With the New Year, it’s about time we got to announcing our resolutions.  If you are like me, I always look at the New Year as a chance to improve and with that come the forming yearly goals for myself.  For 2013, in addition to the usual get in better shape and career oriented goals, I’ve reflected on some personal and overarching recruiting industry goals that I hope can be achieved.

Here are some of my resolutions for 2013:

Personal Resolutions

For myself and what we do here on the SmashFly Blog, there’s 2 main goals I hope to achieve in 2013.  They are below:

A Greater Variety of Content:  Over the past two years, we’ve leveraged the blog as a way to provide ideas and tips on recruitment and talent acquisition.  While it will still remain our main vehicle for sharing great stories from our conversations with innovative recruiting organizations, I also want to diversify the types of content we provide the recruiting community .  In 2013, I want to try and experiment with different mediums from audio, video, white papers and e-books and try to provide more helpful content that readers can take and share with others.  And hopefully I can get over the sound of my own voice on video.

Better Foster Community:   We are always consistently trying to be helpful by bringing up new ideas and concepts that can be relevant pieces to a successful recruiting strategy.  And in 2013, we hope to provide other thoughts and opinions on many of these ideas through the blog and other vehicles we use.  I also personally want to participate in more one on one conversations as well as Twitter chats that can expand this pools of ideas.

Recruiting Resolutions

2012 was the year of mobile, social and big data and I fully expect much deeper look at these areas.  Companies are just starting to dip their toes in the water and in 2013 I expect the strategies are going to become much more concrete.  Here’s a few resolutions I have for the recruitment marketing industry:

Focus on the Right Data: Big Data is a term thrown around a lot in the past few months and while important, I think it can be a little overwhelming to many organizations.  The think the real key for organizations is to sit down and think about the information they want and need to make better talent decisions. It’s not about capturing everything but capturing the right things.

Once this foundation is set, it will be all about how they can better capture this data accurately through technology and disseminate it into easy to use reports and analytics.  This can be difficult especially with this data being housed many times in different systems, so the key is figuring out what you need and how to integrate it all together.

Seamless Mobile Experience: With users using their phones to access the web more than ever, it’s becoming more important for organizations to have a mobile presence.  This is especially true for recruiting.  Organizations need to try and make reviewing content and searching for jobs easier on these devices and create an experience that fits mobile.  I think in many cases the solution is to dumb down the Career Site for mobile but that can be a mistake.  The key is to simplify what you provide but make sure the experience is still robust to help candidates answer the question, “do I want to work for this company?”

Never Start at Square One:  While many organizations are passed this point with their recruiting, others still approach every new open position as a one-off.  While some proactive recruiting methods need to be used in order to find and engage with new candidates, organizations also should be utilizing their own connections from past recruiting and sourcing initiatives to fill these positions.

These include the silver medalists that exist in your ATS, candidates who’ve opted into your Talent Network, candidates sourced for specific skill-sets as well as past referrals.  There is no real excuse for not using these connections when hiring for a new position.  They are a free channel for you to engage with and in many cases you have more information on them in order to make a more informed hiring decision.

These are just a few of the resolutions that I hope the recruiting industry embraces in 2013.

What resolutions do you have?  I would love to hear them, share in the comments below!