Well I certainly think it is the question businesses need to be asking of themselves in these times – when you add the speed of digital progress together with the rising expectations of clients and the cost/uncertainty of investing in expensive specialists to deliver the quality of solution an agency wants to be associated with.

So anyway – to raise the point we created the following advert (placed on the recruitment ad industry B2B social networking site www.MyLongLunch.com) that then leads through to a campaign specific landing page that offers (what I feel to be) some insightful video content, from some very bright people, about how the world is becoming one where collaboration is the only way to succeed. There are 3 videos, and I’ll say in advane that they’re quite long – but go have a peep and if you’re interested you could always bookmark them to come back to again sometime, but I hope you find them as interesting (and compelling) as I did.

MPU banner as running on MyLongLunch.com

I was recently approached by OnRec.com (”The Magazine for Online Recruitment around the world”) to contribute to an article. You can read the article here – Using social media and Web 2.0 effectively (with additional contributions from Jamie Leonard, Euan McDonald & Lucian Tarnowski). I thought I’d post my full thoughts here too.

How can recruiters use social media and Web 2.0 effectively to engage candidates?
The best way to use social media to engage candidates is by first ensuring you understand your target audience. If you have an idea of where they may already be congregating online or what they’re consuming (by way of web content) then it’s a great idea to ‘listen’ to them first whilst you work out what you can bring to the party. If you’re hoping that a couple of tweaked press releases every other month will in any way be engaging then you’re setting yourself up for a very public fall, or worse: indifference.

Put yourself in the audiences’ shoes because they’re asking “What’s In It For Me” and if you can’t answer that with some degree of empathetic certainty then best manage your expectations right down from the start. Engagement requires the buy in of both parties – and if you aren’t offering anything compelling or interesting then you can’t really expect to reap the benefits.

But once you are confident that you know your audience then the best advice is just to get on with it. You’ll soon know whether you’re hitting the right note and raising any interest, and then: keep it up; keep listening; stay true to your brand values; show integrity; keep looking for other avenues to broaden that reach. Overcoming the initial inertia is probably the hardest part of the whole thing, after all then you’re just doing online what you do in the real world.

What are the benefits and also pitfalls to avoid when using social media and Web 2.0?
The very least you should achieve is an enhanced search engine profile (Search Engine Optimisation), because the search engines love regularly updated content – and you should be producing that if nothing else. But the full rewards, if you get it even modestly right, are very compelling:

• The potential to broaden your recruitment horizons – reach outside of traditional, potentially stagnant talent pools and desperate active job seekers.
• The opportunity to change preconceptions about your business that might otherwise have harmed your recruitment activity (often without you knowing).
• Influence / balance online conversations that would otherwise negatively affect your employer brand.
• Reach passive candidates, establishing and then maintaining a front of mind presence with them.
• Differentiate from the competition – tangibly.

The main pitfall to avoid has certainly got to be underestimating the time commitment this will require. For some people the ability to write engagingly comes more easily than for others, but either way once you’ve started any such activity then you have to keep it up, otherwise that can often be perceived more negatively than not starting out at all (stagnant blogs or poorly updated social media groups can speak louder of your organisation than the outdated content). Another pitfall is not being prepared. If you haven’t listened then you won’t know what you might come up against, you won’t add any value and worst of all, you might not have anything interesting to say (in the target audiences eyes at least).

And finally it’s important to remember that nowadays people “trust peers over marketers”, so be ready to take the rough with the smooth as people will look to openly validate your messages against other (sometimes disgruntled, often highly cynical) commentary. If your company isn’t willing for you to be open and honest, perhaps your Employer Brand is actually as much fiction as fact, then maybe it’s best to get that right first before opening yourselves up to the full frankness of the web.

How do you see social media and Web 2.0 developing and influencing the recruitment industry in the future? What will be the next big change?
I think that web will increasingly force the transparency of employer propositions’, certainly within key skills markets. Companies will begin to understand the tangible business value of being THE “Employer of Choice” and invest in managing their Employer Brand more fastidiously, doing so from the inside-out, also realising the benefits of actively encouraging an open culture to further enhance the external Employer Brand.

Potential candidates on the other hand will increasingly hear about jobs through any number of web touch points, peer to peer networks being increasingly ubiquitous, but will also have more and more sophisticated “search agent” type tools that will scour the web on their behalf, sifting through information and collating “must read” lists that will include appropriate job opportunities and articles/comments about previously flagged target prospective employers, all bundled together with their other daily news and active interest subjects feeds.

And what this will all mean is a significant shift in the balance of recruitment spend from what is still overwhelmingly focussed on attraction based activity to a far greater investment in long-term Employer Brand management and broad reach digital engagement activity. Why? Because companies will grow to realise that the new web paradigm is more a technology underpinned attitudinal one than a new medium to be controlled, so getting someone’s attention becomes a (still) crucial but fundamentally relatively smaller part of the overall business picture.

