Digital recruitment might be the key to an effective overall recruiting strategy, but the question is where to begin. This session will walk you through how to prioritize your digital recruiting and marketing options and show you how to develop strategic initiatives designed to drive change and establish buy-in so that you can move forward in your digital and online recruitment efforts. Learn how to get started realigning your recruitment efforts to those of the larger organization. Our session will focus on establishing return on investment, establishing metrics and capitalizing on relationships with other departments outside of HR including marketing, IT and communications.
Four Presentation Focus Areas:
How to prioritize talent attraction efforts using digital strategies
Establish small wins that you can build on focused on executive leadership communication
The top five creative digital strategies that every recruiter and HR leader should consider from programmatic ad buying, social media to using video in your recruiting.
Leveraging relationships within the organization to establish ROI and strategic partnerships
4. Social Demographics
78% of U.S. adult
women & 66% U.S.
adult men say they
use at least one
social media platform
Almost 6 out of 10
U.S. adults say
they use
Instagram daily.
7 out of 10 U.S.
adults say they use
Facebook daily.
76% of U.S. adults
say they have at
least some college
education
81% 69% 40%
top 3 platforms
Up to 81% of U.S. adults
from ages 18-49 use at
least one social media
platform
Source: PewResearch 2023
5. Best Times to Post on Social Media
Source: Hubspot 2023
Best times Best days Worst days
Monday - Friday: 6 p.m. - 9 p.m. Fridays Tuesdays
Monday - Friday: 12 - 3 p.m. and 6 - 9 p.m. Fridays & Saturdays Sundays
Monday - Friday: 9 a.m. - noon Wednesdays & Fridays Sundays
Tuesdays & Wednesdays: 12 p.m. - 3 p.m.
Thursday & Fridays: 3 p.m. - 6 p.m. Saturdays Mondays
Monday - Friday: 9 a.m. - noon Mondays, Tuesdays & Wednesdays Sundays & Saturdays
9. More like, going viral!
Within 48 hours, the video had more than
27 million views on TikTok.
Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams" earned 16.1
million US streams in the week ending Oct.
15 of 2020
Nathan (aka @doggface) has launched a
merchandise line, starred in commercials with
Snoop Dogg, bought a house and partnered with
David Guetta for a music video.
10. Live Video Benefits
Opportunity to engage
candidates in real time
Demonstrates authenticity which
builds trust
Humanizes the hiring process
engage trust humanize
11. 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer
Of the studied institutions, business
is once again the most trusted
Business must lead in breaking the
cycle of distrust
Business needs to step up on
societal issues
At 62%, business is the most
trusted institution, ahead of NGOs
at 59%, government and media
each at only 50%. Seventy-eight
percent of respondents, however,
trust "My Employer," making the
relationship between employer and
employee incredibly important.
Across every single issue, by a huge
margin, people want more business
engagement, not less. For example, on
climate change, 53% say business is not
doing enough, while only 8% say it is
overstepping. The role and expectation
for business has never been clearer, and
business must recognize that its societal
role is here to stay.
While business outscores government
by 53 points on competency and 26
points on ethics, respondents believe
business is not doing enough to
address societal problems, including
climate change (53%), economic
inequality (50%), workforce reskilling
(44%) and trustworthy information
(45%).
19. Automation Is
Your Friend
Used to organize and plan your content
Helps focus your efforts
Allows time for content and graphic creation
Can be as simple as a Google Doc
20. Automation Is
Your Friend
STEP 1: Leverage your ATS
STEP 2: Create message templates, like
SMS
STEP 3: Use CRM, Gmail or Chrome
Extensions
21. Focus on mobile to
engage candidates
Non HTML emails
Customized messaging
SMS
Hi, Adam. It's Jack
from Widget
Company. Confirming
our phone int. today at
2 PM CST.
Hi, Sarah. It's Jack from
Widget Company.
Are you interested in
hearing abt Sr Regional
Mgr Role?
Hi, Omar! Jack from
Widget Company.
Can you complete
onboarding packet online
today?
