Invested, innovative, brilliant: Improving the recruiting experience

Recessionary Fallout

Sarah Welstead — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:08:13 -0400

There was an interesting article recently in the Globe and Mail looking at some of the possible long-term effects of the current recession on employment, company cultures, job development and other areas. I found the changes for young workers (the oft-discussed Gen Y) particularly of note.

[M]any young people I talk to have significantly, and resentfully, lowered their expectations. They didn't imagine themselves in this situation in their wildest dreams.

Nor did many others. Generation Y will be most affected by the cutbacks, downsizings and marked change in organizational cultures over the past few months, but the recession will take its toll on every generation's attitudes and expectations. The question is how long-lasting the reverberations will be in reshaping the way people think, feel and act toward work and their careers.

Now Not to Recruit

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:13:08 -0400

There was a great post on blog The Anti-Pimp recently, 7 Things Recruiters Do That Irritate Me. I had to laugh -- so many of the things listed are complaints that I've heard from quite a few candidates myself.

So I started speaking to contractors that I know to see what other things irritate and annoy them -- sometimes to the point of refusing to work with a particular recruiter or company. In this far-from-scientific survey, I've spoken to a few IT consultants (business analyst, systems analyst, technical writer, and a programmer), as well as a contract HR specialist, a recruiter, a travel nurse, and a proposal writer.

Perhaps the most common complaint (and I've experienced this one a time or two myself!) is recruiters not listening to what the candidate is telling them -- whether it's about what sort of position would be a good fit, salary and compensation, or just that they're unavailable to talk at the moment.

A technical writer complained: "I was recently in the check-out line at the grocery store when a recruiter I'd been speaking to called back with some feedback from a recent interview. ... Despite the fact that I told him that no, this wasn't a good time, and could we please speak a little later (like when I'm not bagging groceries!), this guy just kept right on talking."

In addition to the rudeness of such situations, many also commented to the effect that if they can't trust a recruiter to respect that they are unavailable at the moment -- whether it's due to an important meeting or a family dinner -- how can they be sure that they'll listen to anything else?

But the complaint that surprised me was the idea of recruiters attempting to build rapport by talking about how hard it is to be a recruiter right now. I spoke to a nurse who frequently works with agencies for travel nursing positions. One of her worst experiences, she said, was with a recruiter whose skills were apparently not quite up to the recent challenges posed by the economic slowdown:

"Literally, about the first five or ten minutes we were talking, it was all about how hard her life was these days. How she used to have dozens of open jobs on the go at any one time, and now she only had one or two at a time -- if she was lucky. Better yet," the candidate added, "this recruiter actually told me that these days the candidates she sent rarely got interviews."

Not exactly a confidence-booster. (Not to mention unprofessional.) It can be great to build a personal rapport with candidates -- but that doesn't mean that recruiters should vent to their candidates, whether about job orders or a client, no matter how frustrating things can get.

Another concurred. "I don't see why recruiters are asking me to sympathize with them. You don't have lots of orders? Honey, I'm the one looking for a job."

Great Resource for Recruiters

Sarah Welstead — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:52:13 -0400

I spent some time recently searching for new and interesting blogs (always keeping an eye out for recruiting/HR thought leadership!), and Glen Cathey's blog Boolean Black Belt stood out as a good resource for online recruitment and sourcing. He clearly breaks down specific techniques and search strategies, and has an easy to read style supported with graphs and graphics.

He recently put together a "best of" page with some of his top posts. Seems like an excellent starting place for up and coming recruiters, or those looking to polish or upgrade their e-recruitment skills.

Want media coverage in the Twitter Era? You only need to do 2 things.

Sarah Welstead — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:56:31 -0400

So this evening I saw a tweet from @mayhemstudios (a RT from @the_gman - good lord it's hard to keep track of these complicated crediting of information sources these days) referring us to an article on The New PR: How to write effective press releases in the age of Twitter.

Since I'm responsible for media for both Head2Head and Retired Worker - a quick Google of 'Sarah Welstead' will reveal just how shameless I've been in the past few years - I of course dashed right over to the article.

If this tweeted-about article had some handy hints, then I was prepared to be all over it.

Well, the article was okay, I guess - though I personally haven't ever seen any real advantage to adding multimedia to a media release, and they didn't give any concrete examples - but I've been doing this a while now and I've come to the conclusion that there are only 2 factors which make any kind of real difference in how much media coverage you get.

Here they are:

A stunning factoid that maps into the current zeitgeist, used as your lead headline.
Use any number you like, but make sure it's dramatic, based on some kind of study, and correlates with the current mood of the media. The reason the Head2Head 2007 Salary Report got a lot of coverage was because we led with "Recruiting salaries up 20%" - which was a big enough number to catch the eye of editors, even if they knew nothing about recruiting.

