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Jobcast Link Love!

Have you read this fantastic article from Sprout Social yet?

In it, Anna Washenko explains what your business can learn from Taylor Swift to make your live-streaming events a success…

Do you use live-streaming as a part of your recruitment process?

Let us know in the comments below!

On to the rest of our links:

HR and Recruiting

“30 percent of job seekers said they would rather go on a blind date than fill out an online job application!” – Click to Tweet

Lear more about how your application process could be costing you big time, over at recruiter.com!

Are you ready for the hiring surge? According to John Zappe, recruiting is about to get a whole lot more competitive.

Why making wellness and health a part of your company culture is good for both engagement, and financial strategy.

Social Media

Cultural fit can be a decided factor in a hire’s success at your company. According to The Undercover Recruiter, Social Recruiting may be the answer to finding candidates that fit.

How to develop brand loyalty with social media.

Instead of fighting over time spent on social networks, why not engage employees in your social media strategy!

Work-Life

5 Strategies to prepare for a difficult conversation at work.

5 Ways to prevent “Useless Meeting Syndrome.”

“52% of us spend more than 30 hours a week with our family.”

“91% of us spend more than 30 hours a week with work colleagues.” – Click to Tweet

Which is why… We need more parties at work!

(Video unavailable) Happy Link Loving!

I love browser extensions because they are like shortcut keys that you do not have to memorize, and because without them my workload would double… And I would have to reset my company email account password every Monday!

HR has a lot on their plate, especially now that hiring has gone social. From writing the perfect Job ad, to creating highly engaging visual images, to choosing effective hashtags for hiring top talent (we recommend #hiring), successful social recruiting is hard work.

Thankfully, there are awesome browser extensions that can help you manage all of these tasks and more.

Here are our favorite extensions for social recruiting, plus three more that we think no internet using human should live without!

Bit.ly

The Bitly browser extension is a link-shortening tool.

With Bitly you get custom shortening, analytics, and a copy-and-share button, along with some other nifty, but un-necessary extras, like notifications.

Bitly is easy to use, and keeps your posts looking professional and tidy.

Dragdis

Dragdis is a browser extension that lets you quickly save text, photos, videos, and links by dragging and dropping.

I use Dragdis to save any visual content that I want to share later, keep on file for reference, or use in a future blog post.

Pocket

Pocket is a saving tool like Dragdis, but for blog posts and articles.

The Pocket extension allows you to quickly save articles to read later, and even tag them so that you can organize your Pocket library’s content by category.

 Feedly Mini

To be effective with social recruiting you need to build up a social media content strategy.

This means sharing more than just job ads.

To source great content to share with your social networks, you need a reader tool. My favorite, and one of our 5 Essential Apps for Social Media Management is Feedly.

The Feedly Mini extension adds a small icon to the bottom of web pages that you can use to add the feed directly to your Feedly reader, share to your social networks, favorite, or save to Evernote.

Sidekick

Sidekick is a browser and email extension that lets you see who’s opening your emails and when, and allows you to schedule emails to send later.

Why is Sidekick awesome for recruiters? It lets you know when a potential hire has opened your email, so that you can make sure to follow up with a friendly, and perfectly timed phone call.

Rapportive

The Rapportive extension is like caller ID for your email!

With Rapportive, once you receive, or write an email, the social profile of the person you are connecting with instantly pops up on the right-hand side of your screen.

This tool is great for keeping track of details about who you are writing to, so that you do not get them mixed up with someone else, and make a horrible social blunder.

Not that this happens to me… Anymore… Thank you Rapportive!

Streak for Gmail

The Streak extension is a tool for combining your CRM and your email inbox, but, it’s easy to make Streak more specific to hiring and recruitment. Switching out the sales jargon for more recruitment specific language. Leads = potential candidates, sales = hires etc… makes Streak an awesome tool for HR.

Streak provides all of the tools you need to track the hiring process from within your email account. You can: check and send emails, group emails from a candidate or for a specific job opening together, keep track of status, notes and details of each potential hire, share information within your team and see every email between a candidate and your team all from the one app.