22. Making Digital Recruiting Accessible and Inclusive
Sources: Glassdoor 2020, Catalyst 2020, Deloitte Australia 2013
Deloitte Australia research
shows that inclusive teams
outperform their peers by 80% in
team-based assessments.
According to a survey from
Glassdoor, 76% of employees and
job seekers said a diverse
workforce was important when
evaluating companies and job
offers.
Catalyst research shows that
companies with more women on the
board statistically outperform their
peers over a long period of time.
24. Where to start?
Every employer should consider the
accessibility of each step in the process,
and work with an accessibility expert
who can review their processes,
including their career site and connected
online application(s), to ensure they are
accessible to people with disabilities.
25. Simple Accessibility
Improvements
1. Use plain and inclusive language
when writing content for your job
description or career site
2. Extend length of time for timed
assessments
3. Alt-tag images and caption videos
4. Label elements such as buttons
Find more at PEATworks.org
27. Final Thoughts
Digital recruiting is creative marketing
built on the foundations of
measurement and metrics. Don’t be
afraid to experiment and make
mistakes.
28. Your Takeaways
1. Prioritize digital talent attraction
efforts
2. Create momentum with small wins
3. 5 digital strategies for every recruiter
4. Establish ROI focused on metrics
30. THANKS FOR
COMING!
Resources
Find Me On:
Social Media Use in 2023 | Pew
Research Center:
workolo.gy/SocialMediaUse2021
The Best Times to Post on Social
Media in 2022:
workolo.gy/BestTimeToPost
2023 Edelman Trust Barometer:
workolo.gy/2022EdelmanTrustBarometer
@jmillermerrell
workolo.gy/jmillermerrell
Editor's Notes
Title Theme
Jessica’s Profile Option A
YouTube by and large is the most widely used online platform measured in our survey. Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults (83%) report ever using the video-based platform.
While a somewhat lower share reports using it, Facebook is also a dominant player in the online landscape. Most Americans (68%) report using the social media platform.
Additionally, roughly half of U.S. adults (47%) say they use Instagram. One platform – TikTok – stands out for growth of its user base. A third of U.S. adults (33%) say they use the video-based platform, up 12 percentage points from 2021 (21%).
While mid-mornings used to dominate more strongly in years past, it now appears early morning hours have taken the lead.
TikTok is the fastest-growing social network with a staggering 105% user growth rate in the US over the past two years.
Instagram dominates social streaming services in terms of engagement (81% engagement versus Facebook’s 8%).
As of January 2022, there are 3.96 billion total social media users across all platforms. The average person bounces between seven different social networks per month. The amount of time adults use social media across all platforms is now higher than ever — 95 minutes per day. TikTok is the fastest-growing social network with a staggering 105% user growth rate in the US over the past two years.
According to CNN, it started when Idaho Falls resident Nathan Apodaca (@420doggface208 on TikTok) posted a video of himself in early October of 2020, sipping cranberry juice and lip synching to Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams" as he skateboarded down the street after his vehicle broke down on the way to work. The video went viral and Apodaca was gifted a truckload of Ocean Spray – that came with a cranberry red Nissan pickup
Within 48 hours, the video had more than 27 million views on TikTok. There was a run on Ocean Spray in stores. Celebrities (including those from Fleetwood Mac) stitched his video on TikTok with their own. Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams" earned 16.1 million US streams in the week ending Oct. 15 of 2020, according to Billboard. The last time a hit from the group's "Rumours" album reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was in 1977.
As for Nathan Apodaca, he still lives in Idaho Falls, has launched a merchandise line, starred in commercials with Snoop Dogg, bought a house and partnered with David Guetta & MORTEN in a 2020 YouTube video cover of “Dreams,” which as of June 2022 has over 15 MILLION views.
Live video allows recruiters the opportunity to engage candidates in real time. You can answer questions, point them to resources in real time. It allows you to build trust which is critical for candidates who are passive and casually researching your organization before they are an active job seeker. And lastly, video helps you humanize the hiring process. HR and recruiters always seem to get bad PR whether it’s a candidate not understanding the difference between a staffing recruiter or headhunter versus a corporate recruiter or some crazy story about hiring practices that seems to be splashed all over the news. We need to humanize our hiring processes and live video provides you that opportunity for the candidate to see you as a person or persons just like them. You can share about the culture, tell stories and build that connection through the power of live video.
