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Number two on our list of HR tech game changers is the employee referral system. Employee referrals have stood the test of time as the most effective source for quality hires. - Click to Tweet

Employee referrals are the number one source for volume of hire and the top source for quality of hire, even beating out social recruiting! According to HR thought leader Dr. John Sullivan, if 50% of your company’s hires aren’t coming from referrals, then you need to get proactive with your referral program! Creating an effective employee referral program is no cakewalk. Employee engagement ranks highest on the list of human resources challenges according to a study by SHRM. Employee referral programs rely entirely on employee engagement! Employees must be aware of what jobs their company is looking to fill, understand what type of skills those jobs require, and then actively seek out and connect with qualified peers. That’s a whole lot of legwork on their part. Offering attractive rewards for their efforts will encourage employees to a certain extent, as will making referrals a part of your organization’s culture. But, this is still not always enough to overcome the natural instinct towards inertia. HR tech can help! New cloud-based employee referral programs are using gamification, automation, matching, and social media to make the referral process easier and more fun for employees. Bonus, theses programs make tracking and rewarding employee participation a breeze for human resources!

Careerify uses gamification to encourage employee participation. The Careerify employee referral system allows companies to create challenges based on the candidate, the type of job, the location of a job, and many other data points. The system administrator can also choose to create hidden challenges that employees can unlock by participating in the referral program. Zao’s employee referral system uses big data and matching technology to make the referral process easy for employees. Their system gathers data from employee’s social channels to find out which of their connections are best suited for open jobs. Then Zao will encourage the employee to reach out to these specific candidates, even providing them with an email template. The Jobcast employee referral system makes the referral process more social. With Jobcast, employees have a dashboard that keeps them up to date on all the open jobs that their company needs to fill. When they see a job that looks like a good fit for one of their friends, with one click, they can share that job posting through any social network that they choose.

All three of these employee referral systems automate the referral process through deep integration with Applicant Tracking Systems. Automation cuts down on repetitive tasks, ensures that employees are always aware of their company’s open jobs, and lowers the chances for human error. All three of these systems also make tracking and managing employee referral programs much easier by providing reporting on employees’ participation and results. If your organization is struggling to make the 50% benchmark for employee referral based hires, then using a technology driven employee referral system could be the game-changer you need. For a detailed analysis of the different platforms currently on the market, check out this employee referral systems comparison guide by HR Tech Advisor. To learn more about Jobcast’s social employee referral system, shoot me an email at samara@jobcast.net :D

Time for another round up of the best recruitment, HR, and workplace themed blog posts of the week!

 Here are our top 5 picks:

Combating the Modern Recruiter’s Unrealistic Expectations – By Matthew Kosinski Despite the much-bemoaned skills gap and it being a job seekers market, according to a recent Career Advisory Board study, recruiters have unrealistic expectations of candidates. Matthew’s article explains the negative consequences of waiting too long for the ideal candidate and urges recruiters and hiring managers need to adjust their expectations. This Is What Companies Do When They Are Getting Kicked by Entry-Level Turnover... – Kris Dunn More war for talent inspired writing, this time from the wonderfully blunt Kris Dunn. Kris explains why increasing base level salaries is the smartest, and often, most affordable way to combat turnover.

Lead With Love And You’ll Love The Results – Meghan M. Biro Offering decent wages may be the key to retaining talent, but a high salary isn’t the only thing that matters to your employees. According to Megan, leading with love is mandatory as well, and not just for retention, but for the overall good of your organization. I know it sounds a little bit cheesy, but she’s got the numbers to back up her theory. According to Megan, leading with love is the best way to encourage “whole person” employee engagement, which results in: • 37% lower absenteeism • 48% fewer safety incidents • 41% fewer quality defects • 28% less inventory shrinkage • 10% higher customer satisfaction  and • Up to 22% higher profitability Nothing cheesy about that! Why Buffer is a Tool You Should Be Using in Recruitment – Sophie Deering Buffer is a tool that you should be using period. But definitely for recruitment! As much as you may be tempted to only share job postings on you social networks, it is equally as important for you to share interesting articles, photos, and links, in order to attract more followers. Buffer helps you find new content, add content from your favourite RSS feeds, and schedule that content so that you share at peak times throughout the day.

