Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

What to do when you’ve Googled a candidate?

Thursday Bram offers us some tips on what to do when you’ve Googled someone’s name. We’ve all done it; but what do you do with the results?

If you run an online search on a job applicant, you can find pages and pages of information. For some names, search engines like Google can return millions of results. Interpreting all of that information — and ensuring that it’s truly relevant to a candidate — can take a little work.

Reading Social Networking Profiles

It’s common to find at least one social networking website in the results of a search for a particular name. Depending on the site, you may need a membership to view a profile or you may need to be ‘friends’ with an individual to look at their results. In other cases, you may be able to access a person’s full profile immediately. If you can access a profile, you can find a wealth of information: links to personal websites as well as accounts on other networking sites, details about past employment (sometimes even links to supervisors) and perhaps even updates written by the job candidate.

Reading through such information can be a lengthy process, especially if a candidate has maintained a blog or online journal for a long period of time. You can use Google or another search engine’s advanced search panel to search a website for particular keywords — if, for instance, you want to know about a candidate’s relationship with a former employer, you can search his or her blog for mentions of that company.

Interpreting Other Results

Results can range far beyond social networking profiles: if a prospective employee has been mentioned in a newspaper article or maintains a website, you’re likely to see such information in the results for his or her name. You can find products an applicant has endorsed and awards he or she has won. Not all of this information is relevant beyond proving a resume true or false, but it can help to build a clearer picture of a particular candidate — and help you make a decision on whether such an individual would be a good fit for a particular job.

Finding the Right John Smith

When you research a potential employee with an unusual name, it’s relatively easy to determine which search results are pertinent. On social networking sites, you can quickly compare education or work histories. On personal sites, it’s just a matter of looking for a reference to a particular employer.

But when you’re considering an applicant with a common name, you may run into a few more problems. No one wants to hold a job candidate responsible for the actions of someone else — even if they share a name — but it can be difficult to find an indicator that you’ve got the wrong John Smith. You can narrow down the search results by including a middle name, a location or a company in your search. You can also use other information to narrow down your hunt: running a search on a candidate’s email address can provide relevant information, as can searching a previous employer’s website for mentions of that employee’s name.

So: when you’ve got your search results, there is often more to be done to ensure you’ve got to the bottom of your candidate’s story …

Thanks, Thursday!

Sustainability Legislation : The Future of Sustainability Assurance

Gordon Brown at World Economic Forum, 2007Gordon Brown’s love of bondage is well known to all UK voters. He used to boast in Parliament how he’d snuggle up to the dominatrix Prudence and do whatever she asked, so long as she’d eliminate boom and bust.

Now Prudence has been kissed goodbye, her siren whispers left behind as conveniently as any thought of limiting public debt in line with domestic GDP.

It’s a salutary lesson in being so cock-sure of yourself that you forget that life has a remarkable way of turning out differently to how you envisage.

So I thought I’d do a little self examination. There have been several posts on this blog which have concluded along the lines of “business really has to pull its finger out otherwise governments will legislate”.

But would legislation be such a bad thing? [Read more…] about Sustainability Legislation : The Future of Sustainability Assurance

Fast Forward

2009

As promised in the recent post Back to Basics, we’ll take a sharp turn from the old-fashioned topic of messaging to see what’s been getting buzz in the world of recruiting.

Last August, HR expert Dr. John Sullivan wrote a very interesting post on 13 Trends in Corporate Recruiting for 2009. It drew quite a few responses from folks offering additional insights (and explaining how their own product/service would solve problem X), then got reposted with more comments on other blogs. So there’s a nice bit of discussion around the list, and most everyone seems to agree with the ideas articulated.

Sullivan offers thoughtful commentary, plus suggested ‘Firms to watch’ in each category, so the post is well worth a read. To provide a preview, I’ll list the topics he discusses under the heading ‘Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting,’ and then add a short comment …

  1. Upgrading employment branding
  2. Reinvigorating referral programs
  3. Renewing the focus on quality of hire
  4. Reinforcing the business case for recruiting
  5. Utilizing social networks
  6. Utilizing video
  7. Upgrading succession planning
  8. Using employee blogs for recruiting
  9. Using mobile-phone recruiting
  10. Revitalizing corporate jobs page
  11. Using a CRM model for hiring
  12. Hiring innovators
  13. Recruiting globally

Sullivan also lists 18 trends that will probably not become mainstream in 2009, but do offer some ideas for innovators. They include use of pop-culture tools like Second Life, video games, contests, as well as techno-strategies such as remote interviewing and simulations for candidate assessment. In addition, he mentions internal realignments such as increasing focus on internal redeployment and bringing back key ex-employees.

