Hire Strategies Blog

Best Buy: Why (some) UK retailers should be scared

How many UK retailers really display this kind of open, forward thinking, modern leadership?

How to get your job advert noticed! Maybe too radical for some?

I am doing some research on store manager recruiting and if you search a few of the job boards, or Google for a store manager job, there are way too many to get yours to stand out.

Social Media Revolution Video

Direct Recruiting Strategy

If you have yet to put any real effort into your Direct Recruiting Strategy in my view, time is running out!

With signs of life in the economy once again, and adverts for Christmas already being added (for example) to e-mail footers, I reckon that Christmas will be better than most business leaders will publicly state, and consumer spending will just keep on rolling throughout January and beyond.

The knock-on effect will be that businesses will need to re-focus their direct resourcing efforts to ensure they recruit direct instead of relying just on recruitment agencies.  Or, if they choose to go down the agency route (nothing actually wrong with this) they need to ensure they compensate their agencies well as they will have plenty of business to choose from.

For details on how to develop your own DIRECT RECRUITING SKILLS take a look at our current Social Recruiting Workshop and Google Adwords for Recruiting Workshop.

Do you have a mobile recruiting strategy?

I do smile when I read about "Big Brand" marketers so often quoting protection of their brand being oh so critical.  This week I read in New Media Age about how Google mobile ads are in some cases linking people to web sites that do not render well in mobile browsers and therefore giving a "poor brand experience".

It is however a valid point so how mobile friendly is your career site?  You can either try and search/apply for a job on your own site via your phone or download a mobile phone browser simulator that you can run on your PC.

Opera have a great little simulator at www.opera.com/mini/demo where you can see how your site will look on a mobile with this browser.  Zoom in to read the text!

You may not think it matters today but as the mobile phones become so much more powerful the phone really is no longer just a phone.

Facebook Page - make it easier to keep in touch

With all the different communication channels available such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, latest jobs etc it is of course hard work for a potential job seeker to stay up to date with a number of employer latest activities.  Add in the word "passive" and it gets that little bit harder.

Friendfeed

My own favourite is Friendfeed because I think it works really well and is very easy to follow.  You can subscribe to my FF feed at http://friendfeed.com/petergold99.

However, many potential job seekers will not know too much about FF which is where good old Facebook comes in; plus FB has just acquired Friendfeed so two may become one shortly anyway.

Facebook

By creating a company Page you can also aggregate the various feeds you want.  Although the "big" questions always seems to be how to manage the Page you don't of course have to start off with the Forum instead making it a bit more of a one-way update whilst you gauge the level of interest.  I know some of you will say this defeats the idea but this is just a start point for now.  The monitoring aspect can always be outsourced if necessary!

I've set-up my Hire Strategies Facebook Page; feel free to have a look - it may be the final option as FF may soon be gone!

Social Recruiting Ad Packages - Facebook and Linkedin

With both Facebook and Linkedin after your recruiting budget should you be trying out their ad packages?  Well, before you decide I've set-up trials with both to see how well they work and how easy they are to track.

Is local recruitment advertising the way forward?

I was talking to a client the other day about how certain large, horizontal job boards were just not delivering.  Still too many irrelevant applicants either skill based or overseas!

With Google Adwords you can target your ads at a local level which would be one way of avoiding too many applicants who do not even reside in the UK.  Of course where you want to target people in specific countries you can also create campaigns that target those locations as well.  Find me a job board that can geo-target in this manner!

I can see Basecamp

Watching James Cracknell, Ben Fogle and Ed Coats navigate across the South Pole was a damn site harder than implementing Infusionsoft but I know (from my own races) how they must have felt.  Not quite the same elation but I think I can say I have survived the race to the summit and am now back at IF Base Camp ready to start the real journey.

Will the new system work?  Will the new homepage design deliver? Will I overcook the marketing activities? 

As I've said before; buying an implementing a new system is easy in comparison to delivering the results promised.  I can sit back for a couple of weeks and enjoy the views/sun but come the end of August the real battle/journey begins!

This was an interesting article on Cracknell in the Telegraph.

Social Media: connected or dis-connected?

The Dinosaurs are out in earnest with their claims of "when we were lads this is how WE did it".  All about building relationships, picking up the phone, meeting and greeting.  Not all this social media stuff.

Bill Boorman, who admits to being a recruitment dinosaur is still banging his "pick up the phone" mentality (Check out his free sales competition and then you know why [maybe] you are getting more calls than usual). 

Andy Headworth is now following suit with his latest blog post entitled "Has social caused us to lose the power of speech".

Even Seth Godin seems to be contradicting himself somewhat on the YouTube video below (thank Andy H for finding this).