2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: Annual online survey in its 23nd year. Study conducted: Nov 1 – Nov 28, 2022. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2023-03/2023%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
The bottom line: Societal leadership is now a core function of business
When considering a job, 60% of employees want their CEO to speak out on controversial issues they care about and 80% of the general population want CEOs to be personally visible when discussing public policy with external stakeholders or work their company has done to benefit society. In particular, CEOs are expected to shape conversation and policy on jobs and the economy (76%), wage inequality (73%), technology and automation (74%) and global warming and climate change (68%).
Live video doesn’t have to be super high tech. It doesn’t have to be expensive or overly produced. You just simply log into your social media account like Facebook and shoot your live video. This is a recent live I did in our Ace the HR Exam study group on Facebook. Live video costs no money and you can see here that for zero dollars this live spot has 1.4K video views and 276 shares.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Youtube
Digital social media seem to be growing by the day. You have a lot of options. I suggest that you poll your employees and ask what live video they frequent the most. If you are comfortable, talk to new hires and possibly candidates who recently applied. Personally, Facebook live is the lowest hanging fruit in my opinion. Keep in mind, there are 8 billion daily views for FB video = 100% growth in 6 months. Engagement on Instagram is 10x higher than FB. 84X higher than Twitter. What you choose is unique to you…
Instagram and their stories feature also provides another great way to engage job candidates using one of my favorite social media sites. Zendesk is a customer service software that aims to help build better relationships. On its website the company states: “Happy customers are the bottom line.” On its Instagram account, you can see that they also believe “happy employees” are part of their bottom line. From “swag days” and team potlucks to encouraging smiles with sweet treats, Zendesk showcases the work of its Workplace Experience team and Culture Clubs on Instagram.
One really good example: AT&T does a great job of empowering employees to share their own work stories using the #LifeatATT hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. It puts the power of social amplification of its employer brand in the hands of its employees and allows them to tell their story. Candidates hearing directly from company employees on social media is a unique way to share a brand message.
Programmatic offers an opportunity to target candidates using a pay per click model similar to what happens with social media ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Depending on which programmatic platform you use there are several, you can use pay per click postings just like your marketing team does. I’m sure you have had a time where a purse you looked at on Nordstroms or Amazon seemed to follow you around. You can use the same philosophy by following candidates around the web. They are “cookied” or tagged when they visit your site and your employment ad pops up all over the web. You can also use these on job boards being able to turn up and turn down your spend based on immediate needs instead of paying $250 for a single job posting.
According to the Boston Consulting Group “advanced [programmatic] techniques garnered a 32% decrease in cost-per-action (CPA), as much as a 200% improvement in action rates for clicks and view-thru and up to a 70% reduction in cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-view (CPV).”
There are a number of programmatic platforms out there that allow you to post and monitor activity across multiple job sites, social networks just like marketers. Job boards like Jobs2Careers and Indeed offer a solid programmatic product for their respective job aggregator platforms. These are ones I have personally been a part of success with my client. For example at the Wunderland Group, we had an immediate need for an experienced graphic designer in the Chicagoland area. We can shift our spend within programmatic to that single job posting pushing candidates into our job posting funnels quickly and by managing cost more efficiently. We were able to able to better measure cost per hire using programmatic and able to lower our costs because we were monitoring activity closely and more importantly we were able to see the results in the traffic and conversations that programmatic was driving to individual job postings and our career site.
Additionally, I see a lot of promise in retargeting efforts and campaigns online as well. Candidates who visit your communities, job boards or career site are “cookied” and your targeted career ad, event or job posting follows them across the web. Just like that Coach purse from Nordstrom’s does after you visit it on your desktop.
