Link Love

Ripped from the headlines (Buzzsumo), we’re bringing you the hottest (most shared on LinkedIn) social recruiting articles of the week. I don’t know about you, but I love using Buzzsumo to see what’s trending on the internet. Personally, I use Buzzsumo to find out about the latest social media releases, HR Tech news, and social recruiting articles. Then I share these articles here with you our beloved readers. Although I’ll probably have to find a new link loving strategy now... According to Buzzsumo, here are the most shared social recruiting articles this week: The first is actually targeted at job seekers, not employers or recruiters, but it’s an interesting reminder that job seekers also struggle with social recruiting best practices!

Social media use says what resume can't to recruiters The next article is a must read for employers.

5 Reasons Why Your Social-Recruiting Strategy Isn't Working Abby Perkins’ tips are blunt and to the point. I’m not sure that I agree with her third point, You’re Sticking to the Basics, as it actually serves many employers well to keep their social recruiting simple. But her fourth point, You’re Being Reactive Not Proactive, is bang on!

Apparently it’s trendy to be critical of employers and their use of social media...

Employers Love Social and Mobile Recruiting--But They Don't Know How to Do It (Infographic) This one comes to us from Inc. (no wonder the engagement is sky high!) The information presented is mostly taken from Jobvite's latest recruiting survey results. Jobvite inspired infographics are another hot trend this week and Sharlyn Lauby’s first page Buzzsumo post proves it! Recruiters: Target Your Audience [infographic] 

Next up: How Social Media is Changing College Recruiting This article is specific to sports recruiting and doesn’t transfer much to other fields of recruiting, but it’s a very interesting piece. Did you know that if handled incorrectly, the universities can face serious penalties and sanctions from the NCAA (over social media posts concerning recruiting), even if the communication comes from someone outside the university athletic department?! The Social Tester got a lot of engagement with yet another post blasting recruiters.

How to Help Your Recruiters Create a Great First Impression The article warns employers that “some recruiters are creating a bad first impression of [their] company.” Eep! Oh, and guess who made it on to Buzzsumo’s first page for social recruiting... We did!

The Jobcast blog’s post, Social Recruiting Lessons Inspired by Facebook Rooms, made it. Barely. But we’re still pretty happy about it. Enjoy these links and stay social. PS. I did not include three other pieces of content that were on Buzzsumo’s front page because 2 of them  had nothing to do with social recruiting and the other was in a language that I do not speak, and therefore could not vet.

This week has been an absolute dream for social recruiters. Mostly because of all the buzz around Jobvite’s 2014 Social Recruiting Survey. In fact, almost all of this week’s article are in response to it.

So I should probably go read it now…

Jobvite’s 7th Social Recruiting Survey

This survey is a font of knowledge for anyone in the business of hiring.

It’s full of interesting tidbits about how today’s job seekers are using social media, and how recruiters are responding.

Jobvite’s survey is free, but you must give them your info in order to access it… and it’s really long!

If you don’t have all day, then check out:

How Recruiters Are Using Social Media in 2014

This article is a summary of Jobvite’s survey, highlighting the most salient of its findings for you so that you can save a little time and effort.

For a more visual summary have a look at MediaBistro’s blog post:

73% of Recruiters Spending More on Social Networks

This article is full of beautiful, sharable graphics. Like this one…

Job Seekers Rely on Facebook, But Recruiters Prefer LinkedIn

It seems like everyone’s on a Jobvite kick this week! This article from Human Resources Online interprets the results from Jobvite’s survey to better understand the social media disconnect between recruiters/human resources and job seekers.

The author shares some interesting thoughts and ideas about the survey, instead of just summarizing its findings.

What Everybody Ought To Know About Social Recruiting

Identify, Follow, Share, And Engage, these are the key factors for effective social recruiting according to Alexandra Vornle.

Her article is a wonderful follow up to all this research as it provides simples steps for anyone looking to make their hiring process a little more social.

