Archive for the ‘Branding’ Category
2010 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For
Posted by JasonThe 2010 Fortune 100 best companies to work list is here, and most are hiring. How prevalent is social media becoming with these 100 companies? Nearly 40% contain links to groups, pages, and channels to connect on. Check out KPMG’s branded YouTube channel as an example.
Here are some additional stats related to this years top 100 companies to work for:
- 11 are new to the list and 41 dropped from their # spot last year
- Approximately 1/2 added new jobs in 2009, the others remained flat or decreased their employee counts
- 10% still don’t link to jobs or a career site from their home page
- Nearly 40% have dedicated pages or content related to diversity commitment
- Only 10% have updated their career site with the 2010 award
- 20% have “pre web 1.0″ career sites, but hey, they have a lot to be proud of
My “Personal Branding” Interview with Dan Schawbel
Posted by JasonToday I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Dan Schawbel, the “Personal Branding” guru. You can read the “Personal Branding Interview: Jason Buss” on Dan’s blog.
If you haven’t had the chance, I would highly recommend Dan Schawbel’s book, “Me 2.0″. In his book, Dan talks about the importance of personal branding and gives readers practical tips on how to differntiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. He highlights his success and keys to personal branding and provides a blueprint for ways to identify, create, and harness key elements for a personal brand.
Building Your Personal Brand on the Web
Posted by JasonBy Jason Buss.
Like it or not, your personal brand and reputation is built in many ways - consciously or unconsciously - by what you do, the sites and tools you use, where you work, your profile, and more.
You likely use social media and social networking sites along with a variety of tools on the web including twitter, plurk, friendfeed, Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, and the list goes on and on. What’s your brand? What you do with these tools and sites, and the output, play a big role in building your online brand.
Here are a few links to several great articles filled with additional tips and techniques - all geared towards building your brand:
- 5 twitter tactics for building a stellar brand
- How to build your online brand
- How to build your personal online reputation
- 49 ways to build your brand using online marketing
- Building your online brand with social media tools
- Schawbel Report: The current state of personal branding
You could sit back and do nothing, or take charge in developing your brand online. What are you waiting for?
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Web 2.0 is about enhancing creativity, information sharing, and collaboration. The definition must have been written with the intent to exclude job postings and job boards as part of the world wide web.
With all of the talk about attracting passive talent, the war for talent and focusing on hiring quality, I was surprised to see little has changed - when taking a look at things from a candidate’s point of view.
I started with a simple search on a job board. After closing 2 pop up windows, here’s what the candidate would see with this example:
A page filled with paid ads:
- 1 on the page header
- 8 vertically on the right side of the page
- 1 on the footer
- 2 pop-ups
Within the job posting:
- Grammatical errors
- 40 different daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual responsibilities / tasks
- 9 requirements
Thinking this must be a fluke, I ran another quick search on another board. The first posting I clicked on was from 1 of Fortune’s Best Companies To Work For. Surely, this will be better…
This posting was much shorter, and contained:
- 9 responsibilities
- 8 requirements
- 3 portfolio examples
Since the organization requests you apply online through their site, I clicked the link, and found the following:
We’re kidding right? The candidate has to complete another search to find the position, which ironically isn’t even listed on the corporate career site. If it would have been and they would have applied, the candidate of course would have had to sign up for another profile too.
If you use the big boards for postings, consider the following 5 quick fixes you can control and implement:
- Utilize a branding template with all of the boards. Templates pushes the ads off the page, so the candidate is looking at your posting, in your brand. They’re not forced to look at the online degree programs, or the amazing work from home opportunity ads. All the major boards offer branding as a service and is easily negotiated as part of a package.
- If you believe recruiting is sales and marketing, then sell and market both your organization and opportunity. Don’t utilize a bureaucratic, and time consuming process to accept Resume’s.
- Link your posting directly into your A.T.S., so the potential lead doesn’t have to search again once coming into your site.
- Do not copy and paste you’re job description into your online posting. It doesn’t always format properly, and your main goal should be driving talent to your community or site. You can engage them further if they get there, so focus on selling in your posting.
- Use titles and keywords candidates search for, and limit internal acronyms.
When relying on a poorly written job description or web posting, there should be no surprise less than 10% of corporate career site traffic converts into a completed application.