WhoWorks.At

The WhoWorks.At browser extension will let you know if you have any connections who work at whatever site you’re currently browsing, and if so, who they are.

The extension lists your connections, along with links to their LinkedIn profiles and basic info about them.

HootSuite

Hootsuite is the most popular social media management tool out there.

The Hoosuite browser extension allows you to schedule and share posts to multiple social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi.)

For the love of all things good in the world (wide web) get these extensions!

LastPass

Did you know that using the same password for all of your different online accounts is a REALY bad idea? Especially if that password is just your cat’s name followed by 123.

But, if you’re like me, it’s completely impossible to remember a different, “secure” password for all of your accounts.

That’s why you need LastPass.

Not only does LastPass remember all of your passwords, it also helps you generate super secure, unique passwords for all of your accounts. Say good-bye to the “forgot password” screen of shame and hello to the awesomeness that is only having to remember one password.

LastPass, I love you!

(video not available) TabCloud

The TabCloud extension allows you to save a load of tabs to a cloud syncing service so you can open them at another time or on another computer with one click. It is easy to use, efficient and free.

I also use TabCloud to save groupings of tabs that I like to use in combination.

For example, I have a “social media tabcloud“ that opens Hootsuite, Feedly, Pocket, and Dragdis all at once for easy content searching and sharing.

AdblockPlus

Adblock Plus, like the name implies, blocks annoying pop-ups.

With the Adblock Plus extension You will never have to worry about a horribly inappropriate message popping up from Kiki the fun loving blond while you are -surfing the internet- looking up HR advice online at the office.

These are our current favorites, but we’re always looking for more, so we’d love to know…

What are your favorite browser extensions?

Effective social recruiting is about more than just posting jobs on Twitter.

If all you share is job ads, unless the name of your company is Apple, then you won’t attract a lot of followers.

Developing a diverse content strategy is an essential part of building your online employer brand.

That strategy must include image-based content, because it is the most effective kind of content for encouraging engagement.

According to content marketing pros, like the Buffer team:

“Tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets.” – Click to Tweet

So, to help you grow your employer brand…

Here are 5 tools to help you create visual content:

Recite

Recite is a simple tool that allows you to turn quotes into images that you can then share to Facebook or Twitter.

People love quotes, almost as much as they love visual content, so Recite is an excellent and super easy way to get more shares.

Canva

Canva provides templates, fonts, and curated photographs with which to create beautiful visual content to share on all your social networks.

Infogram and Easel.ly

Not only are infographics a highly engaging form of content, they are also an excellent tool for communicating your company culture.

This is because they allow you to express data and information about your company to candidates visually.

Infogram is a gorgeous, and very reasonably priced tool (there are free options) that allows you to create your own detailed Infographics with a variety of charts, graphs, and even maps.

Easel.ly is a less gorgeous, but completely free tool, for building infographics, though it does not provide nearly as many options as Infogram.

Easel.ly is a far simpler tool than Infogram, and I find it easier to use, so it is better for small projects. Infogram is best for larger, more important projects.

Placeit

Placeit allows you embed your own images and video into placeholders. This an excellent way to make your visual content look more slick and professional.

These tools will help you create incredible visuals to make your brand shine.

They’re also a whole lot of fun!

So get out there and play.

Referrals are the number one source of quality hires. They significantly improve time to hire, and referred candidates consistently outperform candidates hired through other channels.

Here are seven best practices for creating a referral program that works:

Build a Solid Infrastructure

Your referral program needs a solid structure to build upon.

“By launching an effective ERP, Vistaprint increased referrals from 19 percent to 42 percent of its total hires in one year.” Source: Wall Street Journal MarketWatch

Before you start asking employees to go out and spread the word about your jobs, you must have a plan.

• Assess your recruitment needs to help you set goals.

• Make sure that you understand your team, so that you can tailor the program to fit your staff culture.

• Put standardized policies in place to ensure that the company is well represented.

•  Address the need for tracking your referral process, so that you can measure success and reward successful referrals.

