Tag: Candidate Experience

5 Things Recruiting Companies Need to Stop Doing

by Maddyin Recruiting

1. Making Candidates Apply by Email ONLY

How many emails do you get? How many do you read? I’m not one of those people who will tell you to forget about using email altogether – it’s still a useful and reliable tool for a great many things – but recruiters’ inboxes are usually pretty stuffed. I think it’s safe to say most recruiters have had a few candidates get lost or forgotten in the shuffle of email.

The beauty of having a system that somehow registers candidates with you is that data and information are then housed and organized in ways that are specific to candidates. When you have candidate pools grouped to your job requisitions, you’re more likely to disposition your candidates – which is where most recruiters and employers fall short in the candidate experience. Which brings me to…

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How Niche Job Boards Solve Big Problems

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

Niche job boards can solve a lot of problems for recruiters, and there are many different types of recruiters. Most of them have to really hustle and work hard to do their jobs, and while new technologies are opening up all kinds of doors and possibilities for the future, it can be overwhelming. Some people who need to hire employees aren’t recruiters at all – they’re primarily business owners and office managers who are also responsible for recruiting and hiring.

 

Hiring feels like an aberration of some kind. It’s a disruption to an employer because it means that somebody has quit, retired, or been fired. Or it means their business is growing and they need more hands on deck to get the work done or even just to keep their heads above water.

 

Often, it’s a big hassle that needs to be dealt with in a rush.

 

And yet, without the right people to fill those gaps and come on board, businesses can really struggle. Niche job boards can help solve these problems for employers and recruiters.

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Recruitment Marketing Platforms: Dead or Thriving?

by Maddyin Recruiting

A couple weeks ago ERE published two articles on the same day, with each article’s premise opposing the other:

  1. 10 Reasons Why Recruitment Marketing Platforms Are Dead By Tom Steele
  2. Recruitment Marketing Platforms Are Not Dead. Here’s Why By Chris Forman

 

Both articles raise interesting questions about what problems need solving in recruiting and how different technologies have tried to solve them. Below I’ll dig into both perspectives and sum up the broader questions that recruiters need to ask about not just recruitment marketing platforms, but about their whole process and all the tools involved.

 

Steele’s contention is that most solutions calling themselves “Recruitment Marketing Platforms” come with a series of inherent flaws which will determine their demise. In his experience, a recruitment marketing platform adds unnecessarily to a recruiter’s tech stack, and doesn’t solve the fundamental problems like candidate experience, which continue to plague recruiting:

“Yes, I’ve heard you all say your career site is mobile optimized. But after your 35-step application process on my mobile device, I have to disagree. Maybe the front of your career site is mobile optimized, but not certainly the application.”

It’s a fair point, considering how many job applicants still face the situation described above. Recruitment marketing in and of itself does not fix a problem caused by employers and recruiting agencies who still use tools and processes that are suited to their own bureaucracy instead of a positive candidate experience, which in turn positively impacts hiring. So if recruitment marketing platforms are simply a glossy veneer designed to lure candidates in without the infrastructure to capture and retain them, as the picture Steele clearly paints, it does sound like they’re a dead-end.

 

But that’s not the whole story.

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Convincing Great Talent to Join Your Job Board

by Maddyin Marketing

In the recruiting industry, there is frequent debate about passive vs active candidates. A passive candidate is someone who has a job, and isn’t really focused on finding a new one. They may occasionally look for jobs or apply, but they’re not as absorbed in the activity as someone who is an active job seeker. An active job seeker might be unemployed or trying to leave a job they don’t like. They’re applying to jobs regularly, and are always on the lookout for opportunities.

There is the perception that passive candidates are better, perhaps because their current employment implies success in their role. On other hand, a passive candidate who can be lured away from a job they’re content with could be just as easily lured away from the employer you recruit them to join. An active job seeker may want the job more, and work harder to keep it.

However you feel about recruiting passive or active candidates, a job board needs both.

By now, you should be familiar with the chicken-and-the-egg game of simultaneously attracting both talent and customers to your job board. Last week I talked about finding the right balance of original content to make your job board unique and valuable enough to be useful to job seekers and develop good SEO, a crucial element of attracting job seekers to your board.

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Status of Facebook Jobs: It’s Complicated

by Maddyin Marketing

Facebook started out in 2004. I joined in late 2005. Only college and university students could sign up back then, and you could only register using your school-assigned email address. Now we might refer to it as a closed social network, with subnetworks of people who add each other as “friends”. Later on, high school students were allowed to sign up, and then eventually the world at large was welcome on Facebook.

