I recently spoke at the British Library on the subject of developing a social media strategy with a focus on social recruiting for the social media in recruitment event

Thanks to those of you who attended the event and participated in the debate afterward.

For those who didn’t I include a copy of the pres below, outlining our 10 x point plan.

It doesn’t mean a great deal without the accompanying commentary, so here is are the key points of nos 1-5.  The rest will follow next week….

1. Are you ready?

In his excellent blog, The CounterIntuitive CEO (a must read for anyone in management) Colony (Forrester CEO) equates social media to sex : i.e. you can read about it as much as you want, but it’s only when you start doing it that you actually get it.

This is sound advice.  Taking it one step further, for us, social media isn’t about having a Facebook fan page or a twitter account; there is way too much tokenism / box ticking right now in this space.  The organisations that are really benefiting from web 2.0/ social utilities are embracing the values that underpin them - transparency, openness, authenticity, conversation. If your organisation isn’t really ready to act in this way, then you’re not really ready.

2. Listening

We’ve written lots of post on this before, and indeed social media monitoring / online reputation management is a key part of the Carve proposition.  We basically used a slide showing 2 ears and 1 mouth as a reminder that it’s critical to listen first. Who is saying what (customers, employees, past employees, potential employees, partners, etc), Where are they saying it (Facebook, forums, blogs, niche communities, etc) and What are they saying? Typically we recommend a full social media audit (about which Jeremiah Owyang blogged recently) if you’re serious about understanding you and your competitors corporate social networking environment.

3. Identify objectives

What do you want to achieve? Get more customers? Get closer to your customers? Give them a better service [think crowd-sourced CRM. If you've no idea what that means look at http://twitter.com/comcastcares then get in contact] In corporate recruitment it might be to attract the top graduates, develop external talent communities for your pipeline;  for recruiters it might mean finding new ways of engaging passive talent,  offering new services to your clients, etc.
Sounds obvious, but without it you’re not building a strategy.

4. Choose your platforms; Decide what you’re going to say

Often your business might want to do everything:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing,  (Europe’s leading business network if you’re not in the know) YouTube,  a private Ning community… all, you know, like, yesterday.  We advise that (following points 2 and 3) you identify the key platforms for your audiences and make them fly first.

Equally important is - seriously - what the heck are you going to say? There must be a million blogs, twitter accounts, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups all set up - and all saying nothing. What is going to be your USP? What reason are people going to want to read you / retweet you / quote you / engage you in conversation?
Your organisations thing might be perhaps thought leadership… or the best insight into the market.. or using these tools to encourage peer to peer communities... or to give the deepest insight to the latest jobs… or to help your customers become prosumers and engage in your R&D process… or.. well you get the idea.

A good touch point is the 3C’s - community, content and conversation (as picked up by Recruiter in fact who covered our presentation )

5. Develop a Roadmap, build a team

Having chosen your platform, you need a roadmap for that platform, which a beginning, an end and attendant milestones / KPIs along the way. Here for nothing is a version we’ve developed for LinkedIn from the perspective of  a corporate recruiting environment.

Then build a team.
Do you know the first thing we strive to do when engaged to help an organisation or recruitment firm develop a social media /  corporate social networking strategy? Its to identify an internal champion - someone who really is passionate about dialogue, your customers.  They don’t need to be an expert on Facebook - but they do need to be able to enthuse their co-workers about the whys / wheres / hows of doing this. Secondly, you’ll need someone from your management team involved.   Get corporate comms on board, HR, legal.  And (perhaps) hire yourself a Twinten.

Points 6-10will follow next week. Please find the embedded presentation below.

With many of the 2.2 million people out of work in the UK relying solely on the internet to find a job*, a new web TV channel will offer expert advice to jobseekers to help them find a job online, where a labyrinth of over 10,000 job boards and social networking sites dominate.

The CareersCast (www.careersiteadvisor.com), will launch on Wednesday June 3rd at 12:30pm, with its inaugural live videocast featuring experts from the recruitment, internet and social networking industries.

Following on from the success of the innovative website, Career Site Advisor, CareersCast will offer jobseekers a chance to learn directly from experts such as Luke McKend from Google about how to find a job online says Career Site Advisor co-founder Keith Robinson.

�The recruitment industry has undergone a revolution since the first job board launched in 1994, but many jobseekers are in this market for the first time and may never have looked online for a job before,� Mr. Robinson says.