40 Considerations When Choosing Your Next ATS - Bridget Webb Buffer may be great for recruiting, but a good ATS is essential! According to Bridget choosing the right ATS for your organization is a decision that affects not just your recruitment team but also your entire company. Her article gives you a checklist that you can use to determine which ATS is best for your needs. Enjoy the links, and happy social recruiting!

Out of sheer curiosity (read, nerdiness) I spent my Sunday morning clicking through a Ceridian Slideshare presentation on the history of HR technology. Yes, my life really is that exciting! Comparing tech from the 1960’s to that used by HR professionals today made me feel an overwhelming sense of sympathy for the human resources departments of the past. Completely manual payroll systems, no ATS, no Excel... Oh the humanity! Access to personal computers and the internet has revolutionized HR and recruitment helping to facilitate the wealth of fantastic HR tech tools at our disposal today. As someone who works in the field of recruitment technology, it’s my job to stay informed about the latest trends and innovations in HR tech and what these changes mean for recruiting. By researching performance reports, surveys, and our own user generated data, I’ve noticed 5 key areas where HR tech is changing recruitment for the better: Candidate Assessment, Employee Referrals, Matching, Automation, and Reporting. This article is the beginning of a five part series on the most game changing innovations in recruitment technology. Starting with...

Candidate Assessments

Candidate Assessment is an interesting area of HR tech because it can go so very, very wrong! Take this example from an article in the Economist about “a case where the [assessment] software rejected every one of many good applicants for a job because the firm in question had specified that they must have held a particular job title—one that existed at no other company.” But, when used well, assessment tools are an effective way to boost retention rates and quality of hire.

Xerox used Evolv to mine their employee data in an effort to improve their candidate assessment process. Evolv found that the best predictors that customer-service employee will have a lengthy future at Xerox, is that they lives nearby their place of work and that they can get to work easily. Neither of these things were previously priorities to Xerox when assessing potential hires. Xerox used the information that Evolv gave them to cut attrition by a fifth! Another way that assessment tools are helping companies find the right talent is with intelligently designed survey tools. Surveys can measure soft skills by asking a series of indirect questions, such as “How good at computers are you?” followed up several questions later with “What does control-V do on a word-processing program?” Good assessment tools are linked to the actual performance of the people they are used to hire, so that HR can measure success, and better understand how to optimize their use in the future. These tools with help minimize bias in the recruitment process, analyze employees soft skills, and change how and what questions we ask to determine a candidate’s fit.

This week’s link love has some excellent articles to satisfy your thirst for recruitment knowledge.

You’ll learn tricks for sourcing in demand passive candidates, what recruiting tech talent in 2015 is all about, and another way to assess the risk vs reward of using social media to reach job seekers!

Here’s our list of the top 5 HR and recruitment articles this week:

 The 7 Steps for Recruiting Hard-to-find Passive Candidates – Lou Adler

Lou walks you through the steps he took to successfully source top talent for a difficult to fill tech role. He explains the techniques needed to find, attract, and recruit the best passive candidates.

Recruit Tech Talent in 2015 by Going Back to the Basics – Holly Glover

Out of LinkedIn’s recently released 25 most desirable skills list, only 5 of the skills listed aren’t related to tech. So this refreshing on recruiting tech talent by Holly is very apropos!

Outsourcing Social Recruitment the Pros and Cons – Cheryl Morgan

Social recruiting is about more than sharing your job posts on Twitter, but many companies struggle to build strong employer brands and grow their social networks.

A great way to solve this problem is to enlist the help of a social recruiting agency.

Social Media Recruiting Has Similar Risks as Word of Mouth – Allen Smith

Allen puts the various concerns arising about the legality of recruiting via social platforms in terms that most recruiters are more familiar with by comparing social recruitment to word of mouth recruitment.

If your worried about the diversity implications of using social media to share job openings, then you’ll definitely want to give this post a read.

HR Trends You Can’t Ignore – Todd Owens

Although I simply cannot agree with his title (I can ignore pretty much anything should my brain so desire!), I sincerely hope that the trends Todd lists become top priorities for HR in 2015. Especially when it comes to mobile!

Happy link Loving and stay social.

Recruiting with social media is the new normal. For years we’ve written (and read) about how social recruitment is the next big trend in HR, how it’s just about to take off, and we’ve worked pretty hard to show employers and recruiters the effectiveness of using social media to hire… Despite the positive statistics and encouraging research, social recruitment remained just a trend. Something people talked about but didn’t necessarily practice. I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it has. According to Jobvite’s latest research, 94% of recruiters are using social media to hire. – Click to Tweet

Here are 7 reasons we think that social recruiting is here to stay:

1) Increases Job Visibility Facebook has over 1.35 billion active users, Twitter hosts job search chats, and Gen Zers are using LinkedIn. Your potential candidates are social! Using social media to broadcast your job posts makes them more visible and increases your odds of reaching top talent.

