Blog Archives
Recruiting on Facebook: New Ad Targeting Options
Facebook Advertising for recruitment has become an integral part of recruitment advertising strategies across the board. Why has the field of recruitment gravitated towards Facebook advertising so quickly? The reason is twofold.
Why Recruiters use Facebook Ads:
- The insanely high volume of traffic (approx. 152.4M visitors / month)
- The unique targeting options it offers to advertisers.
And with the recent release of “Partner Categories” targeting, Facebook has taken it’s ad targeting to a whole new level.
Facebook’s New Ad Targeting
By combining both online and offline consumer behavior data (courtesy of Acxiom, Epsilon, and Datalogix), Facebook developed over 500 unique groups of Facebook users. Each represents an audience segment based on demographics, psycho-graphics, spending patterns, and everything in between as Facebook Ad targeting options. As a result, over one billion Facebook users are broken down into simple, highly targeted audiences.
How Will This Impact Recruitment Advertising?
7 Great Tips for Marketing Strategy and Building Your Brand
You don’t need the luck of the Irish to find the pot o’ gold this St. Patrick’s day. KRT is here to remind you about “The Seven Golden Rules of Marketing” that will help you get lucky when it comes to building a stronger brand.
The seven golden rules, provided by The Brand Factory, remind us that a strong marketing strategy is essential for a successful business. At KRT, we specialize in recruitment marketing, where we apply these “golden rules” to create a strong brand that candidates will gravitate to. Below are the 7 Golden Rules with a KRT twist:
- Highlight your uniqueness – Avoid talking about what it is you do. Focus more on what makes your services unique compared to your competitors. Instead of discussing what you offer, talk about how you offer it. You might have a special way of presenting clients’ accounts or a system of assessing their advertising needs. At KRT, we take an organized and creative approach that shows our clients exactly what kind of ROI they are getting from our vendors.
- Be consistent – Once you’ve presented your unique selling proposition (above), apply it! Don’t be tempted to leave old messages out there. New prospects can come to you from all kinds of ways – business card, website, phone call, newsletter, blog, print, online ads and so on. Read the rest of this entry
Recruitment Playbook: Hiring insights and takeaways from the “Big Game”
As this Sunday’s BIG GAME fast approaches, I recalled an insightful article by recruitment industry “Hall of Famer,” Dr. John Sullivan, titled “10 Recruiting Lessons That You Can Learn From the Super Bowl.”
While the article is a few years old, Dr. Sullivan’s lessons that recruitment teams can learn from the Super Bowl, still ring true:
1) “Minor colleges” produce some of the best players on Super Bowl teams.
2) “Experience” isn’t required to become a Super Bowl head coach.
3) “Recruiting/draft systems” still need continuous improvement.
4) It takes organization-wide excellence to make the Super Bowl.
Who Still Reads the Newspaper? The Relevance of Print Advertising in the Growing World of Internet Marketing
In this day and age, it takes a certain skill to grab the attention of readers and passersby in our bustling lives. With so many things working against the future of classified print advertising such as social media, it is more important than ever to know how to maximize your reach for potential candidates in print media. We at KRT continue to place ads for our clients.
That’s what she (or he) said! – The importance of companies taking an active role on employer review sites.
This week’s news of Glassdoor receiving $20 Million in funding to expand internationally is confirmation that workplace review sites are becoming a permanent fixture in the recruitment landscape.
When you examine the vast amounts of traffic that these portals receive (i.e., Glassdoor, CareerBliss, Indeed Forum, etc.), employers can no longer turn a blind eye on what employees (past and present) are saying about them.
Mike Larsen penned a great article on ERE,”Anonymous Employer Reviews — Opportunity or Threat?”, that identified both the pros and cons that these sites present.
At KRT, we’ve worked with our clients to embrace these portals and have developed strategies to take an active role in monitoring reviews in real-time and, as appropriate, responding to comments. We firmly believe that companies need to demonstrate to candidates that they’re listening and engaging with what’s being said about them.
Additionally, we offer services to consolidate ALL feedback/reviews into a quarterly dashboard that categorizes content and ranks each post as positive, negative, or neutral. This report becomes an invaluable deliverable to present to senior management on what’s working — and what’s not — within their company — a report that’s certainly less bias than any internal surveys.
Contact a KRT representative today to discuss how we can assistance with managing your employment brand reputation.
Making “Pinning” Winning – by Kelly Adachi (Intern)
Pinterest is on the rise. The new social media site offers a vast collection of images and video and allows users to create personalized virtual bulletin boards to share with friends. Pinterest has experienced rapid growth, reaching 10 million users faster than any site in history. In February 2012 it earned at average 1.36 million visitors every day, and the numbers continue to climb.
With this influx of activity, one wonders how to best utilize this new social media platform, especially for purposes other than sharing images related to top Pinterest topics like fashion and décor.
