Recruitvertise

Posted some DBA ads on LinkedIN and Facebook to cover our DBA jobs’s. Hopefully they will cause enough laughter/anger/confusion to increase click through rates and get some good passive candidates checking out our jobs.  Will post CPM/CPC results in a week or so…

Posted something similar on Facebook – early returns looking pretty good although it’s nation wide.  I may retarget just NYC in a few days depending on # of apply’s I get…  I already have 2 applicants for $13.00 bones – and it’s been running for about 10 hours – a good sign!

I read on TechCrunch this AM that BranchOut, Facebook’s first mainstream recruiting application – is about to release a new solution for recruiters to source talent from Facebook called RecruiterConnect.

This could be HUGE for us recruiters as we have been waiting for somebody or something to compete with LinkedIn for high quantity, kick-ass passive candidate sourcing and more particularly to drive costs down.  Believe me, I love LinkedIn as much as the next recruiter (in fact, I am literrally sipping my shitty start up coffee out of a LinkedIn mug right now!) – but they can charge whatever they want right now - there really isn’t much competition out there.  Monster and Career builder are completely an after thought and Indeed.com and Simply Hired is a simple SEO-driven idea that has become big – and have some cool targeting features…  but every day the candidates they draw for you look more and more like the ones from Monster and Career Builder.

Kool-Aid or Coffee?

And yes – there is a space for the Monster’s and Indeeds – but if you are a top notch “A player” – there is NO way you are putting your resume up on there.  Here’s the key – if you are at an aggressive company that seeks top talent in a highly competitive environment – you have to pay for it.  Our job as in house recruiters is to maximize efficiencies and find them without paying boat loads of money to head hunting agencies, etc… It’s our job to source the people that aren’t looking.  We want to find people that don’t put their resumes out there.  BranchOut may be the only mainstream app/site that may help us easily tap into to people that LinkedIn can’t.

Now perhaps my favorite part about all of this is – is this is being announced just as hundreds, if not thousands of recruiters are attending LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in Las Vegas.  (I would certainly be there right now, and was cordially invited by my super-star account rep at LinkedIn – but I have a ton of people to hire by end of year – every day counts!). BranchOut clearly has some Start Up bravado – LOVE IT!  It is coming right as you see the executive team at LinkedIn talking about how they are not Facebook as competition.  As far as I’m concerned, any social site / database with 800 Million active members is probably competition for LinkedIn.  The database just needs to be cultured with employment data – which is starting to happen, and BranchOut will make all of this happen faster.  Another thing is LinkedIn’s Cost model for their targeted ads is close to three times the price on Facebook from my per-view – so if Facebook becomes more “work data” conscious - it would be huge for targeting.

All this said – LinkedIn also just announced Talent Pipeline  at Talent Connect – a new tool which will start to move them  towards becoming a player in the CRM/ATS space.   I am excited to check out the product, but am skeptical it will cost a boat load and won’t provide as much value as a tool that can interface across your entire sourcing strategy, providing complete data & analytics, etc… It also can be a bear to continuously upload data from different systems into yet, another system.

At the end of the day – all of this is good for us this recruiters, competition keeps things innovative and drives costs down.  More please!

If you had the chance to step into a shiny, brand new company and start a recruiting organization from the ground up- what would you  do?  Or what if that dude Ty from Extreme Home Makeover came in a with a bullhorn, sent the whole rest of the company to Disney for a month, wiped out your recruiting operation with a giant wrecking ball and said – let’s start over!  Where would you start?

We are working in unprecedented times on the recruiting front.  So much has changed in how we source candidates – everyone wants passives and it just takes more time these days.  Our roles as strategic talent advisers are growing,  and with shrinking budgets and smaller teams – we just all have a ton on our plates.  The Full Life Cycle has become the Extreme Life Cycle.  It seems like there is always something that isn’t quite there yet, or we just haven’t gotten to, etc…

So for me – this exercise has been a different way to take a step back, and really analyze priorities.  I would love to hear how other recruiters out there would approach it.

So to make things a little easier, let’s say Ty has mandated with senior management that upon returning from a climb up Space Mountain and a whirl on the Tea Cups – your company is going to be progressive, aggressive, tech-savvy and well funded with a decent recruiting budget… And they want talent – top talent.  It has a turn key business model that was sure to grow the company – but at a steady pace…   50 hires year 1 and  150 year 2.

Now if I were to start fresh, so many things come to mind…

How would you go about building your talent brand?  What ATS would you select?  Who would you hire first on the team?  Would you set aside dollars for new digital and social sourcing methods like Indeed, Facebook and LinkedIn Ads?  Would you spend extra time trying to explore new avenues like Google+ and/or Twitter in stream Ads (coming soon)?  What key metrics would you set up and establish?  Would you pay for LinkedIn Recruiter or just InMails?  Ditch Monster for Free Indeed?  Build an Employee Referral Program? How would you set the tone for hiring managers?  Interview Process?  The Candidate experience?  Compliance Measures?

… The list goes on and on doesn’t it?

So you have this clean slate – how and where would you start?  What do you think are the most important things you need to get right first to be successful?

Welcome to Recruitvertise!  I’m excited to get this thing started and get a good feel for how people are using digital advertising for recruiting.  Please be sure to check out our How To Contribute Page and send us your latest and greatest creative!

I would like to start by sharing that Ad creative that made me come up with the idea for the blog.  I was so shocked by these results, it seemed only fitting to try and start a blog and share my results and see what other people are doing out there.  This little Ad, out performed several different, more traditional variations and I received great results!

I ran the campagin on LinkedIN for a recruiter position for about 2 weeks.  I tried to mix up my ad variations ranging from serious, to progressive to unorthodox.  The Audience I was targeting was as follows:

Here are the creatives, and how they performed, pretty amazing how the Cave Man blew up the others!

My thoughts as to why this happened is really… noise.  There are so many Ads on a ton of sights, and to stand out from the crowd you really have to be creative.   LinkedIn’s Ad platform is great because it allows you to use different variations easily and track your progress and make changes quickly to see great results.

I would love to see some other Ads that were completely out there in terms of concept that did well – send them in!