. I have never attended and regret that and will try to rectify that in 2012.

For those of us unable to attend, however, we were treated to a steady stream of updates on various sessions, seminars, new introductions, etc.  Using blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn either individuals or groups kept those of us back at home well informed.  Many bloggers came home and expanded on what they saw.

Or what they didn’t see.  I read two blog posts that disturbed me from two retail social media connections I admire and respect – Doug Stephens, The Retail Prophet and Carol Spieckerman, a retail genius from the merchandising side. This blog discussses Doug’s view, Carol’s comes next.

Readers of this blog know Doug Stephens The Retail Prophet Doug went to NRF’s Big Show and took a different approach to attending.  He attended some sessions but interviewed other attendees as well.  Read all about it here

Doug makes the point in one of his posts from NRF  ‘Our Greatest Assets’ as he refers to the NRF overall program that everything under the sun for the consumer was covered and lots and lots on the latest social and technological advances, but just about nothing about engaging, retaining, and developing retail employees.  Just about nothing.

“What was conspicuous by its absence however was any meaningful mention of the value or importance of the retail employee in actually delivering or supporting this experience.”

Doug interviewed Caitlin Kelly, the author of Malled – my unintentional year in Retail We can’t get the results of the interview until the book is released April 14th, but Caitlin will reveal what she sees as being the fatal flaws in the industry’s staffing paradigm.  And why companies so often refer to sales staff as their greatest assets but so rarely back it with action. I have already pre-ordered my copy.

From the time I worked in HR for the now-defunct Woodward’s Stores Limited in Western Canada in the ’90′s until today, there has ALWAYS been talk of the working experience in retail, particularly at the hourly level.  Some aspects of working in retail will not suit everyone.  If you work on a Merchandise Allocation crew then yes, you have to stock shelves all your shift.  BUT, does anyone ask if you have other aspirations?  Would they listen if you had a better way to do some of the stocking? Can other skills be learned a portion of a working week so that the move up could be more easily achieved?

It’s not an easy topic, and there are definitely retailers – large and small – who have worked hard to improve the working experience in retail.  But why, in a conference with 20,000 attendees, weren’t there more sessions and emphasis this crucial area???

Particularly in Canada, we talk a great deal about Retail as a Career.  The labour shortage is again beginning to return with a vengeance.  Why not more time spent on employee relations, retention, and training and development and a little less on ‘engaging’ immigrants?

How do you like me so far?  Seriously, its a very good thing that I’m going to an all day WordPress training course this weekend. Yesterday’s blog on Bill Boorman’s excellent list of HR Recruiting / Social Recruiting blogs to follow included a spelling error in the title, and not one, but two incorrect links.  My apologies, here is the blog post again with everything working properly.  Could I blame this on Blue Monday?  I’m sure the first thing they will tell us on the weekend is proofread about 10 times before hitting the ‘publish’ button.  My apologies…

More than anything, this blog might serve as yet another example of the outstanding value of social media in general.

Bill Boorman is one of those incomparable Brits who seem to have such a firm and enlightened handle on the evolution, progress, and future of using social media to recruit.  He is one of the founders of UnConferences (@radicalrecruit in Canada), TRULondon which is a huge recruiting conference in London, England featuring guest ‘team leaders’ from around the world – all world-class in their niche.

Bill Boorman’s blog is The Recruiting UnBlog and by checking his website you can learn all about Bill and his brilliance.  I strongly suggest you hook up to his RSS feed or have his blog sent to your email inbox when produced and you can follow Bill on Twitter – @BillBoorman

One of Bill’s recent blogs is a list of 100 recommended HR, Recruiting, and Social Recruiting blogs with explanations on what the blog emphasizes, who writes it, why follow, etc.  This must of taken him a great deal of time, yet its up on the internet for anyone to benefit from.  This is the sort of value of social media I am talking about in the first paragraph.

If you want to begin learning online through social media, following a few select blogs is an excellent way to start and this list (even though it doesn’t include my blog!) includes just about anyone who does a good job of covering the HR/Recruiting/Social Recruiting topics today.  Get ready, here’s the link:

100 HR/Recruiting and SocialRecruiting blogs

More than anything, this blog might serve as yet another example of the outstanding value of social media in general.

Bill Boorman is one of those incomparable Brits who seem to have such a firm and enlightened handle on the evolution, progress, and future of using social media to recruit.  He is one of the founders of UnConferences (@radicalrecruit in Canada), TRULondon which is a huge recruiting conference in London, England featuring guest ‘team leaders’ from around the world – all world-class in their niche.

