Samara Parker

Millennials are weird. I am one, so I can say that!

Last week we talked about how the rising percentage of Gen Yers in the labor market is shaping recruiting methods. We also talked about how emojis are a very important part of my generation's identity. There's so much incredible information about millennial workers, recruiting Gen Y, and the cultural significance of emojis out there, that we thought we'd share some of it with you!

Let's Link Love it up:

One of the most interesting and detailed resources for better understanding a millennial candidate is the PWC Future of Work Survey. If you want all the info you need to win the hearts and minds of millennial workers, this is the place to start. Millennials want flexibility in the workplace. In fact according to this massive collection of data by oDesk, the only way you can hope to retain millennials is to create a flexible work culture. oDesk provides more information on Gen Y than you could ever hope for, thankfully they've presented it using slide share, so it’s easy to skip over the stuff you don't need to know! Who is the authority on recruiting millennials? No! It’s not me, but thank you for thinking so.

Dan Schawbel is THE expert when it comes to Gen Y candidates; his website is the go to place for both millennial job seekers and those looking to recruit them. Once you understand millennial candidates, it’s time to learn how to real them in! In this article you’ll learn the basics of setting up a recruiting strategy to target Gen Y. Or, if you’re feeling super serious and you have a little extra time on your hands, you can download this media room booklet on how to attract and retain millennials. It makes for some excellent treadmill reading... Unless I am the only person who reads about social recruiting on the treadmill?!? Let me know in the comments. And while you’re at it, sign up for our newsletter. It’s rad! (That is millennial speak for highly informative and interesting.)

Hello, my name is Samara Parker, and I am a millennial.

My generation is entering the workforce en masse; we are basically taking over your office, your break room, and your life. For this, I am sorry. I am sorry for all the #selfies we post, our love of skinny jeans, and our obsession with Portland, Oregon. 

But I am not sorry for how my generation is pushing recruiting into the 21st century. It's about time! Gen Y is forcing recruiting to adopt social media strategies, optimize for mobile, and focus on employer branding. We're like that cute girl you want to date who motivates you to go to the gym, buy new shoes, and brush your teeth after eating garlicky food. What makes us so hot? Well...

Millennials are motivated by challenging work "Unlike other generations – who were simply happy with getting the job done, the younger generation need to feel like they are making a difference and that their contribution in the workplace is meaningful." - Amanda Rose

This means you can hand us all those complicated, frustrating projects you don't have time to delve into. Millennials are up for the challenge! But do make sure to provide a lot of real time positive feedback and explain how these projects benefit the company. Gen Yers respond extremely well to this kind of motivation. Social media is confusing, we can help

We've grown up with Apple products, cell phones, and big data. We understand how Facebook works, and know what Instagram filters are the coolest. And most importantly... We do what we're told!

"41% of millennials do what their managers tell them to do, which is much greater than older generations." - Dan Schawbel All we ask in return is that you use social media to recruit us. Don't make us buy a newspaper. Don't make us look on ugly old job boards! Let us apply for work from the comfort of our favorite social platform; Facebook! 

83% of millennials reported using Facebook to look for work in 2013 (Jobvite). Make sure we can find you; it's surprisingly easy to set up a career section on your company Facebook Page, especially if you use a really awesome recruiting app like Jobcast.

Oh, and not to be demanding or anything, but we'd also really like it if you would make your recruiting as mobile as possible. Millennials generally prefer to look for work on our smart phones, in between exciting games of Flappy Bird. Almost 80% of us used mobile as a major part of our job search in 2013. Well... okay, maybe we are a bit demanding... 40% of us will abandon the application process if it isn't mobile-friendly #sorrynotsorry Lastly, it would be awesome if you started using more emojis in your job descriptions. Many of us have trouble understanding sentences that are not accompanied by fitting emojis. For my generation these simple graphics are what clarify the emotions behind the words. How are we supposed to know if you are being sarcastic, or if you are joking and we cannot tell because you have not included a

 or a

? It scares us. Happy social recruiting 

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What's new with social recruiting? A lot of course! But, everyone is always covering the newest, shiniest topics; at Jobcast, we like to take the road less traveled, to boldly go where no social recruiting app has gone before... Well, actually, we mostly just try to cover the topics our readers want covered! That's why today's Link Love is all about the basics of social recruiting. The basic stuff that never changes, no matter how up to date your apps are, or even what social platforms you are using; these key tenants will help you optimize your social recruiting.