Experts participating in the Career Site Advisor livecast include:

� Luke Mckend � Google: Finding the right job when searching on Google
� Andy Headworth - Sirona Consulting: Manage finding a job through networking
� Don Leslie � BLT: How to best approach a recruitment firm � what should you know
� Dave King - Shares his experience of being unemployed and online job seeking.
� Elaine Hewens - FinelyBalanced, providing advice on career development

Special thanks to JobsGoPublic.com who are sponsoring the first livecast.

The website, Career Site Advisor launched in March and offers a single reference point for online jobseekers to search job sites, company career sites and recruitment consultancies in one directory as well as advice and links to online resources.

*National Online Recruitment Survey 2008

- Ends -
Issued by Carve Consulting
For further information, case studies or interviews please contact: Keith Robinson, on 0779-652-3355 or keith@careersiteadvisor.com http://www.careersiteadvisor.com/contact.php

About Career Site Advisor
The company was founded by Keith Robinson formerly COO of Totaljobs.com and Publisher of Personnel Today, and Simon Goddard formerly of Yahoo HotJobs & News International. Headquartered in London, Site Advisor Ltd is a privately held company, offering the United Kingdom�s first web based Careers comparison Site with the latest job seeker news and advice from across the web.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1538881 - Link to Ustream trailer video.

I was kindly invited recently to speak at the ONREC Newspaper 2009 conference in London.

At the conference - focussed toward publishers, media owners and classified sales directors - I looked at the challenges facing recruiters, advertisers and candidates, and suggested 10 ideas of strategies to adopt and new revenue streams to pursue:

Hand picked jobs for me
- jobs are ubiqitous so why don’t publishers ‘act as the editor’ / filter for their audiences, just serving them with ideal jobs.

Event-based publishing
- again jobs are everywhere all the time; could publishers create events again around the pulling together and publishing of those ‘hand picked jobs for me’ and - on another level - encourage engagement via live virtual interviews / events( on blogs via http://www.coveritlive.com, in Second Life, Twitter, etc )

Twitter
- publish jobs via Twitter to external talent communities

mRecruitment has arrived (finally)
- through iPhone and Android, opportunity to build loyal audiences via mobile internet

APIs & Mashups
- open your content and users to 3rd party developers to create apps - and monetize content; use mashups ( like Google maps, custom linkedin searches, etc) to differentiate, improve candidate experience

Communities and Peering
- engender vertical communities (look at http://www.beaker.com) and peering to build loyalty and create value

Free Ninety Nine
- publishers should give advertisers free real estate to host videos, apps, blogs, etc - then sell around that content and to those content creators ( see facebook, youtube etc)

User generated content… And Crowd sourced classifieds?
- Looking at example of http://www.guardian.co.uk/users/forums and beyond; and why not get your readers - who know you and have great loyalty to you - to suggest the kind of jobs / brands they want advertising: a great mandate to take to advertisers..

Farmers, Hunters and Making buying easy
- recruitment sales people from pure play publishing backgrounds tend to be ‘farmers’ and not great at hunting for new business / selling complex online propositions. Also, how can publishers make buying their inventory easy ( looking at examples of Facebook ads and Goole Adwords)

Social shopping – or “Burn the boat that bought you”?
- Should publishers buy social media companies, or should they realise they even consider dropping their print titles to go online ( and specfically ) web 2.0 only?

The presentation is up on la SlideShare here (btw all recent presentations we’ve made including Listening to the Conversation: Brands and Social Media are also hosted on http://www.slideshare.net/CarveConsulting)

The presentation itself it not very descriptive. Just looking through it doesn’t mean anything in fact in unaccompanied form…please get in contact if you’d like more info..

Thanks to Clay Shirky’s outstanding piece on “Newspapers: Thinking the Unthinkable“, Miles at Matchwork, Mike @ WDAD Keith at CareerSiteAdvisor.com Woody Lewis whose Save The Papers blog and articles on Mashable provided a lot of inspiration / content / examples. And check out the superb http://thismodernworld.com/contact/ by Tom Tomorrow who is responsible for the cartoon strip on the last slide.