If the headline of the 2008 report had been "Recruiting salaries down 15%", we would have had huge coverage (see below for the comparison between 2007 and 2008), because at the time, the media was actively looking for 'bad news' stories - the media was all about the doom and gloom of the recession. Unfortunately, even I can't spin that much.

Use a 'Tips for [whatever]' model - that also maps into the media zeitgeist.
In the absence of 'factoids' (though SurveyMonkey and a little judicious Twittering can get you whatever factoid you want in 24 hours), you can almost guarantee yourself some quick and dirty media coverage if you put together a list of 'handy tips' (5-7 tips is best) for something that has some mass appeal. Could be "Tips for older job-seekers", could be "Tips for recession-proofing your resume" - both of which map into current media trends - it doesn't really matter. They sound helpful - and unbiased - so editors think "Yay! That's 11 column inches I don't have to think about!" and copy and paste.

[Of course, it should go without saying that to be properly effective, a media release needs to be sent out across a paid newswire service - I use Canada Newswire - because for all that we're supposedly living in a social media world, most of the news channels we think of as mainstream (national newspapers, radio and television networks, etc.) are still accustomed to checking the wire services every morning, and tend to give more credence to information that comes across 'the wire' than information that turns up on a blog somewhere.]

But getting back to PR in the Era of Microblogging. How do my two tips (see? see how this works?) tie in?

Easy: A stunning factoid is easily tweeted ("84% of Canadian recruiters plan to hire in the next 6 months") and retweeted with a link. And a 'handy tips' article is one of those things with a life of its own - the December blog post about The Top 5 Job Search Tips From 2008 continues to be the #1 post on the Head2Head blog, even though it's not exactly Pulitzer-worthy journalism. (If you feel ambitious, Google 'Retired Worker job-seeker tips' and you'll see just how that kind of thing basically disseminates itself across the web, over a long period of time. But you may want to take my word for it.)

'The New PR' article recommends that you use all the online channels at your disposal, and they're right: once you've distributed a media release, you should make sure it's on your website, write a blog about it, Twitter about it, post it to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, etc. - this is how your 'news' will have a longer shelf-life and contribute to your Google rankings.

Don't panic if you don't get the response you were hoping for right away. PR is always a crapshoot: Head2Head's 2007 Salary Report got a whole lot of media attention, but the 2008 Salary Report got a whole lot less. Why? Because, as I wrote in January, the 2008 report revealed good news (salaries were up 6-15%), and at the time, the media just wasn't interested.

At the same time, I can almost always get good media coverage for Retired Worker - there's always some radio station looking for a 3-minute soundbite on 'boomers' and 'the changing face of retirement'.

(If people knew just how much of their 'news' was being driven by people like me, writing media releases at midnight in their home office, they'd never believe anything they read ever again. And the Toronto Sun - among many other supposedly legitimate publications - basically just reprints media releases without any attempt to turn them into articles. But don't let me scare you.)

What do you do about candidates whose only flaw is bad personal hygiene?

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:57:31 -0400

The other day I wrote another in our ongoing series of Egregiously Bad Candidates blog posts, where we - as recruiters - get to laugh about some of the more hilarious stories of candidates who just don't get it.

One of the comments on that post was about candidates who keep on applying for jobs at your company, even though they keep getting turned down. Specifically, why do these candidates keep applying, when it's 'obvious' you don't want them?

Except, I don't think it's always so obvious. (In fact, I've blogged about this before.) These poor candidates keep getting rejected, but without concrete - or constructive - feedback, they take our polite rejection ("It just isn't a fit right now, but we'll keep your resume on file...") at face value, and figure it's just a matter of time before it is a 'good fit'.

The one that makes me cringe most often is the candidate with bad personal hygiene. You know the one: he's (and, let's face it, it's almost always a 'he') got a decent resume and would even be a decent interview - if only you weren't gasping for air after 10 minutes in a closed room with him.

You know that all the guy needs is a bar of Irish Spring, a box of lemon-fresh Tide (because you just know that his whole wardrobe, and probably all his sheets, need a serious, um, freshening up), and a can of AXE deodorant spray, and he'd increase his chances of getting a job about 1000 percent.

So why don't you tell him?

I mean, I've had recruiters tell me what to wear to an interview ("It's a fairly formal office, so wear stockings"), how to do my hair ("You might want to consider dyeing your hair - I know they'll think that white-blond, super-short style is a little too fashion-forward"), and even advise me on shoe selection ("They have a dress code, so don't wear open-toed shoes, even if they're Christian Dior"). I don't take offense at this - both the recruiter and I have a vested interest in me putting my best foot forward, as it were. I've also declined interviews at companies which have draconian dress codes, such as the cosmetics firm which didn't allow women to wear pants of any kind, because I probably wouldn't have liked it there much anyway.

So why are we so reluctant to tell people that they need a shower?

To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a legislative or regulatory prohibition on this in Canada - I don't think 'body odor' or 'personal hygiene' is protected under the Human Rights Code. And I know that some US states have odd rules, but I'm pretty sure that hygiene isn't one of them.

