Starting now…we’ve moved our blog to a new URL: http://smashfly.wordpress.com/ so that we can enable other SmashFly people to start blogging about this recruitment marketing space.

We’ve copied over all the old content…so starting today, please find us at the new blog url. We’ll also be updating the look/feel of our blog in the coming weeks.

There’s an interesting cover story over at Business Week entitled “Help Wanted, Why that’s a bad sign” . The article discusses the paradox that, in one of the worst recessions we’ve seen in many years, there are still 3 million jobs left unfilled.

The gist of the story is that we are going through a structural change in our jobs…many jobs being lost in the construction, manufacturing, and finance sectors while new jobs are being created in the education, health care and government fields. The problem is that the the people who have lost their jobs lack the skills for the new jobs being created. What is making the situation worse is that even if a person finds a job they are qualified for, they often can’t move because their current mortgage is more than their house is worth keeping them stuck where they are.

According to the study, there are still 2.2% of all jobs still unfilled. For those companies looking to hire, it’s becoming increasingly frustrating in their in-ability to find the right person when so many people are out of work. For these companies, trying new recruitment marketing techniques & technologies will become increasingly important…as they fight for the few people who are both qualified for their jobs, and able to relocate to the specific job location.

The article shows that for many companies, even in times of tough recessions,  they still require the right tools, technologies and solutions to help them reach and sell potential candidates on their unique job opportunities.

As always, you can learn more at our SmashFly website .

I came across this Ben Stein article entitled “The Sales Profession: Attention Must still be paid” , and found it interesting in the fact that I’ve never personally held a “sales” position. But the following paragraph struck home for me in my own dealings with exceptional sales people.

“In 1976, when I moved to Los Angeles, I desperately wanted a Mercedes 450 SLC, a car that was — even in used form — far more than I deserved or could afford at my entry-level, highly tenuous work as a scriptwriter. My salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills, Larry Anish, listened to my objections and simply asked, “Don’t you believe in your own future?” Of course, I bought the car.”

How perfect is that?

These types of sales techniques should not be lost on the recruitment world. At the end of the day, recruitment is about sales, and recruiters (or staffing firms) need to have the same type of messaging to convince candidates that they need this job, they deserve this job. I’m not talking about the candidate who is actively looking for a job…this is the guy who says “You had me at  paycheck”….he doesn’t need to be sold…he needs a paycheck! Is that the best fit for your position?

Most likely, the best person for the job already has a job. And it’s YOUR job to get the right sales pitch in front of him to convince him to consider another possibility. You need to find them and then pitch them. That’s were having the right technology & tools and understanding great sales techniques can help you convince this person that you have the right job at the right time for them. You need to convince them they need & deserve this job.

If your only sales tool to attract and inform candidates about job opportunities at your company is your current job descriptions…good luck! 🙂

In today’s competitive market, it’s time to start creating targeted, multi-media commercials that reach the hard to reach passive candidates and sell them on how great your company and job opportunity is.

Learn more at  SmashFly Technologies

I came across this blog entry entitled The Technology generation gap at work is oh so wide , which provided some basic stats on how different generations access online content. The  story isn’t particulary interesting to be honest….yes younger people spend more time online than the boomer generation…what a surprise!

But for me, it’s just another data point in how companies need to plan their recruitment marketing strategies. If the younger generation is spending more time on facebook, or twitter or whatever blog site they have…that should increasingly be the place companies try to reach them.

When I talk to companies about the current state of recruitment marketing, there are those that “get it” and are aggressively pursuing sophisticated recruitment techniques on the latest social media sites and tapping into the new channels that have been created. They are reaping the benefits. And yet…a majority have not made the transition from the old practice of leveraging the major job boards/staffing firms for their recruitment needs. …they continue with the same practices they put in place 5 years ago, which undoubtedly will continue to produce fewer and fewer results.

Times, technology, and recruitment practices are changing. In a down market, what better time to review your existing technology solutions and vendors, and see how you might implement a next generation recruitment marketing platform to tap into these new, exciting, and cost effective recruitment marketing techniques. We think you’ll find our WildFire platform a cutting edge solution in the recruitment marketing technology space.

