5 Noteworthy Pieces of Sourcing News - 13th October 2014

In the news this week:

Facebook have Just Changed Mobile Advertising Forever

This week, Mark Zuckerberg’s baby announced the launch of it’s new ad platform, Atlas, and told us exactly why it has the potential to significantly increase how much we advertise on mobile devices.

Yep, unlike many other social advertising platforms, Atlas isn’t just an upgraded version of another advertising platform, it’s essentially a total rebuild “from the ground up” which intends to solve the biggest problem facing digital marketers according to Facebook: “the mobile problem”.

Basically, Facebook aren’t happy about the fact that even though more people are spending more time on their mobiles, marketers are not buying mobile ad space. Atlas has been developed to “help” us do just that – buy mobile ad space.

What makes Atlas Different from Google’s GDN/Adsense?

The first big advantage associated with using Atlas to buy ad space, is the fact that it lets you use Facebook data to target your users on other websites. Yes, Atlas will be about using Facebook data to reach Facebook users on other websites. “But what’s the big advantage of that?” I hear you ask, well, simply put, Facebook knows more about us (and your potential candidates) than Google does and can make more informed decisions about when to serve us ads – especially those intended more for brand-building than commerce (employer branding aficionados take note).

Secondly, anyone who’s tried advertising on mobile will know it’s a tricky business. Click through rates seem high, yet conversions are quite low. And you can’t track a user’s journey to see why.

Because of this problem of tracking users across mobile, many marketers experience a ‘mobile hump’. They want to ‘be on mobile’ but they also need to know where and how the mobile ads are working. And because cookies don’t work well on mobile devices, it’s really hard to track user behaviour compared with the behaviour they display on their desktop.

Atlas (read: Facebook) has the solution. They know who you are because you log in to their site, they know about your mobile device because you log into their site using your device, they know who you are on your desktop because you keep yourself logged in, and using all that information they’ll now be able to know who you are on a site with ad space.

For the really nitty-gritty info on how Atlas actually does this, read this very detailed blog post.

All you really need to know in the end, is that Atlas has solved the “mobile hump” that stopped you reaching your mobile advertising potential in the first place and that alone is something worth investigating!

Will you be using Atlas to post job ads? Let us know in the comments below.

Uh oh! The Time to Fill Job Openings Lengthens Yet Again!

It was only 2 weeks ago we reported that in the US alone, it took almost 25 business days to fill a job in the month of July, which was 9% longer than in July 2013.

In August 2014, it took an average of 26.5 working days (Mon-Sat) to fill a job, says the monthly Dice-DFH Vacancy Duration Measure. Sponsored by Dice Holdings, parent of several niche career sites, the measure is now at its highest level in 14 years.

Several individual sectors ‚¬€ construction, manufacturing, and financial services among them ‚¬€ are also above their previous highs. Manufacturing jobs, for instance, now take an average of 29.6 working days to fill.

And all this hiring difficulty, as well as the addition of contract labour and temps as a workforce strategy, has pushed staffing agencies to new heights. In fact, since the beginning of the year, agencies have added workers at an average of 17,980 a month, a pace exceeded only once since 2000.

Workers employed by staffing firms now account for 2.1 percent of the total U.S. workforce, a new historic high.

Salesforce to Build a Recruiting and HR System

Salesforce, the wildly successful and widely used system businesses use to keep track of their customers, has also been used on occasion by recruiters to keep track of job applicants. Now, a new partnership will result in a more formal recruiting and HR system being built on the Salesforce platform to help recruiters keep track of job applicants exclusively.

Lumesse, one of the big ATS providers, will be in charge of the build and will create a new organisation, TalentObjects by Lumesse, that will, in the first quarter of 2015, launch a talent acquisition system sold in the Salesforce AppExchange.

For more information on the brand new product offering and how you can start using it, click here.

The Top 100 Employment Brands of the Fortune 500 are Announced

A new list of the best employment brands among the Fortune 500 has been announced.

The ranking comes from WilsonHCG, a recruitment outsourcing company, and in putting the list together, the criteria included these and many other factors:

• Career pages: are the jobs updated? Is there multimedia content?
• Job board presence: are positions listed on general boards as well as niche sites?
• Candidate experience: how’s the company’s Glassdoor ranking?
• Accolades: did they make the Fortune list for who’s hiring and best companies?
• Social media: does the company blog about its culture?
• Social responsibility: how does the company rank on veteran, diversity, and green lists?

The full list is embedded below:

The Results Are In: The 2014 Global Sourcing Survey is here!

And finally, we have some rather big news of our own to announce this week!

Ever wondered what it takes to be a great online Sourcer? Maybe you’ve been curious about how other Sourcers go about engaging with passive talent or how they use LinkedIn on a daily basis? Well wonder no longer my friends, because as of today we are launching the 2014 Global Sourcing Survey, in partnership with Alexander Mann Solutions, and it has the answer to all your burning sourcing related questions.

Packed with comprehensive stats on LinkedIn usage, response rates, social media figures and top takeaways, the 2014 Global Sourcing Survey was carried out to bring you the most up-to-date figures and findings associated with the sourcing industry.

The full survey is available to download for FREE right now at socialtalent.co/sourcingsurvey.