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12/22/2006 How to Make a Kick-Butt Recruiting Blog PortalZoe’s post on JobSyntax about whether job postings on blogs distract jobseekers, especially given that most of these postings are generic feeds (at best filtered by "category," whatever that means). It inspired my following take on the issue of what a recruiting blog should be. If you want to stand out from the crowd and develop a loyal following, I think you have to go as close as possible to one or the other of the following extremes: 1) Pure, clean blog: Just your postings, and ideally, just your own original thoughts, not repostings/links which is what Shally accurately described as the noise that turns most thinking people off to the blogosphere. Stick with it, and people who matter will come to find and appreciate you. Conversely, bloggers who add any content other than their own probably secretly wish to have a portal, not just a blog. That would potentially attract more visitors (jobseekers and otherwise), so I understand the motivation. But if you’re leaning that way, then do it right as a… 2) Blog-portal: If you’re an employer, you’re already investing in a career website. If you’re independent, I understand you may want to make money (or even a living!) from blogging. It’s possible, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I were doing it the way some are (i.e., backroom entrepreneurs who hire SEO gurus to create hundreds of vanity sites with autogenerated, repurposed content into some semblance of a targeted category and everything links to contextual ads and products sold with affiliate codes). I think the recruiting blog-portal (I didn’t make up this term) is a term not properly used – currently refers to any amalgamation of blogs related to employment – and needs to go much deeper than what I’ve seen. How it can be done well is to craft a truly useful portal that contains:
When you provide a greater range of content of interest, you increase the chance you can touch someone, then you have the potential to draw them in further to other parts of your blog-portal, and ultimately apply to and/or refer opportunities. Ultimately, blogs, jobs and anything else that supports the desired employer brand will become integrated with corporate websites. Third party sites trying to get a share of the job market will do the same. Do you know any companies doing portals this way? Did I miss anything? Am open to your suggestions. --Glenn Gutmacher P.S. On the last bullet about your own employees in the target group providing content, you can use pseudonyms to discourage poaching (e.g., anyone asking for columnist "Clyde Jones" immediately gets transferred to HR/Legal) but this does go a bit against the genuine feel you should be striving for. I’m ambivalent on this one. Recruiting.com, Talkdigger, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious 12/11/2006 When Phone Sourcing Doesn't Work, and What to DoQ: I am an Internet-focused sourcer who sometimes gets primary phone sourced data to expand upon. However, there are times I get high-profile names from high-profile companies, and I still can't find anything about them, whether I use major search engines and resume databases, ZoomInfo, etc. Why is this, and what can I do? A: Aha! You have encountered the only quality problem in name-gen by telephone (a/k/a telesourcing): misspellings. Unless the phone researcher is being very careful to validate spellings, name errors will creep into their deliverables. Sometimes it's because the source is providing names very quickly, has a strong accent or unclear speaking style. However, when someone is spitting out gold, the researcher may not want to interrupt that conversational rhythm, which asking for spellings might create. In your case -- since the leads are apparently high-profile ones who should have a decent Internet presence -- searching online later just by the name that was least likely to be misspelled (sometimes it's the first/given name, sometimes it's the last/surname) along with the job title, function and/or company name info will typically turn up links with the proper spelling that you need to fill the blanks. Ironically, this is typically the opposite of most sourcing functions that break out sourcing specialties: the online researcher supplies the phone researcher initially with data. The online deliverables may contain more instances of dated information and thus need validation, but you typically don't encounter the spelling errors that can cause the grief you cited! The only other quality problem that sometimes (very rarely) occurs with phone sourcing is purposely-misleading information. In this case, the employees of a targeted company have been warned that researchers are after certain passive prospects. They turn over such calls to designated competitive intelligence (CI) personnel who will cleverly feed the researcher false information. A good phone sourcer's radar will perk up when this happens, and cross-check the data with other sources to validate before submitting their deliverables. However, a relative newbie or a sourcer under a tight deadline to deliver a name-gen project may not take the extra step, and this shortcut comes back to bite them! Of course, this false info tactic can also be done online (e.g., posting false rumors to blogs, newsgroups, etc.) so every researcher must be careful to validate. I do not want this blog post to come across as anything against phone sourcing. As anyone I've worked with knows, I have the utmost