Bill Boorman’s blog is The Recruiting UnBlog and by checking his website you can learn all about Bill and his brilliance.  I strongly suggest you hook up to his RSS feed or have his blog sent to your email inbox when produced and you can follow Bill on Twitter – @BillBoorman

One of Bill’s recent blogs is a list of 100 recommended HR, Recruiting, and Social Recruiting blogs with explanations on what the blog emphasizes, who writes it, why follow, etc.  This must of taken him a great deal of time, yet its up on the internet for anyone to benefit from.

If you want to begin learning online through social media, following a few select blogs is an excellent way to start and this list (even though it doesn’t include my blog!) includes just about anyone who does a good job of covering the HR/Recruiting/Social Recruiting topics today.  Get ready, here’s the link:

100 HR/Recruiting and SocialRecruiting blogs

Recruiting Trends for 2011 for the Retail industry in Canada

This blog has been delayed and delayed as each day brings another knowledgeable blog post or article on the topic of recruiting in Canada or worldwide and every day I think I should wait a bit longer until I can absorb all the current knowledge so I can produce THE most edifying thoughts on recruiting in Canada and North America.  Yeah, sure.

Finding the right needle in the haystack that is the Internet is often times an exercise in futility and frustration.  This very accurate blog Social Media Statistics from Andrew Hannelly at Social Media Explorer will clearly illustrate that most elements of Social Media are not the Silver Bullet that often gets promised for every aspect of all of our lives.

I used to call these trends ‘predictions’ and I used to take a fairly strong stand on what would happen or work and what wouldn’t.  Perhaps age or perhaps way more information now demands I simply call them trends with the only caveat being that these trends are only in context for the Retail and Hospitality industries and primarily in Canada.  Here are my 2009 predictions -  Retail Recruitment Predictions for 2009

Here are the 2010 predictions – Retail Recruitment Predictions for 2010

These are in no particular order.

My first point in the 2010 prediction blog was that social media would become a household word and that using social media to recruit would become commonplace.  Duh! The social media part is only partially true and the using social media to recruit is only very partially true.  Let me explain…………

The Social Media part wasn’t quite as pervasive as I envisioned.  Yes, Twitter has gone from 300,000 in May to nearly 1 billion today and the advent of the Facebook ‘Company/Group/Political Party, etc’ page is being embraced at all levels.  Words such as tweeps, followers, groups, and fans are being used in whole new ways.

BUT, whereas the majority of retailers in Canada are now aware of ‘social media’ and probably have a somewhat decent understanding of the term, there are still many, many individuals who toil in marketing and human resources departments in mid and large size retail and hospitality firms still trying to convince their bosses that getting in the social media game is essential and not defined by creating a Facebook Fan page.  There are thousands and thousands of superb independent retailers and restaurateurs who get it that social media is necessary but aren’t embracing it because it will take up time, or it isn’t fully understood.  I predicted that Social Media would become a household word in 2009 and most retailers would be embracing social media to recruit in 2010.  I think the household part is true, but embracing and using social media to recruit isn’t being embraced on a large scale at all by retailers in Canada.

If anyone reading this blog takes anything at all away from the read, please know that social media – really the re-definition of communication today – MUST be embraced at some level in 2011, particularly but not necessarily only for recruiting purposes. Having stated this, social media will always remain a tool in the Recruiting toolbox and does not define recruiting today.

2010 was supposed to be the year that Marketing started working with Human Resources in utilizing various Social Media platforms for recruiting and employment branding and, for some retail and hospitality companies, they did.

They most certainly did in great online examples of Sodexho, L’Oreal, Starbucks, Fairmont Hotels, and many, many others.

2011 will see the demographic-driven labour shortage that was in full swing in 2007 and early parts of 2008 return.  Retail and Hospitality will feel it first.  Recruiting will re-gain its topmost priority position at most retailers.

I talk a little bit further down this post on Diversity hiring and its importance in working with the challenge of a Labour Shortage.  But, whenever talked Labour Shortages we can never forget the importance of ensuring Generations Y and Z are aware of the benefits of Retail as a Career.  This is a more difficult challenge in Canada – it always has been – as our citizens haven’t viewed Retail or Hospitality as a chosen career right from college as students in all other parts of the world do.  Much work has been done to change that perception, but something like the Retail Careers Facebook Fan Page owned and operated by the National Retail Federation in the US would go a long way to providing students and graduates with profiles of successful retailers, information, the opportunity to ask questions, etc. etc. in a platform they prefer.  Check out Retail Careers

Another aspect of addressing the labour shortage and forwarding Retail or Hospitality as a Career is understanding the latest audience – Generation Z.  Andy Headworth, an expert on using social media to recruit, wrote this Guest Blog for me in November  -  Is Retail Recruitment Ready for the Socially Advanced Generation Z?