Finally, there’s a section on what’s not hot. Can you guess? Outsourcing recruiting processes and relying on large job boards—not hot. Also mentioned, internal concerns such as retention and speed of hire.

Of the 13 major trends, number 10 is the most relevant from a Corporate Eye perspective, and here’s what Sullivan has to say about it:

Revitalizing corporate jobs page. Recruiting managers are beginning to understand that pitifully dull and dated websites drive away innovators. Focus areas include providing personalized information to the visitor, Flash video integration, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Q&As. Firms to watch: Microsoft, Google, and Deloitte.

And here’s my comment, which is really a question. There’s a significant difference between the 2009 of ‘now’ and the 2009 of ‘then.’ In fact, it’s hard to believe the world looked so different only last August. Given the precarious condition of the economy today, employers seeking experienced talent may find their prospect pool shrinking, as employees who have jobs become reluctant to give them up and look elsewhere. And with unemployment rising steadily, employers who offer an entry-level path may find themselves overwhelmed. (Just look at the recent rush of applicants for jobs with the Miami Fire Department.)

So . . . which of the touted trends are going to be effective (or even relevant) for your company in the real 2009? And which (if any) trendy website embellishments might be worth an investment? Most important—do you have the information needed to make these decisions?

Food for forward thought.

And thanks to Môsieur J. for the image.

On harsh truths and the corporate website

Did you see 10 harsh truths about corporate websites?

It’s a great post by Paul Boag about some of the issues faced by people responsible for the corporate website in large organisations, and much of it had me nodding in agreement. If you saw it, I expect you had the same response. If you haven’t read it yet, go and do that now. I’ll wait here …

Back with me?

Here, in summary, are Paul’s 10 Harsh Truths:

  1. You need a separate web division
  2. Managing your website is a fulltime job
  3. Periodic redesign is not enough
  4. Your website cannot appeal to everyone
  5. You are wasting money on social networking
  6. Your website is not all about you
  7. You’re not getting enough value from your web team
  8. Design by committee brings death
  9. A CMS is not a silver bullet
  10. You have too much content.

Did you agree with all of those? I wonder if we agreed with the same things? Either way, it is a post likely to generate strong opinions.

I want to look at two of his 10 Truths today.

Truth #3: Periodic Redesign is Not Enough

putting it together

He argues that corporate websites go through a cycle of build:gradual deterioration:redesign, with the result that every few years the company faces a significant expense, and that it would be better to go for continual investment and a gradual evolution.

And to a large extent, I agree.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify those relatively low-cost changes which would improve your website significantly, without having to undergo a full-on redesign? The 80:20 rule works in most cases …

On the other hand, sometimes a site has had so many incremental changes – an extra tool here, additional pages there, a whole section bolted on the side – that it has become unwieldy and needs to be stripped down and rebuilt. Just sometimes, a redesign is exactly what is needed. Either for technical reasons or for business ones: perhaps the company is rebranding, or is launching a new strategy; perhaps they’ve merged or sold off a chunk of the business. The site should serve the needs of the business, and if the business is being redesigned, so too should the site be.

However, I agree that periodic redesign isn’t enough – between these rebuilds, there should be a process of continual improvement and evolution, as the needs of the business change and new best practices in corporate communications emerge.

Truth #4: Your Website Cannot Appeal to Everyone

Swiss Army Knife

The target audience too often includes a long, detailed list of diverse people … and that the website should be primarily aimed at a clearly defined audience.

Unfortunately, for the corporate website, the prospective audience just is diverse.

For a retail site, you can say that the audience is – for example – teenage girls (or buyers for the teenage girls, usually their mothers). The corporate site, however, has as its primary audience a mix of:

  • investors (potential and current; professional, with thousands of shares, and retail, with a handful of shares)
  • analysts (investment and social responsibility)
  • journalists (mainstream media – broadcasting and print – and the new media)
  • job-seekers (from top to bottom of the organisation, from the inexperienced to the non-executive director, the short-term contractor to the full-time careerist)
  • suppliers (of a whole range of products, services and people)
  • business partners (current and prospective)
  • customers (browsers, purchasers, those seeking support)
  • employees (current and – sometimes – alumni).