While most of this seems fairly basic it appears there is still a tremendous amount of opportunity - and we have a long way to go in recruiting - in Web 2.0 standards.
A Professional Development Seminar from Kennedy Information
Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 1pm (ET): Click here to register.
Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – How are these “social media” sites changing the landscape of recruiting? Gone are the days of placing an ad in the paper or on a job board, receiving resumes and beginning the interview and selection process. In today’s world of recruiting, it’s all about networking and connecting with passive candidates.
On Thursday, June 12, 2008, Susan Burns, Founder of Talent Synchronicity, will lead a one-hour Professional Development Seminar — Make Your Talent Strategy Come Alive with the Power of Today’s Social Networks — that will take you behind the curtain of these popular new networks and show you how to put them to work for your organization’s talent strategy.
The edge of the social media wave is just beginning to be felt, says Susan Burns, and with it comes the potential for sweeping change. Navigating through this vast, ever-shifting landscape is no longer an option but a must to ensuring competitive brand positioning and attracting the best talent now and in the future.
The art and science of social networking is the common thread to broadening your reach, engaging talent and differentiating your brand – all while executing a cost-effective strategy.
Key takeaways from this Professional Development Seminar include:
- Understanding how social media and networking changes the game of attracting talent
- How to tie your social media goals into the “bigger picture” HR and business goals
- What to consider before pursuing a social media strategy
- How to allocate your resources and manpower to support your social media strategy
- Understanding how to build a community, the expectations and value creation
- Designing an integrated talent strategy that leverages the best of social media AND differentiates your brand
About the presenter: Susan Burns founded Talent Synchronicity to offer talent strategy solutions through an integrated alignment with core business functions and processes. Enabling success by further enhancing the essential relationship between business and talent to advantage companies is grounded in Susan’s core philosophy. Susan has leveraged technology, branding, P & L experience and alignment with strategic business directives to create intrinsic value in recruitment and talent initiatives. She achieves objectives through a creative, resourceful, and collaborative approach to planning, development, and implementation.
This is a 3 part series, focused on deploying and managing effective corporate career sites. The 3 posts will include:
- Part 1: Effective Corporate Career Sites & Measuring Results
- Part 2: Top 5 List for Deploying an Effective Online Career Center
- Part 3: Results unveiled: Integrating SEO and PPC Tools
Part 3: Results unveiled: Integrating SEO and PPC Tools
After seeing the results of the latest recruiting blog poll - with 81% of respondents stating they do not have an overall online recruiting strategy or they need help - the timing is perfect to wrap up this series. In the first two parts I highlighted several high value metrics on measuring your overall investment with an effective corporate career site, as well as 5 ideas to integrate social media into your online recruiting strategy and candidate experience.
For this post, let’s begin with some basic grounding on job board traffic over the past 3 years - as the picture tells the story.
If you’re still relying on the big boards (which can still play a role in your overall strategy), a good place to start is taking 30-50% of your annual spend and trying something different. Sounds aggressive and possibly harsh depending on your overall reliance on the big job boards, but the results are very telling. After implementing a site overhaul in addition to a 6 month pilot with SEO career site leader jobs2web and job aggregator site leader indeed, here are the results:
- Visitor to candidate conversion ratio doubled - from 9 to 18%.
- Percentage of traffic generated from search engines from 2.2% to 11.3%
- Career site ROI tripled
- Visitor time on the site skyrocketed from 3 minutes to over 8 minutes
- Site traffic and candidate contacts increased by over 300%.
While it is to early to measure overall the impact on new hire quality, several of the metrics outlined point to an increased number and more targeted audience visiting the site, a higher conversion rate, increased time on the site, search engine traffic doubling (with no change in job board referrals to the top 5 referring URL’s), and the ROI of the site tripling.
Based on the initial success of this initiative the overall online recruiting costs were cut in half, with stronger results. If you’re still not convinced, I know the names of a few job board reps that are trying to recoup lost revenues and are playing let’s make a deal.
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To set itself apart in attracting the future of our workforce, one organization has taken a unique approach. While career fairs, information sessions, partnerships with career centers, and building relationships with Professors have their advantages, Amod Damle from Russell Investments decided to add to his recruiting arsenal.