You might be thinking to yourself. All this sounds great, Jessica but I’m a small team or we aren’t anywhere close to doing something with TikTok or VR. I’ve eluded to this a bit, but it starts first with knowing your audience. Recruiting for a warehouse or transportation company and having virtual reality headsets doesn’t really align with your audience which is why I suggest a quick 20 question survey. I’ve done this a number of times and am happy to share best practices. You send out the survey using a survey monkey, analyze the responses and build your strategy and get with an executive sponsor. The key to driving change in the organization is by having an ally in the boardroom. One who has trust and relationships with his/her peers to help push your recommended change forward. Sometimes that sponsor is your head of TA or CHRO and sometimes it’s not. It could be your CMO, CFO or COO. It just depends.
That relationship is critical but so it doing your homework with the survey and taking a look at your competition and the larger candidate marketplace. What’s working for others in different industries right now? What isn’t working? Where can you see the most ROI with the littlest amount of effort.
Once you have all that in place and the relationship with your sponsor, you want to work with them to build a lighthouse which is a way to spotlight a new project you are tackling. You want to shine a light on it for 30, 60 or 90 days and test things out to decide if you want to expand the program and pilot you’ve built. But before you do all that, you’ll need to have a plan for metrics and a way to measure your success, progress, and failures so that you can make the case to modify your approach, abandon or expand.
Before I dive into metrics a bit more later, the key to successful social media recruiting happens when you have a plan and strategy and that includes having an editorial calendar. I, personally, use a Google Spreadsheet Template to create work on our blog editorial calendar. It helps you plan and decide the types of content and social media to share in your recruiting strategy and efforts. For example, earlier this month, AT&T celebrated Pi Day which is 3/14 with simple but effective social media graphics on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, probably elsewhere too. I like Pi because it gives a gentle nudge to STEM recruiting efforts. Us geeks love this and it’s an effective way to let your candidate audience know your creative, you have direction and a strong plan.
By having a plan you have time to develop graphics instead of waiting until last minute and running around with your hair on fire. Personally, having an Edcal is a great way to collaborate with your marketing and communication teams. You can work together on different programs and social posts and activities.
When it comes to candidate engagement, automation is your best friend. I talked earlier about providing resources and information to candidates before they need them. I’m a fan of automation to help us effectively make the best use of our time. They could be in the form of automating some of our social media using automate jobs feeds to social media accounts as well as using social media scheduling tools, my favorite one is MeetEdgar right now to recycle and share content to different accounts over time.
You don’t have to invest in a bunch of new tech to use automation. Use your existing ATS and share ongoing with candidates what’s happening in the job req throughout the process. It could be as simple as sharing videos, benefits information and providing a FAQ of commonly asked questions to candidates in a .pdf or hyperlinked in an automated email.
One of my favorite ways to automate candidate engagement comes in the form of text messaging. I’ve seen companies use texting to remind candidates to complete onboarding paperwork or to complete the online assessment. I personally, love text messaging and despise email. If you want to get to me, texting is the best way. AT&T does something really cool where they send a customized video to the candidate about the company after they apply. The video is automatically translated into the language that the candidate speaks providing them resources and information in a different medium that makes a really positive impression.
Lastly, if you don’t have automation tools that I’ve mentioned, your CRM or email gmail extensions exist for you to follow up with candidates and send them customized and automated messages. I rely on a Gmail extension called Boomerang which reminds me to follow up if the person hasn’t responded or clicked on a link. I also use IFTTT which is free that helps you automate within Gmail. For example, every time a resume is sent to me via email and has an attachment, it’s automatically uploaded to a folder in my Dropbox. I also like Chrome extensions Agile CRM, Email Hunter, and Discover.Org for additional sourcing and follow up.
Since we live in a mobile first world, it’s important to focus on mobile engagements with candidates and that includes the original mobile activity aside form the phone call which is email. Our phones are our primary technology for reading and responding to email which means eliminating graphics on your email messages and sending non html emails for quick and easy reading. I mentioned text messaging before, I am seeing an increased engagement with candidates when it comes to text and have personally experienced several job offer acceptances that happened via text. Previously the candidate had been unresponsive via email or answering the phone. Texting offers you a way to introduce yourself the job seeker since we, including me rarely answers a phone from a number we don’t know. And the responsiveness is great via text even with cold reach out messages. I’ve experienced over 80% responses from a staffing company I just finished up consulting with.
