Technology in Recruitment; truLondon Live Blog
Sarah White is leading this track about technology in recruitment. With all the technology available to us recruiters is there a danger of recruiters spending all their time on technology and not enough time on actual recruitment.
Re-targeting: have you have ever been on a website and then for the next month, every time you go online you seem to see that website everywhere? What’s happening is that a cookie found its way to your computer and drives advertising to your computer based on your previous viewing preferences. Companies have been doing this for years. In a recruitment context, if a candidate comes to your site or one of your landing pages, they will get targeted ads directed towards them about your brand for the next few weeks. People who come from you through re-targeting have a higher conversion ratio then someone who just lands directly on your website. Sarah predicts that this is going to grow more and more over the next 18 months.
A re-targeting system can be integrated with your CRM allowing you to measure your metrics and justify your ROI. When the technology is used together, it really starts to work. Question from the group: Can the recruiters piggy back off the systems that the marketing department is likely already using to re-target rather than looking at specialist systems such as Incisive Media. Cookies are being put on your computer by websites all the time, this is just using those cookies more effectively.
The bigger players like Google are kind of behind the curve on this type of technology; its largely the smaller start-ups who are leading the innovation in this area.
A wider discussion has started on how you track, manage and engage with your talent community across multiple channels or sites. G4S are one of the largest employers in the world and use various technologies to try to control this and measure it. But what about the rest of us who have shoestring budgets? There are tons of companies who will provide you with content for a low cost and thousands of HR bloggers who would be more than happy to provide you with free content.
G4S have added social media share tabs on all their content on their careers page and have one job that has over 90 “Likes” so far. Facebook is now the 8th largest driver of traffic to their site from just a couple of small tweaks to the website.
Sarah says that she doesnt agre with recruiters who friend everyone to recruit. She does have her own Page on Facebook which is how she uses the platform to connect with people. For a company, Facebook is one of the most affordable ways to do targeted advertising at a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords. Gen Y do not use LinkedIn, many recent graduates dont even know what it is? The challenge for that generation is to balance their personal Facebook presence with needing an online network to get a job.
Guy Rubin suggests that senior executives are moving away from LinkedIn yet graduates are flocking to it. I disagree: LinkedIn have launched some excellent products in the US to attract graduates as that is where the ad revenue and recruiter revenue comes from but it is hard to localise these products in Europe as professional standards and education differs greatly from country to country so will companies like Brave New Talent make Facebook work in a LinkedIn style for European graduates before LinkedIn make it work here?
What about Mobile? In the US and the UK people cannot live without their mobile phones yet Sarah was in Paris this week and realised that the French consider it rude to take your phone out so frequently. Is mainland Europe going in a different direction than the US and the UK? The French talk on their phones, they use them for telephone conversations (who are these crazy people? 😉
Do senior executives need mobile optimised content as much as younger execs or grads? Do senior execs even apply for jobs or do they wait for them to come to them or use their personal networks to find jobs? You can design customised landing pages by setting up a site on WordPress using a $50 WordPress template and a day’s website design (relative novices can do this). Pepsi, on a global scale, came up with a centralised them for their employer brand called “Possibilities” and depending on who is looking at it, it is tweaked slightly based on your personal demographics.