Putting the Recruitment Innovation Summit in Perspective

I attended the Recruiting Innovation Summit hosted by ERE, LinkedIn, and Facebook's Richard Cho a few weeks ago.  The people, tone, and content of the event made it great.  It was well attended, and Richard Cho of Facebook is the man.  Attendees had an edge about them, giving you a sense that there is real momentum in the recruiting marketplace.  The agenda and content were great, as recruiters were encouraged to jump into new technology and recruiting strategies.  Simply, people were encouraged to innovate, innovate, and innovate. 

This last piece was my only issue with the event.  Innovation means different things for different organizations and recruiters.  For example, I think the augmented reality for recruiting session was way too far out on the ledge for most recruitment marketing game plans.  The risk, as I saw it, was that someone may not be comfortable with the bleeding edge of innovation and decides not to innovate at all.  It would be a huge mistake for your organization to skip all of the opportunities at its fingertips if it can’t be out on the edge with something like the augmented reality project.

Don’t get me wrong, I love innovation and new technology.  I worked at an e-commerce software shop in 1996.  I joined Segway as soon as it launched its two wheeled people mover.  I dig shiny toys and their digital equivalents.  But the bottom line is that my job is to help corporate recruiters build and execute their recruitment advertising and social media strategy, and there is plenty to do today without innovating to the very edge of the field.     If you are not ready to innovate out onto the outer edge, here are five key recruitment marketing and social recruiting tips that can help everyone innovate today:

 ·         Look beyond LinkedIn’s recruiter & jobs products.  They have built and will continue to build a series of tools that will help you innovate.   Check out “Work with Us Recruitment Ads.”  Think Apple for recruiting.  Love the products and stay close to everything new they do.  They have high expectations on their shoulders – they will innovate to help you.

·         Facebook recruiting strategy.   It’s time to sit down with your team and a blank white board and figure out how to leverage this beast.  Targeted Facebook Ads – go for it.  Build a dedicated recruiting page.  Start the project today.  This is a long term play and you need to start learning how Facebook works for your brand today.  The audience has voted – it is real and a whole generation of talent visits Facebook first, for everything.

·         Start telling your company’s story.  Whether you realize it or not, you are in the content game.  You need to develop blogs, videos and other windows to tell your story to candidates. Once the story is told, it is key to distribute this on your site, through Twitter and your other social media channels.  This is a big undertaking, but people can do more research than ever on sites like glassdoor.com.  You need to take control of your employment brand and build a content strategy.

·         BranchOut, now. If you have not had the chance to set yourself up with a BranchOut account, check it out today. You should start to dip your toes in it to get a sense for the job seeker experience.  There are sure to be innovative recruiting tools coming from this talented and well funded team.  

·         Dig into Meetup.   Meetup is a relatively untapped resource and should be interesting to those of you who like the face to face interaction.  We see individual participation for your hiring managers and recruiters at Meetup events as a way for your hiring crew to standout.  Also, it is a great way to find relatively low budget events to sponsor if you want to win some local friends.

On my trip to Silicon Valley, I got to spend time at the Recruitment Innovation Summit, meeting with prospective customers at our Facebook Recruiting Seminar and visiting HireClix’s friends at LinkedIn right before their IPO.  These events send the same message: now is the time to recharge your recruitment strategies and messages.  Find out what innovation is for you and then execute your plan every single day.  Please add your thoughts and ideas around innovation you see happening in recruiting.