• Create a manual that lays out your recruitment goals and explains the referral process to your team.

Having a sturdy foundation will mean significantly fewer problems down the road, increased efficiency, and better results overall.

Prioritize

Focus your efforts on hard to fill positions, and finding top talent.

“On average, it takes just 10.4 referrals to lead to a hire.”  – Click to Tweet Source: John Zappe, ERE.net

Referral programs are one of the best tools you have for accessing passive candidates and higher quality talent. Make this kind of hire the priority by communicating this to your team, and even offering bonus rewards for those who successfully refer for especially hard to fill job openings.

Create Candidate Profiles

Your team do not necessarily know what makes for a good referral. This can lead to employees referring friends based on how much their friend needs a job, instead of how right their friend is for the job.

So, show them exactly what you’re looking for in a great hire

Draw up a profile of an ideal candidate. Focus on soft skills, such as drive, problem solving, and teamwork skills, but also, clearly state education, training, and experience minimums.

Have your employees ask themselves:

• Would I want to work on a project with this person?

• How well will they fit in at our company?

• What skill gaps might they be able to fill

   

  for

   

  our team?

Remove Friction

Make it as easy as possible for candidates to make referrals. That means providing email templates, education, and elevator pitches.

You can even use apps to help automate the referral process for your employees.

Have a Social Strategy

Your employees have an average of 150 connections through their social media. Many of these connections are past colleagues and schoolmates, which are ideal for referrals!

… but, your employees may not have these contacts’ phone numbers, or even interact with them in real life. So, to reach these potential candidates, you must encourage your team to make referrals via social networks.

Teach your employees about social media best practices, explain the value of reaching out through social networks, and then make it easy for your team to make referrals with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Make it Part of Your Culture

“46% of all hires at top performing firms are referrals.”  – Click to Tweet Source: John Sullivan

Explain to all of your employees the value of employee referrals.

Tell them about how using referrals as a core part of the company’s recruitment process will directly benefit their happiness at work, because it means hiring people who will fit the team dynamic.

Everyone wants to work with people that they get along with!

Encourage open dialogue by openly celebrating successful referrals, and making a point of commenting on how much you appreciate your team’s efforts.

Reward Accordingly

If you have made referrals a positive part of your company’s culture, then your employees will be happy to help, but you should still reward them for doing so.

Most of the referrals they make will be outside of office hours, and they should be compensated for taking the time and effort to help you recruit qualified candidates

“Referral hires are 69 percent higher when companies offer a reward.” – Click to Tweet

Vary your rewards depending on the situation.

For example, give a $10 gift card for a good lead. Give a day off, or a larger gift certificate, for referrals that result in interviews. Give monetary compensation for successful hires.

You can even add bonus rewards for especially hard to fill positions.

Get as creative as you like, so long as the reward system is consistent, enticing, and always, always, includes a thank-you!

Referrals are the fastest and most effective way to hire. With these best practices, before you know it, you’ll be swimming in qualified candidates.

Do you share articles that you have not actually read?

According to a recent article on the Verge by Adrianne Jeffries, most of as are doing this on a regular basis.

The article quotes Toney Haile, CEO of traffic tracking company Chartbeat, as saying:

  “WE’VE FOUND EFFECTIVELY NO CORRELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL SHARES AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY READING.”

Crazy, huh?

This week I had planned on doing a round-up of our most shared articles of 2014, but upon reading Jeffries’ post, I’ve changed my mind.

Instead, I present to you…

The most read Jobcast blog posts of 2014 (so far):

10 – 26 Social Recruiting Stats and Facts.

9 – Three Recruiting Trends To Watch: And how to implement them.

8 – How to Choose the Your Recruiting Specialty: Personal brand = Social recruiter.

7 – Recruiting with Pinterest and Instagram: Yay or Nay?

6 – Five Essential Social Media Management Apps.

5 – Transform Your Job Posts From Ho-Hum to Aha! Starring Susan Wright-Boucher

4 – Creating a Culture of Retention for 2014.

