Recruiters & Social Media – Love/Hate or Love/Love?

The most frequent comment I hear from recruiters when we talk about social media is that it takes too much time… they are super busy finding candidates and filling reqs and don’t have 2 -3 hours a day to spend on social channels, updating their statuses and sharing information. While I agree that it takes a bit of time up front, once you have all your social profiles completed you really only need to spend 30 minutes a day monitoring and updating them. 

I’m all about automation to save time.  My favorite tool right now is Buffer App.  This is a free tool that allows you to schedule up to 10 articles at specified times of your choice.  Use this scheduling tool with Feedly.com or whatever reader you use and set your updates to your social networks in advance.  By using a reader you can follow blogs and online papers like Mashable, TechCrunch, Fortune, VentureBeat, INC.com, Wired, Engadget or any of the many, many other great publications.  Then use RSS feeds to your reader or Outlook.  You can quickly scan and click on interesting articles and then use Buffer App to schedule sharing via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

HootSuite or TweetDeck are great tools to manage social feeds and schedule postings.  I use HootSuite and have linked it with my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Feeds.  I have tabs for each stream and can schedule posts to all of these networks, multiple times.  It’s easy to post your current job openings directly from HootSuite.  You can also schedule them to recur every week and keep them at the top of your social profiles. 

Use your downtime and leverage mobility.  While you are waiting, pull out your mobile device and check your social feeds and retweet, share, like and repost articles that you find valuable.  I’ve spent many hours at the salon, doctor’s office, auto repair shop, coffee shop or restaurant catching up on my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds and sharing content from them. 

If you decide to automate (and I hope you do) remember that it is best to read the content that you want to share first and then share with your network.  If you allow the tool to pick the content, you might end up sharing content that is not relevant to you or your network.  People follow you for a reason and you should be sharing what you consider valuable information.  If it’s not valuable to you, it probably won’t be valuable to your followers.  

Defining Your Online Brand

Everyone knows what a brand is… most people associate it with a product or a company like Cheetos® or Nike®.  We have been talking about Corporate Brand in the recruiting industry for quite awhile and now Personal Brand has become just as popular.  You hear it on everything from the Wall Street Journal to America’s Next Top Model.  What exactly does Personal Brand mean and do you really need one? 

I teach a workshop on personal branding so I read a lot of articles on this subject.  Today I read an article by Jasmine Sandler about How to Create a Visible and Engaging LinkedIn Profile that also explains personal branding extremely well.  I would like to take it outside of LinkedIn and apply it to your career goals and personal life. 

What is it?  Your Personal Brand is basically what people think about you.  How they see you at work, in real life and more and more importantly these days, online.  Going one step further, what they will say about you to their friends, associates and colleagues. 

Why do you need one?  Even if you don’t think you need one, you have one. It might not be what you would expect.  People are forming opinions about you based on their interactions with you, word of mouth (what they see and hear about you) and how you present yourself.  You need to take control of how people view you and show yourself in the best light.  Good lighting is crucial for a great picture and you are creating a picture of yourself for the world to see.  If you are a job-seeker you need a strong, positive personal brand to attract prospective employers, present who you are and get interviews.  As an employee you need a good brand at work to make the best possible impression, define how you can contribute to the organization and advance your career. 

How do you do it right?  You should start by knowing yourself, your capabilities, and the direction you want to go and then start building your brand.  A key place to start is building a powerful online brand.  This will be the cornerstone of your personal brand.  The article I reference earlier is a great example of building out your LinkedIn profile which is the most important professional social network at this time.  You should also create profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and maybe even Pinterest to share your perspective and establish credibility.  Show your personality and let people see your thinking, world view and sense of humor.  (Remember to constantly manage and adjust privacy settings to only show professional pictures and interactions.)

Start Building Credibility… when you develop your online profile, make sure people can find you when searching by using key words that are the most relevant and make sure your profile reflects those key words.  Be sure and publish your recommendations and accomplishments. Highlight your successes… share the conferences you are attending, articles you have published and accolades received.  Stay informed… subscribe to publications like Forbes, Bloomberg, Tech Crunch and follow your favorite companies and people. Join groups related to your industry and comment on the articles that interest you or that especially touched or informed you.  Engage in conversations, share your expertise!  Be consistent, select a unified theme for all social media so people will easily recognize you everywhere. 

Become a Subject Matter Expert… decide what you want to be known for and make sure people know you for that.  Share your opinions, educate and inform others.  You can start by creating a blog.  It doesn't have to be super high tech, many sites like Blogger are very easy to use and set up.  Create engaging content about whatever you are passionate about and share your passion with the world.  Finally network and make connections… you never know where that next speaking engagement invitation or job offer will come from. 