Is Your Social Recruiting Cart Before The Application Horse?

Or, if your application process sucks, then no amount of social recruiting can save you.

Katrina Collier’s article is an excellent reminder that the process of directing candidates from your Facebook job ad to the application “landing page” is as important as the ad itself.

She goes on to provide some excellent tips for improving this part of the recruiting process.

It’s a must read!

For more great advice about improving candidate experience, I highly recommend our recent article:

3 Tips For Improving Candidate Experience From a User Experience Designer

Happy link loving and stay social!

It’s time to get your learn on with this week’s top articles!

When Performance Reviews Simply Aren’t Enough – Anna Carroll “For the average Millennial, feedback is indeed ‘the breakfast of champions.’ ” – Click to Tweet

I agree with this statement 100% and I’m willing to bet most of my fellow Millennials would too. Anna Carroll’s excellent article explains the importance of real-time feedback especially in regards to GenY. Oh, and hot tip: If you don’t have time for a constructive feedback conversation, just use emojis!

But First, A Single Source Of Business Truth – Kevin Grossman “It’s time to answer the talent analytics call!” According to Kevin, HR and recruiters need to step-up their data game, as it is essential for moving away from a reactive hiring model to a more effective, organized, and proactive one.

#HRTech Gossip - ToddRaphael Because who doesn’t love being in the know?! This blog post shares a little of what Todd Raphael picked up at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas.

4 Tips to Drastically Improve Your Career Site Now – Shannon Smedstad “Whether it’s a consumer or career site, you have to give users just the right amount of information to know what to do next.” This post gives excellent advice for improving candidate experience by putting the jobseeker first.

101 Super Effective Ways to Reward Employees – By Peter Economy According to a poll conducted by Maritz Research, employees who are recognized on the job are:

• 5 times more likely to feel valued

• 7 times more likely to stay with the company

• 6 times more likely to invest in the company

• 11 times more likely to feel completely committed to the company

Sooo… You should definitely read Peter’s article! Have a lovely Wednesday and stay social!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

In case you didn’t know, I am a woman. Yes, most of my posts reference sci-fi, comic book heroes, and my many failed attempts at mastering Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, making my gender glaringly obvious. But just in case you had any doubts left, I wanted to clear things up. I am woman, hear me roar. We recently welcomed another female member into the Jobcast fold, making our core team an even 50/50 split of men to women. This is a pretty rare thing for our industry. But it doesn’t have to be. Our founders, Ryan and Johnny, know a thing or two about recruiting. They’ve both been working in the field of HR Tech for over thirteen years, and their experience has helped them to find, and recruit qualified female talent. Why does this even matter? Diversity makes teams stronger, women on staff can provide insights into female customers, and according to research out of MIT and Carnegie Melon, having women on a team makes it smarter! Today’s links are all about how to recruit women. Let’s start with something controversial! Fast Company shares an interview with author Vivek Wadhwa, Calling Silicon Valley Out on Its Gender Problem. You’ve probably heard the stat: Women will only apply for jobs if they meet 100% of the qualifications. – Click to Tweet

In comparison to men who will apply if they meet 60% of a job ad’s stated qualifications. This info is often used to suggest that women need to put more faith in themselves.  But Tara Mohr provides a more complex, and researched back explanation for the phenomena, which will help you better understand why more women aren’t applying for your jobs. After learning more about the female applicants’ psychology, here are some straight up tips for recruiting and retaining women in tech.

This advice is actually applicable to any field, but when it comes to gender diversity, tech needs all the help it can get! The last article I’m going to share isn’t about recruiting women, or gender diversity. HR expert, and Chief Writer at blogging for jobs recently published what she calls, The Hardest Blog Post I’ve Ever Had to Write. This article deals with an issue that is very important for women in the workplace, but is rarely discussed: bereavement policy and miscarriages. Jessica’s writing is brave, bold, and an essential part of the gender diversity dialogue. Thank you for reading, and happy link loving from the guys and gals at Jobcast.