This week, Referagig had the opportunity to attend Glassdoor’s Talent Warrior Road Show in Seattle and hear from a few of Glassdoor’s Talent Warrior’s on the Employer Branding and next-generation recruiting techniques they’ve rolled out at their respective companies.
Here are the 5 key takeaways from the event:
1. Profile prospective candidates and serve relevant content
Nuzhat Karim, Program Manager at EMC, shared EMC’s “EMC Me” job search portal, which she described as a “social portal serving highly relevant and engaging content” to prospective applicants. She gave a demo of the custom-built solution, which allows job seekers to provide information about themselves, after which they are presented with content pulled from the web relevant to their interests, as well as job postings from EMC’s career site (powered by TalentBrew) relevant to those interests.
Action item: Be creative about how you present your jobs to candidates on your career sites, and whenever possible, “profile” prospective applicants and present jobs and content that is relevant to them specifically, instead of using a one-size fits all approach.
2. Promote your Employee Referral Program through LinkedIn
Tiffany Ligon, Director of Talent at Evolute Health, described how she has helped the company grow from 50 to over 800 employees in just 2.5 years. In an effort to boost the company’s employee referral program, Tiffany opted to send InMails to all of the Evolute employees she was connected to on LinkedIn (almost 100% of all employees) reminding them how to make referrals through the company ATS (Jobvite) and some tips on how to search LinkedIn for connections that might be a fit for open jobs. The result: a 50% increase in referral volume.
Tiffany also mentioned that Evolute hires about 1 in every 9 referred candidates, vs. about 1 in every 25 candidates they receive through Indeed.
Action item: Market your referral program through LinkedIn, where your employees are most likely to find talent they can refer into your organization.
3. Treat Recruiting as Marketing
Greg Rucker from Jobvite shared a few slides about the “marketing funnel” which online marketers treat as the holy grail of lead generation, and encouraged recruiters to use the same tactics in their recruiting. Candidates are leads that must be taken through all of the steps of the sales cycle through “closed”. Your recruiting CRM can help you manage this process.
We published a post on this subject at SourceCon in 2013. That post can be read here.
Action item: Talent Acquisition professionals should leverage their marketing colleagues to identify gaps in their recruiting funnels.
4. Reward Referral Program Participants
Cindy Cloud described how she identified employees who had been participating in Informatica’s referral program, but have not had a referred candidate hired, and found ways to recognize and reward them for their efforts. By doing this, she reminded employees of the importance of referrals to the company, and gave what may have been otherwise dis-encouraged or engaged employees a reason to re-focus on how they could contribute to the referral program.
Action item: Reward employees who make referrals that get hired financially, but find ways to recognize and reward all active participants in the referral program.
Cindy Cloud asks audience members if their companies have active Employee Referral Programs
5. Pay Attention to your Glassdoor Reviews
Alison Hadden, Director of Marketing at Glassdoor, shared statistics and insights on how popular Glassdoor Employer reviews have become for job seekers. The metrics speak for themselves, the majority of job seekers will visit your company’s Glassdoor page and read reviews before determining whether or not to pursue a career with your organization. Companies can no longer afford to ignore the positive or negative effect reviews can have on your talent acquisition strategy, whether you are a company with 50 employees or 50,000.
She also described how Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff personally responds to Employee Reviews on Glassdoor every Friday afternoon.
.@glassdoor reviews & CEO ratings give investors great insight. #CultureMatters $Z #zillow http://t.co/DjExejDMmC
— Spencer Rascoff (@spencerrascoff) May 2, 2014
Action item: Ask your CEO to respond to Employee Reviews on Glassdoor immediately – if you don’t have any reviews for your company, find creative ways to get some!
In summary, the event provided some proven strategies from the field on ways to make an immediate impact on your company’s recruiting strategy. It’s clear that talent acquisition professionals are paying more attention today on their employer brand then ever before, due in large part to the social media-influenced world we live in.
If you have not yet had a conversation with your executive team about “employer branding” it might be time to do that, sooner rather the later.
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