2) Improves Quality of Hire 59% of recruiters rated candidates sourced from social networks as “highest quality." – Click to Tweet

This stat makes a ton of sense to me because of just how targeted social media allows recruiters to get with their job posts. With Facebook you can target by demographic, interests, skills, and even by peer group. LinkedIn is awesome for targeting based on work history, and Twitter’s search is perfect for sourcing candidates based on interest.

3) Better Employer Brand Awareness Not only does social recruiting increase the visibility of employer brand, it strengthens it. Candidates want to work for employers that they trust. Establishing a strong social presence for your employer brand is and essential part of building this trust.

4) More Referrals Referrals are the number one source of hire. – Click to Tweet According to Guidant Group, employee referrals also lead to better quality hires, and improved retention rates. Encouraging your staff to reach out to their peers via social and share links to the jobs you post on line will simplify the referral process for employees and lead to in increase in referrals made overall.

5) Engages Employees Posting jobs to your company’s social media platforms and encouraging employees to spread the word makes them active participants in your hiring strategy. The same goes for encouraging them to interact and comment on your social career page.

6) Reduces Cost to Hire I’m not going to tell you social recruiting is free. It’s not. But recruiting-related transactional costs of social recruiting are almost always lower in comparison to other hiring sources. Running a Facebook Ads recruitment campaign will cost you less to reach a larger audience than many traditional newspaper ads and popular job boards.

7) Opens the Door to Engagement Social media allows you to connect, chat, and engage with people you might never come into contact with in “real life.” Many old school recruiters fear that social recruiting means less phone and face-to-face interaction with candidates. But, when used right, social networking is just another way to facilitate more personal interactions. Conversations that start on Facebook lead to phone calls, then interviews, then hopefully, your next winning hire! You’ve probably already begun using social to recruit, but keeps these benefits in mind when your planning your strategy to make sure you’re capitalizing on all social has to offer. If you want to simplify your social media efforts, then try the Jobcast social recruiting app. Jobcast automates the social recruitment process for you to save you time and stress.

Happy New Year, I would insert a party emoji if I knew how to do so on WordPress without destroying the internet and ruining our tech team’s day. I have about 30 resolutions, most of them already broken, but my goal to spend the first 15 minutes of my day reading interesting new blog posts is going strong. So far I have learned a lot about the importance of drinking lemon water first thing in the morning, how to cook a whole chicken in a crockpot, and how my home office is lacking some essential items. I have also read lots and lots of excellent blog posts about human resources and social recruiting that I am (slightly too) excited to share with you. Our first Link Love of the New Year features social recruitment goal-setting, excellent tips to avoid recruiting like a dinosaur, and some advice for keeping tabs on your hiring competition!

Your Early 2015 Social Recruiting Priorities

– Katrina Collier If you read our blog then you know I love Katrina’s writing. This article is no exception. Her points are bang on, especially her warning about the pitfalls of automation. When It Comes to Social Recruiting, It’s All About the Mobile

– China Gorman China explains how social, mobile recruiting provides higher quality candidates, reduces time to hire, and increases employee referrals. Three Tips for Recruiting in The Age of Social Media

– Jeremy Roche This article touches on some less talked about aspects about the importance of social media for employers and recruiters, such reputation and appearing tech savvy to younger candidates.

Social Talent’s Social Recruiting Round Up

– Siofra Pratt An excellent assortment of the most popular social recruitment blog posts, news stories and infographics of December.

Know Your Talent Acquisition Enemy

– Jim D’Amico The war for talent is heating up for 2015 with boomers retiring, more new jobs, and fewer qualified candidates. It’s time to start keeping a closer eye on who and how your competition is recruiting. To make a little extra time for your recruiting resolutions try using the Jobcast App to simplify your social recruiting. Enjoy the links!

Jobcast’s CEO Ryan St. Germaine was recently interviewed by Cheryl Morgan for Social-Hire. In his interview, Ryan talks about the reasons why he founded Jobcast, how social recruiting has changed since, and what not to do when using social media to hire! If you haven’t already checked out the interview, then head over to the Social-Hire website and read the Expert Interview with Ryan St. Germaine on the Benefits of Social Recruiting.

