Link Love

Social recruiting is still confusing for a lot of people.

There are so many different networks, strategies, and stats to consider that it is easy to get overwhelmed.

This leads many a smart HR professional to put social media on the back burner.

Considering job seekers increasing use of social networks to look for work and the role that social media plays in mobile-friendly candidate experience, this tactic just isn’t practical.

Which is why I was so happy to see Recruiter.com’s latest As Away feature titled What Do Recruiters Need to Know About Social Media?

In it Matthew Kosinski poses this question to a group of recruitment experts:  

Social recruiting is all the rage — but what do recruiters really need to know about social media in order to be the best in the business? Share your tips and tricks!

 The answers are full of smart actionable tips that you can apply to your own social recruiting.

Real Strategies to Organically Growing Your Social Audience – Travis Huff

In this article Travis provides several solutions for one of social recruiting’s biggest challenges: Getting more fans and followers.

His tips may be directed towards marketers but they are equally relevant to any company trying to get more ROI for social recruitment efforts.

The Most Buzzed-About Social Recruiting Posts of the Week – Jodi Ordioni

(YouTube video no longer exists) Jodi shares three excellent social recruiting posts, one for Facebook, one for Twitter, and one for YouTube.

All three are definitely worth checking out and borrowing from.

Why Your Employees are the Key to Talent Brand Bliss – Stephanie Bevegni

No matter what network or medium you choose to use for social recruitment you should always get your employees involved in the process.

According to Stephanie, candidates will trust your employees and what they have to say about your employer brand 3x more than they trust your CEO.

Stephanie explains how this and several other factors make employees the best ambassadors for your employer brand.

Nick Fury’s Guide to Assembling Your Team – Natalie Morgan

I saved the best for last.

This article is also the least related to social recruiting because Nick Fury would never be so overt as to use Twitter or Facebook to reach out to potential Avengers…

In fact I doubt his highly secretive modus operandi allows for any use of social networks whatsoever.

Social media use aside as Natalie points out, Nick Fury is a talented recruiter and has a lot to teach about talent acquisition!

Enjoy these links and stay social!

Quality over quantity is the key to pretty much everything.

Happiness, healthy eating, and, of course, social recruiting!

You do not have to incorporate every social network or type of content into your social recruitment strategy in order to be successful.

You do have to use the tools that you select well.

This week’s top 5 HR and recruiting blog posts will help you do just that!

We’ve put together a selection of articles to help you create an excellent recruiting video, source with Twitter, get started on Instagram, and understand content curation.

LinkedIn’s Tips to Making a Great Recruitment Video – Casey Fleischmann

Adding recruiting videos to your social strategy has been shown to significantly boost application volume and engagement.

This short explainer from LinkedIn will solve your recruitment video woes for good.

You’ll learn how to use your smartphone effectively for shooting your video, what to do about sound and why it matters, what kind of content to focus on.

7 Steps to Getting Your Brand’s Instagram Channel off the Ground – Dorien Morin-Van Dam

Brands like Starbucks have shown that Instagram can be an extremely effective social recruiting tool.

The network is hugely popular and effective for attracting younger candidates.

But Instagram is not a good fit for every company.

If you are thinking of making Instagram a part of your social recruitment strategy, then I highly recommended reading Dorien’s detailed article.

Along with providing a guide to getting started with Instagram, the article will also give you a sense of the necessary requirements and work involved in using the social network effectively.

A Recruiter’s Guide to Sourcing Twitter – by @FindSouth (Chris South)

Chris South is a Twitter recruiting expert. Pay attention to lists of Twitter influencers and accounts worth following in the field of HR and recruitment and you will definitely see Chris’s name mentioned.

This article is full of smart and actionable tips that you can use to transform Twitter into a powerful sourcing tool!

The Types of Content that Get Shared The Most – Chelsea Hejny

Content is still king, but the type of content that rules is always shifting.

This article/infographic shows how popular different types of content were at different times throughout last year. It also explains a bit about each type of content.

The Difference Between Content Sharing and Content Creation – Kimberlee Morrison

Do you know the difference?

You probably do… But this infographic goes into detail about why both content sharing and content creating play an important role in your social media strategy.

Enjoy these links and stay social!

There are few elements so essential to the workday as a cup of coffee. This magical beverage helps us survive boring meetings, early morning shifts, and email overload. And, according to a collaboration by CareerBuilder and Dunkin’ Doughnuts, coffee can even help us build relationships with our coworkers.

Coffee Lovers Rejoice: It Could Be Making You Better at Your Job – Lily Herman

This infographic provides some excellent excuses for indulging in a coffee break, or two, or three! A strong cup of coffee is also the perfect companion for tackling social media. But this infographic is a strong runner up:

How to Manage Your Social Media in 34 Minute a Day – Shortstack Shortstack’s infographic is an excellent step-by-step guide for covering all of your social media bases quickly and effectively. Or you could just delegate social media to a millennial…

How are Millennials Shaping the Workforce? – Brian Fanzo with Robin Carey As part of the #NewWaytoWork project Robin Carey interviews Brian Fanzo about how he and fellow millennials view work.