Naturally, most of the user-generated content on Facebook during those early years was posted with the assumption that only chosen friends would ever clap eyes on it. Messages on your Facebook wall (now your timeline) and selfies (taken without the advantage front-facing camera on your phone) were the norm, along with pictures of friends hanging out, partying, and making dumb faces.

If you’ve watched The Social Network, you can no doubt imagine that all sorts of social drama was acted out on the platform, and you’d probably be right. Facebook was responsible for popularizing “it’s complicated” as a relationship status, after all. On the other hand, it was also common to change your vital stats for fun – Antarctica as your hometown or relationship status set as “married” to unlikely match, platonic friend, or favourite food.

I’m not taking you down Millennial Memory Lane for no reason, mind you. The context of Facebook’s history and evolution is important to take into account when evaluating the social media platform as a recruiting tool, since now it’s a place to look for a job.

Back in November, TechCrunch reported on Facebook’s upcoming Jobs feature for company pages, and now it’s here. Let’s quickly review what we know about Facebook Jobs:

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The Simply Hired Shutdown: News and Next Steps

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy

You’ve likely already heard the news that job aggregator Simply Hired is shutting down on June 26th. A letter was sent to their customers and publishing partners, informing them of the shutdown.

The Simply Hired shutdown will impact those whose job sites are hosted by Simply Hired, and anyone using Simply Hired’s job widgets, API, and data feeds. Simply Hired staff also “face an uncertain future”, and many assume they will be laid off. It has since been reported through “a trusted source” that Recruit (Indeed’s parent company) has acquired Simply Hired.

Simply Hired Shutdown Timeline and News Round-Up

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Why Recruiters Should Consider Adding a Job Board

by Maddyin Recruiting

We’ve talked about the sometimes blurred lines that distinguish between job boards, aggregators, and recruitment companies, as well as how their technology and business needs match up or overlap.

The traditional idea of a job board is morphing, changing, and growing to adapt to new employment trends and recruiting needs, so the idea of extending one’s job board services into the realm of recruiting isn’t a stretch.

But what about recruitment companies? Staffing agencies and contingency recruiting companies can benefit from consolidating how they advertise jobs and collect candidate information. Let’s take a look at the top three benefits of in-house job listing and candidate profiles.

Job Advertising Efficiency:

As a recruiter, you need to reach candidates where they are and bring them into the fold. With a job board that takes advantage of outbound feeds and sets up distribution relationships with other niche boards, aggregators, and recruiting networks, a recruiter can be done-in-one as far as their advertising needs go. 

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5 Ways to Write Better Job Posts

by Maddyin Marketing1 Comment on 5 Ways to Write Better Job Posts

We’ve broken down the basic components of a job post on this blog before, but there is always room for improvement. Here are five ways you can write better job posts, or help your customers do the same.

  1. Be Search-Friendly

This slideshare featured on Recruiting.com recommends avoiding overly creative job titles. iMediaConnection has collected a list of hilariously (and unnecessarily) creative job titles here, that will give you an idea of what they mean. “Wizard of Light Bulb Moments” and “Chief Visionary Officer” might sound fun and quirky, but you’ll drastically reduce the discoverability of a job advertisement with that title. If you’re looking for an Inbound Marketing Strategist, don’t advertise for a “Growth Guru” if you’re hoping to cast a wide net. Candidates are unlikely to search using your fun and quirky terminology, and they won’t be using them in any email/job search alerts.

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Job Matching is Not a Magic Bullet

by Maddyin Job Board Strategy3 Comments on Job Matching is Not a Magic Bullet

The most important thing about a job board is that it introduces candidates to employers, and vice versa. If that function is not working, then you do not have a job board.

The basics of how this process works usually goes something like this:

  1. Employer posts job opening
  2. Candidates discover the position
  3. Candidates apply for the position
  4. Employer reviews applications
  5. Employer contacts the candidates they’re interested in, followed by interviewing, hiring, etc.

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How to Make Recruitment Marketing Work for Your Job Board

by Maddyin Recruiting

“Recruitment Marketing” is another one of those phrases you’re probably hearing about more often lately. It’s the concept that in order to recruit and to hire, you need to market to candidates.

It’s the kind of idea that seems obvious in retrospect. I’ve already written about how job boards can help their customers create great candidate experiences by thinking about job seekers as customers, and recruitment marketing fits right in with that.

If the candidate is the customer, then the employer (or the job they are hiring for) is the product you’re selling to them. In order to sell it to them, you have to market to them. Marketing a job or an employer encompasses a variety of components, including:

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