Remember the three fundamentals… Be Seen, Be Heard and Be Respected. See you online!

Secrets To Successful Recruiting

Do you ever wonder what makes some recruiters so successful while others don’t seem to be able to produce great results?  I’ve been in the business for a long time and worked with many, many recruiters in both agency and corporate environments.  The great ones are happy to share their knowledge and secrets of success and I am an enthusiastic learner.  Allow me to share what I have learned with you and I would love to hear back what you have learned on your recruiting journeys.  What I have discovered is there are 4 basic skills that every successful recruiter has mastered.  They are; sales, smarts, savvy and storytelling. 

Sales:

Recruiting is basically all about selling… you sell the candidate on the job and you sell the hiring manager on the candidate.  Agency recruiters have to use super sales techniques to cold call into companies and sell the hiring managers on using an agency and paying a fee.  Corporate recruiters also face challenges in convincing hiring managers who assume calling their job out to an agency is the only way to get top tier candidates.  They have to convince their hiring managers to give them time to source, screen and submit qualified candidates that didn’t apply to the posting.  Then they sell them on why they should interview the candidates they have recruited.  Both face the ultimate challenge of convincing that perfect purple squirrel candidate to accept their role which, when successful, can be a feat of infinite magic and a wonder to behold.  This is one of the best feelings a recruiter will ever have… taking a stellar passive candidate, presenting them with their ideal job, arranging all the interviews, negotiating offer details and finally getting the signed offer letter… talk about time to celebrate and pat yourself on the back!  In the agency world we used to ring a bell when that happened and sometimes I feel like ringing a bell now when closing a really challenging req… if not ringing a bell then at least popping a cork.  J

Smarts:  

Recruiters have to be experts in their fields.  They are super sleuths like Nick Charles or Jake Gittes (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”), private detectives prowling the cities and cyberspace… first finding top tier candidates; researching where they work and play, finding contact information and getting them into a conversation before they can even present a job opportunity to them.  Some great recruiters can work without any tools at all… just their intellect and industry knowledge.  I know one recruiter who only recruits for specific industry professionals so he pretty much knows all the players and has their contact information so that when he gets an order from a competitor, he just picks up the phone and starts dialing for dollars.  Other great recruiters use all the tools available.  (I happen to fall into this camp.)  We need tools not toys.  ATS, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Blogs, ZoomInfo, Boolean searches… you name it we use it!  We are building a social network and a personal brand to attract and engage with leaders in our industries.  I love it when I find people using new tools like Pinterest and can speak to them about their interests and interacting with new people who find me on Twitter and Google+. 

Savvy: 

To paraphrase a Kenny Rogers song… you won’t get very far as a recruiter unless you know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away and know when to run.  You never count your money when you’re sittin at the table...  Recruiters are like gamblers in a way; they have to read people and know what motivates them, when and how to approach them and how to give them what they want so that everyone wins.  This is a fine art and a skill that is honed over the years.  Every now and then you will come across a natural born recruiter but most have been seasoned, tried and proven thru fire.  They know what works because they have made mistakes and had great successes and learned from them both.

Storytelling:

If you can’t tell a story about the company you are representing or why this particular job is so wonderful for that particular person at that particular time in their career, you probably won’t see stellar results.  On the flip side, you have to tell the candidate’s story to the hiring manager so that they will understand how that particular candidate will successfully meet their needs for their team at that moment.  Great recruiters use their storytelling skills to paint a picture of the role they are recruiting for, the company culture, innovation in the industry, career path, success stories from former people in that role, what it would be like to work with that team, current projects and cool new projects on the horizon that they can be a part of from day one… you get the picture.  Some people think that if you offer a candidate enough money they will take your job.  They couldn’t be more wrong.  People change jobs for many different reasons but in my experience only about 20% or less focus solely on salary… it is usually the type of work they will be doing, who they are working with and if they will be challenged and afforded new growth and learning opportunities.  My hiring managers are interested in why candidates do what they do… what motivates them and gets them out of bed every day.  A passion for what they do and the fire to make things happen and make a difference… that’s what our hiring managers look for in potential candidates, we have even started hiring to our values in some roles over technical expertise, especially in customer care roles.  You can teach technology but you can’t teach desire, drive and a heart for the customer.  

Just call me +Leslie

That’s right… I’m in Google+… totally socially networked now.  Are you impressed?  I’m overwhelmed!