Recruiting Trends for 2015 – Sean Little It should come as no surprise that the trends Sean talks about in his article are strongly influenced by an increased focus on attracting millennial job seekers. Sean explains that companies must focus on transparency, mobile, and retention if they want to win the war for today’s talent.

5 Reasons Why I Love Working At Greatist - Ariella Coombs Ariella’s blog post is a perfect example of employer branding done right. She gives the reader a window into what it’s like working at Greatist and showcases the company’s culture and values in an extremely appealing way. If you need inspiration for creating employer branding content, then definitely check out Ariella’s article! Enjoy these links and stay social :D

Happy April Fools’ Day, if you are lucky enough to live in a country that celebrates it! Unfortunately, the Dutch do not do April Fools’ Day, so I have to indulge vicariously through my Canadian friends and the geniuses at Google. April Fools’ Day is an age-old tradition that can be extremely entertaining, but also somewhat tricky for human resources to navigate!

Like Scotland’s version of the holiday, which revolves around pinning fake tails, and kick me signs to each other’s rear ends, a combination that incorporates just enough potential for violence and sexual harassment to make even the most cool and collected of HR managers sweat. Tricky! Humour is relative; one person’s idea of a hilarious prank is another’s cause for filing a harassment suit, making April Fool’s Day one of the more controversial workplace holidays, and a favourite topic for HR and recruiting bloggers.

Use Humour to Engage Employees on April Fools’ Day! - Karen Huss Why not use April Fools’ Day to your own advantage? Instead of fearing the holiday, embrace it by pulling some of the office appropriate pranks Karen recommends. Getting your team laughing is great for morale, team building, and engagement… It’s also just plain fun!

April Fool’s Pranks You Can Pull at the Office and Not Get Fired - Elizabeth Bromstein Need more prank ideas? Elizabeth has you covered with an excellent list of jokes that you can pull at the office without hurting any feelings or inspiring any lawsuits. She even includes tutorials for the more complex pranks!

List Maker to Create List of Recruiting Lists – Todd Raphael Todd Raphael shows us how it’s done with a unique April Fools’ article. In it he writes about how “In one of the more curious decisions the talent-acquisition field has seen a recruiting vendor has decided to make a list of the 100 most influential lists of recruiting influencers.”

If You Think That Humour is Risky and Hard to Pull off, You Haven’t Seen These Corporate Videos – Rocco Sannelli Maybe the real takeaway from April Fools’ is to add more silliness into every workday! Rocco shares some examples of companies who inject humour into their recruitment process with great success.

The Top Office Pranks for April Fools’ Day - Dan Wisniewski In the spirit of keeping work fun, this infographic shows the best of the best of office pranks. Personally I’m really into the Jell-O stapler idea!

I have never been asked a quirky interview question. Not a single one! I’d like to think that if I was I would be able to fire back with a witty answer, but after reading through Glass Door’s list of the strange questions job seekers get asked… I’m not sure how I would fair when faced with the quirkier side of human resources.

The questions, gathered from companies in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and France, range from the unusually specific: “Can you calculate how many tennis balls are used during the course of Wimbledon?” – Accenture Analyst job candidate. To the downright weird: "Is batman a super hero?" – AlphaSights. Check out the rest of the questions on the Glassdoor blog.

Top Oddball Interview Questions of 2015 – Glassdoor Another equally interesting, yet admittedly less funny study released this week covers the use of analytics to explain the effect of social media marketing on branding.

You Know Social Media Is Advancing Your Brand—Now Prove It! -  Conference Board of Canada This new research from the Conference Board of Canada is helpful for anyone who needs to distill and edit data to clearly demonstrate the impact of social media on their business. A great read for anyone looking to improve their social recruiting.

Recruiters – It’s Time to Embrace Your Inner Troll! - Joshua Jones Joshua Jones explains how human resources can source passive candidates and gain insight into competitors’ employer brands by trolling with a new app called Canary.

Facebook’s Ad Images Checklist - David Cohen A cheat sheet to help you choose what images to use for your Facebook recruitment adds.

7 Cringe Worthy Crimes LinkedIn Users Make – Marisa Sanfilippo Are you making any of these LinkedIn blunders? I was definitely guilty of number 3 when I first joined the network!

#1 Secret To Being A Savvy Recruiter - Careeralism I was shocked to learn that the answer is not providing candidates with delicious snacks. According to Careeralism the secret to great recruiting has more to do with the way that you communicate with job seekers than feeding them!