Learn more about our solution at  www.smashfly.com .

Recruitment Marketing is all about data measurement and analysis. The only way you can improve your recruitment marketing effectiveness is to first understand how it’s working. Their are many different ways of measuring your job ads performance,  total views, apply clicks, applicants, and ultimately hires.  You can measure the ROI of your advertising by calculating Cost per view, or cost per applicant, or cost per hire.

Another important piece of data you should be measuring is WHERE your ads are being viewed. Having in depth knowledge of what parts of the country or world are interested in your jobs can help you create more targeted and personal job ads for candidates.

To that end, our WildFire Recruitment Marketing Platform now provides job specific and aggregated reports on where your jobs ads are being viewed, who is clicking apply, and which ones are converting to “applicants”. In addition, you can now filter by source, such as by job board, email campaign, by social network sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook…to see which boards or sources perform better in different parts of the country. And these reports & graphs are just a single click away from your recruiters if you are using any web based ATS system such as Taleo, Kenexa, SAP eRecruit, PeopleClick, Virtual Edge, etc.

Once you start learning where your ads are best performing for different types of jobs, you’ll be able to create customized targeted ads that speak directly to those candidates.

In the April issue of Staffing Industry Analysts, Sara Moss has written a very good article entitled “Leveraging Recruitment Media: It’s not just about jost posting anymore: multimedia and optimized job ads”

I highly recommend that anyone in the recruitment marketing or talent acquisition space read this article…it’s not just relevant to staffing firms but to recruitment  marketing in general. Sara does an excellent job of defining the new recruitment media options that are available to companies and  explains why staffing firms (and recruiters) need to leverage those services for a successful recruitment marketing strategy.  You should read the article, but one of her summary paragraphs is.

“Candidates are becoming demanding consumers, and their expectations about their online experience are on the rise. In order to engage them online, recruiter advertising must be more dynamic and interesting than ever before. At the same time, job postings and ads must be more widely distributed, both to job boards and to the Web destinations where potential candidates spend their time. Job ads must be presented to a very tightly defined niche group of targeted users and personalized to the candidate.”

and

“Job posting, once considered an administrative function, is now a skilled marketing role“.

I couldn’t agree more.

In this new world of recruitment marketing services & technology, Sara chose to highlight two companies that are on the leading edge of recruitment marketing …Spherion and SmashFly. We’re excited that the word is getting out about our WildFire platform, and Sara clearly “gets” what’s going on in this space…technology is quickly changing how companies connect with and recruit new candidates. The one correction to the article I would mention is that we’ve changed our terminology from a “Talent Marketing Platform” to a “Recruitment Marketing Platform”…which we feel better conveys what our solution provides.

I expect to see more and more companies starting to leverage these new technologies in the coming years.

You can learn more about our WildFire Recruitment Marketing Platform at the SmashFly Website.

My friend John Kamin forwarded me this link regarding a brief conversation regarding the effectiveness of video on career portals. On the forum, Craig endicott ends by saying  “I believe that video can be an effective part of the recruitment communications mix. “.

Putting up a static video on a career site is just the first step in how video can be leveraged in recruitment marketing. At SmashFly, we’ve introduced web commercial technology which advances this whole concept into an entirely new space…providing companies the ability to create customized flash videos for each job and having different formats to target different industries.

We are continuing to invest in this area. In the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing a new partnership with a video production company, which will provide our clients a single solution for the creative side of putting together the web commercials, having a video team come on site to shoot the video, doing the post production work, and finally integrating that into our web commercial technology that can then be leveraged by recruiters right from within their ATS.  We’re really excited about this space…lots of exciting news and examples will be showing up soon.

We’re doing a number of things to improve how we deliver information regarding our WildFire Recruitment Marketing Platform. One of those efforts is a new 5 minute presentation that provides a good high level overview of our solution, as well as a walkthrough of how it integrates with existing web based ATS systems such as Taleo, Kenexa, PeopleClick, SAP eRecruit, or any other web based solution.

