Recruitment 2.0

Source tracking

Where did you hear about us?
How did you find out about this job?
What prompted your application?

Probably most important after asking the candidate’s name, is asking the media source question.

Why? Well, without this you have no idea as to which advertising method worked or not. Given that the biggest spend in the recruitment process is either an advertising campaign, or recruitment agency fees – this is important to get right!

The ATS/RMS (or spreadsheet) you use should then be able to spit out any number of reports based around the answer to this question.

These are principles everyone reading this blog will understand.

So it should all be simple, shouldn’t it?

There are a number of pitfalls with capturing media source...

Problem 1: Ask the question at the right time.
If you undertake any kind of filtering/killer questions, you need to know the source at this point. If you ask killer questions and then ask the source question on the application form, you won’t have captured the media source of those candidates that were automatically rejected. This is important information.

Problem 2: How big is the list?
If this list has greater than 15 entries, then candidates will get bored and either choose the top entry or choose a random one. Not good.

Problem 3: You have your own web site listed.
Contentious one this. I disagree with adding the client’s website into the source list. The reports we see when clients do this are that 80%+ of applicants will choose this.

Problem 4: Don’t ask if you already know the answer.
If you advertise your job online, then at the point the candidate clicks “Apply Now” or “More Details” on the jobsite, he will be transferred to your careers site. An important snippet of information is available to the careers site, namely, the “Referer” (it’s actually spelled that way). This piece of information is a reference to the exit page from the referring site. So, chances are that, if you advertise online, you don’t even have to ask candidates the source question. We already know.

I’m amazed as to how many systems DO NOT do this.

I saw Dan’s painful demonstration of a bank’s online recruitment process at a networking event in January and key to this was the media source being obfuscated on the application form. This would totally mislead the recruiters as to which advertising source worked.

Problem 5: List isn’t up to date.
If you’ve just spent £10k with a new advertiser, you must add it to the source list entry. If you don’t, it won’t be in the list for candidates to choose.

The solutions

• If you have a long list of advertisers, go down the “double drop-down” route. This should consist of two drop down lists – the first containing media types, the second containing the actual advertisers for that media type.
• Only add media sources in which you actually advertised for that job. Can your ATS/RMS provider do this? It’s probably a feature they just need to enable for you.
• Don’t put your website in the list. If you do advertise specific jobs on your website, then the “Referer” that I mentioned earlier will capture this and pre-fill the media source answer.
• Have your provider properly implement the referer capture method, so that the media source question isn’t even asked.
• Keep the list up to date.
• Test, test and test again. Don’t trust your providers to do this for you. Typically, there are a number of companies involved in providing a recruitment strategy – there are numerous elements of technology involved. Don’t trust – test.

Now you can rely on those media source reports!

- Mike

Sales calls – are you bombarded by them?

I’m not surprised by Louise’s blog post regarding Emma at Sky receiving 32 calls in a day from recruitment agencies. We’re a tiny company, in the grand scheme of things, yet we attract around five inbound sales calls from recruitment agencies per day. What is that all about?

As Louise also states very clearly, if you are going to call a prospect at the very least you should look at their website and have an understanding of what they do. As an agency, this must include looking at their existing careers website and finding their agency terms and maybe even a statement about their PSL.

Personally, I don’t mind receiving sales calls, I just accept that it’s part of the world’s natural order of things. What I do find a little surprising is that we also attract around five calls a week from recruitment agencies looking for recruitment software. Pretty surprising given that we don’t provide software to recruitment agencies! I guess this must be a fault with our positioning/messaging or advertising – but it does smack of a lack of research.

To compound all of this, we as a company must sell our solutions into HR teams and corporate recruiters, however, it’s nigh on impossible when they are being bombarded by agencies all day! Our opening line is, “Hi, my name’s Xxxxx and I’m calling from a company called Advorto, we’re not a recruitment agency. (insert researched elevator pitch)…”. I fear in 9 out of 10 cases, their ‘shields are already up’ before we even get around to mentioning our name!

Incidentally, I’d never even make a sales call if it was clear from the outside of the company (i.e. the prospects website) that they do not have a need - what’s the point?

I’d love to hear from corporate recruiters and senior HR staff as to what pitch they find themselves susceptible to…?

- Mike

Linkedin as CV 2.0?

I love Linkedin; I think it’s one of the most innovative web 2.0 applications out there, the type of application that just would never work offline.

Whilst I’ve had a profile on Linkedin for a while, I’ve always felt its search tool was lacking. My search results always seemed to return U.S. people (even though I don’t have any really strong links with the U.S.). It’s crying out for a good location-based search tool for the U.K – e.g. I want to find graphic designers within 50 miles of EC1R 3AF. This always puts me off using it as a business tool for finding people – which of course is it’s raison d’etre.

The news that they are now taking the UK more seriously, by opening a European office, is really exciting, especially for our industry.

Having said that, I do know that Linkedin is one of those places that recruiters go to in order to check people out as part of their general background research into potential hires. It’s a good check and balance against a CV.

The thing I did not see coming was that candidates might start using their Linkedin public profile as a REPLACEMENT for their CV! What a fantastic idea.

We’ll certainly be asking our clients if they are interested in having a new field on their application forms prompting for Linkedin public profiles alongside CV upload boxes.

Here’s a few  links related to this Linkedin:
Matt Alder at Digital Recruiting
Linkedin's own blog
10 Ways to use Linkedin

- Mike

Welcome to our blog!

On the one hand Advorto is a company that provides online recruitment technology to clients across all market sectors, on the other, we are a dynamic team of software and recruitment professionals.

From clients to prospects, from partners to competitors we see quite a lot of action. Believe it or not we (well me in particular) surf the web a fair bit. Hopefully, we'll be able to post on some of this action and share some of our experiences, both good and bad!

Over the coming few weeks and months, we're going to try and create a blog with posts on a number of topics, hopefully most of this will be recruitment related but in reality it will probably include items on the tech world, software, advertising, design, and quite likely a fair bit of just plain random subjects.

Enjoy the blog, and please feel free to link back and please, please make comments.

Mike