And the next big change?
Joe Public and the Corporate World have a long way to go to get up to speed with what is possible today. The vast majority still barely get Web1.0, so there has to be a period of catch up and consolidation as the technology already here gets converged and simplified – and that’s actually what is going to be the big change: a massive swell of new and existing internet users switching from just accessing 2 or 3 elements of the web resource to becoming immersed in the complete social web.

The systems, technology and downright mindboggling cleverness underpinning the web will continue to evolve at a lightning pace too (not least in pursuit of the next next big change – The Intelligent Web), but I believe a large part of the focus will switch from “what” can be done to “how” it’s done – most importantly delivering the user experience that enables the greatest number of people to engage with each other as efficiently as possible. And with the Internet increasingly being where we store our information and where the software we use runs from (as opposed to on our local hard drives) so barriers to access will continue to diminish and remote functioning capability improve, all furthering the swell of immersed users – welcome to the age of Cloud Computing.

OK, perhaps a bold statement, but I really can’t think of another presentation on Employer Branding I’ve seen that really does the ‘hitting the nail on the head’ job in terms of content as well as this (picked this up on ERE.net). Of course maybe I’ve not seen that many – please comment if you have seen better.

Anyway – if you, like me, are passionate about Employer Branding and think that taken seriously and done properly it could actually be THE most powerful business tool to leverage in the ultra-networked world we increasingly live in, then my advice is get yourself a meeting room, sign yourself out or just make yourself a coffee and close the door / put on your headphones – this is excellent stuff (but be warned, you’ll need an hour).

The presentation is by a chap called Frank Lane who has, quite literally, been there and done it. He’s written a book called “Killer Brands”  (which despite being a self-confessed rubbish book reader, with 4 already on my “to read” pile collecting dust, I’ve just ordered) and explains from his first hand experiences just how powerful, with quantitative proof, getting your employer brand right can be and why in the long run it’s the business investment that you can’t afford to overlook.

Frank’s presentation style is old school – but stick with it – the man’s got great insight. He’s literally been there, done it and clearly deserves the t-shirt he wears. Added to which as his case builds the clarity with which he sets out his perceptions makes it all, I think, phenomenally powerful.

Oh – and 3 things that particularly jumped out at me:

1. c.36mins – ICG Commerce – where they brought Marketing & HR into one department into one entity. This is exactly the approach that I think more companies will start to adopt in the future (as set out in this post from earlier in the year).

2. Bit of a not thinking/not getting it summary from the Brendon (Production Manager at ERE media doing the hosting) – saying people will “walk away from this… knowing how to market themselves as a more desirable choice than the competition” – because it won’t tell you that. What it will do, hopefully, is give you clear explanation and proof based examples as to why an inside out approach, recruiting and retaining the best talent to then inspire and deliver the best product / best customer experience and from that grow a successful business, is the only long term business strategy that makes sense.

3. And one of the questions at the end asked how in the Internet age where it’s far easier to see the comments/opinions of disaffected employees you avoid situations of negative alignment (where your marketing is trying to say one thing but the people commenting disagree so loudly that it counters, in some cases even ruins, your efforts). Frank’s response: “Tell the truth & live the truth… [it’s] fundamental to branding in any category, but now more important than it ever has [been]”. But for me most important of all when thinking about your business: “the first thing to do to get good people is deserve them.”

To be honest I’d give my right arm to work with a business where the CEO had watched and “got” this – so if you know of any then send them this link and tell them we could do some beautiful things together, in the short-medium term for their bottom line, in the long term for their overall business success.

Hope you find the time to enjoy/be inspired/go fight the fight with your business.

Another day and another collaborative website launch to put on our “Delivered” list.

Again this one was done working with the lovely people at ThirtyThree and to be honest was finished back at the end of last year – but with a bit of tweaking here and there and some lengthy sign off delay it only went live yesterday. But live it is, and although a modest little affair we think a nice little campaign style site using some very well produced corporate videos. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to better connect with the company ATS (in this instance Taleo – unfortunately, IMO, demonstrating all the front end shortcomings and inflexibility of those big systems), but hopefully the content is compelling enough for the candidate to bear with the hoops they’re required to jump through before finding and completing an application.

Anyway – Lady & Gent – we’re pleased to reveal www.whereitshappening.com (a nice URL for all you vanity url fans out there )

Bombardier - Where It's Happening recruitment site

It’s been a busy ole time over the past couple of months for Tony & his techy mates as we built and delivered, in conjunction with our ole buddies at ThirtyThree, a brand new shiny careers section for Virgin Group.

