The document provides tips for building an employment brand on LinkedIn and social media. It recommends starting with a narrow target audience and understanding their goals. The tips include monitoring social media for discussions about the company, joining relevant groups, establishing a company profile, and leveraging employee profiles to showcase the company culture and career opportunities. It also suggests finding champions among current employees to contribute thoughtful content to key communities and partner with existing communities relevant to recruiting goals.
2. What is the 1st thing candidates check to learn more about you, after seeing your InMail?
3. 3 Your Challenge I don’t know who you are I don’t know your company I don’t know anyone who works at your company I don’t know about your open positions I don’t know what you can do for my career And you eventually want me to make one the most difficult decisions of my life?
4. What your profiles tell them (unfortunately) Full life cycle recruiter Staff Augmentation Consistently outperforms fellow recruiters Passive Candidate Sourcing Employs proven communication skills close hard to find candidates Cold-calling developing strategic recruitment and sourcing solutions Screening exceptional track record of candidate closure.
5. What if you used your profile to hire people instead?
6. What your profiles tell them too (fortunately) Career Coaching / Life Coaching Seeking world-class engineers to participate in building the world's most sophisticated, distributed, Java platform capable of serving billions of page views, scaling up to 100 million LinkedIn members and more, and supporting revenue lines of several hundred million dollars each year. I am looking for Engineers who are experts in :1) Java and J2EE 2) System level White box QA Engineers. Here is a great article about LinkedIn from Fortune Magazine constantly curious and passionate about people and understanding their goals My true joy is finding an amazing candidate and helping them understand the true potential of the opportunity and how it will benefit them.
7. So, how to build a great recruiting profile on LinkedIn?
8. 1. What is your goal? Who is your audience? One size does not fit all Use your profile to hire (not just to get hired) Keep your audience in mind
9. 2. Let the real you shineDon’t publish a resume full a business platitudes Be personable and authentic. You are a human being. Not a resume. Add a picture. Invest most time in your headline summary what you do at LinkedIn
11. 4. Display pride and excitement You will accelerate these people’s careers: be proud! Show off our company’s achievements, culture and careers. Display our blogs with the WordPress App Bind your or our Twitter account Help candidates be better informed
12. 5. Get recommended by people you hired: You did them a favor: they owe you one A few will do Make them hit on different points
13. 6. Connect with all hiring managers (and more)Tap into their networks. See who they know.
14. 7. Become a RWFEnsure best candidates will “follow” you Prove you have hired key people Show you know key people: connect and like / comment Share job seeking tips in Groups, with your status message Make introductions Recommendations
15. 8. Don’t be afraid to put off some candidatesNot every candidate is right for us “If you like working at Oracle, you may not like LinkedIn”
21. Building your Employment Brand with Social Media A roadmap to success from a marketer v HCI – Strategic Talent Acquisition San Francisco, June 30th, 2010
22. 6 Common Mistakes Not understanding your audience first Starting too broad, too big Waiting for social media guidelines Ignoring paid options Starting without right content or team Not measuring & monitoring 22
87. Your Roadmap to Initial Success 41 Check List: Modest & measurable goals Narrow target audience Unique benefits, story & content Two social media outlets, max A multi-disciplinary tiger team Access to budget
Not understanding your audience firstWe’ll get back to thisStarting too broad, too big: goals are too lofty, too many channelsWaiting for social media guidelines from “corporate” – get started. Just start small. Ignoring the context, i.e. sourcing aggressively on Facebook or using smileys on LIDoing it on your own – it’s many people to many more people. Not one person to many. Otherwise, use a newsletterIgnoring paid options – they will boost your ROI and / or boost-trap your effortsStarting without right content or teamNot measuring & monitoringWaiting for social Media guidelines:A report by Manpower employer services found that only 29% of companies in the Americas have a “formal policy regarding employee use of social networking sites.” The number is lower in other regions — 25% in Asia-Pacific and 11% EMEA. The worldwide number is 20%.
Why picking?Obvious: so you know where to start, what to say no to and so that your message and plan can be relevantAlso so you can track the impactIt’s quite simple to understand them:DIY:Ask your employeesAsk your candidatesConsider LinkedIn’s very targeted Surveys
In the May 2010 study by Digital Brand Expressions, Respondents were equally concerned with the ongoing monitoring of brand reputation, at 71%, but only 52% had a plan for such activities. monitoring of your employment brand: Google alerts, Tweetdeck / Seesmic, LinkedIn Company Buzz, join key Groups on FB, LI and beyond. Don’t be the only one! Ask your team to do that to for audiences they’re responsible for and hiring managers too. Oh, and don’t forget your competition! Do the same thing with them. (But do not mimic them.)Doing as as a team: set up an internal LI Group to share good / bad articles.….
Identify and join existing communities. Establish the list of major blogs, groups and other resources that your audience reads and mostly participates in. What do they talk about? What topics do they react best to? What is their angle? Who participates? Start contributing: dip your toes.This is a little bit like doing your homework before really contributingIdentify and join influential communitiesAsk your employees where they spend timeUnderstand what drives engagementStart contributing: give adviceRespect their rulesResist temptation to sell / source at first
company profiles: establishing the right basic company presence: for people who already research you. Company pages: 1MM on LinkedIn, do you know what’s on yours? FB page.
