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Careers

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.

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!

Communicating the Employer Brand

Employer Branding Fortune Top 100 Companies

The new Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work For is out—and as always, it offers great information and ideas. So this will be the first of three posts that explore the list, to find out more about what we might call the ’employer brand.’ Basic idea:

Your company has a customer-facing brand, but it also has an applicant-facing brand, which images the company as an employer.

Job-seekers will judge your company at least as much by its ’employer brand’ as by its ‘customer brand.’ The Careers site harmonizes with the customer brand—but it communicates the employer brand.

Today’s post will look for useful lessons from the top three companies on the Fortune list. Part 2 of the series will take up the cautionary tale of two-time winner Google, considering whether (and how) to leverage perks on the Careers website. Finally, Part 3 will do some speed-dating with 50 or so of these employee-friendly companies, in search of common threads and good ideas.

Now, to end the suspense . . . at win, place and show: NetApp, Edward Jones, and Boston Consulting. When I visited their Career sites, I found that NetApp and Edward Jones are already leveraging their Fortune ranking, with badges and links that grab your attention on the Careers home page and also on the corporate home page. (The Fortune print issue is not out yet, but the list is up on their website.) That signals attention to the site, as well as an appreciation for the importance of employer branding.

I also found that all three of these sites are attractive, interesting, and easy to navigate. But most important — all three have a pronounced focus on individual employees. And instead of talking about the company, or talking about people in general, all three sites employ a consistent, apparent ‘you’ focus.

I’ll pound this home by bolding some relevant bits from their sites, as follows:

Employer Branding NetApp
  • NetApp starts big with the first sentence: ‘Leadership, passion and ownership are qualities in every person at NetApp.’ Prominent on their Careers page is a list of key points (“Get rewarded for your great work,” “Push yourself and your imagination,” etc.) that immediately puts the visitor inside the message.

  • Edward Jones also starts off with a personalized headline (‘Welcome to Your Career at Edward Jones’) and follows up in the first sentence with ‘we’re known for our personal approach to business.’

  • BCG has a similar all-about-you focus, with messaging topics like ‘Chart Your Own Course’, ‘Challenge Your Mind,’ and ‘Is BCG for Me?’

Obviously these three companies are very different. They range in size from relatively tiny BCG (1,680 employees) to mid-sized NetApp (5,014) to the fairly large Edward Jones (34,496), and they have different business model and employee populations. But their common emphasis on individual employees seems to endear them to workers—and that emphasis is evident in their Careers messaging.

For a reality check on this point, I went way down the Fortune list to number 72, Nordstrom, and compared their Careers messaging to Macy’s, which is not on the list. (Picked these two because they are apples-to-apples.) Sure enough . . . the Nordstrom page starts off with the headline “Your Bright Future.”

The Macy’s headline? “Opportunities for Success.”

Not exactly a scientific survey, I know—but pretty interesting. Nordstrom’s message goes on with a paragraph containing 44 words, 10% of which are some version of ‘you.’ Over at Macy’s the very first word on the page is ‘We.’ In fairness, there are some ‘you’ sections on the Macy’s site, but they are buried at lower levels, so the impression you get from a quick visit is not especially personal. (And it’s worth noting that the word ‘we’ does not ever appear on the Nordstrom top page—it’s all about ‘you.’)

Now, it may very well be that Macy’s is just as person-friendly as Nordstrom, or more so! But you wouldn’t know it from the messaging. So our takeaway for Part 1 is . . . figure out whether the Careers message is effectively communicating your company’s commitment to individual employees.

And PS: The online Fortune list provides plenty of details about all 100 companies, with enough slicing-and-dicing to make the information worth exploring!

Recruitment agencies and the corporate website

I recently invited Aaron Blower, from Chelsea Search Group, to explain how recruitment agencies use corporate recruitment sites, and what services the corporate site could provide for the external recruiter.

Targeting the One

An astute Corporate Eye editor recently noted that “Most corporate sites, it seems to me, are designed for the new graduate or the experienced hire – individual potential applicants, not agency recruiters …” 

Oh how right she is! 

This raises some interesting questions, both about the structure and usability of corporate recruiting sites, but also about their purpose. 

