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 >>

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.

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?

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.

Montreal, March 24, 2009 – Standout Jobs, a leading provider of web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts, today announced it has signed Quantum Corporation (NYSE: QTM), a global storage company, specializing in backup, recovery and archive technology to its quickly growing roster of recruitment micro-site customers. Standout Jobs lets companies easily create and quickly deploy interactive career sites and recruitment micro-sites using the latest Web technologies such as blogs, chat, profiles and even video to attract both active and passive talent based on skills and cultural fit. Quantum Corporation will use the Standout Jobs Recruitment Communication Platform to augment its ongoing sourcing activities with creative, multi-purpose micro-sites capable of reaching the high value prospects needed for critical openings.

Quantum Corporation chose Standout Jobs for its ability to turn the recruitment process into opportunities for strategic employer branding. As a global, multi-disciplinary enterprise, Quantum Corporation can now create employment campaigns that showcase its culture and people in relation to specific job categories, locations or event-based recruiting needs. Employment branding is part of a long-term strategy companies employ to build strong teams to best position themselves for future success. Standout Jobs’ Recruitment Communication Platform makes attracting and vetting candidates easy and efficient with a suite of tools specifically designed to make the company attractive to the right candidates, reduce the costs of talent acquisition while building the candidate pipeline and engaging and communicating with prospects.

“Our businesses are very diverse and complicated. The types of professionals we need to bring in are highly skilled in their fields and there is no one common way to reach them,” said Rick Powell, Senior Recruiting Manager, Quantum Corporation. “Standout Jobs became an attractive solution for us when we learned how flexible we could be in communicating our employer brand, designing multiple recruitment campaigns based on the needs of our hiring managers for long term projects and other strategic company initiatives.”

Tools included with the Recruitment Communication Platform allow hiring managers to post open positions once and the listings are automatically distributed across the Web to a variety of job boards, job aggregators and most importantly to search engines. Standout Jobs ensures that job listings and all content on micro-sites is optimized for search engines, to capture a growing number of job seekers that use search engines in their job search. Quantum will integrate Standout Jobs into its existing applicant tracking systems to create a seamless process, from employer branding to prospect engagement to applicant conversion.

“Quantum Corporation exemplifies a trend we’re seeing of bigger companies building multiple campaigns to create a dynamic presence on the Web as employers of choice,” said Benjamin Yoskovitz, co-founder and CEO, Standout Jobs. “Standout Jobs offers an efficient way to quickly and easily set up career micro-sites aimed at attracting top talent in specific niches while acting as a branding tool for the company in an increasingly competitive market for high-value candidates. We’re excited to be working with Quantum and expect to see some innovative hiring pushes over the next few months.”

Standout Jobs’ recruitment communication platform is provided as an on-demand solution, so no IT or technical experience is required. Companies with limited resources or personnel enjoy a dedicated, interactive career site that attracts candidates from across the web in just minutes. Standout Jobs is simple to use and saves valuable cycles while presenting potential candidates with a professional look and feel to the company’s brand.

About Quantum Corporation

Quantum Corp. (NYSE: QTM) is the leading global storage company specializing in backup, recovery and archive. Combining focused expertise, customer-driven innovation, and platform independence, Quantum provides a comprehensive, integrated range of disk, tape, and software solutions supported by a world-class sales and service organization. This includes the DXi-Series, the first disk backup solutions to extend the power of data deduplication and replication across the distributed enterprise. As a long-standing and trusted partner, the company works closely with a broad network of resellers, OEMs and other suppliers to meet customers’ evolving data protection needs. Quantum Corp., 1650 Technology Drive, Suite 800, San Jose, CA 95110, (408) 944-4000, www.quantum.com.

About Standout Jobs

Founded in February 2007 by Benjamin Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo and Austin Hill, Standout Jobs provides a Web-based hosted employer branding and job marketing platform to power companies’ online recruitment efforts. At the heart of Standout Jobs is a do-it-yourself interactive career site that leverages social media tools and principles, including video, blogging and widgets, to showcase a company’s culture and team. Standout Jobs also includes candidate relationship management tools enabling HR managers to identify, interact with and track candidates effectively.

Contacts:

Benjamin Yoskovitz
Standout Jobs
press@standoutjobs.com
(514) 510 3585
www.standoutjobs.com

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And now Polk has won an Arbor Award of Excellence for innovative or best resources in human resources management.

It’s great to see our customers get recognized for their efforts - with our platform and of course beyond, with everything else they do to remain innovative, aggressive and focused on recruitment.

Jay Marshall, Manager of Talent Acquisition at Polk, did an interview with Crain’s about the award win and the use of Standout Jobs, entitled Polk ‘portal’ no ordinary job site.

He notes in the article that the Standout Jobs portal only accounts for a relatively small portion of its 200 or so recent hires, but as it grows, and Jay’s team continues to manage and communicate with the growing applicant and job seeker pool, that’s going to change.

It’s fairly small now, just because we’re in the first six months of using it. Right now I’d say about 20 percent of hires are coming in this way. But that will probably become the main artery by which most talent comes in to our (company).

Here’s the official press release from Polk. And an interesting snippet / description from the release:

R. L. Polk & Co., a global company that specializes in automotive information and marketing solutions. Based in Southfield, R. L Polk & Co. is pioneering new methods of recruiting high tech talent using social media strategies such as chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter and a robust internship program, strategies that enable job candidates, in particular techies from Generations X and Y, to “experience Polk.” Polk has developed a pipeline of qualified candidates and talent pools. Their philosophy is to “Hire slow. Hire tough,” taking two to three months or longer to make the right hire. As a result of Polk’s Recruiting for Results strategy, employee recruitment, retention and satisfaction have increased dramatically. Eighty-six percent of employees surveyed would recommend Polk as a place of employment.

Other winners of the prestigious award include The University of Michigan, NSF International and Comerica.

Congratulations to Jay Marshall and the entire team at Polk for their efforts. It’s great to see companies pushing forward on innovative recruitment marketing strategies, testing new ideas and reaching out to Gen X and Y specifically.

More than 450 corporate recruiters signal shift away from job boards and place more emphasis on corporate branding to attract high-value hires.

Montreal | March 11, 2009 — A just completed joint survey of more than 450 corporate recruiters by recruitment software company Standout Jobs and PBP Media revealed that almost half of the companies polled (43 percent) are pulling their spending from Internet job boards and re-directing those resources to better showcase their brand to potential employment candidates. According to the survey, the shift away from job boards is a response to current market conditions, which have made more high-value candidates available to companies looking to capitalize on the market’s turnaround with strategic hires.

While the current market is difficult, optimism still dictates many of the respondents’ near term hiring plans, with more than 30 percent of those polled planning to increase hiring during the second and third quarter of 2009. Adding the fourth quarter brings that number to 41 percent. Referrals are still the most popular avenue for sourcing jobs (108 responses), but the companies polled indicated their web site or career page was the next most valuable vehicle for finding candidates (85 responses). Job boards, while useful for generating a higher volume of resumes, were criticized for not delivering qualified candidates (121 responses), which are seen as the key for surviving the tough current economic climate and building future organizational strength.

“We decided to create this poll to get a sense of how bad or good the market for hiring really was at the organizational level, rather than continuing to rely on media reports which have been overwhelmingly negative,” said Benjamin Yoskovitz, Standout Jobs CEO and founder. “With the help of our poll partner, PBP Media, we asked 450 internal company recruiters a number of questions having to do with their hiring practices and plans for the immediate future. The results showed cautious optimism, with many expecting to start hiring again in the third quarter. We also learned their standards and processes have changed, and now strategic hiring is the name of the game.”

Companies are putting more emphasis on engaging quality talent in an effort to show they’re a ‘great place to work’ for the right candidates. Creating a better fit between employer and employee is seen as a key to hiring success, and employment branding attracts the right type of candidates through more open, regular and interactive communication with applicants. This trend was evident in the poll question “Which recruiting trends do you think could improve your recruiting efforts?” 239 respondents said “social networks,” while 187 respondents indicated candidate relationship management was high on their list of priorities. Next in line was search engine optimization (143) followed by “other” (53), blogs (38), online video (36) and Twitter (15). Companies are clearly interested in re-marketing to job seekers, treating people well and delivering a strong candidate experience.

Even though the companies polled indicated they were increasing their dependence on their sites and social tools to engage candidates, the majority of them had no specific strategies for recruiting Generation X and Y applicants, which have grown up with the web and are more likely than their older colleagues to use it for job hunting, socializing and networking. The question “Are you developing specific strategies to recruit younger (Gen X, Y) job seekers” was answered: No: 190, Eventually: 132, Yes: 85, Unlikely: 43.

Overall, the poll shows companies recognize the need to interact and communicate with candidates where they congregate online. They understand the need to be more open and give people a “sneak peak” inside the organization to ensure the right type of people applicants are presenting themselves. While this does promote the brand, it also “meets candidates halfway” and provides a great experience throughout the recruitment process.

Standout Jobs’ web-based Recruitment Communication Platform allows companies to more efficiently deploy career sites and micro-sites loaded with the web’s latest interactive recruiting tools. Employers seeking specific, high-value talent in what has become an increasingly tight employment market benefit from dynamic career portals that showcase their company’s culture and people–not just open positions–and builds recruitment pipelines by engaging candidates with Web 2.0 tools and a full suite of relationship management features.

Click here for full survey results and PDF download.

About PBP Media
PBP Media publishes 12 specialized websites for HR, Finance, and Safety professionals featuring news and actionable advice updated daily. The HR Web sites targeting Vice Presidents of HR, HR Directors, and HR Managers include HR Morning covering HR management; HR Tech News, which covers technology developments in the human resources field; HR Benefits Alert for benefits professionals; HR Recruiting Alert featuring staffing and recruiting news; HR Legal News for workplace employment law; and HR Blunders which covers the lighter side of HR.

About Standout Jobs
Founded in February 2007 by Benjamin Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo and Austin Hill, Standout Jobs provides a Web-based hosted employer branding and job marketing platform to power companies’ online recruitment efforts. At the heart of Standout Jobs is a do-it-yourself interactive career site that leverages social media tools and principles, including video, blogging and widgets, to showcase a company’s culture and team. Standout Jobs also includes candidate relationship management tools enabling HR managers to identify, interact with and track candidates effectively.

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Ben Yoskovitz was recently featured on the popular HR-targeted social network, Recruiter Earth, talking about Standout Jobs and where the recruitment industry is headed.

He also recently published a guest article on Cheezhead, entitled “Is the recession dooming startups?” The article looks at innovation and evolution within the overall HR space and the impact startups can have on the industry.

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.

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