We will be launching additional targeted presentations for each component of our platform, such as our CRM module, Web commercial technology, SEO/SEM solution, etc. We find that 5 minutes focused on one topic provides users the info they need without wasting a lot of their time.

You can access the presentation page here , but you’ll need a personalized passsword to access it. To do so, simply email me at mike at smashfly dot com, and i’ll be happy to provide you with one!

Our WildFire Recruitment Marketing Platform continues to grow its lead in providing the most sophisticated recruitment marketing services available to recruiters. We have integrated a number of new social networking services seamlessly into WildFire, enabling recruiters to automate the process of growing their social networks and drive more traffic to their career sites. And they can seamlessly leverage WildFire right from their favorite ATS system.

From one platform, recruiters can now post their jobs to their favorite job boards, kick off a targeted email campaign, run a google Adwords campaign, utilize an optimized SEO site,  and now promote their jobs direclty on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even their current blog service such as WordPress. WildFire automatically updates their facebook or twitter status and provides a new trackable link to their job on their careersite. Recruiters can then view the WildFire real-time marketing metrics report and see exactly how ALL of their ads are performing. Below we show a couple screenshots of how a recruiter, from a single report, can see how their ads are performing on Monster, CareerBuilder, Twitter, FaceBook,WordPress and DirectEmployers. They can see, in real time, the views, apply clicks, and total applicants from each site, switch to a graphical view, and then click on the metrics tab to get Cost per view, cost per apply click and conversion rates from views to apply clicks and conversion rates from apply clicks to applicants.

This report can be easily printed off and handed to the hiring manager, providing a tremendous amount of data on how the Ads are performing, which sources are working, and which ones aren’t.

WildFire makes leveraging & tracking these new social networks  just another component of a companys overall recruitment marketing strategy. You can learn more at http://www.smashfly.com

I came across this blog post by Chris Brogan entitled The Quest to Inspire Action , where he refers to a quote from Thomas Kempis : “The object of education isn’t knowledge, it’s action”

I found the post really interesting…it’s a simple statement, but it does provide a different viewpoint into how companies should be looking at how & why they communicate with customers, prospects and candidates.

As it relates to recruitment marketing, a company should be looking at their messaging in terms of inspiring action, not just knowledge. Your company needs to ask itself , “does our recruitment marketing inspire action from candidates?” Instead of just informing candidates about your job openings, do you have tools that help you inspire candidates? Does your message compell passive candidates to take action and reach out to you?

For most companies, i’d argue the answer is no. It’s easy to test…go search on Indeed or Monster or a site of your choice and search for a job you’d be interested in. Then take a look at what companies put in front of you when you click on their job ad. Is it compelling? Do any of those job descriptions make you want to apply to that company?  Most likely, after clicking on 4 or 5, you’ll quickly lose interest…they all look the same, the same format…a list of requirements and qualifications…INFORMING you of what they are seeking…but hardly inspiring any action to reach out to the company. Then try applying to a job…most likely you’ll spend 20 minutes filling out 15 forms…..now THAT’S inspiring…that inspires people to just say “forget it!” .

Of course for candidates who are actively searching…they’ll jump through any hoops you put in front of them… they NEED a job! But everyone knows that the perfect candidate for your job probably isn’t looking for a job right now….and if you want to reach THAT candidate, you’re gonna have to do more than throw out a standard job description.

That’s where you need better tools, tools that first help you get your message in front of those passive candidates, and then tools to help you build an inspiring “job presentation” that helps inspires the candidate to take action and reach out to you. Finally, you need the tools that make it EASY when that passive candidate does reach out. These people don’t need your job so if you are lucky enough to catch their attention, don’t force them to fill out 15 forms…because they probably won’t…

What you need is a recruitment marketing platform that does all three of those steps for you. It needs to:

1. Make it easy for you to distribute your job advertisement to candidates where they are on the web.
2. Provide you the tools to easily create compelling job presentations that inspire action.
3. Provide the tools that make it EASY for those passive contacts to reach out to your with their interest.
4.  Automate the entire process.

Our WildFire platform is such a tool….come learn more and start inspiring action with your recruitment marketing.