Damle has spent the past 18 months advancing relationships with targeted investment clubs at several Universities, for Russell’s highly sought after Investment Internship program.
A couple of examples of the student led clubs he and Russell have forged relationships with include the exclusive sponsorship of the California Investment Association from UC - Berkeley (CIA); and the University Investors Association from University of Texas - Austin (UIA).
One may think sponsoring student clubs, not too original. But, according to Siddharth Jawahar, President of the UIA, Russell’s partnership has been particularly unique. Jawahar stated, “Amod and the Russell Investments team have invested the time to get to know our members personally during several visits to our campus. The business leaders they have brought to club meetings share in depth information about their career paths, trends in the financial markets, as well as get personally involved in a variety of social networking activities.” He also stated on one occasion the UIA has received more benefit from the partnership in a 6 month period than some of the other financial services companies over a 5 year period.
When the partnership started Amod hired LOCAL Na8ion to build a technology platform for the clubs. The UIA site includes a blogging capability, once the club is ready to start.
Another great example was a 2 day visit to the firm’s headquarters in the greater Seattle / Tacoma area. A dozen students from various clubs throughout the U.S. attended. The agenda included several presentations from Russell Executives, an in-depth company overview, tour, time with former interns, hiring managers, and recruiters. To top off the visit, a Seattle Sonics game.
The inaugural “Investors Open” in Austin was also a major hit.
75 students and 6 associates from Russell attended the memorable event. The day included a golf tournament, food, awards, and a raffle for 2 iPhones with the proceeds benefiting the face AIDS initiative.
When asked about the success of the program, Damle stated, “The relationships we have built with student organizations and clubs are invaluable, and mutually beneficial.” He added, “The connections made and the relationships we have built are both long-term and meaningful to us. They have positioned Russell for success on campus, and have enabled us to receive high quality hires and referrals - something we would not have received with a simple on campus presentation, left over brochures for students, or a pizza party”.
While the investment in these partnerships on the surface may look costly, the return has proven otherwise. It is more about allocating resources wisely when you look at what is thrown at the traditional recruiting methods.
It’s intelligently investing.
This is a 3 part series, focused on deploying and managing effective corporate career sites. The 3 posts will include:
- Part 1: Effective Corporate Career Sites & Measuring Results
- Part 2: Top 5 List for Deploying an Effective Online Career Center
- Part 3: Results unveiled: Integrating SEO and PPC Tools
Part 2: Top 5 List for Deploying and Effective Online Career Center
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series (Effective Corporate Career Sites & Measuring Results), there are articles and white papers all over the web outlining the need to build an engaging, leading-edge corporate career site. In addition, there are hundreds of ideas and tactics on what those elements should be.
While it is not realistic to incorporate every best practice into every career site, it is important to understand your target audience and what elements will create the most engaging experience yielding the highest conversions of quality applicants on your site. Equally important is capturing some basic information from those visitors you don’t convert.
Here are 5 ideas to consider for engaging a candidate on your career site:
- Incorporate a blog. Easier than it sounds given the policies in many organizations, fear of the unknown, and possible risks involved. There are enough success stories in this space, dating back several years. Hats off to those who have pulled it off, they must be ecstatic there is little competition in the blogging space. Blogging is an effective way to build a true candidate community and mutual exchange between candidates and organizations.
- Integrating a chat feature into your site. Experts agree, today’s sites are static, and provide one-way communication. There are several inexpensive ways to build chat into a site, and the payoff can be big. The ideas are endless… Highlight workplace awards, discuss diversity and inclusion strategies, hold information sessions, profile work teams, or discuss new ideas.
- Provide interactive elements. These could include maps, live video streaming, webinar offerings, and career information that is meaningful and excites your target audience.
- Option to download gadgets and feeds. These are important for both active and passive candidates. Options can include information on jobs, postings, company information, press releases, and related career information.
- CRM capabilities to capture leads. 90%+ of most career site visitors do not apply, for a variety of reasons. This provides a significant opportunity to develop and implement a strategy to communicate with this audience.
Technology plays a big role in the recruiting process but it does not replace or address the human element. Not having the resources with the competence or drive to get aggressive about recruiting is a recipe for disaster. A site incorporating these or other best practices is only one element of a broader solution.
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