*image disclaimer m’lud: the writer of this article is not for one moment suggesting the Kingston Whig-Standard is “Dead in the Water Now” (as David Gray might put it). In fact the author knows nothing about the Kingston Whig-Standard except that it’s a cracking name for a paper. And that they have a nice photo of their venerable organ on the web courtesy of Deb Newton.*

Alex posted this on his excellent blog ( http://onlinerecruiter.blogspot.com ) and asked if we’d be interested in publishing this via our network. Alex, the floor is yours..

The industry head of careers and classifieds at Google is quoted in this month’s Recruiter magazine as saying:

“The Hays and the Adeccos of the world haven’t got it right. Where are they online? They are feeding the jobs boards.”

Lovely. I’m sure Hays and Adecco are delighted to have their online approach critiqued in such a constructive manner! In fairness to the chap from Google, it looks like he’s been quoted at “recruitment society” event (? have you been to one of these?) as opposed to having an open pop at them… I suspect he may be surprised that his comments have made the press (not to mention this blog obviously.) Don’t fancy being Google’s Hays account manager today…

Anyway, do you think he’s right? Do you think Hays and Adecco are behind their larger competitors? I’m not so sure they are.

My take is that there is just so much coming at the recruitment industry at the moment - everything from impending economic meltdown to disruptive technology - that it is very tricky for recruiters to know what to and what not to adopt in their online strategy. Trying to stay ahead of the curve on this isn’t easy. Trying to do this for a huge business like Hays, Adecco or any of the other big recruiters is a heck of a job. Think about it - decide to run with one of the new routes to market, get buy in from various stakeholders in the business, sort process changes/ set up and then go for it. Back the right horse and you’re a star. Make the wrong call and consider how much time (and therefore money) it would cost a big recruiter to adopt even a free service.

As much as there’s now a huge amount of choices and an ever changing market, not getting the right approach online will cost any recruiter hugely over the short, medium and long term. It really is rock and a hard place for some of the larger firms. As well as having to make calls on social media approaches, business networking (I did promise not to mention Hays/ Mark Ions in this post…), getting their own website right and sorting out a sensible job board strategy, recruiters also have to deal with the disruptive approaches coming at them (very regularly now) Here’s some examples:

www.bountyjobs.com - crux of this site is to allow the client to post the vacancy as well as what fee, recruiters then decide whether to work it or not. If they do its submit CVs. Want more detail on this? Click on www.cheezhead.com
www.beaker.com - I like this one…. Its a community site specifically for the life sciences sector. Its got the lots, career management, job ads, training/ development options and a LinkedIn style connect function. Where does the recruiter feature there? It may not come as a surprise that the CEO is an ex recruiter…
www.zubka.com - hugely disruptive referal bounty site. Now attracting more entrants to the market - www.yellojobs.com worth a look, the latest entrant in the US. Zubka is the daddy mind you - its been classed as “ebay for jobs” and in the UK is the closest thing to a “brand” in that market.

The list is almost endless… Flip yourself into the seat of the CEO of a listed recruitment firm.. Some big decisions ahead. No doubt many of the new sites/ offerings will launch in a blaze of glory only to fizzle out. Some of them are going to make it. As a recruiter if you miss the boat on this then you’re really playing catch up.

What will really bring all of this to a head is the market slowdown. Most now acknowledge this is already upon us in the UK. Check out the comments on the Michael Page results on Yahoo Finance and the article in today’s Times (links at the bottom of the post)In summary, MP’s numbers are still very good (those of you who found this blog from my Xing or LinkedIn profile may accuse me of being a tad biased!) Few would argue that things are going to be tough in the UK over the next year or two.

During the last slowdown, we saw the Recruitment Process Outsourcing firms take a grip on the market. Love or loath RPOs? Think their day has come and gone? It doesn’t really matter - the part of the market they are in is unlikely ever to go back to the straight agency market. This slowdown is likely to see another portion of the market go to the internet. How many businesses do you think are plotting how to cut agency spend at the moment?

Can the bigger firms have the same sort of agility as the smaller ones? Can they trial concepts? Anyone noticed what BLT are up to these days? Worth checking out www.carveconsulting.com/blog… Whether a big brand recruiter can or can’t is almost irrelevant. They will need to adapt how they work to suit the increasing part the net is playing in jobsearches. Can they have a basic structure that is black and white in their online strategy and top this up with a “grey” area where they can trial new initiatives? I wonder.