And, make sure to visit the main Social-Hire site to learn more about their awesome consulting services. The team at Social-Hire can help you build your employer brand and improve your social recruitment strategy.

Enjoy the interview, and happy New Year!

I love New Year’s. I love making resolutions (whether I keep them or not!), I love the whole fresh start thing, and most of all, I LOVE ‘best of’ posts. With New Year’s Eve falling on Link Love Wednesday, I thought it best to wrap up the year with a list of our favorite social recruiting blog posts of 2014. #Social Recruiting and the Hashtag

– Maren Hogen Maren explains hashtags, what they are, why they’re important, and how to use them for recruiting.

5 Ways Technology Has Changed Recruiting Forever

– Franklin Morris This article is a great read for both recruiters and job seekers, providing simple advice for adapting to today’s tech-centric hiring process.

10 Reasons Why There is a Disconnect on LinkedIn Between Recruiters and Candidates

– Andy Headworth Andy is a social recruitment pro and in this article he breaks down the reasons why recruiters often miss the mark when using LinkedIn as a hiring tool.

Are We Ready for Social Talent?

– Lilian Mahoukou Lilian reviews his experience at #rmsconf (the leading social recruitment conference in France) and gives his takeaways on how social media can be leveraged by both those looking to hire, and those looking to be hired.

How to Get ROI from Social Recruiting and Social Media

– Lisa Jones Lisa Jones is one of the leading experts in social recruitment. Her company conducts in-depth surveys on social media for hiring, and she works closely with recruiters and employers about social recruiting strategies. In this article, she reveals how to get measurable results from social recruitment.

The Benefits of Social Recruitment

– Interview by Cheryl Morgan Cheryl interviews Ryan St. Germaine about the past, future, and present of social recruiting. They go over why social media is so effective as a recruitment tool and how to leverage social networks for better results.

26 Social Recruiting Facts and Stats

– Samara Parker This was our most-read article of 2014. As the title implies, this blog post contains 26 easy-to-share statistics about social recruiting. And, of course, our favorite HR meme of the year

Those are our top picks for 2014, we’d love to hear about yours in the comments!

Hiring in 2015 is going to be more competitive than ever, here are the 7 recruitment trends that you need to pay attention to!

Recruiters Want Gen Z

As a millennial, I am sad to report that Gen Y’s time in the sun has gone dark. We’ve already staked our claim in the workplace, we’re even taking over leadership positions, and so recruiting us is old hat and not the shiny prospect it once was.

2015 is the time to prepare for Gen Z Companies, such as Microsoft and Facebook are prioritizing intern outreach in high schools, with Facebook going so far as to pay out thousands of dollars to these intern positions.

Gen Z will not simply be Gen Y amplified.

One thing that stands with this new generation out is a greater desire for structure, which is a quality that may run counter to the recent trend against hierarchical workplace structures.

Candidates Own the Market

2015 is a buyer’s market for candidates. – Click to Tweet

With unemployment at an all-time low, and the skills gap at an all-time high, qualified job seekers now have the upper hand.

Time to hire rates haven’t been this high since 2008 and unemployment rates are the lowest they’ve been since 2000.

Boomers are retiring en masse, leaving employers with a dearth of qualified talent. According to Career Builder, 50% of employers are unable to find qualified candidates.

This will necessitate more competitive recruitment tactics, an increased need to reach passive candidates, and a re-evaluation of what defines a qualified candidate.

The Definition of ‘Qualified’ Will Shift

With the previously mentioned skills gap raging, employers may finally be forced to face the fact that their ideal candidate doesn’t exist.

Instead of defining a qualified candidate by their past experience and job titles, it’s time to focus on their soft skills, their ability to learn quickly, and their motivation.

2015 will demand more in-house training for new hires, but the upside will be that employees will be groomed to work the way that you want them to, and an overall bump in retention.

Everyone’s Passively Seeking

The distinction between hunting for work and not hunting for work is disappearing. – Click to Tweet

Thanks to social media, it’s a lot easier to find a new job without ever having to put yourself on the job market. Gone are the days of employees having to sneak around so as not to alert their boss that they’re looking. With LinkedIn, everyone’s on the market 24/7.

As Dan Schawbel puts it:

“Employees are undergoing a continuous job search job and are never settling.”

