Plugin Recruiter – An agile response to a changing recruitment landscape

The role of the inhouse recruiter has changed forever. Gone is the transactional mindset, in a world where external perception counts for everything, todays recruiters works far more holistically.

It is often the company’s ability to nurture and manage their employer brand that enables them to attract the best talent. However, many inhouse recruiters are ill equipped, underfunded and often unsupported in their efforts to build such a brand.

CEO Chris Heron comments:

“Many inhouse recruiters are finding themselves under increased pressure to both attract talent and nurture an employer brand. They are performing multiple functions on a shoestring budget and naturally feel stretched. Plugin Recruiter was developed with these people in mind.”

Traditionally if a recruiter wanted to launch a highly branded online recruitment campaign, integrating video jobs, multimedia landing pages and video interviewing, they would need to appoint several different service providers. This is often time consuming and expensive. This is where Plugin can really help, the system enables recruiters to procure, deploy and manage the latest attraction, selection and branding tools all from one interface.

Having already landed technology giant Samsung, Heron and his team have big plans for the future, including international growth. Hayley Bird, Senior HR Officer at Samsung commented: “Plugin is at the forefront of intelligent recruitment and we don’t feel there is anything like this around. Working with them will really make us stand out as a recruitment innovator.” View Samsungs Campaign here:www.pluginrecruiter.com/samsungscsc

Plugin are also announcing a major partnership with the multi award winning video interview company Sonru. The partnership will see Plugin as the only non applicant tracking solution in Europe to be fully integrated with the Sonru platform. Edward Hendrick, the Founder and CEO explains that: “Sonru welcomes this partnership with Plugin Recruiter - this exciting talent acquisition platform. Sonru is synonymous with best-practice interviewing and candidate experience and we are delighted to partner with Plugin Recruiter to assist their clients seeking to optimise their interview process.”

Plugin Recruiter is an agile talent acquisition platform capable of deploying highly branded recruitment campaigns globally. Plugin helps companies market themselves as employers of choice. We work with direct employers, in-house recruiters, corporate recruiters, HR consultants, talent acquisition, resourcing and employer branding specialists.

Recruiting is a difficult, and sometimes, frustrating task. But if you’re not getting the quantity or quality of applicants you want for open positions, spending hours re-wording job descriptions trying to make your positions seem more exciting isn’t going to suffice. You don’t have a recruiting problem. You’ve got a marketing problem. Software Advice has done a little digging in an attempt to help you revamp your recruiting efforts. So without further ado, here are four basic strategies you can use to win new candidates, which marketers have traditionally used to win new customers.

Build Awareness Among Candidates
Lesser known companies have it rough when it comes to recruiting. Most candidates would prefer to work for a company they’ve heard of, rather than the one they haven’t. So, if you’re a company with little name recognition, posting job vacancies in all the usual places probably won’t be sufficient to get the number of applicants you want. Your best bet: get creative.

For instance, BBDO, a German advertising company attempting to recruit talented young copywriters published “The World’s First Napkin Book” and stuck it on lunch trays in universities to build awareness among young literature students. Instead of wiping their hands, students had an enlightening read about the exciting world of copywriting. And the tactic worked. BBDO received 15 times more applications the month after the campaign launched than usual.

Instill Preference to Work For You
Marketers would tell you that creating awareness is only part of the challenge. You also have to instill preference—candidates have to want to work for you.

Military and intelligence agencies worldwide know this all too well. As recruiting levels decline, inspiring patriotism in the youth of today is becoming an imperative for defense departments. So what do young men like? Video games of course! Putting two and two together, GCHQ, a U.K. government intelligence agency, embedded ad campaigns in Xbox games to get the attention of agile-minded 18-34 year olds—a marketing-savvy strategy, for a bureaucracy.

Stand Out From The Crowd
Most companies make it a high priority to differentiate themselves from competitors. The same is true when recruiting. To attract employees that stand out, you have to stand out. But as James Clift, CEO of KarmaHire, explains, that’s hard to do. “There’s nine billion dollars spent on recruitment advertising a year, and there’s all these amazing companies out there, and they really just all look the same right now with their job postings.”

Although your company might have a great work culture, so great that employees actually want to go to work in the morning, the job description—and even the job itself—might be similar to jobs offered by your competitors. One thing that can make you stand out from your peers: culture and values. While Google might have jobs similar to those at other companies, what makes it stand out is its culture.

Since the most direct way to let applicants know your story is usually through your website’s job page, Karmahire reinvented the job post. As Clift says, “We let companies create, instead of a job post, a really awesome landing page for their job that showcases their culture, their work environment, and what makes them unique.”

Make The Process Challenging—And Fun
Good marketers know how to attract target customers with the right messages, delivered in the right way. Recruiters need to do the same. And since CEOs value creativity as “the most important competency for the successful enterprise of the future,” the recruiting and application process needs to mirror the applicants you’re trying to attract.

MasterCard did just that when it launched a campaign last year to find great interns for its advertising department. The company asked applicants to “creatively” promote the benefits of a cashless society. The result: 350 qualified applicants, compared to its usual yield of 20-30 applications for advertising jobs.

By challenging candidates to create original material—YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter campaigns, etc.—rather than complete a standard form application, not only did MasterCard effectively get the attention of potential candidates, but the application process became part of the interview. Applicants were allowed to showcase their skills and knowledge in the way they best saw fit, and the results were some pretty great interns for the advertising department.

A well-known HR professional recently said: “The recruiting process is broken.” The typical job board posting just won’t suffice in an age of multiplying online job sites. If you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors to attract top talent, you need to be outstanding.

Erin Osterhaus is the Managing Editor of Software Advice’s HR blog, The New Talent Times. She focuses on the HR market, offering advice to industry professionals on the best recruiting, talent management, and leadership techniques.

Video is definitely starting to make an impact on the recruitment world. When we first started making professional recruitment videos back in 2010 we had to make a lot of noise to get ourselves heard. Video was still being seen as a gimmick only affordable to big brands.  Fast forward 18 months and we are now getting 2 or 3 calls a week from agencies, in house recruiters and SME’s wanting discuss their video projects.

So what has changed?

Cheaper equipment and sites like YouTube have helped make video more accessible. However what I have really seen over the last 6-8 months is a mindset change. Companies both small and large are embracing video as a ‘must have’ as opposed to a ‘nice to have.’ Companies are starting to ask themselves, why would someone want to follow me on Twitter or Facebook? Once someone has found my website, what will make them come back, again and again? The answer is engaging content, and there is no media more engaging than video. 

However for most, video is still an unknown quantity and many are confused as to how it is best utilised. We often get asked, “can we make a viral video?” so first of all I want to dispel the myth that one can create a viral video. Videos go viral because they are funny, different, innovative or surprising. It is of course possible to make an amusing or different video but there is no guarantee that others (your target audience) will agree with your comical genius. If your sole aim is to create a viral video then there is huge margin for error and you are setting yourself up for a big disappointment. Rather than trying to create a viral video it is much better to concentrate on creating a practical and engaging video that gets your message across to your target audience.

How do you choose what content to put in your recruitment video?

This takes some careful planning, in my experience the companies that take their time and plan are the ones that end up happiest at the end of the project. There are many things to consider when making a recruitment video, but most importantly you need to think about where this video is going and who is going to watch it. There is no point in creating a long ‘information heavy’ video if your goal is to distribute it through Twitter.  You need to think of the mindset of the people that are viewing your video. When people are on Twitter they are in scanning mode, looking out for key words or titles in a 140 character paragraph. So if you are distributing your videos through Twitter then try to make them short, concise and digestible. Twitter followers are much more likely to click on the retweet button if they feel your video length follows the rules of the environment. This also means giving your video a title that is engaging, impactful and potentially provocative. On the other side of the fence if your video is to be viewed on your website you have a much more captive audience. You can afford to make your video a little longer (no longer than 2mins 30 seconds). One of the tricks we use when creating video content is to create a long video for the client’s website made up of up to 10 distinct points. We will then cut this video up into individual short videos so that the client has the option to use both the full length footage for their site and the 10 individual videos for their social media distribution. 