Maybe the key word here is “adapt”

All of the disruptive media in the employment space is exciting stuff… All promise to be the catalyst for dramatic change… Consider one example. www.bountyjobs.com - on the face of it, this looks like it’d bring momumental change to the market. Job driven market, lots of candidates - from a client perspective its great: “Lots of recruiters want my business, I can use this site to drive the cost down.” in principle this is really simple. In reality I’m not convinced. Why?
1. If recruiters need just agree to the terms on offer, can you imagine how many “hit and run” merchants will send CVs? Its not sounding like a positive experience for mr client
2. If the client is solely interested in driving cost down it stands to reason that a service oriented, quality recruiter would more than likely be thinking “thanks but not thanks” leaving lower quality firms to work the assignment. Again, as a client I would not be convinced that this the savings would outweigh either the inconvenience or the risk of not getting the best candidate for the job.

So what’s the summary then?

3 key points for recruiters considering their online approach:

- Adaptabilty
- Flexibility
- Integration

Keep those three on the agenda… Simple hey, but can big firms act like smaller ones…?

We recently helped BLT organise their first ever Virtual Careers event for Management Consultants. Hosted by Top-Consultant, the event featured BLT and a number of leading employers, including Accenture.

The event was hosted on the iCongo Live platform. As you can see below, it looks good, and you could add some quite cool features (we recorded a quick podcast with Don to greet people who arrived on the stand.)

But the only question that matters of course is whether it delivered for exhibitors and candidates?

Our own experience was that it was all a bit “cold”, the technology a little clunkly, and - at least on the stands I visited - I had to proactively click and contact someone to get any engagement, rather than being ‘greeted’ as I arrived. Plus conversations were s-l-o-w (possibly as a result of large numbers of attendees?)

But this is purely an anecdotal appraisal of the event’s strengths / weaknesses , and we’d be interested to hear from Top-Consultant , Don from BLT / other exhibitors, and perhaps any candidates who took part?

Quick update on Jamie Leornard’s speed-dating style event “My Working Lunch” , the graduate edition of which I openeded a couple of weeks ago.

This really is a neat idea that really seems to work - wonder if you could extend the concept (..to clients direct? / ATS providers?…)

You can see the short film, with references to this blogs title, here

We’re delighted to be working with one of the world’s leading global recruitment firms as they launch their new online careers portal.

If you’re a Legal, HR, IT or Finance / Accountancy professional and would like to have your say as to what online recruitment might look like in the future, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll pay you £75 for just 2.5 hours of your time and will provide refreshements. Whether you’re a graduate or experienced, if you would like to attend please email Alex@carveconsulting.com

Date: Monday, 23rd June, 2008 6-8.30pm
Venue: Carve Consulting, 74 Back Church Lane, London E1 1LX (map)

We look forward to hearing from you.

A guest post here from
Struan Yallup, Head of Copy at recruitment advertising agency WDAD Good work Stru!

Note to readers. This blog starts off like a rant about press advertising. Bear with me and we’ll get to the digital recruitment bit. Honest.

Do you ever come across a piece of recruitment advertising that makes you so angry that you want to gouge out your own eyeballs and then devour them with a dash of Tabasco, so you never have to look at anything like it ever again?

Yes? Good.

Well I felt a bit like that the other day when flicking through the jobs section of People Management (29th May edition).

I get angry part 1

On page 51, is a ‘spoof’ advert inviting you to “Hate yourself at Dullton & Hive City Council.” The ad is advertising two senior HR roles and is full of copy like “you can look forward to an environment refreshingly free of new thinking and imagination.”

The only response method is a microsite address for www.bored-senseless.co.uk (I’ve put the link in a bit further down, hold off if you can).

Now, it’s not a bad spoof in itself. They’ve done a decent job with both the copy and the art direction.

However, it’s this kind of advertising that absolutely horrifies good direct marketers. For one-off, direct response ads, the experts never, ever touch the fake ad approach - it is a classic example of ‘what not to do’. In recruitment ads it kills response (it all comes back to the who, why, what, where, how stuff - but that’s for another blog).

I was so dismayed to see this advert in print, I immediately went online to find out who had produced it. And that’s when things got even worse.

I get angry part 2

I typed in the microsite link and was taken to a dummy home page full of spoof headings and links, none of them live. After what seemed like an eternity the screen started to go fuzzy and shake about. Then nothing happened. Nothing. At all.