I keep thinking about what my mother - a high school teacher - used to say: "If I don't take these kids aside after class and talk to them about taking a shower every day and using deodorant, the other kids are going to make fun of them. Which is much worse than the momentary embarrassment s/he feels when I talk to them about it."

Some of these poor candidates are going to go on being unemployed for months. Surely we owe it to them to give them a heads' up?

Personal Branding: Is it all about you, or not?

Sarah Welstead — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:49:16 -0400

So tonight Dan Schawbel, self-proclaimed Personal Branding Guru (and maybe he is a guru - after all, he's got 23,000+ Twitter followers and I haven't even cracked 1,000 yet) tweeted about Katie Konrath's blog post, "Personal Branding: It's Not About You".

It caught my attention, because a while back I wrote "An Introduction to Personal Branding: It really is all about you."

Of course, those of us who are out here blogging and tweeting and social media-ing all the time know that a decent title can ensure even the most dreck-filled article or PowerPoint deck gets some attention, so both of our titles were tongue-in-cheek.

However, it got me thinking...

The thrust of Katie's piece was really that people need to see 'personal branding' for what it really is: A sales tool.

In sales, you don't just yammer away at the potential client endlessly. You ask them questions about their hot-button issues, the things that are keeping them up at night, how they measure success, etc., and then you show them how what you do will address these business issues.

The same, as Katie says, is true of personal branding: Instead of telling people all the great things you've done, are doing, and could do for them if only they'd pony up your hourly fee, you should identify your potential clients' business issues and then, clearly and concisely, demonstrate how you're going to deliver against that.

So far, so good: It's amazing how many personal-branding websites I've seen which have pages and pages of things like 'Awards I Won In 1996 When I Worked At Bombardier' and no pages like 'How working with me will deliver demonstrable results within 3 months.' Katie is absolutely right that personal branding needs to be built on what stakeholders need/want, not what we want to deliver to them

I've written an awful lot of blog posts in the past few years - upwards of 150, at least. My goal with blog posts has always been to add some original data, analysis or insight to the conversation. Because at the end of the day, isn't personal branding supposed to be about establishing a unique proposition, positioning, and personality?

In Dec 2008 I did a blog post with "7 Top Tips for Job-Seekers" - which in fact was just a refresh of a blog post I'd done in 2006 - and it continues to be the single most popular post in the whole blog, even though there are zillions of 'tips for job-seekers' blogs all over the internet already.

By contrast, in Apr 2009 I published a whitepaper about grassroots corporate philanthropy which was filled with original ideas and data - and hardly anyone was all that interested.

I spent 30 minutes on the blog post and it gets 1000+ visits a month; I spent more like 30 hours on the whitepaper and I've only had a couple of media interviews.

So what have we learned?

It's clear that my 'stakeholders' are more interested in job-seeking tips than the paradigm shift in workplace philanthropy.

If I did nothing but write blogs which were "7 Handy Tips for [something recruiting-related]", I'd get a whole lot more traffic to my blog(s). People love retweeting articles with titles like '5 Tips For Reducing Time-to-Hire' or 'Thinking about RPO? 6 things you need to know', they love referencing them in presentations or their own blogs, and the media loves that they can just copy and paste the stuff into their publication without having to waste any time on that pesky journalism or editing.

However.

In the long-term, where does that leave my personal brand?

I'd like to be able to say that in the long term, people who go the '7 Handy Tips' route end up with a weaker personal brand. (I'd like to be able to say that because I'd like to think that, in the long run, all these epic-length blog posts of mine are actually going to have been worth it.)

But all of us are so new to this hyper-networked world - heck, when I wrote my first big whitepaper in 2001, hardly anyone was talking about personal branding; today, there are, like, 8 million 'Personal Branding Architects' on Twitter alone - that I don't think any of us really know what the prognosis is, or whether the brand equity delivered by a whitepaper is actually higher quality than the brand equity delivered by a '7 Handy Tips' blog post.

(Oh great - another question to ponder all week.)

Social Media and Recruiting Facts, Canadian-style

Sarah Welstead — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:38:56 -0400

NOTE: If what you really want are just the stats about how Canadian recruiters are using social media, just scroll down - there's a handy bulleted list at the bottom.

While there are plenty of great things about living and working in Canada, there is one drawback: The companies large enough to have offices in both the US and Canada tend to have their research and marketing functions headquartered in the US.

This means that when they're determining budgets for market research, they often figure, "Oh, Canada is pretty much the 51st state anyway - we don't have to do separate research in the Canadian marketplace. We'll just extrapolate from the US data using the 10% rule of thumb."

I'll admit, while most Canadians are adamant in their position that Canada is very different from the US, we all know that there are plenty of similarities in the two markets, and using the old "10% rule" (i.e. if the US market for a given product is $100 million, it's generally safe to say that the Canadian market is $10 million) can often be reasonably accurate at a high level.