3 – Recruiting Passive Candidates with Social: It’s kind of a big deal.

2 – Back to Basics: 4 Great Articles on the Essentials of Social Recruiting.

1 – Are Passive Candidates the Unicorns of Recruiting? Short answer: Yes

Do you have a topic that you would love to see us cover? Let us know in the comments!

What is an employee referral program?

For a simple definition of an employee referral program, I turned to BusinessDictionary.com.

Here’s what they had to offer:

“Recruitment method in which the current employees are encouraged and rewarded for introducing suitable recruits from among the people they know.”

All right, blog post done. That was an easy one…

If I left off this blog post here, the chances of it being successful (educational and shareable) are slim to none.

Yes, technically it answers the question: “What is an Employee Referral System?”, but it is far too basic, and adds nothing to the dialogue that would inspire or help you, or anybody else.

Unfortunately, many employee referral programs are built in a similar fashion.

According to employee referral program expert, John Sullivan, when it comes to employee referral programs, “most are pretty dull.”

Sullivan explains that this is because “many organizations task the management of their program to a loosely organized committee that rarely invests the time required to build anything more than a conservative, basic program.”

Just like I was tasking the development of my blog post to BusinessDictionary.com!

But, unlike boring blog posts, even basic employee referral programs achieve greater success than most other external recruiting sources.

That is how valuable employee referral programs are to an organization.

Even the bad ones work.

And the good ones?

Well-run, creative referral programs are on average twice as effective as basic ones.

Here are some key features that separate these excellent employee referral programs from the basic ones:

Employee Education

Great ERPs provide employees with the confidence and tools that they need to make quality referrals.

Teach your employees where to look for referrals, what to look for in a referral, and how to approach them.

Arm them with some stories about your company that sell your employer brand.

Provide them with a few basic script options to fall back on when they are unsure of how to approach a potential referral. Provide examples for phone, email, and social networks.

Clear Communication

Tell your employees exactly what you want from them, and why.

Be very clear about what you are looking for in potential hires, and the basic standards that referrals must meet in order to be considered.

Transparency

Employee engagement is mandatory for any referral program’s success.

To boost your employee engagement, make your ERP process transparent.

Keep them in the loop about their referral’s progress and status throughout the hiring process.

Social

Many of your employees no longer communicate with former classmates or colleagues in real life, but maintain relationships with them via social networks.

Your employee referral program must include a social element, which encourages your employees to reach out through these channels.

Odds are, if you do not encourage them to reach out through the internet, you’ll miss out on some of the best potential candidates.

Smart Compensation

The rewards you offer should be relative, enticing, and creative.

Offer small rewards for recommendations, and larger rewards for successful hires.

Add bonuses for job posts that are especially difficult to fill.

Instead of cash rewards, offer prizes, or even prize draws. Prize draws allow you to offer one very large reward. The chance of an exciting prize (such as a car, or vacation package) is often more motivating than the promise of a smaller one.

No matter what type of rewards you choose to give, make sure that a thank-you note is always a part of it.

Your employees want to feel like they are making a difference at work. Expressing to them that their referrals are an essential part of the company’s success can be even more rewarding than a cash bonus.

Measurable

ERPs must be easy to track.

If you aren’t tracking your employee referrals, then you won’t be able to run a consistent rewards program, dole out thank-you notes, or make data-backed strategy adjustments.

Great referral programs also make it possible for employees to track the status of the referrals they’ve made.

A quality employee referral program system, like Jobcast Social Referrals, makes it possible for employees to check in on the status of the referrals they make, and to assess which social networks are the most effective for referrals.

Check out John Sullivan’s site for more great information about employee referral programs.

Learn more about using social media and employee referrals.

Happy social recruiting!

Social recruiting, and employer branding have become mainstream.

Finally!

Most companies now use multiple social networks to share their job openings, engage with candidates, and grow their employer brand.

Sadly, what most companies still fail to do is embrace the element of fun that makes these social networks so popular.