respect for smart name-gen phone researchers, and can't imagine doing a comprehensive sourcing project without having at least one such person on my team. On a related note, I had the pleasure to meet a top third-party name-gen professional for the first time face-to-face last week, Krista Bradford. She participated with Shally and me as panelists for AOEP's Challenge of the Sourcing Sleuths last week. Her information on phone sourcing was excellent, and she uses it in combination with online methods. Analogous to Shally's excellent Google and LinkedIn cheatsheets, Krista has just created a cheatsheet of sorts for phone sourcing. Maybe some would call it a white paper, but it's written in a very user-friendly way. She gave it as a freebie to the AOEP attendees (who paid to come), so I don't know what she'll do for others who request it, but I recommend you ping her and ask nicely! --Glenn Gutmacher categories: phone sourcing, telesourcing, name-gen, name generation, lead generation, internet recruiting, internet sourcing, cybersleuthing 12/2/2006 Recruitment e-marketing: Using Social Media to build a Candidate PipelineRecruitment e-marketing: Using Social Media to build a Candidate Pipeline Question: I am with a third-party recruiting firm. I started a Yahoo! group the other day that lets people subscribe to see our job postings. It is geared to a particular industry niche where we want to build a candidate pipeline. We're hoping to entice them by a job ... you know the strategy ... any thoughts for driving folks to the site? Using Yahoo! cause it's free; hoping to build a business for doing this "the right way." Answer: I don't want to discourage you from having a list (because it can work well if done right), but your implied direction is problematic. You'll only get bottom-of-the-barrel candidates if jobs are your main hook. Yahoo! Groups that are one-way (i.e., basically an e-newsletter where you generate the content that goes out) will only work if there's frequent, ongoing posts of value. Only Regular Readers Create Buzz This is because people must stay subscribed long-term if you want the list to develop buzz and organic subscriber growth from forwarding. And gainfully employed professionals (passive candidates) aren't always looking for job info. So the content must be useful to people who do that kind of work. So calling it a "jobs" list and, even more narrowly, describing the list as being jobs just from your firm, seems to be two strikes against long-term success, IMHO. The Yahoo Group Consider starting a new list with a broader scope and brand. You can inject that wider range of appealing content in a one-way Yahoo! Group. There are plenty of blogs and other syndicated feeds that find news stories in any narrow niche you might ever want, and you can selectively pull stories of interest from those and add them as content. (Be sure to keep your excerpts short and credit your source, so as not to run afoul of copyright laws. If you're unsure whether your excerpting falls under what the federal government calls Fair Use, contact the source to get permission to repost the content.) However, you're much better off opening it up as a two-way list (i.e., anybody can post, and every post is sent to every subscriber). Monitor The List To start, you should monitor this: act as list moderator to delete any spam or inflammatory posts which would devalue the list and discourage participation. When the message volume gets high enough, you should be seeing enough results to justify sharing administrative duties with others. Consider A Blog But -- instead of or in addition to the above options -- you might consider a blog. Blogs eliminate any concern about being blocked by email filters. You can share content easily and drive response (through commenting or guest posts). Blogs allow podcasting and video and have syndication possibilities that allow viral buzz to occur much more easily than by building or buying a mailing list (which takes more effort and/or cash). Ask active recruiting bloggers who also touch jobseekers about how that can work. (e.g., Joel Cheesman, Dennis Smith, Jim Stroud) Prime The Pump Whatever method(s) you employ, I would recommend priming the pump with a few posts from respected people in the field whom you've placed or otherwise know. How To Promote It Then use that as a hook to promote the list/group/blog in posts on other established virtual communities related to your target candidate industry niche. (Include newsgroups, professional association user groups, and other Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups, etc.). Include Jobs From Other Recruiters This suggestion will be controversial, but I would recommend you allow job postings from other firms as well. That may seem counterintuitive to your goal, but ask creators of active recruiting lists (e.g., Maureen Sharib) why that strategy can work. Targeted Keywords Finally, you said you wanted to do this for free, but if you ever get a budget, you can also buy targeted keywords on search engines that support Pay-Per-Click (PPC) such as Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc., to steer people to you. The good thing about PPC is you only pay when someone clicks on your ad link, vs. the old model of Pay-Per-View which costs you regardless. There are also third-party consultants that offer PPC special services specifically for recruiting purposes such as CareerMetaSearch. Good luck! recruitment marketing, Internet Recruiting, Sourcing
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