I’ve also seen companies use text messaging to further candidates in with the hiring process giving them a gentle nudge that they need to complete an assessment or to remind them of their phone or face to face interview. At my client, we had great success reminding candidates to complete their onboarding paperwork with a text message prior to their start date. The possibilities are endless.
With my client, we found that candidates were very responsive using text messaging in ways you might not think. In addition to the amazing responses from candidates, recruiters received great response for candidates in cold outreach situations. In fact, one of the biggest surprises was the number of candidate offer acceptances that happened via text. Candidates wouldn’t responsible to email or answer their phone during work hours but would respond to a text from a recruiter with an offer amount and terms before a formal offer letter was sent.
Diversity as we know it is not a new trend, but reaching diverse candidates and ensuring an accessible and inclusive candidate and employee experience should be a default setting by now. So what exactly should a diverse and inclusive workplace look like? When we think about it holistically, it means that your company’s workforce includes people of different races, genders, ages, disabilities, sexual identities, education levels, and religions, and that all your employees are valued, respected, and have access to the tools they need to achieve success.
Here are just a few data points on how a diverse workforce can benefit your company:
According to a survey from Glassdoor, 76% percent of employees and job seekers said a diverse workforce was important when evaluating companies and job offers.
Catalyst research shows that companies with more women on the board statistically outperform their peers over a long period of time.
Deloitte Australia research shows that inclusive teams outperform their peers by 80 percent in team-based assessments.
Metrics are the key to making the real business case for social recruiting strategies like some of what I’ve discussed. We can’t get additional budget anymore on a gut feeling, a whim and a prayer. But with a lighthouse, solid research and metrics to support your work you can make the case for social recruiting. One of the most underutilized metrics reporting is google analytics. With little effort, you can set up and see where candidates are spending time on your career site, the duration, and what pages are converting visitors to applicants. I love GA because it has a free version. You just need to work with your IT team to set up and you can have access almost immediately to this data which is helpful if you are trying to determine where your best candidate sources are and the effectiveness of different placement of say buttons on your job postings which I’ve had some fun with testing as of late.
Here is a case in point. For my Workology podcast, I interviewed Sassy Outwater, director of the Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (or MABVI). I was interested in her experience as a person who is visually impaired, as well as in her work with MABVI. She walked me through the application, interview, and hiring process that job candidates face when they have a disability, highlighting the points where candidates with a disability can run into roadblocks caused by a lack of accessibility. I think that every employer should consider the accessibility of each step in the process, and work with an accessibility expert who can review their processes, including their career site and connected online application(s), to ensure they are accessible to people with disabilities.
Accessibility improvements can be as simple as using plain and inclusive language when writing content for your job description or career site, extending length of time for timed assessments, alt-tagging images, captioning videos, labeling elements such as buttons, and other minor adjustments. Many employers don’t take accessibility into consideration when building career sites and connecting them to an apply process. It’s also important to note that all of the above applies not only to career site accessibility, but also to organizations that collect candidate data via an online survey process. The Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT) has an extensive guide on creating inclusive and accessible job descriptions at PEATworks.org.
Not all metrics are created equal and this will require some education on your part with your sponsor and executive team. It might be helpful to work with your marketing team to discuss the importance of impressions, conversations, engagements and clicks in their own work at your company. This way they can be an advocate for you possibly and you are using the same language when discussing these things.
Source of hire, conversions, engagements and clicks are the most important. I think it’s also important to distinguish against organic and paid marketing. If you are sponsoring a post on Facebook or using a Twitter Job card that is a paid activity so your clicks, engagements and conversations will be paid opportunities. Doing this helps you understand your own work as well as tell a story of how a candidate goes from passive to active and the number of activities we have to engage in before we convert a candidate into an employee.
I mentioned programmatic earlier. If you set up ads this way, you have additional data points and metrics you won’t normally have in terms of the number of impressions before a candidate clicks to learn more versus a conversion. All these things help with making the case to expand your recruiting efforts and do other lighthouse projects.