Let’s start by laying out some of the general goals of the different groups here:

Recruitment Agencies

The primary goal of headhunters is always to make the most money with the smallest amount of effort.  They work for two types of clients:

  • Type 1 clients, who actively source active job seekers and use recruitment agencies only for the most difficult positions after they have exhausted all of their options
  • Type 2 clients, who use agencies for most or all of their positions and do not do much to attract direct applicants. 

Recruitment agencies are always on the lookout for type 2 companies, but their bread and butter is the passive job seeker for type 1 companies (a passive job seeker being one who would consider a job if made aware of it, but isn’t actively looking, unlike the active job seeker).

Corporate Recruiting Website

Corporate websites are designed to attract potential applicants for current and future positions as well as inform all applicants of the benefits of working for the corporation.  This is one of the primary things that turns a type 2 company into a type 1 company; the better the corporate website, the more attractive it will be for active job seekers.  A company with no online careers presence is unlikely to attract the same quantity of applicants. 

Since agencies are hoping your corporation is a type 2 company, they will be talking to active candidates as well as passive candidates.  What this means of course, is that the corporate website is in competition with recruitment agencies for the same active candidates!  If a corporation can get a candidate to apply through the company’s website before an agency submits their resume, the corporation saves significant quantities of money. 

How to Make Them Work Together

With regards to agencies, the corporate website should serve a couple of primary goals.

First, it should be easy for everybody to see all of the open positions without registration or too many clicks.  Most recruiters are going to corporate websites to find out what jobs are open, to see if they might have any candidates that they can skill-market to that company. 

Second, it is nice when they have their corporate policy regarding use of recruiters in plain sight.  These are all examples of sites that clearly spell out their policy towards recruiters.  Some take the extra step of providing information on how to inquire about providing recruitment services.  This one seems to go the extra step of even listing which positions might be open to recruiters if they have a contract.

The point is to have a website that works towards your recruitment goals.  A note specifically tailored to recruiters may decrease the number of cold calls you get and most certainly will decrease the number of unsolicited resumes received – both of which saves HR a lot of time. 

I would probably take an additional step and note which positions the company would be open to filling via recruiter, with specific instructions on how to inquire with specific candidates.  Corporate HR departments cannot spend a lot of time fielding speculative calls from recruiters, but most would be willing to receive targeted contact from recruiters with candidates they would actually be interested in. 

Thanks, Aaron!

Funny Business

There’s actually a good story about how I came upon today’s topic, but I’m going to save it for another post. (Just remember “Company A.”) For now, I want to zip right on to the silly stuff!

Or let’s put it this way: Given the proposition that recruiting should express a company’s personality—how do you deal with a corporate image that’s quirky, or even downright comical? Should you embrace the humor, play it straight, or go somewhere in between?

(And in case you’re thinking “if only that were my problem,” don’t stop reading. There are some lessons here for seriously dull businesses as well.)

Jack

Let’s start by looking at two companies that put a lot of money into making people laugh at their brands. Ask most people for one word about Jack in the Box commercials, and the answer will be “funny.” Same thing for Geico. When job-seekers go to those company sites, they take the humor association right along with them—and it may be a bit of a turn-off if they find an impersonal, unfunny page.

But neither company is recruiting for comic talent, and job-hunting is not by nature a humorous topic. So the key would be to bring the brand together with the mission. Enough Jack, but not too much. Just a touch of Gecko. And the balance needs to fit the business.

For the sake of full disclosure I’d better report at this point that I’m in the tank for Jack. If he’s on TV, I stop to watch, and I never get tired of analyzing the really great Jack moments. (Hint: It’s all about the mouth.) So I’m happy to report that Jack hits the mark on recruiting, with a site that perfectly captures “his” personality through conversational text and iconic illustrations.

jack-topper

Three things to notice: First, attention to detail. For example . . . in some browsers, when you hover on a navigation tab, a Jack antenna-topper pops up above the tab and starts turning his head back and forth. Yes, really! (All across JITB messaging, details sustain the illusion that Jack’s world is an actual place, which is a large part of what makes it all so funny.)