It’s an excellent piece on what retailers have to do to engage with Generation Z.  Those recruiting for the Retail and Hospitality industries need better information on what their audience wants.

Good old Recruiting has morphed into Talent Acquisition, Radical Recruiting and Recruiters are now named Sourcers.

It seems that Recruiting/Talent Acquisition has come to mean exclusively the identifying of ‘talent’, not the entire Candidate Care process.  There is a tsunami of information on how to network, use job boards, use social media, work job fairs for best results, etc. etc. all in aid of finding candidates.  Comparatively, there is little about how to engage and relate with candidates once you’ve established an interest in your open position.  Has Recruiting/Talent Acquisition come to mean strictly the sourcing without the hiring?

Mobile Recruiting is Here

I guess this is a given.  I did not believe that candidates would respond to the latest positions being texted to them via their SmartPhone as soon as they become available.  I was wrong. Candidates do and many now expect any company with openings, or job boards, or Facebook Fan Pages to have the ability to simultaneously upload through an application (app) to their SmartPhones as soon as a new job posting appears anywhere.  Every type of SmartPhone, not just Blackberry or IPhones.  Preliminary screening questions to be answering by a mobile phone are being tested.  Every online presence your company has for the purpose of recruiting must be configured in such a way that it can be read easily on a mobile device.  Mobile Phone and the development of new applications for recruiting will only increase in 2011.

What about job boards?

I still follow the job board industry in Canada fairly closely, particularly those boards with large amounts of both retail and hospitality jobs.  As stated last year, job boards won’t disappear and die any time soon.  But the large companies posting hundreds of job postings on a single job board under an unlimited package are nearly gone.  Most larger retailers are now splitting their job board dollars between niche sites, social media sites and everyone uses LinkedIn for certain category levels.  LinkedIn’s job search focus is currently second-to-none, in my opinion.  Job Boards with strong reputations for results in Canada in the retail and hospitality industries with social media features and collaboration with aggregators will continue to succeed.  Those boards that are now incorporating more recruiter-like services like personalized short-listing, reference checking, and job post writing will succeed even better.

Diversity

Diversity recruiting became increasingly important during the labour shortages of 2006 – 2008 as companies turned to new immigrants and different cultural groups to fill their open vacancies.  Some progress has been made in how best to approach, source, and engage candidates from outside traditional pools.  Diversity only Job Board Talent Oyster and Will Stewart’s Equitek plus the many diversity groups on LinkedIn are making inroads into not only how to attract, but also engage diversity candidates. And saavy recruiters are discovering new ‘diverse’ groups. In the US, 1/2 million military workers per year for the next 5 years are transitioning out of active service with the withdrawals from various fighting fronts. On a much smaller scale, the same situation exists in Canada. Brand new companies are being established to assist Canadian and US companies in hiring these ‘diverse’ individuals.

Recruitment Training

I wrote a blog this year entitled Untraining – the Training and Development Revolution about training in the Retail and Hospitality industries.  It wasn’t written especially for Recruiters or Human Resources personnel, but I believe the points made apply.  Training for Recruiters, Sourcers, or for HR people in general has been inconsistent, even spotty, over the years.  Today’s hiring climate demands razor-sharp individuals with good business skills as well as recruiting skills.  For years before the CHRP in Canada, the Human Resources profession, including recruiting had no barriers to entry and the standards reflected that.  2011 will see recruitment conferences with a difference (I will be one of the Team Leaders at a Radical Recruiting Event in Vancouver in June –  Radical Events ) The format for these sessions ain’t your mother’s conference, but they have become wildly successful worldwide, along with Recruiting Camps, tweetups, etc.  Finally, in the areas of training, most social media platforms are not self-evident and it’s astonishing how many recruiters use only a very small portion of the features of Twitter or LinkedIn or others.  Solid comprehensive training in that area is required as is team-building.  More on that in my final comment.

Contingency workers

You heard it here first.  The term ‘Contingency workers’ via Wikipedia – A contingent workforce is a provisional group of workers who work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, also known as freelancers, independent professionals, temporary contract workers, independent contractors or consultants. …  It is estimated that beginning in 2012 in the United States and in Canada in 2013, 10,000 Baby Boomers will retire per day, every day for the next nineteen years! Now, there’s lots of talk that due to the recent recession not all Baby Boomers can or will fully retire.  But report after report after article after blog agrees that many Baby Boomers will prefer to work on a ‘contingent’ basis.  Further, new Generation Z workers no longer look to establish themselves with a full time job for a single company, in fact the opposite.  Most companies do not have policies and procedures to work with these flexible-workers.  With the candidate re-gaining control, the nature of the worker has changed and we all know the most successful recruiter is not just the one that can find or identify the top talent, it’s the one that can actually hire him/her.