Just when I was getting accustomed to using my twitter handle @leslie12002 (which I still use in my signatures and is a great way to reach me) along comes the new social network, Google+.  Thank goodness I have connections and was able to get past the bouncer at the door.  Now I’m at the club, just had my first trip to the bar but still watching the crowd to see what’s up.  Not sure I’m ready to get out on the dance floor yet.  Don’t want to give away all my moves until I’m sure this is a place I want to hang out.  Also I haven’t quite figured out yet all the security issues, the bouncer seems like a capable and reasonably good guy but will he be there if I get in trouble? 

My first thoughts are to keep this social network for my cool, socially connected friends who share relevant information with a twist of humor.  What I don’t want is another invitation to Farmville.  I’m a big city girl after all… or is that wicked city woman?   I started with just my immediate contacts in my circles, and then I found a list of all the Google employees and decided I had to have  a circle for them.  Is there a limit to circles?  Can I assign which circles come into my home stream?  What I really need is a HootSuite for Google+… has anyone found one? 

Looking over my 2 week old Google+ ecosystem… I now have 13 circles created thus far, 128 people in my circles with 32 people adding me to their circles.  I have no idea how these people found me or why they want me in their circle, I’m not sharing relevant or witty information yet (remember, still at the bar).  My first instinct is that they want to sell/send/spam something to me or even worse – stalk me!  (Of course I intend to use it for recruiting purposes, after all my momma didn't raise no dumb babies.) 

  

The jury is still out on Google+… for now I’ll continue to monitor my stream and selectively add to my circles.  I'm open to suggestions and creative solutions.  Let me know if you have anything that will sway me, all I need is a good reason to bust a move! 

LinkedIn Improved Email Settings Features

Someone at LinkedIn must have read my previous post... have you seen the new features under your settings page?  (I don’t remember it being this way before, but then again, my memory isn’t exactly the steel trap it was in my youth.)  They have made it much easier and more organic to manage all your email settings now by adding the new email preferences link that allows you to control how all email is sent to you.  Click on the settings tab (hover over your name) in the top right corner and land on this page:

Now if you click on the Email Preferences Tab you can manage messaging to you via email:


   
• Select the types of messages you're willing to receive
• Set the frequency of emails
• Select who can send you invitations
• Set the frequency of group digest emails


 
 
 
And you can manage how LinkedIn pushes information to you via email by clicking on the Frequency of Emails link. All this in one place!
 



• InMails
• Invitations
• Messages
• Group emails
• Announcements
• Status updates
• Notifications
• Network Activity
• And several others including LinkedIn Partner Emails


 
 
 
Thank you LinkedIn! 

Too Much Information? Easy Steps to Manage your LinkedIn Status Updates & LI Twitter Stream

Recently I received an email from one of my LinkedIn connections requesting that I “remove him from my list”. This person is a connection that I know personally and I was surprised at the email since I don’t have a list and wasn’t sure what he meant. Turns out he was referring to the frequency of my LinkedIn status updates… seems he had all his connections status updates set to come to his inbox and my daily updates were becoming “too much noise”.

For a recruiter, this can be a fine (on) line to walk… how many updates are necessary and how many are too much? My solution was to twofold… to show my connection how to manage his LinkedIn Status Updates and for me to manage my LinkedIn tweets and only post the tweets especially relevant to my network and my role as a recruiter. Seems I have gotten a bit overenthusiastic on twitter lately. 

My part was accomplished by going to my LinkedIn settings under “manage twitter preferences” and checking the box to only post my tweets with #in instead of every tweet that was going out.

For all of you out there who are having this problem, here are the steps to manage your LinkedIn Status Updates so that you won’t be affected by all the online noise.  This is how you can turn off status updates on your LinkedIn Profile and you won’t receive any of them at all in your stream:


1. Go to your LinkedIn profile and click on your name in the top right corner

2. Click on SETTINGS

3. Click on the ACCOUNT tab on the left bottom of the page

4. Under settings – click on “customize updates you see on your home page”

5. Under the General tab uncheck the “status updates from your connections”

Hope this helps… we are all out here in the sphere together… let’s all try and get along.

Data Driven Decision Making - YouTube as a Recommendation Engine?

Those of you who have been following my tweets are aware that I have been strongly evangelizing my company's involvement in our push to “data driven decision making”. We are offering our products as online/SaaS offerings as well as mobile applications. With this direction, data becomes more and more a priority and talking point.

From Intuit’s business perspective… one of our greatest assets is in the data we collect through our software and services for small businesses and general consumers. Our goal is to transform our data assets into innovative services to better serve our customers. We are currently in the process of transforming our DaaA strategy... specifically in web analytics. We are focusing our efforts on data driven insights on customer behavior, customer acquisition and lifetime value. Over the course of the next two years we will be building a linked collection of data assets to provide near real-time market intelligence to our internal and external customers.