And it has to provide information for most of those people most of the time, as well as provide additional information, perhaps about corporate governance and compliance, about its social responsibility actions, or about its subsidiary businesses, or mergers and acquisitions – even corporate messages in times of crisis.

This potential audience can be reduced, though why would you want to? How else are you going to communicate with all these different people?

Do you really want to reduce the breadth of your target audience?

There are ways of reducing the diversity of the audience; companies take different approaches to this, and this will vary by the business strategy of the company.

  • Sometimes a company tries to meld its retail and corporate site together, and in that case usually the customer is seen as the primary audience, and the corporate information is hidden behind an About Us link. Others don’t address customers at all.
  • Some companies don’t address suppliers on their site; most don’t address their employees. Some don’t even put information for job-seekers on their corporate sites.
  • For some, business partners are all but irrelevant; for others, partnering is a significant part of the business strategy, and spelt out in full on the site.

And so the size of the potential audience can be reduced a bit, possibly, and even when you’ve done that, there still remains a wide range of interest groups, which as an absolute minimum includes investors and the media, each of which is a widely diverse group in itself. A financial print journalist may not be interested in the same material as a feature journalist or a broadcast journalist; and print journalists are not necessarily interested in the same information as a small-scale shareholder.

Is providing information for investors and journalists really more important than for the other stakeholders in the company? And scaling down the target audience in this way doesn’t take into account the required information that a company must provide on its site.

So what should those responsible for the corporate website do?

Authorised

It is very difficult to say which of this assortment of interest groups should be seen as the target audience; and that is why the corporate website is almost always broken down into silos, with a section for each interest area.

That way each section can be targeted to the interests of that group, providing them with the information that they need quickly, and providing easy access for them to find information elsewhere on the site if needed.

Even so, the overall site should be consistent in appearance and message, so that the brand and strategic message of the company is conveyed effectively across the whole site.

And that brings us to an issue touched on tangentially in the list of Harsh Truths: branding, and the debate over who gets a stake in the home page territory. Prime real-estate up for grabs – and of course everyone wants a share. Imagine the committee meetings in a Harsh Truth company to decide how many pixels each should be able to fill with content … and imagine the confusion on the home page if each division were allowed to fill their 250px*250px with whatever seemed best to them.

This is where Paul’s suggestion of a Web Division with adequate resource, experience and responsibility, led by an experienced manager with real control is interesting, and brings together a number of the Harsh Truths, particularly #1. Someone has to be in charge.

But who has control of the message? Who matches up the web strategy with the corporate strategy?

None of this is easy, and leads us to Harsh Truth #11: the corporate website is more difficult to manage than you’d think.

LinkedIn – 5 Ways to Target Recruits

I recently asked Thursday Bram, a freelance writer and experienced recruiter, to discuss ways of using LinkedIn for recruitment.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a recruiter’s dream: thousands of potential candidates listing their work histories online for recruiters to browse through, providing links to past supervisors and co-workers and even often providing links to their outside projects. But the sheer number of candidates on LinkedIn makes targeting a search absolutely crucial: sorting through thousands of profiles means that a labor-saving tool like LinkedIn just wouldn’t be doing its job…

These five tips can help you narrow down the field to a manageable number.

  1. Build up your own network

    The more connections you can add to your own LinkedIn network, the more people are within your extended network — and the more people you can contact directly. LinkedIn generally limits the information you can access about an individual who isn’t in your extended network. Even with a relatively small network on LinkedIn, your extended network can number in the thousands when you consider the people your contacts know, as well at those people’s contacts.

  2. Look for warm leads

    LinkedIn provides you with several tools to easily contact your network — you can quickly find out if anyone in your network has a recommendation for a particular position. Even if you simply send out a blanket email to your network, you can get back solid leads — complete with links to a LinkedIn profile full of information about that potential candidate. Not only will you get prospects that are likely interested in the position you need to fill but they’ll also come with the recommendation of someone in your own network.

  3. Use Google to search LinkedIn

    Google returns millions of results when you search for LinkedIn, but you can get some useful results by limiting your search. The following search string can be a starting point: copy “site:www.linkedin.com -intitle:answers -intitle:blog -intitle:directory” and then list keywords like your location and the specialty you’re looking for.