Here are 4 essentials of social recruiting and 4 articles that will help you capitalize on them:

You just gotta be you! And that you must appeal to the talent you want to attract. Before you can start engaging with potential candidates, you have to have an employer brand presence that they can engage with, and that they will want to engage with. This article from ERE.net will show you how to create an employer brand that will appeal to the candidates you want to attract. The goal is greater than just filling one job

Social or not, if your recruiting strategy is just focused on filling positions as they open up, you've got a problem. You've got to think long term if you want to increase the ROI on your recruiting efforts. Thinking in terms of talent communities and talent pipelines is a far more effective way to recruit. In this post from Blogging4Jobs, Crystal Miller explains the essential pillars of talent communities.

The emphasis is on the Social, not the Media

No matter what platforms you choose for recruiting, they only work if you are actually social with them. You need to engage with potential candidates, respond to their questions, and share interesting content with them. Here's a great post by Syed Balkhi on how you can create a story with your content to engage candidates through social media. It's still all about the jobs

Speaking of creating engaging content, when it comes to social recruiting the most important content you share is still job posts. Not to brag or anything, but my dad knows more about writing job posts than your dad. This is because he has worked in HR for over 30 years and is married to my mother who has worked in HR for almost as long. Here are their best tips for writing great job posts.  Happy social recruiting!

You are all super savvy about hiring trends, of course you are… you read this blog! So, you all know that mobile is very important when it comes to social recruiting. What you may not know, is that the importance of having a mobile hiring strategy is even greater when it comes to recruiting passive candidates.

Passive candidates choose mobile over desktop, when looking for work, even more frequently than their active counterparts.

This probably has something to do with the fact that they are currently employed, and can’t exactly spend their days researching job posts on their company computers! In fact, many of the candidates you’re looking for don’t have any access to a computer while at their job. Retail workers, for example, spend their days on the store floor, making sales, dusting display units, and checking their Facebook accounts. They are also checking out potential employers on their smart phones.

In a recent survey by Jobvite, 21% of passive candidates admitted to using their smart phones to look for a new position, when at work. Naughty! Those candidates are also looking for work while they wait for the bus, while they wait for their morning muffin, and even while they use the restroom (at least 7% of them!)

So how do you get your job posts onto their smart phones, their iPads, and into their restrooms?

Tweet your job posts

Twitter doesn’t really work as a primary social platform for recruiting. It does, however, make for a top notch second in command. Twitter is a quick easy, way to let people know you’re hiring.

I like to break down effective strategy for using Twitter to improve mobile recruiting into three steps: build it, tweet it, tag it!

Build up your Twitter employer brand by posting images, sharing quick tips, and interacting with other tweeters in your field.

Tweet your jobs. Every time you post a job, tweet it, and then tweet it again! Twitter feeds fill up quickly, so you should tweet the post at least a couple times a day until the position is filled. Just make sure to intersperse those tweets with other valuable content.

Tag everything you post, everything! Use niche hashtags to make your tweets searchable, this will build your brand and talent pool. Tag your job posts with #hiring. Always, always, always #hiring! Mostly because this is the number one hashtag career advice bloggers tell job seekers to look for.

Here are the top 50 hashtags you should use when recruiting with Twitter.

Make your application process mobile friendly

Most career sites are not mobile; in fact, our own survey found that around 90% of career sites were not mobile friendly. This has got to change! But, until it does, there are some ways around it.

Use social networks to share your jobs. Yet another way Twitter can benefit your passive candidates recruiting! Take advantage of the mobile friendliness of apps like Google+, Instagram, and Facebook to get your job posts seen.