So what’s it do? What’s it do? Well with so many different businesses within the Virgin empire but stunning brand resonance, it was clear to Virgin Management that rather than just offering potential candidates a few pages of written content and pointing them off to careers pages here and there (where they existed), it would make sense to capitalise and enhance the Virgin Employer Brand through actually providing an engaging experience that not only helped people better understand the Group and where they might be best suited looking for opportunities, but also offered a live job search facility. But with a couple of the larger recruiting businesses using i-GRasp for their Applicant Tracking Solution (ATS) and others with no such facility (and one already down the path of going with another ATS provider altogether), the back end solution had to be a little, well, bespoke – just how we like ‘em

ThirtyThree project managed the overall project (no small task with 8 distinct businesses actively involved and various other parties too) and produced the flat design, flash work and content – we pulled that all together with a job search and back end that offered each business a dedicated ATS facility together with taking feeds from the 3 i-GRasp systems to post their roles and direct interested applicants back to their system to apply. There’s also a Job Alert facility and Talent Bank resource for Group wide access – and all of this is replicated (to different styling and with some functionality modifications) on the Virgin Intranet. Oh – and it’s also all been built on a Virgin Server.

So go have a look (click on the image below) – we hope we like what you see and appreciate the smoothness of what you don’t

Virgin Portal external facing home page

And just for the stats nerds amongst you – within less than a full day since launch (with no accompanying fanfare) there have been:

• 48 click thru’s to specific vacancies on businesses running i-GRasp
• 3 direct applications to the one role posted from a business using this ATS
• 24 external candidates who have registered their interest with an application to the Talent Bank

Not a bad little start.

So Amazon are just about to launch their second generation kindle e-book reader – and as someone who’s an avid e-reader (you’ll often catch him squinting at a PDA where he’s downloaded the latest Terry Goodkind) my partner in crime here, Tony, immediately fired through the news of it’s impending release.

You can see the old (left) and new version (right) here:

The old & the new Amazon e-Reader - Kindle

It seems those that like new things are going to be lapping it up whatever – one comment seemed to sum it up: “Still ugly. Still Expensive. Still want one”.

But what we can’t work out is why they’re keeping with the full keyboard. It just makes it too big – doesn’t it? And let’s face it – we all know it doesn’t have the capability of a netbook, so you’re not working on it – and if the developers don’t have the ability to create a complete iPhone-esque touch screen interface at this time (we all now that’s where this will go though) then surely they could create a simpler interface that could cope with all you’ll be doing on this version of the Kindle without eating up space? Others are managing to get a better balance e.g. Sony Reader (although there are many things that differentiate the Reader and the Kindle – not least Kindle’s wifi ability and a vastly greater library to chose from).

It’s still exciting to see the future evolving before our eyes (as we touched on in regards to ePaper in an earlier post this year), but I wonder if sometimes product designers lose sight of what they’re actually producing at this release time and detrimentally affect this generation of the product because of that – in this case (in our opinion/experience) an eReader where the keyboard just seems a little in the way and uneccessary.

Still – clearly Tony’s pushing to try and get one through on expenses whatever!

Just before Christmas rather than the usual cards we sent out some flat foam Christmas trees accompanied with a little festive decoration kit (glitter pens, cord & some sticky backed decoration cutouts) to some of the people we’ve worked with or otherwise had addresses for. A 3D greeting from 3D MarComms (see what we did there ) We’ve been meaning to bung something up about this since then – but we didn’t get many images back of completed trees so it kinda slipped our minds.

But we think it’s only fair that we acknowledge the effort of those that did send us shots back – and actually when you look into it then the response percentage was actually not too bad for Direct Mail (found this forum response illustrating what DM response rate norms are). Guess we just didn’t manage our own expectations re response

What we sent out

The raw pip my tree kit

The flyer that accompanied the kit

What we had back

We had 3 back (c.9% return rate) and so here they are in reverse order:

3rd place (purely because as judge and jury we felt that abusive language, no matter how clever, creative and highly amusing, can’t be allowed to be rewarded) goes to… well we’re not going to say who (in case it drags their online personal brand down – but you’ll know their work if you know them). Feel free to guess below if you like.

2nd place: Amanda Rubython (ThirtyThree). Good effort, but unfortunately proof (if any was needed) that Blackberry’s take rubbish photos (or else that the Alcohol induced shaking kicked in early this Christmas)

Amanda Rubython - pimped tree

And 1st place goes to those eager beavers at www.wikijob.co.uk. What we liked in particular is the attention paid to the image composition (nice tree footer guys!). A well deserved first to what we hope will be a winning team and site for 2009 & beyond too.

A wicked entry from WikiJobs - worthy champions

Prizes

So what do they win? Well clearly a plug on this blog (woo-hoo), but I’ll make sure we send a little something in post so they can toast their year starting success.