(Though it should be noted that Canadian consumers do have very different tastes and habits than US consumers in some ways. For example, Hershey's has long used a different chocolate formulation for Canadian tastebuds.)

However, between 9/11, the 8 years of Republican control, the Wall Street meltdown and the global growth in the internet and social media - not to mention Canada's social contract regarding things like gay marriage and healthcare - which are making the differences more apparent.

The internet and social media: Canadians tend to be early adopters

Canadians, while slower to catch on to online shopping circa 2000-2001, were faster to adopt high-speed internet, and we continue to have higher per-capita internet use rates (about 83% of Canadians vs 69% of Americans).

As a result, Canadians have been early adopters of social media tools: Toronto continues to be one of the most Facebooked cities in the world, and ranks #4 in the world for LinkedIn use.

Social media and Canadian recruiting

The upshot of this, of course, is that US statistics on the use of social media for recruiting aren't necessarily accurate for the Canadian market. For example, MySpace never really addressed the Canadian marketplace in terms of job postings, so it was never a popular recruiting/candidate relationship management tool for Canadian recruiters.

Last week, Head2Head hosted, in partnership with LinkedIn, a webinar about "Leveraging LinkedIn For Recruiters" (it was so popular, we've scheduled another session on June 17 - we'd love you to join us).

Since 95% of participants were Canadian recruiters and hiring managers, we decided to ask them about their use of social media for recruiting.

Here's what they said:

69% of CDN recruiters use LinkedIn for recruiting
44% use Facebook
9% use Twitter
6% use blogs
3% use YouTube
3% use Craigslist
0% use Tumblr or MySpace
Only 20% say social media delivers a clear ROI
77% say it’s improved their ability to connect to passive candidates
44% say it’s improved their quality of hire
36% say it’s reduced their time to hire
66% say no one oversees their social media stuff – it’s all rogue

So there you go: Your Canadian-source primary data for the day. Feel free to Twitter, write a blog post - whatever!

7 Great Ways to Ensure No Recruiter Ever Reads Your Resume

Sarah Welstead — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:54:44 -0400

I don't know what the heck's happened in the past couple of weeks, but the flow of Egregiously Bad Candidates has increased considerably.

The thing is, after I finish laughing at some of the emails we receive, I do feel kind of sorry for these dingbats, because they seem determined to ensure that no recruiter gets past the subject line of their email, let alone ever takes them seriously as a candidate.

So to these job-seekers, I offer the following: The 7 things most guaranteed to ensure a recruiter never looks at your resume, let alone calls you. Please, read this before you send out your next job-hunting-related email:

Send a blind email to a recruiting company that doesn't recruit for your profession.
Today I got a really well-written - if really, really long - cover letter from a guy who really wants a position as a senior chef in a 5-star hotel, preferably in Halifax.

Well...we don't recruit for the hospitality industry (a quick check of our job board would tell you we specialize in recruiting recruiters, and HR, Supply Chain and IT professionals), and while we are located in Canada, we don't have offices in Halifax.

So I know this guy just Googled 'recruiting companies' and sent emails to every company that turned up. Whatever.
CC a whole lot of people without hiding their names or email addresses.
You know the people who do this - the CC field is jam-packed with like 50 names and email addresses - would be the first to complain if you revealed their email address to a zillion other people. Not sure how un-email-literate you have to be to fail to use the BCC field, but you're clearly too email-illiterate for our clients.
Send your resume to 'info' @therecruitingcompany.com instead of to a real person or the 'proper' job application address.
At our office, I'm the person who receives all the emails that go to info@head2head.ca - in other words, I'm the one who gets basically all the junk mail. If you're sending an email to 'info' at our address, I know you haven't taken two seconds to visit our website, which brings us to...
Don't visit our website before you send your resume.
I don't get this one. Every single 'job search tips'-type list always says "Visit the company website before you send your application! You will learn valuable information which will will tell the recruiter/potential employer you care enough to do your homework!".

Is it that some candidates still feel that it's nothing but a numbers game - that if they just blast every recruiting company with random emails, they'll eventually hit employment gold?

Because nothing could be further from the truth.
Don't refer to what you do or what kind of job you're looking for in your cover email.
This week alone I've received 14 emails that consist of a resume attachment. No subject line, so 'Dear Ms Welstead', nothing to indicate what these emails are about. Guess what? If you're too busy to write one sentence about what kind of job you want, I'm too busy to open your attachment.
Include a sentence like "I've been looking for over 12 months but no one will hire me..." in your cover email.
Sure, I'm not going to delete your email quite as quickly as I do in #5, above, but here's what happens: I immediately think "What the heck is wrong with this person that no one wants to hire them?" - and then I delete the email, because I'm not putting Debbie Downer in front of our clients.
Attach your resume in WordPerfect.
I'm sure you can't believe this happens, but it does. More often than you think. Even if I can use my document converter to open your WordPerfect resume, all I'm thinking is: Are you making an anti-Microsoft statement, or are you telling me that your computer skills stopped circa that 486 you had in 1994? Either way, we've got a problem (not least because Microsoft is a client of ours - but then, you'd know that if you hadn't done #4, wouldn't you?).