And that brings me to my last point……..

People instead of companies

I read recently that a Recruiter’s job is not to find the right person for the job, but find the right job for the person.  If the talent crunch and the labour shortage develop into anything like most predictions for the next 5 years, the Talent Acquisition role in any organization will become key with only the most skilled in many disciplines (management, marketing, finance, and human resources) excelling in this crucial area.  And the judgement of the skill won’t be with who is best at making lists of potential candidates gleaned from LinkedIn or a day at a job fair.  It will be those people who have developed a group of interested, qualified candidates around them in a talent hub.  Candidates who trust the individual recruiter (not the company they work for) and can be leveraged themselves when the time is right to join the organization or can provide referrals and who appreciate the inside company knowledge and overall information provided by their recruiter.  Recruiters who can, from their ‘hub’ bring forth highly qualified candidates, who are already bought in to the integrity and purpose of the company and can and want to be hired.  Any search firm will tell you that its extremely difficult – and getting harder – to convince clients that you are dealing with the ‘company’ and not the individual recruiter.  Search firm clients become attached – rightly so – to the recruiter and often follow them if they leave.  I know, I owned a retail recruitment firm.  It was true then, and with the advent of all the social digital platforms, it’s becoming truer by the day – people want to work with people, not companies.  This means that 3^rd party recruiters need to let their search consultants shine on their own, perhaps write their own blogs, tweet under the companies Twitter account in their own language, do public speaking, etc.  This notion of engaging and connecting in your own voice is very new and challenging for a large company with strict policies and procedures.  But, I believe, it’s the future.

As always I look forward to your comments…………and if 2011 is the year to embrace some of these new revelations, or begin using social media to recruit, I am available on a contingency basis.

Blog:  The Burch Report on Digital Retail

LinkedIn: Brenda Dumont

Twitter: @retailblog

I don’t know anyone in the Marketing department at Lowe’s Home Improvement, but hats off to them anyways!

Earlier this week I reported on the fabulous Lowe’s-sponsored Christmas Fair in the Distillery District in Toronto.  It features crafts, carollers, beer gardens, holiday season goodies and more and if I didn’t live on the West Coast, I’d be there.  What a great, appropriate way to support their core family customer.

Then today the following appeared on their nearly new Facebook Fan Page…………

Hey fans, you’re famous. This was the 2nd-fastest-growing brand page on Facebook last month, according to Retail Geeks. Thank you. Some brands spend millions on ads to lure fans. We’d rather pass great values along to you. (Wait ’til our Gift-A-Thon next weekend!) “Suggest to friends” by clicking beneath our profile

There were appropriate tweets on Twitter leading to the Facebook Fan Page and updates on LinkedIn.  (I am connected to some of Lowe’s Canadian Human Resources team)

The message about exclusivity and thanks on the Facebook page is text-book ‘social media done right’. Now, if I could just convince them to use those 300,000 plus ‘fans’ on their Facebook Fan Page to recruit using a recruiting app or to set up a Welcome Page………….well, they’d be Brenda Social Media perfect.

Congratulations, Lowe’s!

After thirty years of recruiting and providing various recruiting platforms to the retail and hospitality industries in Canada, I’ve met a lot of people.  Many still stay in touch, many are clients, many are past candidates, colleagues, etc.

I received this LinkedIn InMail earlier this week from a long term member of my network.  He is a senior level recruiter who has worked for three of Canada’s largest retailers in increasingly senior levels over the last 15 years.  Along the way I played a part in his career progression and he has been a client.  Currently, he recruits at the supervisor to senior management level for the Regional Operations area of a home improvement retailer.  We’ll call him Paul but I’m sure you understand why he needs to remain confidential.

He asked about how effective various recruiting methods are today and I thought my blog readers may find this interesting.  Here it is, unabridged:

Date: 12/05/2010

Subject: recruitment strategies

Hi Brenda, is there anything “out of the box” that is new in recruitment besides social media? I don’t believe recruitment is rocket science, but I’m wondering if I’m missing the boat on something.

I agree it isn’t rocket science!  Social Media is such a larger and now all-encompassing term that lots of new talent acquisition methods fall under the term.  The changeup in recruiting is largely fueled by the candidate population and its requirements and trends.  We don’t work in recruiting anymore, we work in Talent Acquisition. We aren’t filling positions anymore, we are building talent hubs.  It’s a big question, Paul, but if you are asking the questions, and with your background and expertise, I’m sure you aren’t missing the boat.