Indeed Hiring Lab has found that 86% of employees are looking for better opportunities and are ready to job-hop. If this doesn’t make you nervous yet, remember that the growing skills gap and increased time to hire makes replacing lost employees tougher than ever.

Companies need to focus on creating tight-knit teams, bound together by culture and friendship, if they want to retain their top talent. They must also make social media a mainstay of their recruitment process, so as to tap into the passive candidate market.

 Recruiting Women in Tech Will Become a Priority

Women are entering more powerhouse roles across the globe in both politics and the workplace. Women are more likely than ever to be breadwinners for their family, and feminism is back in the spotlight.

Yet women are still sorely underrepresented in tech.

Considering that tech companies bear the brunt of the skills gap, it is illogical that so many companies haven’t made recruiting, retaining, and promoting women more of a priority.

In fact, if you look into women in tech, you’ll still find a shocking amount of evidence pointing to discrimination and exclusion of women working in the field of technology.

A recent article in Fortune by Kieren Snyder, Why Women Leave Tech: It’s the Culture Not Because Math is Hard, points an accusing finger at employers.

Snyder surveyed over 700 women who had left the tech industry. A shocking 192 of these women cited discomfort working in environments that felt overtly or implicitly discriminatory as a primary factor in their decision to leave tech. That amounts to over 25% of the women surveyed.

The women Snyder spoke with with suffered discrimination related to their age, race, or sexuality in addition to gender and motherhood.

2015 looks to be the year that tech smartens up.

Startups are already leading the way, with Air bnb boasting a 36% female staff and Shutterfly surpassing them with 38%.

A Google code initiative called Made With Code is giving women and girls funding and resources to learn how to code, there are also software development programs, and even summer camps.

I’ve actually started to learn JavaScript, something that I’ll openly admit felt off limits to me until very recently in part due to my gender.

Employers who are struggling to recruit tech talent need to start bringing women into the fold by offering more training, a female friendly culture, and benefits that support the specific needs of women.

 Mobile. Still.

83% of your potential candidates are mobile. – Click to Tweet

Jobcast’s most recent survey showed that only about 15% of career sites are mobile friendly.

But, we’ve also seen a huge increase in the amount of employers who come to us with questions and concerns about making their recruitment more mobile friendly.

In response we’ll be improving Jobcast’s mobile features, so stay tuned for some excited updates in the next few months!

 Social. Still.

Reaching Gen Z, succeeding in a competitive hiring market, finding top talent in spite of the increased skills gap, recruiting passive candidates, engaging with more female job seekers, and making your hiring process mobile will be the focus for HR in 2015… Social recruiting addresses all of these concerns.

• Gen Z are even more reliant on social media than millennials, so if you want to reach them you’ve got to get social.

• Using social media to grow your employer brand will make you more appealing to job seekers, social networks are one of the best ways to source talent based on specific skills, and passive candidates are doing most of their passive job searching using LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Women are just as active, if not more active than men on social platforms, and as more of them move into the world of programming, you’ll want to start looking for them on sites like Stack Overflow.

• Mobile jobseekers are conducting their search using apps like Twitter and Facebook, so these apps are an essential part of mobile recruitment strategies.

All that and social media is the best way to reach more candidates, attract higher quality candidates, and showcase company culture.

To make 2015 the year that you master social recruiting, try the Jobcast app.

With Jobcast you can create a Facebook Career Page, and automatically share your jobs to Twitter, LinkedIn, and your Facebook Timeline.

Follow this link to try the Jobcast Facebook Recruiting App free for 30 days.

Hello, It's almost Christmas. So, if you celebrate that holiday, hopefully all of your shopping is done. At Jobcast we tend to celebrate with food. This is why our Holiday staff party consisted of a two hour lunch at a fancy Thai restaurant followed by doughnuts. I am not complaining! We also like to celebrate with knowledge. When we get together our entire team loves to discuss new podcasts, books, and blogs we've found and what we've learned. So, to celebrate the upcoming holidays, I thought that I would give all of you, our awesome readers, a gift as well. It's the kind of gift that employers everywhere dream of (in lieu of sugarplums): A free white paper about how to use Facebook for recruiting. I know, I know, there are a lot of white papers out there. This one though, is full of great tips and tricks, has a really easy get-started guide, and is very thoroughly researched. It even includes real life examples! What's not to love? Check out our free white paper for an awesome guide to Facebook recruiting. Happy (holiday) social recruiting from all of us at Jobcast.