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Archives for February 2010

A Closer Look at the Candidate Experience


Black Hole

“Improving the candidate experience” is a frequently used phrase.  But—who’s really doing it, and how?

I was motivated to look into this question more closely by this  comment on a recent post that discussed some psychological aspects of unemployment:  “I am currently ‘in transition’ and can tell you that the suggestions you made would go a long way in making job seekers feel as though there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

The suggestions?  Offer encouraging messages and helpful advice on the Careers website; communicate with candidates; send rejection letters—and make them nicer; give every candidate a fair shake, even if they are not “passive.”  Those steps seem like common courtesy and common sense.

So I decided to check out what the experts are saying on this topic, and what I found was very interesting.  Most presentations and posts on this topic relate to increasing social networking and improving functionality.  Generally, the advice is about technology 2.0  rather human interactions.

If you haven’t seen Improving the Candidate Experience, a 2009 presentation by consultant Elaine Oursler, catch it now on SlideShare.   It’s an excellent overview, and offers some good insights.  But only one slide (out of 28) is focused on how the candidate is actually treated. Slide 13, “Seven Ways to Build a Better Relationships Today,” includes these important points:

  • Remember the golden rule:  Treat every candidate the way THEY WANT to be treated.
  • Avoid the “black hole” syndrome:  No matter how many resumes you receive, acknowledge the receipt of a person’s resume or job application.
  • Use technology for what it does best:  Give the candidates what they want most – timely feedback. Use email for frequent, short communication.
  • Recognize that small things lead to big impressions: Be attuned to professional details.

Are companies doing these things?  Most are not avoiding the black hole syndrome, apparently.  In a recent story titled Lifting the Curtain on the Hiring Process, Wall Street Journal Online reports:  “Job hunters should expect to wait anywhere from a few days to several weeks before receiving a response to an application, if at all. A recent survey of 56 companies with at least 500 employees found that just 27% have a formal process to decline every external candidate they consider for an opening, reports CareerXroads, a human-resources consulting firm in Princeton, N.J.”

And speaking of CareerXroads, since 2002 they have been conducting an annual “Mystery Job Seeker” investigation, which regularly reveals unfortunate truths about the candidate experience. Have a look at their reports. On a more positive view, see Leslie Stevens’s 2008 article Improve the Candidate Experience, which features a nice case study on efforts at Whirlpool.

Finally—check out Kevin Wheeler’s prescription for Using Career Sites to Create a Positive Candidate Experience.  Though not focused on human interactions, the article offers some good suggestions for engaging candidates through blogs, webinars, and even contests.  Plus this idea for personalizing content:

Make the site adapt to the candidate’s needs. Build in choices so that candidates who are analytical can get data, facts, and charts while those candidates who are more verbal get similar information in text or pictures. Creating various forms of the same content is a clever and effective way of adding what seems to the candidates a personal touch to the website.

Takeaway: Technology can only go a little of the way toward making human resources more humane.  In the final analysis, it’s the attitude of the company–from top leadership right down to resume screeners–that creates a positive (or negative) candidate experience.


(Thanks to lautsu for providing the impressionistic “black hole.”)


Sustainable Business | Still A Long Way To Go

Long Way To GoSchool.  Everyone has their own memories of school, how well they did or didn’t do, and why.

I’ve recently been talking to my eldest about school.  He’s at the end of primary school (year 6) and I was attempting to explain how important it is to take full advantage of your years in school for your future life and prospects.

The chat was successful and we now recognise that a lot of effort is required from both of us over many years before he matures into the job-wielding adult of our dreams and aspirations.

All of which sprung to mind as I looked over a list of the 859 companies kicked out of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) at the start of this month: a lot more time and effort is required, by all parties concerned.
[Read more…] about Sustainable Business | Still A Long Way To Go

The Value of Earned Media Should Not be Ignored

emarketer_social_media_advertising_spending_2008-2011Through the social Web, brands have more opportunities to earn media mentions from both traditional online publishers and new social Web publishers such as bloggers, Twitter users, Facebook users, and more.  In fact, according to a study by eMarketer, social media advertising is expected to reach nearly $3 billion by 2011, which demonstrates the intense focus companies are giving it as part of their overall marketing strategies.

There is a reason why earned media is so powerful, and it’s rooted in trust.  Consumers are more likely to act when marketing messages come from sources they trust.  When consumers hear positive reviews about products via a Facebook friend, they trust the authenticity of that review more than they trust an ad on TV or on a billboard.  It’s a fact that researchers have proven time and again, and it’s the reason why companies invest large sums of money into building word-of-mouth through social media marketing.