Supply Chain Meets Talent Management

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:10:06 -0400

An interesting article showed up on my radar recently: "Talent on Demand: Applying Supply Chain Management to People," which highlights some of the talent management ideas discussed in a new book by Peter Cappelli.

The attraction of his approach is clear: by applying the principles and rigour of supply chain management to human resources and recruiting, we can develop a more effective and responsive talent management strategy. To do so would clearly be a big shift in thinking in numerous areas -- the author questions everything from the value of the vaunted "big talent pipeline" to common hiring and skills development practices. And truly, what human resources professional doesn't bristle at the idea that people are to be thought of as a product, talent as inventory?

Yet there are clear correlations between common problems experienced in the manufacturing and hiring processes -- so why not see if there are similar connections to be drawn between solutions? This approach also seems to rest on a cornerstone of human resources thought: namely, that a company's talent management strategy, if properly managed, adds significant value to an organization's bottom line.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds: employ a "supply chain"-style talent management strategy that delivers demonstrable value while simultaneously delivering an excellent candidate experience, supporting employees, and maintaining a workforce that is invested in and passionate about the organization? Just a little food for thought.

Guess what? Social networking is saving the economy.

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:03:23 -0400

In the past couple of weeks, everyone I've talked to - both in recruiting and in other professions - agrees: the worst of the recession is behind us, and by Christmas we'll see some real recovery.

But it wasn't long ago that plenty of economists were saying that the recession may last until 2010.

So what gives?

Well, writing an article today - about how the recession is making us all more creative - I found myself comparing the current economy with being in London in WWII.

There's a reason there are so many romantic novels and movies made about London during the Blitz: what with everyone hanging blackout curtains, running for cover in the Underground, eking out their ration coupons and accepting women in the workforce, it forced everyone - regardless of class, wealth or education - to pull together as a team for a single cause.

And I can't help thinking that the same thing is happening now.

Thanks to social media - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. - we all know that the current economic downturn is global. That girl from high school who moved to South Africa, that guy from your first job who's now in Spain, that guy who's travelling in South Asia - they're all talking (or Twittering or Facebooking or blogging) about how the recession is affecting them and the people around them.

This, in turn, is giving us a real sense of team spirit, with "Screw you, recession!" the rallying cry.

Since, as we know, the economy is driven by emotions (oh, people may think their economic decisions are rational, but they almost always aren't), this sense of team spirit is having a galvanizing effect. Social media - a network in which everyone has a voice, and each node on the network has increasing value - has given us the confidence that we can change the world.

So instead of simply enduring the recession, with a fatalistic sense that there's nothing much we, as individuals - or even as businesses - can do to make a difference, more and more people are simply deciding that they're not going to let the current economy hold them back.

Instead, they're starting interesting businesses, building their personal brand, or changing the way they live so that material things aren't the main focus.

The result?

The consequences of the global financial meltdown haven't been nearly as disastrous as they could have been.

Heck, that $7 billion fraud by that French trader alone was just a drop in the bucket in terms of how much money disappeared from the global economy overnight. In many ways, it's surprising we aren't all on the breadlines right now.

So what's different from previous recessions? Social media.

I like long walks on the beach ...

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:05:08 -0400

Job postings remind me a little of profiles on dating sites: sure, all the information's there, and there's something (or someone) real behind the façade, but read enough and they all seem the same. Responsibilities, experience required, skills desired, cut-and-paste company profile ... boring, generic -- and did I mention boring?

In a sea of "long walks on the beach" job postings, when a company does something a little different -- like show some real personality -- the opportunity seems to leap from the screen. A little over a year ago, we mentioned the success we had with a series of job postings that contained pop cultural references to everything from Red Bull to Jon Stewart. Of course, not every role or company will be best served by such references -- but wow, what a difference it can make if a job posting is written in a tone and style that truly reflects the organization's culture. (The potential candidates who are turned off by the tone? Probably wouldn't be a good fit anyway.)

Who do you think is doing something different or taking interesting risks in their recruitment strategies? What job postings have caught your attention in recent months?

Yes, Twitter is delivering results for us. Here's how.

Sarah Welstead — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:01:25 -0400

Today I received an email from a guy who said he was doing an article on whether social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn deliver value in a business context, and if so, in what ways.

One of the perils of our networked world is that anyone can call themselves a 'reporter' and anyone with a blog can refer to their 'online publication' to give them credibility. And plenty of legit media channels have terrible websites, so an amateur-hour site doesn't necessarily mean the reporter isn't credible.

In other words: It's entirely possible that the email I received today was just a well-done generic broadcast email phishing expedition and next week I'll start receiving calls and emails from their hyper-aggressive sales team, trying to sell me A Social Media Solution Customized For Your Business.