  4. Learn LinkedIn’s advanced options:

    Near the top of every page, LinkedIn has a box for searching for particular people. If you click into the advanced options, though, you can search for a lot more than a name. You can search for particular titles, locations, keywords, industries and more. You can start limiting your search by the factors relevant to a job opening and then slowly move outward, expanding your results as your search progresses. For example, you can limit your search to a particular job title in the town where you’re looking to place a candidate. If you don’t find the right candidate in your results, though, you can expand your search to the state level or even ignore location.

  5. Use LinkedIn’s hiring tools

    LinkedIn has a whole set of tools built with recruiting in mind. From posting job opportunities to searching for candidates, LinkedIn’s tools were created with the full extent of its network in mind. While there is a price tag for using these tools — posting a job costs $195 per 30-day posting — they do allow you to take full advantage of the website’s total database.

Thanks, Thursday!

Applying SWOT Analysis to Recruitment

Recently I invited LaTeisha Overton, who is an experienced recruitment professional and CEO of IndieRecruiter, to describe for us one of the approaches she takes to helping recruiting teams put together better recruiting strategies.

strategy

Put on your Recruiting gear and prepare for combat!

Ever thought about the strategy behind a successful recruiting team?

As a Recruiter, I find that I am most successful when I am strapped with as much information as possible about my employer as even more so, my employer’s competitor. As this information is vital to compiling an effective recruiting strategy, knowing what the candidates are looking for is equally important. One sure way to gather this information is to perform a S.W.O.T Analysis with your company or employer and their competition.

A S.W.O.T Analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business.

This analysis proves to be very useful and effective within the Recruiting industry as well. Performing a SWOT analysis will assist the company or organization’s Recruiting team with valuable insight and information that will enhance your recruiting strategy and improve candidate sourcing efforts.

Competitive Strengths

In this area, you want to see just what you are up against by taking a look at your competitor’s stronger suits. Here are a couple of questions to research:

  • What stands out about the competitor?
  • What types of benefits are offered?
  • Is there opportunity for work-life balance?
  • What is the measure of growth per year?
  • What is the rank or position in the industry?
  • How long has the organization been in operation?
  • Is there a specialty or unique focus?

Weakness Overview

When considering your competitors Weaknesses, we should focus on the following:

  • Company Presence – Where is their biggest presence? What part of the country? (Is that an area that candidates would want to live or work?)
  • Company Culture – What is it like to work for X company? This information can be gathered through Social and Professional Networking sites like “Facebook” and “Linkedin”. These sites host groups that are sometimes made up of employees from specific companies. Employees use these groups as an opportunity to connect with other employees around the world, use it as a forum to openly discuss new ideas or sometimes, just for fun. Typically these employees are very honest and open to sharing information about their experience working with that company. Just ask, “what do you like and dislike about working with xyz company”? You will be surprised!
  • Attrition – What is the rate of attrition per year? What area do they tend to lose the most employees?
  • Credibility – Look for information on the credibility of the company. Although you may not find any negative information, this is still a worthwhile area to check.

Exploring Opportunities.

As you continue to research and gather more information about your competitor, recognize the areas where there may be an opportunity for you to shine! In this area, you are comparing certain aspects of your organization with theirs. You are using a combination of the Weaknesses and Strengths, yet finding areas where there may be possible loopholes where your company or organization could have the advantage.

Here are some questions to consider:

  • Are the benefits comparable?
  • What does your organization offer that the competitor does not?
  • How valuable is the competitor’s credibility?
  • Who (what type of candidate) is the competitors primary target?
  • What type of advancement opportunities are in place?

Considering the Threats.

In this area, we are to take a look at the road ahead! Recognizing and evaluating your competitors advantages and current status is a great way to determine potential Threats and provide clarity as to where the attention needs to be within your company or organization.

Some questions to consider would be:

  • What is your competitor’s forecasted growth?
  • What is your competitor’s niche or specialty?
  • Are they in expansion mode?
  • What was the revenue percentage for the previous year?
  • What is their current industry ranking?

With the current state of the economy, the recruitment industry will surely need to restructure their approach to yield better overall results. As some companies are reducing their staff, other companies are hiring, yet becoming more detailed in the candidates they seek. When in similar industries, more than likely, the same candidates are being targeted. How well you are prepared and equipped with the right information will make all the difference in the direction the best candidate follows and which Recruiter wins!

Thank you LaTeisha.