A study by Nielsen Online conducted in July 2009 offers an excellent breakdown of consumers’ feelings toward different types of advertising and marketing tactics.  Consumers were asked to rate each marketing tactic presented in the study survey by stating whether they trusted each.  The percentage of respondents who stated they either “completely” or “somewhat” trusted a tactic presented to them are shown below:

  • Recommendations from people I know: 92%
  • Consumer opinions posted online: 72%
  • Editorial content such as a newspaper article: 70%
  • Brand Web sites: 69%
  • Emails I signed up for: 67%
  • Ads in newspapers: 66%
  • Brand sponsorships: 62%
  • Ads in magazines: 62%
  • Ads on TV: 61%
  • Ads on radio: 61%
  • Ads before movies: 53%
  • Billboards and outdoor advertising: 53%
  • Ads served on search engine results: 37%
  • Online video ads: 33%
  • Online banner ads: 24%
  • Text ads on a mobile phone: 18%

Given the results above, it would seem that shifting a portion of your marketing budget to tactics that boost earned media would be a wise decision.  However, how much of the $3 billion that companies plan to spend on social media advertising will actually go to marketing activities that increase earned media?  Earned media is hard to track, and companies like to take the safe route and invest in tactics they can analyze for months.  Without hard numbers, many companies find themselves at an impasse — completely unable to make a decision.

Until hard metrics can routinely be applied to earned media results, the bulk of the marketing budget will continue to go into more traditional online advertising tactics such as banner and text ads.  Not that there is anything wrong with those tactics.  They still work quite well, but the allure of earned media is hard to resist.  What do you think?

Read more about branding and trust in these articles here on Corporate Eye:

Image: eMarketer

Confused about .jobs Job Boards? Join the Secret Club.


Dot Jobs

To catch up on this topic (I admit I was way behind) you will have to follow several steps.

Step 1 Read this post by John Zappe on ere.net:  Guests Invited to Hear Million Job Board Plan.  My summary: Direct Employers, a “nonprofit association of employers” has invited 29 people to a meeting which will “answer questions that have come up” about the Direct Employers plan to build “tens of thousands” of new job boards using the .jobs top domain.  The names of the 29 people are not revealed, but Zappe says they are “easily recognizable.” Included are “recruitment leaders,” “job board CEOs,” and “a few industry writers.”

Step 2 Read this other post by John Zappe on ere.net:  A “Universe” of .Jobs Job Boards is Set to Launch. Follow carefully (it’s very twisty) and continue to the end—which is a bit challenging to common logic.

Step 3 Visit the curiously cute Employ Media sales site http://goto.jobs/.  View the tutorials if you like, then click Buy Now and choose GoDaddy.  There you will see a nuts-and-bolts explanation of the .jobs “rules,” available from links in the right-hand column.

Step 4 Visit the stately Direct Employers website http://www.directemployers.org/.  Scroll down and click on “Enter the Universe.”  Oops—apparently Universe has been sucked into a black hole. [Now fixed – Ed]

Step 5 Re-read Guests Invited to Hear Million Job Board Plan.  Notice the following statement by Direct Employers Executive Director Bill Warren:  “We are not so vain that we think anyone really cares about what we are doing. However, we have had many phone calls with questions about what we are doing and how we are building out the domains.”

Those two sentences do not seem to fit together comfortably. But it gets better!  Scroll down and read the Comments section, which turns into a very subtle scrap among apparent stakeholders in the issue.

Since I am the outsidest possible outsider in terms of these proceedings, my only goal in the present post is to encourage attention.  After a few readings of the above items (plus another Zappe post on the topic, which provides valuable background), I think I’ve figured out what the flap is all about. But your guess is just as good as mine, so I won’t attempt to interpret.

However, I will hypothesize.  Suppose a not-for-profit group joined forces with a for-profit group and sort of annexed a large amount of potentially high-value territory in an area that was supposed to be controlled by a certain set of rules.  Suppose other people with interests in the area asked questions about this, but couldn’t get very good answers.  Suppose it was all awfully important to begin with, but—since everything moves so darn fast these years!—it may turn out to be somewhat irrelevant in the end.

According to the Comments exchange noted above, the  names of the invitees were not publicized as a matter of courtesy.  And it appears many of them were expected to be otherwise engaged at the time of the scheduled meeting, while Warren expects to be otherwise engaged at the time of a public forum where matters might have been clarified to a larger audience.  So it doesn’t look as if there will be an outcome to this story any time soon.  But it’s definitely worth knowing about . . .