After a minute of scratching my head, I remembered that our over-zealous externally hosted system blocks pop-ups and the like. So, I dropped out of the hosted system and tried visiting the site again, but using Firefox. No site came up at all this time.

Finally, I tried it in Explorer. Low and behold, after five or so seconds of fuzzy screen I get a pop up with a Brighton and Hove logo telling me I’m being taken somewhere I’m appreciated. All of a sudden bright colours appeared and I get some copy telling me it’s a good thing that Brighton & Hove isn’t Dullton & Hive – plus a link to the B&H recruitment site where you can view the two real senior HR positions.

Try it for yourselves. www.bored-senseless.co.uk

Most of you web-savvy types will probably get the intended result straight away. But I imagine there are plenty of people like me with browser and security set-ups that will have problems with the site. Surely this isn’t good? When taken together with the press advert, it is worse.

I’m not going to dwell much further on the microsite, and whether it’s appropriate for its target audience or whether the message is actually saying anything or if this is just a big waste of people’s time. Instead I’m going to finally get to the point.

Finally getting to the point

Eventually I got round to checking out the People Management job board to see how these two adverts are listed. The answer is conventionally.

When searching, you can find the jobs by their actual job title, location, salary and employer. Plus, it’s the real copy for the adverts from the B&H recruitment site, not the fake ad text.

So this got me thinking. The vast majority of the visitors to the microsite are going to come through the web listings. I doubt many relevant enquiries will come through the press advert at all.

How do digital recruiters feel about this? Do you ever get frustrated that some clients spend big chunks of their budget on unmeasurable, poorly thought out and targeted press adverts, while you often do all the hard work and live and die by the metrics?

Widening the question, what do digital recruiters think of the traffic driving advertising produced by off-line creatives in general? Is its thinking in line with yours? Is its lack of measurability an issue for you? Or in a world of postings, SEO, Zubka and behavioural targeting, are you less interested in offline advertising than ever?

Right, who’s going to co-join Stru in this debate? Bottle of Carve Cava on offer for the best comment …

Later on today I’ll be opening proceedings at MyLongLunch’s “My Working Lunch”.

Lauched by Jamie Leornard and the team over at MLL, it’s a great idea that brings together agencies and media in a speed dating / elevator pitch type format. Basically, agencies move from table to table, meeting media owners who get the chance to meet and pitch key ad agency contacts.

A cute concept and, judging from the feedback from the first event ( see the video here ), it seems to be a working.

Thanks Jamie for the invite to come along today… hopefully I’ll have thought of something to say by the time we start. I’ll then be taking a media seat telling anyone who’ll listen about engaging Graduates via blogs, social media marketing,and search engine marketing.

I was at the Top-Consultant.com recruitment event recently supporting our client the leading Management Consultancy recruiter, BLT.

Whilst the panel (including Matt Alder of Barkers / DigitalRecruiting, and Tim Elkington of Enhance) Q & A could perhaps have been improved with the ability to take questions / engage with the floor (all questions had been prepared in advance), there was some interesting points raised.

One of the most hotly debated questions was about the importance of the candidate experience - but how many employer careers sites have totally ignored this. Anyone who has had to endure a 20 minute + application process (designed for the HR department rather than you, the candidate) will know precisely what we’re talking about.

The argument is basically thus: in a talent/candidate driven markets, are applicant tracking /recruitment management systems creating unnecessary barriers to employers hiring candidates directly?

Tony Restell of Top Consultant suggested that those clients who insist on making candidates apply via applicant tracking systems lose as much as 95% of possible response. Whilst this may not be a controlled experiment, certainly there is widespread anecdotal evidence to support this view.

From a candidate perspective, if you know that there is a need for your skills, why would you jump through hoops to make like easier for the HR department, rather than just fire an email with a CV to a headhunter / recruiter and say “Get me an interview at X or Y Co”?

Moving beyond the transactional nature of a full job application, the need for organisations and recruiters to enable “degrees of engagement” is one that we wholeheartedly espouse at Carve. Recruitment Blogs, Virtual events, Social Media, Business Networking programmes and similar allow encourage conversations - developing richer, deeper relationships and forming the basis of informed decisions (Would I hire this person? Do I want to work for this organisation?) moving forward.

A good primer by the way for the development of user-orientated websites is Don’t Make Me think. It’s also one of the first usability books that doesn’t want to make you kill yourself. And the author.

Available from the Carve Bookshop aka Amazon.com:
:

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability