Standout Jobs and Talent Synchronicity are very pleased to release our Definitive Guide to Corporate HR Blogging.

Real-time social networking via Twitter, Facebook, etc. is certainly all the rage. But fundamentally, blogging still remains the best way to build brand, authority and thought leadership. Lots of companies blog and more and more are joining the world of blogging on a regular basis. Corporate HR blogging on the other hand has a long way to go.

Blogging is a great way for HR and recruiting functions to attract the right types of job seekers and candidates in a long-term, strategic approach to hiring the best. You can build employer brand, generate awareness for job postings, leverage community to increase referrals and make sure you’re a participant in the ongoing online dialogue about your organization and industry.

But blogging isn’t necessarily easy. And with Legal and Marketing departments getting involved the challenges can increase. There are plenty of great resources online about blogging in general, but I’ve never come across much information on how to setup a corporate blog, and specifically for HR/recruiting.

So Susan Burns and I decided to write a comprehensive, how-to guide for corporate HR blogging.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why blogging is important to your success in HR/recruiting
• How to develop the business case for blogging
• How to get management approval
• How to handle bad news and negative criticism
• How to start a blog – the technology, definitions, and more
• How to write a blog – editorial calendars, story ideas, research
• How to build traffic – linking, social media, commenting, etc.
• How to go beyond blogging – Twitter, social networks

The guide is 31 pages long - but it’s broken up into small chunks that are easy to read and digest. There’s a list of Top 10 Corporate HR Blogging Tips near the end, along with a list of great online resources for blogging, HR and recruitment.

We’ve compiled resources and expertise from across the Web - from HR bloggers, corporate bloggers, small business gurus and more. Thank yous need to go out to Intel, Amy Beth Hale, Ben Gotkin, RSM, Becky McCray, Laurie Ruettiman, Dan Schawbel, Jim Kukral, Willy Franzen, Barbara Adachi, Deloitte and others who provided their input, tips, etc.

The Guide is completely free!

Get the Guide Now >>

Facebook recently launched a recruiting video. I like it. Perhaps a bit too polished to give you a real sneak peak on the inside of the organization, but it’s a nice way of talking to potential candidates. Not surprising, some people have called it cheesy and lame.

I liked the video. Whether you think Facebook is a great business or not is a different story, and maybe it’s not going to convince someone that hates Facebook to fall in love with it. But it’s a good way of telling people a bit about Facebook, something people might not have known, and it focuses on just a few specific ideas of interest.

I’d like to see Facebook (and other companies) do more recruitment videos. I’d like to see them give employees Flip cameras and tell them to do whatever they like. Run a contest to find the best videos and post them all online. It’s not complicated to do good recruitment videos. And it’s not expensive either.

Amegy Bank of Texas bans social networking sites in the hiring process for fear of being sued. It’s a shame companies feel this is a necessary step.

It seems to me what you put on the Web that’s accessible publicly is public. (I’m certainly no lawyer, of course.) There are ways of uses social networking sites in private - Facebook and Twitter both allow you to hide your profiles and updates. But I think you do give up some right to privacy when you post things online that anyone can see. You don’t have to publish content online in a public way, so when you do so, you’re making a choice and should have to live with any consequences.

What do you think?

Over the weekend, Standout Jobs released new functionality - primarily aimed at increasing career site interactivity. Those features include:

1. Chat. The chat feature allows you to schedule group chats, so you can invite a bunch of people to visit your career site and communicate with you. This could be thought of as a simple, online career fair. You can have different recruiters or individuals at your company in the chat to speak with job seekers and candidates. It’s easy to schedule a chat, create the chat room and then place the chat widget on your career site wherever you want. When someone visits the chat it pops up a new window.

   

   

   When you log into the chat you can do so with your Twitter username, and this will then send out a tweet letting everyone know that you’ve setup the chat. This is a great way to generate exposure for a chat that you might be running to attract job seekers.

   We partnered with TinyChat to provide us with the basic chat technology. And you’ll see more functionality coming in the near future, including the implementation of a white label chat service.

   

2. Twitter Integration. You can now display a handful of your most recent tweets right on your career site. Use any Twitter account you want - just input the Twitter name into the Web Presence widget, and then drag the Twitter widget onto your career site. For most companies you can use a corporate recruiter’s Twitter account or the company’s Twitter account, if one exists. And if you’re not on Twitter, give it a try!

   

3. More Recruiter / People Connectivity. We’ve added a number of ways that job seekers and candidates can interact with recruiters and company employees that are highlighted in the People widget. The People widget allows you to highlight individuals within your organization and tell their stories. It also allows you to publicize your recruiters and how job seekers & candidates can connect with them. In the People widget, you can now add contact and information details for LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo! and MSN. This makes it incredibly easy for recruiters to make themselves available; so job seekers can instantly start chatting with individuals. And it also gives you the opportunity to share much more information about your organization and the great people that work there.

   

All of these enhancements are designed to increase the interactivity and communication between job seekers, candidates and employers.

We’ve made some additional enhancements as well:

1. Category Widget. We’ve added a Job Categories widget, which makes it very easy to give job seekers quick navigation into various job opportunities.

   

2. Twitter Distribution. There’s no doubt that Twitter is growing in popularity, especially with respect to jobs and job hunting. Standout Jobs now distributes jobs to Twitter for free. This happens automatically when you post a job - so you don’t have to do anything. Jobs are distributed to our “job distribution account” — @standoutjobs — which anyone can follow.

   

   We will be promoting our Twitter account actively to get more job seekers following it. As well, by using the #jobs hashtag we’re ensuring that more people using Twitter to search for jobs will find our customers’ listings.

3. Application Autoresponder. You can now customize the autoresponder message that is sent to people when they apply for a job. This gives you the chance to personalize the email message further - for your specific company. In the near future we’ll be increasing the functionality around autoresponders, so you can send messages out for different actions; for example, when you change someone’s application status.

   

All existing customers can immediately start using this functionality. And we’d be happy to demonstrate this functionality as well as the rest of our recruitment communication platform.

Standout Jobs recently released a number of new and enhanced features to our Recruitment Communication Platform.

1. Multiple micro-site management: You can now more easily manage multiple micro-sites from within one interface and administrative dashboard. Leveraging multiple micro-sites is extremely useful when targeting unique audiences with unique messaging — for example when hiring for specific job categories, locations or event-based recruitment. If you’re hiring for engineers and salespeople the message you put out to them is different, what you want to highlight is different, and so it makes sense to do so in multiple micro-sites.

   

2. Mass candidate management: You can now manage applicants more easily through our mass editing functionality. You can change statuses, send replies or leave comments on groups of applicants instead of doing it just one at a time. This can speed up candidate management and communication.

   

3. Assign hiring managers to jobs: You can now specify a Hiring Manager on each job, so that notifications are more targeted and the applicant management process is streamlined.
4. Blog import: You can import an RSS feed into the Blog widget from an existing blog - to keep the blog content fresh at all times. Even when importing an RSS feed you can also blog separately with the blog widget for additional, unique content.

   

5. Improved ATS integration: You can now more easily have jobs pushed to a Standout Jobs career site or micro-site from your existing applicant tracking system. This streamlines the connectivity between your applicant tracking system and the Standout Jobs Recruitment Communication Platform, so you can maintain existing infrastructure that you have but gain the benefits of improved branding, search engine optimization, communication with applicants / job seekers and job marketing.

We’re working on a variety of new functionality that will be released over the coming months. Our focus remains the same: to help companies improve the way they market to, engage with, and hire top talent.

At the beginning of January, Standout Jobs and PBP Media launched a Recruiting Trends 2009 Survey. We’re now ready to publish the results.

Get Full Recruiting Trends Survey Results Here

We had over 450 respondents dominated by corporate HR professionals and recruiters. The results come from a broad range of companies - with a large variety in terms of size and industries.

Some of the key results:

• 41% of respondents believe hiring will increase from Q2-Q4 2009.
• Social networks dominate as the most important recruiting trend, but candidate relationship management is a close second. This is a strong indication that companies recognize the importance in providing a positive candidate experience, building long-term candidate relationships, and re-marketing to candidate prospects.
• Companies are recognizing the increased importance and value of their corporate career site as a primary source of applicant flow, and by extension the importance of employer branding.
• 27% of respondents believe that a lack of qualified applicants will be the biggest hurdle over the next 5 years.
• 43% of respondents are not actively implementing recruiting strategies for younger Gen Y and Gen X job seekers. This is extremely surprising.

It’s clear that not everyone is completely despondent over the hiring and recruiting scene. Companies are looking towards an uptick in the relatively near future, and seem to be taking the time now to plan longer-term strategic initiatives and research new technologies and ways of sourcing, attracting and engaging talent.

Click here for the full Recruiting Trends Survey Results

Interactive Brands is looking for a Web Integrator / Web Designer.

Interactive Brands does a very good job of describing their company on their career site:

Interactive Brands is a privately held corporation, it was formed by a team of experienced industry professionals who had a vision of creating the “ultimate” digital-market-dedicated affiliate programs. Some of the expertise our team brings to the table include: Online Marketing, Research and development, IT specialists and affiliate management.

They have some additional job openings available as well for an Affiliate Manager, Web Analyst and Search Marketing Specialist.

You can learn more about Interactive Brands on their career site.

UpClick.com, a growing and successful Montreal-based technology company, has recently added new jobs to its career site.

Click here to visit UpClick’s career site.

The latest jobs include:

• Call Center Supervisor
• Senior Network Administrator
• .NET Programmer / Analyst

UpClick.com has over 90 employees and continues to grow, expanding in a variety of different areas including technical, IT, sales and more.

APCQ’s and Kennedy’s recent recruiting benchmarking study discovered that very few organizations ask new hires about their experience during the recruitment process. It’s simply not something companies measure. But most people agree that the candidate experience has a direct and significant impact on the quality of hires, turnover and overall brand appeal.

Simply put: You treat people like crap (during the recruiting process) and they won’t want to work for you, they’ll be the wrong fit (and leave quickly) and they’ll tell all their friends that your brand sucks.

Rachele Williams and Lawson Arnett say that, “…this is an opportunity for recruiting functions to shift from an internally focused model to one that considers the external customer experience and its impact on the overall corporate image in the marketplace.”

They argue that this is really about shifting the focus from recruiting as sales, to recruiting as marketing.

Without a doubt, too few companies focus on the candidate experience. But it clearly matters. And it’s a direct page out of marketing’s book.

You can read more examples on recruitment as marketing and the importance of the candidate experience in their post, Marketing 101 for Recruiting: A Paradigm Shift.

Take that a step further and think about recruiting as an exercise in customer service. Perhaps that’s the shift we’re really waiting for — the fundamental understanding that job seekers and candidates are customers. Of course too few companies do a great job of customer service, but ultimately customer service and marketing are blending. And companies lose customers all the time due to poor customer service and support.

Social media and social networking are blending marketing and customer service - where communication, dialogue, authenticity and a focus on offering a great experience start the minute someone interacts with your organization as a prospect (or job seeker) through to becoming a customer (or a candidate, or hire.) The delineation between prospect and customer is less and less, and the importance in making sure that people are treated well throughout the entire process is critical to success.

I’ve heard this said all too often. Sometimes the person replaces “Monster” with another of the big job boards, but I think Monster’s brand still leads the way as the definitive job board online. So most of the time people say “Monster” when they want to reference one of the big job boards.

And the point people are making when they say this is that there’s no need for them to do anything else to recruit, because the big job boards are a known entity. Even if they’re not getting the results they want, they can’t be fired for doing what they’ve always done…(that’s their argument, not mine!)

So, no one ever gets fired for posting on Monster…but how long will that remain the case?

Kris Dunn points out, of course, that big job boards aren’t disappearing any time soon. And I would completely agree. It’s not that they’re too big to fail (we’ve seen that truism collapse in a number of industries of late), but they will find ways of evolving, and people still rely on big job boards for applicant flow. Kris rightly calls the big job boards, volume generators. And interestingly, he points out that his organization still hires 30% of their people through big job boards. That’s a sizable portion.

But ultimately, more and more candidates are coming from other sources - and the source of most interest is social media and social networking. The low cost is appealing, as is the apparent access to everyone on the Internet. Combine Twitter, Facebook and MySpace and I’d say you’re pretty much there…

Kris makes it very clear, “The goal for most of us who are curious about social media is to grow our overall % of hires who come from the passive candidates found in social media over time.”

That means a few things:

1. Multi-pronged strategy. You can’t recruit exclusively through one avenue anymore (and posting on all 3 major job boards doesn’t count as a multi-pronged strategy!) Companies need to implement more comprehensive, long-term recruiting strategies and tackle the issues of quality applicant flow, employment branding, hiring efficiency, etc. with multiple solutions.
2. Getting the source right. One of the big challenges with social media and social networking is effectively tracking the source of applicants. Jason Whitman at Indeed talks about applicant source all the time. It’s a serious issue and few companies track it properly. Applicant tracking systems don’t do a great job of it, and even automatic systems are far from perfect. But with social media and social networking it becomes even more relevant. Sure, you might be able to track a clickthrough from Facebook or Twitter, but can you track the overall impact your marketing and branding efforts are having? It will become more important, and will become a necessity to justify the investment (in dollars and time.)
3. Shifting your investment. To benefit from social media and social networking doesn’t involve a huge shift in dollars spent (although it can involve significant savings), but it does require a shift in your time investment. Posting on Monster takes a lot less time than building up your identity, social capital, brand on Twitter and Facebook (or anywhere else for that matter.) Even if building up a social media profile only takes 10-15 minutes a day, it’s still an investment. And don’t forget blogging. Blogging remains the single best way of building authority and thought leadership, both of which can attract top candidates to you and your organization. You have to recognize the important of that shift, and you have to be productive when you begin the process - because otherwise you’ll find yourself wasting time on social media and social networking without benefit.

Job boards are legitimate sources of applicants. Companies are still hiring people through job boards on a regular basis. But they’re no panacea. (And most people know that and admit it, even if they just keep doing it and nothing else!) But if you’re in HR today and all you’re doing is posting on job boards, you’re in trouble. You may not be able to argue, “no one ever gets fired for posting on Monster…” for much longer.