You can also create a Facebook career section for your company Page and post your jobs there. Your career section will be viewable to Facebook users via their  mobile app, so all those passive candidates, who really ought to be working, can be looking at your job posts instead! Win-win!

Here’s how you can make your Facebook recruiting mobile friendly

Focus on Facebook over LinkedIn

Yes I am biased. No this is not the (only) reason I am giving you this advice.

84% of job seekers are active on Facebook. Only 36% of them are active on LinkedIn.

Nuff said.

Oh, except that passive candidates are even less likely to use LinkedIn in their job search, or to have up to date LinkedIn profiles (if they have one at all). LinkedIn is still a useful tool for connecting with other professionals and recruiting them, but for reaching the vast majority of passives candidates, hourly workers, and anyone under 35 Facebook is a better bet.

This article does a great job of explaining the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook for recruiting

Hopefully you’ve found some helpful info to help you recruit some passive talent. If you have any questions, or other topics you’d like us to cover, let us know in the comments.

Happy social recruiting!

Passive Candidates, you know why they’re important, you know how to source them, and you know how I think you can recruit them. But what do I know?! Well, a fair bit actually… In fact I would say that social recruiting, with a specific focus on converting passive candidates, is one of the things I know best! It makes me very boring at parties! Anyways, now that I have bragged a bunch at you, I will confess, there are other passive candidate experts out there. In fact, don’t tell my boss, but a lot of those experts know a lot more than me, ssshhhh. Our secret. In return for your silence, I will introduce you to some of those experts.

Here are 5 fantastic articles that will help you recruit passive candidates like a pro!

And a case study that you really ought to check out :) Culture Fit lays down some serious knowledge in their article about deciding when you should look for passive candidates. No, it’s not technically a “how to”, but it’s always nice to know you’re putting your efforts in the right place before you get started. The Undercover Recruiter shares how you can use mobile, social media and video to recruit passive candidates. Apparently this is also called recruitment 3.0… Are we seriously using 3.0? Am I old? David Spark knows social media, he a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, so he’s the perfect person to interview these 20 recruiting experts on how they use social media to recruit passive candidates. Facebook may be our favorite social platform, but we would never deny the greatness of Twitter. In fact, I personally think combining Twitter and Facebook is the best way to tack social recruiting. In this blog post, Social Media Today gives you 5 tips on using Twitter for recruiting. HR & Talent Management recommend using recruiting apps to find passive candidates. I’d like to leave you with this super cool case study on how Earls Restaurant has successfully integrated Facebook into their recruiting strategy. Happy social recruiting!

Just to recap: Passive candidates are magical unicorns. They will instantly improve your business, upgrade your company culture, and double your chances of winning the lottery.

Recruiting passive candidates will solve all of your problems!

Sadly, this is extremely difficult to do because passive candidates live in a land without help wanted ads, job boards, or desktop computers. It’s a scary place.

Annnd back to reality.

Passive candidates are not the be all end all of recruiting. They do, however, make up a huge percentage of the labor market (80%), they tend to need less skill development (around 17% less), and they also tend to be more driven once hired.

Why recruiting passive candidates has higher ROI than you think

The part about passive candidates being hard to reach was a little more realistic. These candidates already have employment and are not actively seeking work in the traditional sense. So, no, they usually aren’t looking on job boards.

But, many of them are interested in new career opportunities, 61% of them according to Jobvite. They may not be actively looking, but they are open to being contacted by a recruiter, and if they stumble across a really cool job post, they’ll happily apply.

Last week we talked about how to use social to source passive candidates. This week we’re going to focus on how you can get your job posts seen by those candidates.

No surprises here, the best way to reach passive candidates is social recruiting.

The Why

Passive candidates may not be checking the help wanteds, but they are checking their Facebook accounts (76% of them every day, often multiple times per day!) This means that you can use Facebook’s targeted ads to reach the candidates you can’t reach with traditional recruiting channels.