Bonus link because I care about your general happiness as well as your hiring process:

10 Habits That Will Make You Happy Today (Even if Life Isn’t Going Your Way) – Alexander Heyne I’ve implemented some of these tips already and highly recommend the article. Happy link loving!

I have never applied for a job via mobile, but the last time I was looking for work Swype Keyboard did not exist, so what do I know?! Personal experience aside, mobile is one of the biggest trends in recruitment. We all know the importance of having a mobile-friendly career site and companies all over the world are investing top dollar in making their application process mobile. The results are mixed. Chipotle recently launched a mobile recruiting app and they’ve seen great results.

Now You Can Apply at Chipotle with Your Mobile Device According to this press release, within one month of launching their app, Chipotle has received 5, 000 applications via mobile (approximately 20% of their total application volume.) Chipotle is a massive brand with a younger talent pool. Their success with mobile recruitment is not necessarily representative of the average employer. That’s where this next article comes in handy.

Mobile Recruiting - You Need It, But Results May Vary... – By Kris Dunn When Kris ran two months of mobile recruitment numbers for his company Kinetix he found that less than 1% of their applications came from mobile. Kris still believes that having a mobile recruitment strategy is essential, but you’ll have to read his article to learn why!

How Recruiters and Job Seekers Use Social Media - From Career Glider More stats on mobile recruiting, as well as social recruiting and candidate behaviour presented in a beautiful infographic.

A Conversation: Top Influencers in HR And Recruiting - By Paul DeBettignies

A fantastic exploration of the use, importance, and accuracy of influencer lists. Read the comments and contribute yourself to get the most out of Paul’s piece.

Why Your Employees Are Leaving (and How You Can Win Them Back) - By John Ruhlin I certainly hope that your employees aren’t jumping ship on mass, but if they are, then John’s blog post is just what the doctor ordered!

5 Stages of the Human Resources Life Cycle in Need of Improvement - Margaret Jacoby A simple, but wonderfully written article about the cyclical nature of recruitment and how a few small changes can improve the process for everyone. Enjoy these links and rest of your week! Oh and just in case you haven’t already, check out our white paper to Learn the Basics of Facebook Recruiting.

Before I post this week’s links, I’d like to share with you a cautionary tale of hiring horror.

My husband Leif is a UX genius  lead product designer by profession, so his particular set of skills and experience are in high demand and very useful when applying for jobs.

So useful in fact that someone, let’s call him “John”, claimed Leif’s work for Silk.co (a fantastic data visualization app) as his own in an attempt to prove that he had desirable skills to a potential employer.

John also claimed honesty as one of his core values on LinkedIn :/

Thankfully the potential employer was smart enough to do a thorough reference check and learned that John had never worked for Silk.

This reference check saved the employer a lot of time, money and tears.

You have been warned!

Now here are this week’s best HR and social recruiting articles 😀

The Unholy Trinity of HR: Reference Checks – by Dawn Burke

Prepare to be warned again, but this time with the added benefit of Dawn’s useful advice.

This article also contains my favorite quote of the week:

“If you think references are irrelevant, unimportant or worthless YOU ARE NUTS. CUCKOO. MAD AS A HATTER. BELONG IN A BOOBY HATCH.”

What Recruitment Can Learn From Community Managers – by Andy Headworth

Social media and mobile technologies have significantly changed the recruitment process, which is why Andy decided to attend a major conference for community managers.

In this article, Andy talks about what he learned and recommends 10 ways that he thinks all recruiters can learn from community managers.

How to Create a Company Blog That Attracts Talent – by Heather Huhman

Blogging is a powerful tool for building a positive employer brand, but only about 22% of employers make use of the medium for this purpose. If your part of the remaining 78% then Heather’s article is a must read.

9 Things to Considering When Creating a Mobile Friendly Recruitment Website – by Newman Stewart

3 in 5 job seekers are now using mobile devices to search for jobs. – Click to Tweet 

I’m willing to bet that number is actually on the low side! If you want to attract top talent your recruitment must be mobile. Newman’s article will help you navigate what it means to have a recruitment website that is truly mobile-optimized rather than just mobile-sort-of-okayish.

Google+ is Poised for a Big Breakup – by David Nield

Via Andy Headworth’s blog

Google Plus is beloved by many recruiters, including Andy Headworth mentioned above, but recent developments may make the network much less valuable for social recruiting.

Google+ is going to be split into separate services called Photos and Streams. It’s still not entirely clear what Streams will look like, but David speculates that this separation may put an end to G+ as a social network.

Do you use Google Plus to recruit? Do you think that this split will make the network less useful for recruitment?

Let us know in the comments!

I did not watch the Oscars… In fact, I completely forgot about them. Why would anyone choose to spend their evening watching beautiful, talented people be rewarded for great artistic feats when they could be reading about recruiting and human resources?! Why watch Broadway vet Neil Patrick Harris deliver an exciting musical theater performance when you could be watching a video about how to perform in your very own exciting recruiting video?