However, as I've discussed before, I'm all about getting the Head2Head and Retired Worker brands in front of new audiences, whether it's an audience of 1 or 1 million. Even if this email was just a ruse, a response from me would put Head2Head in front of one set of eyeballs, at least.

My response ended up being a sort of 'case study' for B2B communications on Twitter. Since all of us are looking to answer the immortal question: "Is social media really good for business, or do we just tell ourselves that to justify all the time we spend farting around on it?", these insights into our Twitter experience may be helpful to you, too.

This is what I told this guy:

Does social networking deliver results?
Social networking only delivers results for business if you go into it with a clear idea of what you'd like to get out of it - but accepting that it's highly likely that you'll end up getting something completely different out of it.

For example, we started Twittering under the @RecruitingH2H name thinking that we'd use it to post 'hot jobs', and we'd get followed by job-seekers. So at first our tweets were just links to new job postings.

That was fine, but I realized that (a) no one wanted to follow me because the tweets seemed too boring; (b) as a small company, we didn't have 10+ new jobs to talk about every day (and you really do need to tweet 10+ times a day in order to build followers); (c) while I wanted job-seekers to follow ME, I didn't really want to follow THEM, because reading the tweets of unemployed people was neither interesting nor educational.

Head2Head's core competency is 'recruiting recruiters' (we place more contract recruiters, on- or off-site with clients, than anyone else in North America), so I decided it might make sense to build a network of recruiters, who tend to be early adopters of social media tools.

Being 'interesting' is more important than being 'relevant'
At the same time, I realized that the best way to build followers is to be interesting - which means including personal, funny and interesting tweets that have nothing whatsoever to do with 'business'. People whose tweets are 100% work-related, with no personal comments whatsoever, simply aren't popular, because the great thing about microblogging is feeling that there's a real person on the other end.

Delivering the authentic Head2Head brand experience
Anyone who's familiar with the Head2Head brand knows that it's not boring, corporate, or all business, all the time. In fact, the reason people like us is because we tend to be quirky, have a keen appreciation for an off-colour joke, and are quite happy to have a Friday-afternoon barbeque in the park behind our office.

Our Twitter posts needed to reflect that.

So I stopped posting so many job opps, started following other recruiters who looked interesting, tried to inject some humour into my tweets and profile (my Twitter bio includes "Fond of non-sequiturs. Newt fancier." - which makes it clear to potential followers that I'm not just some boring B2B person who wants to promote Head2Head 24 hours a day).

THE RESULTS
Our follower base is growing by about 25% per week
...and it's stable (it's my opinion that you get a more stable follower base if you make sure that the number of people you follow is always LESS than the number of people following you. Sure, if you follow 1500 people, a few hundred of them will follow you back - but when other people see that you're following 1823 people and only 432 are following you, they assume that you must be boring or desperate).

Our Twitter presence is already starting to build the Head2Head brand:
This week alone, Head2Head staffers have reported 10+ instances of meeting a new client or candidate and hearing, "I've been hearing about you and seeing you everywhere lately - I didn't realize you Head2Head was such a big player in the Canadian recruiting marketplace."

Twitter has driven a huge increase in our website traffic
Today, after only a couple of months of tweeting, Twitter is the #3 referrer (i.e. the link a visitor has clicked to get to the site), second only to our ATS and Google. Traffic directly to the blog has increased by more than 300% in the same time period - and we know those visitors are coming through social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Twitter increased responses to our recent online survey
- by more than 25% within 48 hours.

We're learning a whole lot
I'm now following 350+ recruiters and recruiting professionals, which means my Twitter feed is always jam-packed with interesting ideas, articles, links - it's an amazing resource. And it's not only me getting smarter: a lot of this knowledge is then disseminated within Head2Head.

Bottom line?
On the one hand, Twitter didn't really deliver against what I thought it would when I started.

But on the other hand, it's delivering a whole lot of benefits that I never anticipated.

Will we ever be able to draw a straight line from 'Twitter' to '$$'? Probably not. But the same is true for most marketing and advertising: It's virtually impossible to draw a straight line from, say, a billboard or tv commercial to specific revenue - but we all know that if you put up a bunch of billboards and run tv commercials, your sales will increase.

The only difference between billboards and Twitter? About $10,000.

Social Media: A Resource for the Unemployed

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:48:44 -0400

It's news to no one that social media is changing the recruitment landscape: names like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have been on the lips of many top bloggers so often that they might as well be tattooed there.

But more is changing than just the ways we source and relate to candidates. A recent article in The Toronto Star begins, "The last time Canada went through a recession, there was no Facebook, no high-speed Internet access and no online chat rooms. Email was in its infancy. That meant public perceptions were shaped largely by economists, politicians and pollsters. The people who were hurting were seldom heard."

But social media is about so much more than being heard.

