Develop your Talent Brand and Win the War for Talent

Develop your Talent Brand and Win the War for Talent Develop your Talent Brand and Win the War for Talent Develop your Talent Brand and Win the War for Talent Excerpted from the eBook: The Digital Transformation of Recruitment by Charlene Li, Founder of Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership. Chances are, when you hear the phrase “social recruiting,” you still think of using a blog or LinkedIn to identify and largely active candidates, or using Twitter and Facebook to push out a new job listing to your existing followers. All too often, social recruiting hasn’t been social at all - it has simply meant broadcasting the same jobs, just this time via social channels. Rather than revolutionizing the process, it’s often more of an update to the established ways of recruiting. What a shame, and what a missed opportunity! If you are going to use social platforms, then use them to find, reach and most importantly also engage your entire audience - including those who are not in the market for a new job. It isn’t enough to simply find and target a “passive” candidate who isn’t looking because he or she is happily employed. Glen Cathey, the SVP of talent and innovation at staffing firm  Kforce puts it bluntly: Someone like a software engineer who is happy in his or her  job won’t respond to outreach efforts, because that person gets  20 messages a day. How do I become the one out of 50 recruiters this person will respond to? Rock stars won’t pay attention to you. To be a modern recruiting organization, you have to be willing to go through a digital transformation - and rethink the entire recruitment process through the lens of candidate experiences and employee relationships. In the “old” days, recruiters were resigned to the fact that a minority of employable candidates was actually looking for jobs.  Those “active” candidates were your best - and, in most cases, only - prospects. But today, social networking creates transparency: It’s clear who works where and what they do. So recruiting is no longer episodic; rather, it’s continuous. Everyone is simply a candidate at a different point in the journey. Just as marketers look at everyone as a potential customer, recruiters should assume every friend, customer, and supplier today could be a candidate tomorrow. There are three best practices that recruiters can take from marketing to win the war for talent 1.      Embrace the candidate journey 2.      Create personas to understand unique needs 3.      Identify experiences to engage candidates Brand marketers think about how they will develop relationships with people over  time - not only when a specific need surfaces. Recruiters must take on this new mindset. This means listening, sharing, and engaging, all the time, in real time. “We can’t wait for the best talent to come to us,” notes Heather Polivka, the senior director of global employer branding and marketing at UnitedHealth Group. “We have to engage with them the way they live and breathe. People are consumers every day, so consumer marketing best practices need to be leveraged.” Mark Stoever, the COO of Worldwide, the parent company of Monster, adds: “We’ve turned our gaze to the changing nature of hiring â€"  getting hired or finding the right hire - in today’s socially-driven environment. Never before has so much emphasis needed  to be placed on personal engagement.” As the first generation in the workforce to have used the Internet since childhood, Millennials  especially expect that recruiters will find them, and that they will be surrounded by personalized content that will drive them to their next job. Smart organizations are tapping into the marketing practice of building out a customer journey for their recruiting efforts. Excerpted from the eBook: The Digital Transformation of Recruitment by Charlene Li, Founder of Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership. Download a free copy of this eBook.