Job seekers have now begun using Pinterest to find employment and career tips and to post their resumes and interests. Companies have started to capitalize on this new emergence of career-related content on Pinterest, and have begun recruiting efforts on their company Pinterest pages.
Here are some tips for using Pinterest for recruiting:
- Use pins to promote company culture/values
- Build a pin board for each job
- Pin multimedia – not just images, but also video
- Include boards on relevant topics with material from outside sources, not just company content
- Relate Pinterest trends back to workplace (For example, you can connect professional attire to fashion, office locations to travel, etc.)
- Make sure to include many ways to connect with users – through links, repinning, comments, contests, etc. As with any social media site, it’s all about engagement!
One of my favorite examples of a company Pinterest page is GE. They have an array of boards on topics that would be interesting to both consumers and job seekers, including industry-related images as well as a glimpse into the GE workspace. They also encourage engagement via hashtags and a campaign called #GEInspiredMe, in which Pinterest users upload images that relate to GE and are able to see their images pinned up on the company’s official Pinterest page.
Some other favorites: Whole Foods, which showcases its company culture and lifestyle, and this whimsical job board for The New Traditionalists Furniture Company
LinkedIn Launches New Targeting Options for PPC Customers
As anticipated, LinkedIn finally launched 2 new targeting options on their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) platform.
NEW TARGETING
- School – This is still growing as many people still have yet to associate themselves with their schools on LinkedIn, so expect the estimated audience to be low. However, it is still a great targeting tool for campus wide targeting. Unfortunately, unlike Facebook, you can’t breakout targeting by year of graduation, expected year of graduation, Major, etc. (Atleast not yet…)
- Skill Sets – This was designed to make it easier for marketers to target people on LinkedIn with the skill sets needed for their product. For our recruitment & education clients, this additional targeting will allow us to target those niche skill sets required to fill a job or sign up for a higher education program.
Still have questions on how LinkedIn can help you in your recruitment/marketing efforts? Give us a call, tweet us @KRTweet, or email us anytime! socialmedia@krtmarketing.com
Source: LinkedIn Sales Representative
Everything is better with Video (and Bacon): The importance of video in a recruitment marketing strategy
During a recent recruitment marketing strategy session with one of our key clients, there was a remark made by the organization’s head of Employment Branding & Marketing that stuck with me:
“Just like everything is better with Bacon, everything is better with VIDEO.”
When a company is trying to bring their employment brand to life, video is an ideal way to showcase the company culture, values, preview a day-in-the-life of an employee, etc.
She made this point to illustrate her goal that we work to incorporate their videos assets wherever possible…on their career site, in job postings, on social media profiles, through video banners, in mobile advertising, etc.
Citing Your Sources – Source of Hire vs. Source of Influence
While attending the ERE Expo last week, I was excited to learn that The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has approved the cost-per-hire standard as the first American national HR standard:
This is a great “first” in an industry lacking in way of “standards.”
However, one of the biggest challenges we continue to face in benchmarking a client’s recruitment advertising performance in comparison to industry norms, is that there is no norm when it comes to the countless ways in which companies are tracking Source of Hire.
Every client has a different methodology for capturing source (i.e., different application processes, career site integrations, applicant tracking systems, media/source tagging conventions, etc.).
And even the exceptional clients, who have implemented the best available resources to track source, know that deep down they’re probably only capturing, at best, 50% of the true source of hires.
Worse yet, is that the Source of Hire is in most cases simply the “last source” the candidate came from prior to applying into the ATS.
So what about all of the other sources that helped “influence” that candidate’s decision to apply? Where did they first learn about the company/opportunity? Did they then go on to research the company on social media platforms (i.e., Facebook and LinkedIn) and employer review sites (i.e., Glassdoor and CareerBliss)? Did they watch a video about the company/culture/position? Did they seek out an employee referral from someone in their network?
Our more sophisticated clients are asking these questions…wanting to look at all of the “Sources of Influence” that led to a hire.
And in an industry where simply capturing the last source is difficult, trying to capture data on all of the touch points along the way is a huge challenge. But there are methods to go about collecting this information (i.e., post-impression media tagging tools, etc.) and as an Agency, this is the hot problem we’re trying to solve for our clients.
And who knows, maybe in another decade or so, ANSI will release their second American national HR standard: tracking Source of Influence.
TheLadders.com Expands Services to All Professional Careers
TheLadders, which since 2003 has been focused on $100K job seekers, is expanding its recruitment services to all professional careers. The service is set to become effective on September 20, 2011. The same model stays in place. It’s just an expansion of its current model. Job seekers pay $15 a month to be a member of TheLadders, while recruiters pay either $10,000 or $16,000 per year, depending on level of services. TheLadders’ full suite of job-search solutions could be a great benefit for the job seeker and employer, but it’s hard to say how it will be received on both ends. Only time will tell…
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