On Facebook, there's a group for pretty much anything you can name (within the boundaries of the terms of service, of course) -- and sure enough, there among the groups advocating taping bacon to cats and preparedness plans for the zombie apocalypse are everything from support and discussion groups for the unemployed, to industry- and role-specific groups where members may share information on how to find, apply for, and retain jobs.

On Twitter it's the same: in 140 characters or less, job seekers are not only commiserating, but sharing information and resources. New job sites. Open roles, companies who are hiring. Names and email addresses of people to contact.

These job seekers aren't just "being heard": they're being empowered.

Don't Forget the Queen, and Uncle Sam, Still Want You

Sarah Welstead — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:24:29 -0400

"Be all that you can be..."

If you ever watched American cartoons as a child of the 80s and 90s, chances are you can sing the end of that jingle.

Around the world, military recruitment is still a heavily advertised art and those trends impact how our own brands of recruitment work in the private sector. It is interesting to see how these early ads, run through a relatively peaceful time in history, see a military career as a means of self-actualization and career development while, as global events put service personel in greater danger, the emphasis shifts away from the "job" aspect of military service (and makes it look more like a video game).

Take a look and tell me how you think these techniques have influenced your own brand of recruitment.

A Little Interactivity Update

Sarah Welstead — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:11:46 -0400

Based on the responses to our Global Workplace Quiz so far, it looks like our blog readers are a pretty knowledgeable bunch when it comes to world work culture. Have you tested yourself yet?

Over at this month's poll, thoughts about the current recession are pretty optimistic. Be sure to get your opinion in before the poll closes down on the last day of the month.

The demise of big job boards: Who gives a shift?

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:51:01 -0400

If you work in recruiting and have been even semi-conscious in the past 12 months, you know that social networking + the recession = the demise of the big job boards (for real, this time).

And if you work in recruiting and have been even semi-conscious in the past month, you know that people with creative titles like 'Social Media Architect and Chief Disrupter' are predicting that pretty soon, everyone'll just find jobs through Twitter, but most people on Twitter spend a lot of time talking to other people on Twitter, so they tend to forget that the average person is still trying to figure out how to use Office 2008 and hasn't quite got around to running his/her whole life through Tweetdeck yet.

If you lived through the dot-com years (1999-2001 in particular) you know how foolish it is to jump on the "by next week, everyone will be doing everything differently and all the old channels will be obsolete" bandwagon. I can't even tell you how many PowerPoint decks I wrote in 2001 for clients who were investing millions of dollars in cell-phone advertising (you remember: how you were going to be walking by a Subway shop and your phone would magically text you with a 2-for-1 meatball sandwich deal? Rriiiggght.) and writing custom apps for Palm software.

In 2000, the Cluetrain Manifesto had everyone talking about how marketing had to be about 'conversations'. In a networked world, the 'one to many' model of communication from a brand to its customers was no longer relevant; to be successful, a brand had to deliver great experiences across all touchpoints and ensure that the communication was a dialogue, not a monologue.

Cut to 2009. The incipient talent crisis - caused, primarily, by the combination of fewer 20-somethings entering the job market just as lots of baby-boomers are leaving it - has been temporarily somewhat quelled by the recession, but the need for A-list, high-achieving employees is even greater now that so many organizations are having to do more work with less people.

So finally - almost 10 years after the revolution in marketing - recruiting is starting to talk about creating 'conversations' with candidates. Why? Because in this economy, A-listers - always a pretty passive bunch of candidates at the best of times - are even less likely to be haunting job boards or even interested in making a move. No one wants to be the 'last in' if it only means being the 'first out' in 6 months if the economy gets even worse.

All of which means that successfully recruiting these candidates requires long-term relationship building. Long-term relationships, whether with candidates or the hot single guy you met at your cousin's wedding last month, begin with conversations. And where the big job boards are doomed is that even when they offer channels for those conversations (like Monster.ca has done with the new forums) no one really wants to use them - if you have a job, you aren't going to be visiting Monster anyway; if you're out of work, why do you want to spend time networking with other unemployed people?

At the same time, of course, social media - Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook et al - isn't exactly efficient in terms of filling specific reqs. You can spend all day tinkering with your Facebook profile or collecting Twitter followers, but the whole thing is so random that it'd take months of social networking to put together anything like a proper candidate base.

So where does that leave us?

At the intersection of 'job board' and 'social media': Sites which combine the narrowcasting community-building stickiness of social media sites with the functionality of job boards.

BrazenCareerist is a perfect example of this new model: Designed as an online community focusing on Gen Y's work/life experience, it's got 'professional' content (they've got some good writers, like Penelope Trunk, who's also built a decent following on Twitter) 'user generated' content in the form of work-related blogs - and job postings that only cost $99.

Most important, it's already got a coolness factor - among 20-somethings - that big job boards like Monster just can't deliver.