All Jobs are Local: Divisions, Departments, Groups, and–


You are Here 2

Every year, when Fortune publishes its list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For (2010 should be along soon, by the way), a healthy percentage of the reader comments are some version of “that may be true about Company X in general, but where I work . . . “

For the most part, people employed by large corporations identify with the local office or agency where they work, the division or department they work in, the group that they work with.  And that has several implications for the corporate Careers site.

1.  Very large companies may have many separate divisions or subsidiaries, multiple global entities, and/or  numerous entry paths (new graduate,  experienced professional, hourly worker, and so on).

Q: How can the site effectively communicate across all these possibilities?

2.  Mid-sized to large companies may have dozens of locations and/or many different departments and groups.

Q. What if there are differences in culture and policies among these various entities?

3.  Employee profiles and testimonials from selected segments of the organization may not reflect other segments accurately at all.

Q: Are there issues of misrepresentation (intentionally or otherwise)?

4.  Combining a variety of entities into one site may be confusing for visitors—but splitting them up into a lot of semi-related sites may be confusing in a different way.

Q: What’s the best approach for a specific company?

5.  Different entities within the organization may have different (even radically different) visions of the Careers site–objectives, approach, style, functionality, et cetera.

Q: How can competing needs be reconciled?

6.  Unfortunate events, management problems, and other negative circumstances may afflict just one component of the company but spread bad publicity to other components.

Q: Can the employer brand be protected from the effects of localized difficulties?

Those are just some of the issues—and there are no easy answers.  However, each question is worth serious strategic consideration

Two observations:

  • Microsites can be used to present smaller employment segments more effectively and accurately.
  • It takes attentive oversight to successfully communicate one employer brand across many employment segments.

Two good examples:

Far-flung KPMG does a nice job of integrating multiple locations and career pthats.

Global Website: http://www.kpmg.com/Global/JoinUs/

U.S. Website: http://www.kpmgcareers.com/index.shtml

Multi-functional Sodexo makes great use of microsites for diversified messaging and social media for unified messaging.

http://www.sodexousa.com/usen/careers/careers.asp

One more point worth noting:

Six of the top ten qualities that contribute to job satisfaction (according to SHRM’s 2009 Employee Job Satisfaction Survey) are more concerned with the local workplace than with the company at large:

  • opportunities to use skills and abilities
  • feeling safe in the work environment
  • relationship with immediate supervisor
  • management recognition of employee job performance
  • communication between employees and senior management
  • the work itself
  • autonomy and independence


(Merci to nicholasnova for the great graphic.)

Pushdown Ads Bring Brand Stories Above the Fold

The Pushdown ad unit is becoming more popular now that some major Web properties have adopted it.  In case you’re not familiar with the Pushdown ad unit, it’s those annoying ads that appear at the top of a Web page and actually ‘push’ the content of that Web page down further on your screen (sometimes a long way down your screen).  Sometimes it can be hard to make them go away.  However, advertisers are learning to love them, and it’s not surprising really.  The surprise is actually that Pushdown ads didn’t gain momentum faster.

Pushdown ads are intrusive, and that’s exactly what the Online Publishers Association wanted when the ad unit was created a year or so ago.  You may have seen them on sites owned by the New York Times, Discovery, ESPN or Conde Nast — some of the first well-known publishers to test the Pushdown ad format.

According to an article from BrandWeek, more and more companies are actively seeking Pushdown ad placement, including AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Universal Pictures, and Nokia.  In fact, Yahoo! has started testing Pushdown ad units in response to advertiser demand (and a desire to increase advertising revenue, of course).

The Online Publishers Association claims that Pushdown ad units allow advertisers to tell more complete brand stories and helps to provide a more creative advertising opportunity that should stand out from crowded online display advertising industry.

There is no doubt that Pushdown ads fall into the realm of ‘interruption marketing’.  The question is whether or not people will feel the ads are too much of an interruption.  Does the extra scrolling to get to a Web page’s real content bother consumers?  Would it bother you?

We’ll have to wait for the inevitable research and statistics about click-through rates, abandon rates, and so on before we’ll know exactly how effective Pushdown ads are.  I know I’m curious to hear how this one shakes out.  What are your predictions?  Will Pushdown ads be embraced by consumers or will Pushdown ads make consumers click away and search for another Web page that provides similar content without the extra scrolling requirements?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.