Second, appropriate balance. The “Why Jack” page is LOL funny–I’ve read it about five times now—but it also delivers some solid points. The trick is skillful comic writing that combines tongue-in-cheek delivery (“This is the big time.”) with substantive messaging (“from the first breakfast sandwich to the first portable salad to the most innovative food safety advancements in the industry”).

The “FAQ,” “Benefits,” and “Roles at Jack” pages are written in a crisp, direct style that signals serious business, but each one has a Jack photo, so everything fits together. And notice that every photo on the site neatly fits its page, to reinforce the key message. So Jack’s a high-flying executive on the “Roles” page (read: road to success), but on the “Benefits” page, he’s fly-fishing (read: quality of life).

Finally, the third thing. As they say in show biz, if you want to get around an inconvenient or unlikely plot point, “hang a lantern on it.” So JITB gives the Careers section a special header: Jobs. This is where Jack in the Box gets serious. And that neatly resolves the dissonance problem.

Geico

All right—now what about the Gecko? Over at Geico, they have a different set of constraints than JITB, since you just can’t be as playful about car insurance as you can about fast food. So the site itself is stick-straight. But on the landing page—exactly in the very center—there he is. And wouldn’t you have been disappointed otherwise?

Some takeaways for the rest of us:

  • Be true to your brand personality.
  • Be consistent across pages, but don’t be boring. Use appropriate variety.
  • Remember these famous last words, even though no one can remember who said them: “Dying is easy. Comedy–that’s hard.” It may be okay to add a touch of humor to your site, but make sure it works!

Lessons from the bleeding edge

What if . . . you were trying to recruit new employees for one of the most famously failing companies in America?

Not a day passes without news of the American auto industry teetering on the brink—and commentators frequently point out that consumers won’t buy cars from a company that’s inches away from bankruptcy. So you have to wonder whether job-seekers might not see Toyota as a better bet than Ford!

On top of that, since Ford, Chrysler and GM are under intense pressure to improve their PR, corporate messaging is now heavy on thriftiness and repentance. Good-bye perks and fat salaries, hello humility! But will the best workers be attracted to a company that apologized in print for being stupid?

Although your company may not be in quite such a fix, odds are that the economic downturn is already having an effect on recruiting, with budgets shrinking and applications increasing. That expanding pool of job-seekers may include high-value employees set adrift by failing companies—but you have to attract them and identify them.

To get an idea of how the auto companies are approaching this problem, I visited the “Careers” pages for Ford, GM, and Toyota. All three offer intro videos, but the videos create very different impressions. At Ford, the video starts automatically, and the message is all about F-A-S-T, with lot of zooms, cuts, and sound effects. The visual focus is mainly on cars—inside, outside, upside down. There is no text message, just instructions for searching the job posts.

GM Careers

Over at GM, on the other hand, the opt-in video feature rotates through clips highlighting diversity, NASCAR, day-on-the-job, etc. The text component is short, but hits the right note with this sentence: “Experience the next GM. Whether it’s battery powered, hydrogen fuel cell or the latest hybrid vehicles, we’re committed to putting cars on the road that meet the needs of the world.” Message? This is the next GM. Not the problem GM you know about now, but the one that’s about to emerge—and you can be part of this rebirth!!

I thought that worked really well under the circumstances, but had to wonder whether the approach was purposeful or just an accident. So I jumped on the Wayback Machine (aka Internet Archive), and found that the GM Career page one year ago featured a diversity snapshot, with this text: “The cars, trucks and SUVs we build are as diverse as the talented individuals who come to work here. And that’s why people from every background continue to choose GM as a great place to build a career and pave the road to a bright future.” Now that’s the voice of a company well pleased with itself . . .

Finally, at Toyota there’s a feel-good video about great cars and great people. No text message, but—and here’s the stroke of genius—a “What’s New” section, featuring press releases on Products, Environment, and Corporate (yes, that’s sales reporting). What does this feature signal? “We’re honest with you.” And we can afford to be honest with you, because the Toyota “news” is not nearly as bad as what’s happening with the Big Three.

Well, it will be interesting to see if there are more changes on these sites. But for now, the takeaway is . . . think seriously about the approach you want to take in this economic environment, and if you haven’t adjusted your site to deliver the most effective message, now might be a good time!