Category: Recruiting

Recruitment Business Models are Evolving

by Maddyin Recruiting

Recruiting is an interesting business to be in right now. When it comes to technology, many businesses are playing catch-up to bring their processes fully into the digital age.

Now, before you run out and buy a fully-formed, artificially intelligent robot assistant, think about examining your business model first. Any technology you use needs to fit with your business and the problems that it solves for your customers. Here are three things to keep in mind when evolving your recruitment business model:

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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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Hybrid Recruiting: How Recruiters Can Move Forward

by Maddyin Recruiting

The recruiting industry is fascinating in how its use of technology varies from company to company.

Some recruiters are always following the latest trends to try and keep a competitive edge, while others are just fine with the tried and tested – they know relationships are at the heart of what they do and don’t mind missing out on new technology. In many ways the latter group has the most to gain by modernizing some parts of their recruiting business but can be hampered by the process of changing.

This is one scenario we’ve heard from recruiters:

I have a legacy ATS that we’ve used for well over a decade. It’s worked well for the most part, but our outdated website reduces our credibility for candidates and sales leads. We also feel we could be attracting candidates and sales leads passively with the right tools, in addition to our outbound work.

We want to change, but we’re entrenched in our current system, so it will be difficult. (We have a checklist of things we know we need: mobile-friendly, social media connections, etc. But we don’t want to throw away what we like about our current process.)

Their concerns are valid, and it’s important to address them head-on. Below, we’ll discuss the four main problems and how recruiters can tackle them.

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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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Hybrid Recruiting for Job Boards

by Maddyin Recruiting

A recruiter is angry at job boards.

Why?

Because he pays for the service of advertising jobs on a platform that will get him the candidates he wants, but the candidates he gets are subjected to job advertisements and offers from every other recruiter who uses that job board.

They’re all fishing from the same pond. 

Most recruitment companies have an ATS (applicant tracking system/software), and use multiple tools to advertise jobs and engage talent. One side effect of using multiple tools and platforms for recruiting is that you sometimes wind up fishing from the same pond as everyone else. Australian recruiter Simon Cox writes:

The online advertising employers and agencies pay for and spend hours preparing is being used to build databases of candidates for the benefit of job boards. Applying for a job on SEEK, CareerOne, Indeed.com and many other job boards, means being encouraged/cajoled/funnelled towards setting up a personal profile on that platform.  Everything is about trying to get you to say ‘yes’ to employers being able to search your CV.  Indeed.com and CareerOne are actually contacting those candidates directly to offer them recruitment services.

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How Recruiters Use Job Boards

by Maddyin Recruiting

Job boards come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and some don’t even call themselves “job boards”. There are small, independent job board businesses, there are large-scale platforms that generate revenue through selling job posts in addition to other services (think GlassDoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn), and there are the career pages of corporate websites and the job postings that tie into Applicant Tracking Systems on recruitment company websites.

Recruiters, regardless of their in-house tech, use job boards as a part of their overall recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing, by the way, encompasses all that recruiters do to reach attract, nurture, and engage candidates. Recruitment marketing can include posting jobs, social media, email, phone, content marketing, and more.

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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 Strengthen your Candidate Recruitment – Guest Post

by Jonathanin Recruiting

Careerleaf was originally founded from a belief that there was a better way to connect talent with employers through technology. Even with the progress we’ve made through the years, our journey is far from over; in fact, it will never end. Philosophically, we believe that our products (as well as our team) can always be improved upon.

So in the spirit of continuously bettering the recruitment process, Wayne Fleming, recruitment and HR consultant from Flexi Personnel, is making a guest contribution to our blog this week on how to strengthen one’s candidate recruitment.

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Reimagining your Professional Association as a Recruiter

by Jonathanin Recruiting

I think bamboo is a fantastic material. From construction scaffolding, human edible food, and entire luxury houses, the grass has been employed in an endless variety of ways through some creative reimagining of what the material was and what role it could play.

The human brain does, in fact, act oddly when faced with different assumptions and frames. Simply asking a question in a different way, or considering a different perspective can derive a different result. Consider the following based on Kahneman & Tversky’s often cited study:

An outbreak threatens to kill 600 people. There are two possible courses of action:

  • Program A will save 200 people.
  • Program B has a ⅓ chance of saving everyone, and a ⅔ chance of saving no one.

Now, imagine the same scenario, but different options:

  • Program C will kill 400 people.
  • Program D has a ⅓ chance of saving everyone, and a ⅔ chance of saving no one.

All four plans theoretically deliver the same result – save 200 people – but 72% of those surveyed would choose program A over B (certainty instead of risk), yet 78% would choose program D over C (risk instead of certainty). The dramatic difference can be accounted for the way A and C are framed – one is positive and one is negative.

So for professional associations out there looking to do more for your membership and increase revenue: it’s time to reimagine your organization…as a recruiter.

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Enhancing Recruitment Marketing with SEO

by Jonathanin Recruiting

I can still recall, quite vividly, the days when my whole household had one cellphone, and it was carried by the family member who could justify the greatest need for it.

In 2007, I reluctantly purchased my first cellphone that I didn’t share with a family member. I was 22 at the time and being a late adopter was a point of pride – I wanted to see how long I could hold out before being swallowed by the mobile revolution. Tell that to my parents, and they’d laugh thinking about the technology they had when they were 22. Tell that to one of my cousins in high school, and well, they’d probably laugh as well – who waits till they’re 22 until getting their very own phone?

Fast forward to today, and I’m more likely to leave my house without my wallet than my cellphone – a sentiment that I believe is quite significant in terms of how the Internet and proliferation of mobile devices has truly changed our society.

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