I recruit for operations services – supervisors and senior managers. We’ve worked on a lot of strategies such as:

- tried traditional – so we placed an ad in the paper – workopolis captures this also –

Unless it is a smaller, regional paper that focuses strictly on a region (and the best potential clients may be living in that region) I don’t advocate newspapers. You are doing the right thing by choosing a job board like workopolis or working.com who have newspaper affiliations so you can economically cover both an online job posting and a print ad but often the size of the print ad included is so small it is even less effective.

- internal referral program + external referral program  -

This remains and always will a superior candidate identification process as long as the program is well crafted and well communicated within the organization.  I’ve always said there should be periodic events in-house that include the referrer and the referees that have been successful.  Congratulating them in front of their peers, while presenting the referral fee cheque increases the value.

- attend job fairs – industry related and universities  -

I’d be willing to say that unless you are targeting university (or any educational institution) level candidates, job fairs themselves are becoming a thing of the past.  You may know I’m extremely pre-online (no kidding, eh?) and online job fairs are becoming fairly common place.  The big knock on job fairs was that working candidates were hesitate to attend for fear of running into the boss and they were expensive to attend and staff.  You still need to ‘attend’ a virtual job fair, but there isn’t the shipping, travel, promotion item expenditures and booth staffing issues AND all candidates can engage without fear of discovery.

- target alumni from universities – always a good plan

- members of operations associations – will attend industry events; have posted on their websites; etc  -

During my whole career, I have played this card.  I thoroughly believe you and your organization need a profile within the industry and the section you are recruiting in.  How did you first meet me? Probably at an industry event.  Whether candidate or client, recruiting is serious, personal business.  If you can build a preliminary trust factor by participating in organizations and groups, it gives you a leg up and the HUGE side bonus is learning and enjoying the organization yourself.

- will target students and develop a co-op program (longer term goal)

It is a long term and expensive goal, but probably essential for a company the size of the one you work for.  Many retailers have a program such as this already in place.  Ask someone at Loblaw Companies Limited how their excellent student coop program is going?

- linked in sites; advertising  -

I’ve often heard that LinkedIn is absolutely, and I mean absolutely, essential to any recruiter.  I agree.  I train the recruiting features of LinkedIn and if LinkedIn had been available when I owned Dumont & Associates Retail Recruitment, I would be on my third Mercedes.  Like using mobile techniques to recruit, with LinkedIn you need to consider whom you want to recruit.  It is the place for management, from store management, planners, supervisors and above.  (far, far above as it turns out).  Its currently not effective for hourly paid individuals.  The features in LinkedIn’s job board are far superior to any I’ve ever seen and, as you know, I owned Canada’s first and largest retail-only job board, canadianretail.com.  At certain levels, buying a posting there is a must.  But, (there are always buts, eh?) For LinkedIn to be really effective for anyone, irrespective of their goal in joining, you need to invest time into building a network, joining groups, participating in group discussions, etc.

- direct sourcing linked in – of course

- job magic – facebook, indeed etc.  –

As I am trying to convince in my current social media recruiting business to many of Canada’s retailers – “Having an effective Facebook Fan Page is an absolute no-brainer, it’s a given.  Fan Pages are wildly effective – particularly for retailers. “ Yet, many retailers either don’t have Facebook Fan Pages or they do but don’t have a recruiting ‘tab’.  I represent a company – Syndicruit – that provides a Facebook app that works like a mini-job board on your Facebook Fan Page.  Free trials are easily available.  I can help you with Fan Page creation and recruiting options on the page.  You can’t ignore Facebook’s 500 million + users.

- in past we have advertised in theatres – banner ads –

A superb idea for hourly paid and customer-facing positions.  Not sure you would receive your return on investment for the area you recruit for.  And, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Places, Foursquare, etc. you are not only strengthening your Employment Brand, but also your overall brand.

- I understand some co’s have done “virtual online career fair” – but the cost is very expensive to do this –

Is it? See my comments above about virtual online career fairs.

We were going to do in-house career fairs?…..

In the stores? In the warehouses? Head Office? In all cases consider that candidates should be able to get there easily.  Something not easily accomplished in the GTA! And, of course, it can’t be disruptive to the business at hand.  In House Hiring events at stores are often successful for part-timers.

Am I missing the boat on anything – is there any other strategies i’m missing? No.

I would love your feedback. – see above Does Brenda Dumont Consulting have any industry related events in Toronto? I am considering this for 2011, other people have asked………….

Thanks for these questions ‘Paul’.