What does this mean for recruiters? Embrace the fragmentation! The next 12-24 months will see job-seeking communities continue to fragment around roles, industries, and even age. The good news? By understanding your 'ideal candidate', and being able to pinpoint where s/he is (i.e. the online communities in which s/he participates and the on/offline media s/he consumes), ultimately you'll spend less time screening through dud candidates and more time securing the A-listers.

Envy, not Greed, Drives Compensation Competition

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:06:10 -0400

Organizations fail when pay incentives like bonuses, retention payments and performance-based salaries aren't managed properly. Caps and other controls, whether implemented by companies or governments, are part of that potential mismanagement.

At least, that's the argument put forward by Jackson Nickerson and Todd Zenger, both professors at the Olin Business School housed in Washington University, St. Louis.

You see, it isn't greed that rules the world of work. It's envy.

"Our argument is the fact that people envy you or make 'social comparisons' creates costs in organizations. A manager has a variety of ways to address those costs…one of which is we're going to go full steam ahead and create these incentives and live with the social comparisons, negative responses and demands for equal incentives. That is ultimately dysfunctional. Managers need to optimize these costs and their consequences."

According to the professors, incentives and competition in corporate culture are necessary, but too much or not enough can lead to losing control of compensation policies and employees who go elsewhere.

Nickerson's and Zenger's theory is that imposing caps on executive pay will have the same effect at banks.

"You're going to find people fleeing banks and joining small firms or starting their own firms," says Jackson Nickerson. "Understanding this basic business principle is important for government regulators and legislators who are structuring compensation for the banking industry or the auto industry or any other industry the government is getting its tentacles into. And our theory can help predict what's going to happen."

Video and Essay Job Applications?

Sarah Welstead — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:09:24 -0400

Can you imagine viewing a job application on video? Think of it as a talent showcase for potential hires. What about reading a personal essay, like on a college application? It may not be a bad idea.

Opportunity Knocks, a job search site for the non-profit sector, recently launched a contest urging job seeker's to submit a video of their talents or to write a 300-word essay about their most memorable job interview.

The videos posted as examples are certainly very memorable. Here's one:

Are you paying attention to the CX (Candidate Experience)? - by guest blogger Karina Sumner-Smith

Sarah Welstead — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:54:14 -0400

[Editor's note: Karina Sumner-Smith is a technical writer here at Head2Head. Oh sure, she SEEMS quiet, but she sits there in the corner just seething with opinions. Here, she expresses some.]

Would You Work for You?

Recruitment and human resource professionals place an emphasis on creating positive candidate experiences throughout the hiring process to create and maintain a positive employment brand. But candidates base their impressions on more than just what you do and say: the office environment itself can create a strong impression.

Pretend you’re coming in for your first interview, and follow the path that a candidate would take on his or her first visit to the company. As you walk around, ask yourself: based on what you see, what impression do you get of the work environment and company culture? Does your company seem like an interesting, welcoming place to spend five days a week – or more?

Areas to consider include:

· Other Employees. Most candidates see and interact with more than just their interviewer. What other employees would a candidate see or encounter on his or her visit? Do the visible staff members appear to be happy and absorbed in their work – or stressed and in a rush? How would you characterize most of the inter-employee interactions?

· Physical Surroundings. We become so used to our offices that we forget that unless we take the candidate on a tour, he or she will only be seeing a small fraction of the whole. Look at the areas where the candidate will wait on arrival, and the halls he or she will walk on the way to the interview room. What sort of impressions do you get of the office from looking at only those places?

· Comfort and Accessibility. Sit in the waiting area, and in the chair on the candidate’s side of the table. If you’re coming in for an interview, is there a place to put your coat or switch your winter boots for your “interview shoes”? Is there a visible washroom? And how accessible would these surroundings be for candidates with a physical disability?

· Noise Level. Most office noise becomes “white noise,” entirely ignored as part of your normal working environment – but what would a candidate hear? Ringing phones, laughter, computer noises, raised voices, and other noises can create a sub-conscious impression of an office environment. So too can silence.

Once you’ve identified areas where your company may be falling short, you can take steps to improve these aspects of the candidate’s experience. Even tiny details like opening the blinds or putting out a bowl of mints can help increase the positive overall impression created by your company throughout the interview process – and help attract and retain the interest of top candidates.

CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY: Grassroots programs, the employee experience, and the bottom line

Sarah Welstead — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:53:44 -0400

Corporate philanthropy programs which involve high levels of employee participation: We all know they seem like a good idea, and HR specialists will tell you that they make a difference to the organization in all kinds of ways.

But do these 'grassroots' giving back programs in fact translate into improved business success?

In terms of HR and recruiting specifically, do these programs increase the level of 'employee engagement', resulting in easier recruiting, improved retention, and increased productivity?

The answer is yes.

In this document, Head2Head analyzes current research and our own data to better understand the role of grassroots giving back programs in overall business success – and how they affect the bottom line.

Click HERE to download the PDF.

(And then let us know what you think.)