Your Guide to Making a Compelling Recruitment Video – By Rob Humphrey And really, you don’t learn any practical tips about filmmaking by watching the Oscars, whereas blog posts are full of useful movie making advice!

17 Essential Elements Of A Successful Millennial Recruiting Video - By Ryan Jenkins Honestly, I’m glad I missed John Travolta manhandling Idina Menzel’s face like a dummy in favour of reading about how not to use SEO like one.

SEO Recruitment For Dummies - By Roxanne Abercrombie

I do actually care a lot about The Lego Movie. In fact both our CEO Ryan St. Germaine and myself would like to make “Everything is Awesome” the official theme song for team Jobcast… But a motivational theme song is much less important to our company’s success than new info showing that social recruiting is now the top source of talent for recruiters in Southeast Asia!

Social networks rank foremost for two in three recruiters - by Jerene Ang Lastly, I may be completely alone in feeling this way, but I think Birdman was totally overrated whereas learning how to get the most out of HR Tech is a topic that deserves way more hype than it gets.

Success with Implementing HR Tech: Know Your Requirements - By Andrea Devers There is a small part of me that is curious about the best and worst dressed list, but I still haven’t finished reading Jobvite’s 2015 Job Seeker Nation Study... So the ball gowns are going to have to wait!

This morning I was thrilled to find a plethora of share worthy articles in my reader, making compiling this week's Link Love a total breeze. As per usual I’ve put together 5 of the best HR and recruitment related articles to share with you. On a completely unusual note, Sports Illustrated is the source of my pick for #1 blog post of the week!

How Social Media is Shaking Up Recruiting; Punt, Pass, and Pork – By Andy Staples Did you know that the NCAA forbids coach-recruit communication on Snapchat? I certainly did not. Andy’s article for Sports Illustrated magazine shares interesting tidbits like this along with a fascinating look at how campus sports recruiters like Matt Dudek, Director of On-Campus Recruiting and Player Personnel at the University of Arizona are using social media to make their recruiting efforts significantly more successful. According to Dudek, “The power of social media is really second to none in recruiting.” – Click to Tweet

A meme Matt created for their social recruitment campaign!

Finding Talent: Set Your Sites on Social Media – By Rebecca Lewis Rebecca gives some excellent social recruitment advice geared mainly towards start-ups, but useful for anyone.

How Recruiters and Job Seekers Use Social Media in 2015 – Infographic by Career Glider Interesting stats about the current state of social recruiting and how employers plan on growing their use of social media for hiring in the future make this infographics an excellent resource. The awesome graphics make it fun. What’s not to love?

There IS a War for Talent in 2015 – By Will Thomson According to Will 2015 is going to be the most competitive year for recruitment since 1999, in his words “2015 will be a blood bath!” Will stresses the fact that this isn’t entirely a bad thing as it means a lot of the candidates that you’ve been looking to hire away from other jobs are now more open to a change of careers. But the same can be said about your current employees, so make sure you have an effective retention program and recruitment strategy in place!

New Social Recruitment Platform Can Make You Money – By Steve Taggart

GigPlug is an app that matches its users’ social contacts with a database of open jobs. Users are then prompted to referral their contacts for the jobs that they match up with. Successful referrals can garner rewards of up to £2 500. Needless to say I have downloaded this app… So far I have been sorely disappointed with its matching algorithm, the app suggested that I recommend a very talented UX designer/developer for an office management role, not cool! But matching algorithms are extremely complex so I would still like to give GigPlug the benefit of the doubt and see how they improve and grow. I’d love to hear your thoughts on GigPlug. Have you tried it? Is it something you would use as a recruitment tool? Or maybe as a way to make a little cash on the side? Let us know in the comments!

I hope you’re all having a fantastic week so far! Here are a few awesome reads to make your workweek even better:

Are You Making the Most of Social Media Recruitment? – Sarah Willis Sarah gives some great advice for making sure that you use your social networks to their fullest possible recruitment potential.

#FirstInHR: Using the Power of Social to Recruit - HR Kitchen I like this article because it explains the all too often neglected topic of candidate’s rights. Definitely worth a read!

New Ways of Working Report: Road Map For How Workplace Will Evolve - China Gorman China Gorman provides a summary of the recently released New Ways of Working report. The report explains what key drivers are changing the way we work and what those changes will be.

What Does House of Cards and Employee Personalities Have In Common? EVERYTHING. - Bridget Webb Have you ever wondered how your work personality matches up with those of the characters on House of Cards? If not, then you should probably take the rest of the day of to watch every single episode of House of cards and then read this hilarious blog post.

Top 6 Facebook Apps For Recruitment - Sophie Deering We’re famous! At least according to Sophie Deering who included Jobcast in her list of the best Facebook Apps for Recruitment.