The How

First you need a company Facebook Page. I’m going to assume most of you have one of those already. If you don’t have one, it’s actually pretty easy to set up. Whether you plan to use it for recruiting passive candidates or not, you need a Facebook Page!

Here’s a simple guide to setting up a Facebook Business Page.

Next you’ll need to create a Facebook Career Site. It’s important that your Facebook Career Site is customized to your employer brand. Brand consistency is important because it makes your Page look legitimate which is important for garnering potential candidates’ trust. Building a fully branded Facebook Career Site will also help you gain social proof, and grow your employer brand’s internet presence in general.

Here’s how you can get started building a Branded Facebook Career Site

Now you’ll need to post some jobs, and promote the heck out of them!

As much as I would love to tell you that all you need to do to reach candidates with Facebook is post a few jobs, share them, and then get back to the one million other things you need to get done… It’s just not that easy.

Like all good things, Facebook recruiting does take effort. Luckily, it doesn’t take a lot of effort. In fact the ROI is quite high according to most recruiting surveys (the Jobvite, and Bersin recruiting studies to name a couple.)

If you want your posts to reach passive candidates, using Facebook Targeted Ads is the most effective way to do it. With FB Ads you can target users based on their demographics, work history, skill set, and interests. This means that your job posts will reach not only more potential hires, but the right potential hires.

 Here’s a step by step guide to using Facebook Ads for recruiting

Using Facebook Ads is currently your best option for targeting passive candidates, and converting them into applicants. But ads aren’t the only reason Facebook is a great platform to reach these potential hires. You also need to take mobile, user demographics, and industry requirements into account…

Wow, this article got long.

You must be exhausted.

We’ll cover why mobile is extra important when trying to reach passive candidates, why LinkedIn (although totally rad) is probably not your best bet for recruiting passive candidates, and how many times I can type the words “passive candidates” before developing a nasty case of carpal tunnel.

Happy social recruiting everyone!

Passive candidates, you want 'em... the social graph has got 'em! So, how do you use the data the graph provides to find a bunch of awesome talent, grow your company, and become the world's happiest employer? Getting yourself branded Facebook Career Page is a pretty great start because it gives your employer brand a mobile friendly social presence. This is important as the first thing the passive candidates are going to after you reach out to them is Google your organization. A well branded, mobile optimized Facebook Career Site makes for an excellent first impression. But, you still have to get out there and source those candidates!

Today we're featuring 5 great articles that will help you understand what it takes to use social for sourcing.

One thing a successful social sourcing strategy definitely needs is a person to plan and carry out the sourcing. Until we have robots to do it for us, this article by Victor Alberts will help you determine who should be in charge of social sourcing and recruiting for your company. As much as I love Facebook for every aspect of social recruiting, it's important to use multiple platforms, if you want to get the most out of your social strategy. Here's a great little guide from Sprout Social about using multiple social networks to source passive candidates. Speaking of import social platforms, Twitter makes for an excellent sourcing tool, especially when combined with another platform that allows for more than 140 character conversations. Here's Suzanne Lucas's take on why when it comes to engaging with passive candidates Twitter is your friend! Now I'm going to break with tradition and share two articles from the same blog. I know, I know, it's not very fair of me, but hey, life's not fair buttercup! And, when it comes to sourcing, Glen Cathey is the man. His article on searching for candidates with Facebook still holds up 4 years later. In the land of social media that's basically an eternity. Glen's more recent post, 100 free sourcing and recruiting guides and resources, is even more awesome, hence the double share. This is as close to a social recruiting reference library as you're going to get! I highly suggest you check it out, and then leave Glen many, many thank yous. Before we go, I’d just like to give a quick shout to HR maven, Jessica Miller-Merrell and everyone over at Blogging4Jobs. They recently did a total redesign of their blog and it looks incredible, check it out! Enjoy these links, and happy social recruiting!