From our recruiting perspective… how do we use data as a two way experience in our recruiting efforts; for a better candidate experience as well as from a branding and awareness recruiting best practice? Being on the forefront of Social Media recruiting, I am taking this discussion to the cloud and would appreciate your insights as candidates, customers, colleagues and interested parties.

Intuit Careers already has a strong presence on Facebook as demonstrated by the data we receive from fans and downloads of our video chat presentations. We also have a strong LinkedIn presence with our Intuit Careers page, Alumni Community, Data and Insights Community and many other Intuit product pages. We are also seeing more and more candidates following and interacting with Intuit Careers on twitter (follow @intuitcareers and our list of Intuit Recruiters).

Going one step further I am proposing using our YouTube channel as a recommendation engine and am asking you to visit Intuit Careers on YouTube where we have many videos posted about our products, culture and our various business units. Go ahead… surf, browse, view, play, share and most of all comment! We want your opinions/feedback/suggestions here: www.youtube.com/intuitcareers.

Pease give us your honest feedback as your insights will help us shape and improve the way we interact with you through our social media channels. Stay tuned… more to follow!

Networking to Find a Job… Are You Using LinkedIn?

There is just no getting around it… LinkedIn has become the major player in networking. Whether you are looking for sales contacts, employees, or just company information; this should be your first stop on the research train. If you are unemployed, underemployed or just looking for that dream job… this tool could just be your ticket.

Recruiters have been using LinkedIn for years to source passive candidates. Why don’t you join the party and use LinkedIn to network for a job? Intuit is proud to have the most connected woman on LinkedIn as a part of our Right Talent team. Stacy Zapar has over 30,000 first degree LinkedIn connections and she will be on the Intuit Careers Live Video Career Advice Series Facebook Chat on Thursday, February 17th at 11:00 am PST.

No matter if you are a seasoned LinkedIn Uber user or a relative Newbie to the tool, you will find something to take away from this chat. Please join Stacy Zapar tomorrow as she discusses how to use LinkedIn in your job search.
Participating is simple. Log on to www.facebook.com/intuitcareers and click on the chat and blogs tab on the left hand side of our page up to 10 minutes prior to the chat beginning. You do not need a webcam to participate. After Stacy’s presentation you will be able to text chat in your questions for Stacy to answer live.

And while you're at it... if we are not already connected on LinkedIn… here is a QuickLink invitation to join my network: http://bit.ly/feKQg0. Hope to connect with you soon and Happy Networking!

Social Networks – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Do you tweet… holla… shout out… tag photos… give your homies their props? How many websites does it take you to voice a single passing thought? If you have the money honey, I have the time! No, wait... that’s a song! But it is a valid point… how much time do you spend on social networks merely updating your status or pinging your friends? When do you find the time… do you try to sneak a peek during work and hope you won’t get busted?

Personally I love my social networks and enjoy keeping up with people. When a friend from the past finds me on Facebook, I’m happy to catch up with them but guilty of not becoming involved on a deeper level. Unfortunately that is pretty much the end of the correspondence unless it’s reading the one line updates and checking out the new photos they post.

So come on… chime in… am I the only superficial social networker out there?

Video Resumes

The vote is still out on the advantages of having and sending video resumes. I have read many articles on this subject and the decision is pretty much split right down the middle as to whether they offer a real benefit as opposed to a traditional resume. I have diligently completed a Visual CV as well as profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Recruitingblogs.com and Twitter. I am socially networked and totally Googleable… do I really need another web presence to drive people to find/contact/reach me?

Inquiring minds like mine want to know… what are the benefits of having a video resume? As a consummate and intrepid recruiter, I have decided to put one together. (Go ahead, laugh if you must.) The content and format is decided and the video camera has been borrowed. Filming has begun! Help has been elicited from my daughter and my more technically savvy, Gen Y friends for editing, music, etc. I am extremely excited and curious as to how this project will turn out while keeping an open mind as to the infinite possible results. Stay tuned for updates… same bat time, same bat channel.

How Social is Your Network?

After receiving yet another "invitation to join my network" from Plaxo, Zing, Zoom, Boom, et al... I wonder just how many social networks are too many? If I spent all my time joining networks, posting and updating bloggs, and attending networking events, there would be no time left for recruiting. This conundrum makes me wonder if all the really great, prolific bloggers out there are strictly in management, independently working or do they stay up late into the wee hours of the morning updating and posting?