Thankfully, there are some daring employers out there, willing to try new, quirky, and occasionally just plain weird social recruiting strategies.

Here are a few good examples:

Hubspot

Not only is the Hubspot blog a wealth of fantastic information, the company knows how to have fun with their social recruiting.

Take their “Inbound Gangnam Style” video for example:

(Video not available)

Taco Bell

Taco Bell has fantastic employer branding on Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest.

They consistently post updates about staff events, give shout-outs to their top performing employees, and share tons of colorful images that showcase their fun-loving employer brand.

For example:

Also, they have tacos, possibly the perfect food.

Marriott

Not only does Marriott connect with candidates using live chats, and webinars, they also gamify their posts by encouraging candidates to create hilarious captions for staff pics.

Marriott famously created a Facebook game to woo candidates, and sadly it seems the game is no more, but Marriott continues to set trends when it comes to their recruitment strategy.

Denny’s

Denny’s social media brand is just plain weird. But it is also wonderful.

The company uses Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for their branding and recruitment.

Here’s an example of one of their wacky tweets that went viral:

They balance the straight up silliness of their Tweets by making a heartfelt message of inclusiveness the focus of their Facebook Career Page.

This way the brand can both engage their potential candidates with the fun stuff, and then convert those candidates into applicants with their promise of a diverse and respectful company culture.

Oh, and I take back what I said about tacos. Pancakes are THE perfect food.

Passive candidates are as elusive as they are desirable, a recruiters golden fleece! Why are passive candidates so desirable? Well, other than the fact that poaching a top performer away from your competition is a major win in the “war for talent”... Passive candidates are more driven and 17% less likely to need skills development than active candidates. - Click to Tweet This is according to research by LinkedIn that points to passive candidates as a better source for quality talent overall. Passive candidates also make up the vast majority of the labor force! 60% of job seekers are considered to be passive candidates. - Click to Tweet

When asked by LinkedIn to describe their current job search status, here’s how fully-employed professionals responded:

• Approximately 25% of global respondents claim to be actively looking for their next role.

• A whopping 45% are open to talking with a recruiter.

• 15% are talking to their networks about other opportunities.

Unfortunately, these candidates are not looking on job boards, career sites, or in the help wanted section of the newspaper. They have jobs. Good jobs.

Sure, they’re open to a chat, but you have to find them first. If you want to reach passive talent, a combination of social recruiting and employee referrals is your best bet. Remember that 15% of passive candidates reaching out to their network about potential opportunities? Chances are that some of them are chatting with your current employees. A good employee referral program incentivizes those employees to jump at the chance to pitch your company to their peers. Employee referral programs also encourage, and reward employees who can help connect you with that other 45% of job seekers who are open to exploring new job opportunities. With referral based hiring you get the added bonus of improved retention rates, better cultural fit, and decreased time to hire. Now lets add social recruiting to the equation. According to research from Pew Internet, 73% of adults have social media profiles, 42% of them have profiles on multiple networks. The average employee has at least 150 connections through social networks. That’s a lot of potential referrals! Then there’s the fact that even though passive candidates are not checking job boards, chances are pretty good that they are checking checking Facebook. They belong to Facebook groups related to their field, they search twitter for hashtags relevant to their work, and they may even pop onto LinkedIn to see what past colleagues are up to. If you have an employer brand presence, and a solid social recruiting strategy, you can reach those passive candidates. Creating a branded Facebook Career Page, sharing job posts to Twitter that include relevant hashtags, and keeping up your LinkedIn presence makes you more searchable, more attractive, and improves your chances of engaging the passive talent you seek. So what are you waiting for? Win the war for talent with a social recruiting and employee referral 1,2 PUNCH!

Statistics and data points are a double-edged sword.

On one hand, they are necessary for measuring success, effective decision making, and convincing whoever is in charge to sign off on your projects.

On the other hand, they are often misleading, difficult to interpret, and hard to track down.

When hiring, employers, HR, and recruiters must look at the relevant statistics in order to make decisions about what their strategy should entail. Thankfully, they can also draw on personal experience and their gut instincts to assess how the available data is used.