Oh, the ever-elusive passive candidate! Part of what makes them so desirable is that elusiveness, the fun of the chase, the challenge... Uhhh wait a minute. Those are actually all of the things that make recruiters prefer to target active job seekers, and ignore the whopping 79% of potential candidates who are not actively engaged the job hunt (Undercover Recruiter). Those candidates may be currently employed, and more difficult to source, but they are still potential hires. Maybe not all 79% of them, I'll admit that's a bit of an overstatement, but not as much as you might think! According to Jobvite at least 61% of those passive candidates are open to, even hopeful for, a change of employer. Considering that statistic, you're still looking at a whopping 50% of working professionals. That's a lot of potential hires to ignore. Ignoring those passive candidates doesn't just diminish your talent pool, it also rules out higher caliber hires. According to research by Linked in, although more difficult to recruit, passive candidates often make for better quality employees. Once hired, they are more driven than active candidates and 17% less likely to need skills development. This ups the ROI on passive candidates substantially. 2014 will see the need to add passive candidate sourcing to your recruiting strategy increase even more because of the current economic upturn. The economic upturn means more jobs, and fewer qualified active candidates in the job market. So, the market for quality talent is about to get a lot more competitive, we've written about it, Inc Magazine has written about it, and Blogging4jobs has written about it a lot! The war for talent is back, and with it comes an increased premium on talent, and the need to get more active with your recruiting. Luckily for employers, sourcing and recruiting passive candidates is a heck of a lot easier than it once was. With today's social technologies, and social graph in particular, sourcing passive candidates is a piece of cake! Alright, so I'm exaggerating again, but with all that big data at your finger tips, passive candidates are more accessible than ever before. With social recruiting, you can search for potential hires based on information they’ve shared about their work history, their interests, their demographics, and even their skill set by using networks like Facebook. The social graph is constantly getting bigger and as it does, using social networks to source passive candidates will get easier. This is great news, because sourcing is hard work! And the benefits of social for accessing passive candidates don’t end there! Social platforms also make it possible to reach out and engage with passive candidates. They may not be visiting your career site, or looking on job boards, or even have a LinkedIn profile, but now a day’s pretty much every single human (in the first world at least) has some form of internet presence. Heck, there were over 35 million #selfies posted on Instagram last year. There are 231.7 million active monthly users on Twitter, Google plus adds 25, 000 new users on the daily, and Facebook accounts for 16% of total internet use. If you can't reach candidates via job boards, you can tweet at them, connect with them on Facebook, add them to your G+ circles, and even heart their excessive Instagram selfies. People love it when you double tap their #selfies! Next Monday on the blog we'll explore how you can use social media to recruit passive candidates, and take over the world! If you want to study up before next week's blog post, download this free white paper and learn how to recruit passive candidates with Facebook. Happy social recruiting!

Getting back to basics is always a good idea. Crisp white shirts, steak and potatoes, Facebook recruiting… You simply can’t go wrong! We recently published a blog post about why Facebook trumps print media for recruiting. In that article we also went over how no matter which medium you choose to employ, when it comes to an effective hiring campaign the basic tenants of effective recruiting remain the same. It’s just that when it comes to recruiting, Facebook has the best return on investment! But, that is only true if you make sure to incorporate the essential best practices of Facebook recruiting. So, in this link love we have 5 great articles on the basics of Facebook recruiting: In this article, John Sumser shares 3 fundamentals of recruiting on Facebook. The advice he presents is so simple, but often overlooked. Another aspect of social recruiting that is often overlooked it etiquette. Actually, I don’t know about you, but it seems that etiquette is all too often overlooked in all aspects of life! Well, this Infographic has 19 Facebook etiquette rules for business, with advice from some of the best social media experts on the internet. Once you have the fundamentals and etiquette down, it’s time to get some fans! You must develop your employer brand, and gain a following to get your content seen by Facebook users. The always awesome Amy Porterfield explains how to attract more Facebook fans to your Page. Reach is one of those terms you often hear associated when discussing recruiting. Reach is one of the most important aspects of any recruiting strategy, but it’s also one of the most difficult to master. When it comes to Facebook, reach is basically how many users end up seeing the content you share. This article by Scott Ayres gives you an incredible step-by-step guide to improving Page reach on Facebook.  Scott’s guide is a must read! We saved the best for last: a detailed guide on how to choose which Facebook Ad is right for you, and how much you should spend on Facebook ads. Facebook Ads are hands down the best tool in the social recruiting tool-belt, let this article be your instruction manual! PS You can also download our white paper to learn how to attract candidates with Facebook. Happy social recruiting!