employee profiles: you already have an army working for you: get them in the right direction! There are probably more impressions on all your employees profiles on LI, FB and beyond than on your own page. What if (and by the way, it may only take 1 email from you)… all your hiring managers had 1 positive recommendation from a current / former employee on LinkedIn, highlighting what a great manager they wereall your employees instead a flat description of what they do used just a positive expression. Such as “I have the privilege…”. “I am fortunate to…”. Tweeted or added to their profile special projects they participate in with your company outside of their normal work (e.g. Yahoo! for Good foundation encourages employees to spend time with charities – will match funds donated)Included a link to your Career Page or open positions (or company profiles). That ideally says “work with us”. There are modules from Jobs2Web and other vendors that can make that easier for you.Wrote in details what they do in their current job: that’s a testimonial right there! Showed in detail in their profile the growth path they had since they joinedAdded your company blog to their LI profileWrote a recommendation for the recruiter who hired them and how it helped accelerate their career!HOW DO YOU GET IT DONE?Give them content- Give them an incentiveShow the example: everyone on your team should do it!- then extend to hiring managers- Create a contest?- Have management call out those who did it- make sure they are comfortable doing it
employee profiles: you already have an army working for you: get them in the right direction! There are probably more impressions on all your employees profiles on LI, FB and beyond than on your own page. What if (and by the way, it may only take 1 email from you)… all your hiring managers had 1 positive recommendation from a current / former employee on LinkedIn, highlighting what a great manager they wereall your employees instead a flat description of what they do used just a positive expression. Such as “I have the privilege…”. “I am fortunate to…”. Tweeted or added to their profile special projects they participate in with your company outside of their normal work (e.g. Yahoo! for Good foundation encourages employees to spend time with charities – will match funds donated)Included a link to your Career Page or open positions (or company profiles). That ideally says “work with us”. There are modules from Jobs2Web and other vendors that can make that easier for you.Wrote in details what they do in their current job: that’s a testimonial right there! Showed in detail in their profile the growth path they had since they joinedAdded your company blog to their LI profileWrote a recommendation for the recruiter who hired them and how it helped accelerate their career!HOW DO YOU GET IT DONE?Give them content- Give them an incentiveShow the example: everyone on your team should do it!- then extend to hiring managers- Create a contest?- Have management call out those who did it- make sure they are comfortable doing it
Find and cajole your social media champions, encourage them, feed them, reward them. Create an internal group, forum or status to share best practices, guidelines, successes, etc.How to find them:ONLINE:Google blog searchGoogle alertsEmail to employeesTwitter search- LI groupsHOST AN INTERNAL EVENT
Unleash your champions in these communities. Make the match between 1 and 2. Make sure that management knows about their contributions. Give them insights they can share. Trust their best judgment. At LinkedIn, we encourage that. EMC also does that with employee testimonials podcasts. Make it easy for them to create and you help distribute, Allow their personality and your values to come through (pick the original ones to stand out!)Warning: it can be time-consuming, but well worth it.2 of our lead engineers wrote a presentation on Java 1 and published it on our blog > 70k views! (w/o a single promotion)We did Tech Talks that we promoted on our social Media Tools:Twitter Our blogOur engineers re-tweeted and share on FB, to their friends, etc.Over 300 people . We had 5 hires for launch 2.0 and 1 for our Tech Talk. We just gave away free pizzaYour employees should do the hard work because their bring their friends.
Partner with an existing community: much easier than starting one. There are probably large communities of your company’s alumni. Or groups of college students form a given university you are targeting. Approach the moderator / owner and see if they’re open for a partnership or sponsorship. They’re always looking for good content, benefits for their member base and some for ways to monetize their communitySuggest a few blog post from your experts.Make them guest speakers at your events or on your blog.
Advertise on a couple of social media sites: If you want better results, advertising goes a long way in increasing your ROI.you have a destination now (your company page or a YouTube Channel). Start driving traffic to it. But focus on your key target audience so the stimulus (e/g banner) and destination content are relevant and contain a clear benefit to them. To the extent possible, showcase your champions in your creative (that’s how you reward them too) AND target based on their background / function to target people like them. Pick the channels that most relevant to your target: where they spend most time, where they seek info, about careers at your company etc. make sure you leverage their targeting capabilities. E.g. Facebook: 90 to 120k people in US and EU with college degree with “recruit” or “recruiter” in their profile or “likes”.
how do you measure with the right audience? Pre- and post. Campaign efforts. Vanity stats vs. useful stats. Many companies are collecting followers and sometimes don’t know what they’re worth or what to do with them. Are they even the right folks?
Start your own community: see the 2-3 following sections on how to do that. 1st thing to do is going through the initial assessment to define whether you have what it takes to make it work. Key question is: can you bring something new to the table that is not easy to find elsewhere that your target audience cares about and requires active discussions?Ensure you have enough content. Create it , but more importantly, allow your employees to create itConsider starting internally
The value prop: Make it about members, not you: what’s in it for them?Recruit & cajole your champions: internal & externalConsider not making it about careers at allEstablish clear guidelines & cultureCreate a plan to promote itStaff proper moderation & content creationBe patient & remember the 90/9/1 rule
Your goals need to be:Realistic / achievable- start with something you have a good shot at succeeding- this means you need to establish your baseline and make sure you can and will have a good way to capture and measure resultsGo for quick winsDo you only want to reach active candidates?Is your employment branding effort meant to improve your direct sourcing, build a pipeline in a given function or geography? Are you trying to establish awareness or change perception? @ LI we invest in Twitter more than FBTarget audience: you need to understand what they currently think of you, what is missing in what they know about you. Do they even know you? What do they want? An MBA grad wants / needs something thoroughly different from a tenured manager. And there is a world’s difference btw a software engineer and a sales person.Certain audiences are perfect for social media: some others not so much.Engineers maybe on Twitter more, fashion designers on FB, etc.Who in your organization could pick this the fastest?What talent vertical to apply it first?