But, when it comes to social recruiting, you may not have a lot of practical knowledge to draw from. And your gut may have a tendency to fall victim to the hype machine… Or worse, fear of change!

So, here are a few places we recommend for finding stats on social media, as well as some examples of the kind of data they have on offer:

Barclay Jones

The Barclay Jones blog shares a wealth of data and statistics about hiring and social recruiting. Their data is well curated, and comes from varied and well-respected sources.

Social Recruiter Guide

The Social Recruiter Guide website offers a new(ish) blog that covers all things social recruiting. Including downloadable How-to-Guides that are a great source of pertinent info, and smart advice for pros, intermediates, and beginners.

Software Advice – Industry Review Best Job Boards

The Software Advice site offers comparative data about different software. They recently did a comparison analysis of top job boards including LinkedIn.

The study is definitely worth checking out. Here’s an example graph:

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook provides tons of great information about Facebook, as well as many other social networks. Inside Facebook, is a favorite of mine, because along with the positive stuff, they do not hesitate to publish critical articles and unflattering stats about FB, or social media gurus.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite posts: Why you may be learning the wrong lessons from Facebook marketing gurus.

“Here’s the untold truth of social media – you can use it to generate sales, lightning fast. And the good news is that it doesn’t matter even if you’re selling seemingly ‘boring’ products.”

This article is a response to the idea that you have to be outside of the box, and pull crazy stunts, in order to be successful with social media.

Jon Loomer

Jon is smart, researches everything he posts about, and performs multiple experiments to back his theories.

His research is excellent!

Check out his post: How to target Facebook users by behavior like purchases, car owned, charitable donations and more… 

Want more?  Follow the Jobcast team on Twitter. We always try to tweet as many great studies and articles as possible about social recruiting.

Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays.

A day off from work, to celebrate the work we do.

For our non-Canadian/American readers (many of you!), Labor Day is celebrated on the first of September, usually with hot dogs and a trip to the beach.

The first “Labour Day” was held in Canada (hence the different spelling of labor) way back in 1872.

This inspired our neighbor to the South, Matthew Maguire, to bring the holiday to the U.S.A. in 1882, but it took 10 years for his attempt to celebrate America’s workers to catch on.

In 1894, Labor Day became a national holiday.

In 1994, Labor Day became a nationally recognized reason to kick back, eat barbecue, and attempt to squeeze your adult sized frame into a child sized blow-up swimming pool! * (See footnote)

In 2014, we will celebrate Labor Day by sharing a whole bunch of links dedicated to improving the way we work.

Let’s start with something beautiful.

“The achievements of workers are important. Our lives are based upon our own work and the great work of others.” Sharlyn Lauby – Click To Tweet

Sharlyn’s quote is a perfect introduction for this beautiful video that tells the story of Chris Merrick, a 34-year firefighting veteran.

1in100MM – Episode 1: Firefighter, Chris

See what else Sharlyn has to say on her blog, the HR Bartender.

Most of us will never contribute the way Chris Merrick has, but most of us work hard, and try our best.

Show appreciation for the efforts your employees make on a daily basis with one, or all of these 11 Non-Traditional Ways to Reward Innovative Employees.

How do you explain what you do to other people?

Personally, I avoid saying that I work in social media at all costs because whenever I do… I see you judging me; don’t pretend like you aren’t!

Mihir Patkar has a suggestion that might solve this problem for me:

Answer “What Do You Do?” By Explaining How You Solve Problems.

But that opens-up a whole new can of worms.

What if the way you solve problems is even more awkward to explain than what you do?

If it is, you should probably give Annie Mueller’s article, How to Handle the Conflicting Demands of Your Core Actions, a read.

Annie’s post is full of excellent advice for getting to the core of what you do, and learning to make that the focus of your work.

If all else fails, and you happen to work in HR…

Just carry around a printed out copy of this meme:

Happy laboring, and Link Loving!

* “Fact” entirely made-up by the author. I mean, who has ever needed an excuse to eat barbecue!