Social recruiting is still just in its infancy, despite having been around for almost a decade. But this isn't really all that surprising. Human beings have a pretty well understood fear of adopting new technologies. When the printing press was invented, concerned biologists urged monarchs to restrict its use, fearing dangerous, and harmful information overload caused by too much reading! Doctors warned against trains, as they were convinced the break-neck speeds (15 miles per hour) of this new mode of transport would cause asphyxia induced deaths. Heck, I am still afraid Google class will lead to a world full of cyborgs that only interact online and only eat Soylent! And yet, employers are slowly but surely adopting social solutions for their recruiting problems. In fact, as of 2013, 72% of companies reported using social networks to find candidates. Even more promisingly, 2 in 3 companies surveyed said that they planned on increasing their social recruiting efforts (and budgets) in 2014. Why are so many companies adopting social as a part of their recruiting strategy? Honestly, I think it's because they fear being left behind by early adopters. Their fear is completely valid, especially considering the growing concern among employers that 2014 marks a return of the "war for talent". Fear is a great motivator, but it's a terrible reason for adopting new technology. It's also a terrible reason for avoiding them! You should adopt new technologies because they work. Because they are effective for solving the problems you need solved. Does social recruiting do this? Absolutely. Those 2 in 3 companies expanding their social recruiting efforts are doing so because it works. Well executed social recruiting has extremely high ROI,  it's an excellent way to reach mobile candidates (over 70% of jobseekers are using mobile in their search), and sourcing passive candidates with social graph data is becoming more and more effective every day. At Jobcast, we obviously favor Facebook for social recruiting, but Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ are all great tools for attracting qualified candidates. None of those platforms offer the targeting or reach Facebook does... But, using several social networks as a part of your recruiting is smart. For example, you can Tweet the jobs you post on your super awesome, fully branded Facebook Career Site! If you still haven't adopted social recruiting as a part of your hiring strategy, the time is now! It's actually pretty easy to get started, especially as I'm going to provide you with some links to how to guides for all the major social platforms that you can use for recruiting, you are most welcome!

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for employers to use in conjunction with other social media. When you post a job on your career site, share content on your Company Facebook Page, or publish a blog post, you can increase your reach by sharing it on Twitter. You can also use hashtags to keep up with trends in your industry. Natascha Thompson's article, 5 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Recruiting, contains way more than five tips. It gives you all the info you need to get started with using Twitter to hire. Facebook

Facebook has the largest active user base of any social network, it has become an essential part of employer branding, and it allows for much more targeted recruiting with the use of Facebook Ads, these are just three of the reasons we think Facebook is the most effective network for employers. In our free white paper, we provide you with a simple guide to Facebook for recruiting. Google+

I love Google Plus, the way that it is set up makes it very easy to create talent communities, because you can simply create a "circle" for each community you have, and stream targeted content specifically to each circle. What doesn't work so well is how much less "reach" G+ has than other networks. Sure, a lot of people have accounts, but they just don't spend all that much time actually using the network. Likeable has an awesome Google Plus Cheat sheet that will help you understand how G+ works. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great tool for social recruiting. Personally, I struggle with the fact that it isn't very mobile friendly, but it's a network completely dedicated to recruiting, which makes it pretty darn handy. Susan M. Heathfield's simple guide to using LinkedIn for recruiting is a great read for anyone in HR. Hopefully these guides will help you to get started with social recruiting, or at least give you more information about which networks to focus your hiring efforts on (Facebook, cough, Facebook!) Oh, and just to give you all a little more encouragement... I'll admit that my fear of Google Glass is probably unfounded! But Soylent is completely terrifying and makes me sad about the state of the world.