What about the player?

By default we will always advise clients to use YouTube as their player. Why? Well, YouTube is owned by Google and Google makes the rules about SEO. Google uses search and indexing algorithms to index your content. Google is placing more and more importance on video indexing which means that well tagged videos will be pushed further up the search rankings. Don’t get me wrong, Vimeo is an excellent player and easily customisable, so if you are looking to brand your player to fit in with the overall look of your web page then it is worth considering. I also like the feature in Vimeo Pro that enables you to create private portfolios. We have advised recruiters to create a portfolio per client, these can then be sent out to applicants to further educate them about the opportunity or company culture.

Where are we going with recruitment videos?

There are two types of video/technology that really stick out in my mind as potential game changers. Since 2007 a company based in San Francisco called Clikthrough (http://www.clikthrough.com/) has been developing state of the art interactive videos.  Clikthrough have enabled advertisers and brands to product place using interactive and clickable links inside the video. From a brand perspective this is vital to making the purchasing experience more enjoyable, quicker and easier for the consumer.  Although recruitment videos do not feature product placement, they do offer the viewer an insight into your company and its culture. So if we can replace the products with different people and departments we could potentially send an applicant on an interactive journey through the company. It would enable them to watch videos of employees in their workspace, even presenting core facts about each person or department.

Another company worth checking out is Insilencio.  Insilencio are a corporate communications agency based just outside of Antwerp in Belgium.  At the end of 2011 they developed an interactive video for Belgium telecoms company Belgacom titled ‘Are you one of the 25?’ The video was used to promote a yearly recruitment campaign that saw the telecom company hire 25 new employees. Insilencio used Facebook as their platform to host and drive traffic. The video has now won countless awards and attracted over 10,000 unique visitors. I don’t want to spoil the surprise so will leave you with the URL to enjoy it yourself www.the25.be

I think it is an incredibly exciting time to be in the recruitment industry, there are changes happening daily with new technologies popping up all over the place. I can only see video becoming a more integral part of the recruiter armory, which is good news for us!

I went to The UK Sourcers event today, created and managed by @TheSourceress aka katherine Robinson . Katherine had secured Mind Candy in London as the meeting destination. For those who are unaware of Mind Candy, they are an online gaming company for 6-12 year olds.  They have had phenomenal success since their inception in 2004 with approximately 65 million registered users worldwide. To give you an idea of the environment in which our meeting took place, the reception desk is a tree trunk, the floor mimics grass and the bar area, yes, the bar area has a selection of fruit hanging from the walls. Needless to say it is a creative environment.  I have been in the recruitment industry for 15 years and have ample experience of headhunting and online sourcing, however nothing prepared me for what I was about to witness. It was like being in a room of magicians and all of them were breaking their code of practice by revealing their dark art. Although I should point out that we all swore to secrecy so I can’t relay any of these ‘bunny in hat’ moments, you’ll just have to ask Katherine if you can attend the next event. I never realised how many secret sourcing tools were available to recruiters and these guys really knew their stuff, no doubt about it, I was impressed. These are tools that every recruiter or in-house team should know, but I would be willing to bet my iPad that they don’t.  I always thought that sourcing was about cold calling and using pseudonym’s to get past the gate keeper, but oh boy was l wrong. Sourcing has moved on a lot since my day as a headhunter, helped mainly by the rise of digital and social media. Apart from sharing my own knowledge and skills my main reason for being part of this event was to see how some of these techniques could be integrated into our platform Plugin Recruiter. I asked the group if they felt any one technology had successfully aggregated search results from all the different channels into something more manageable, a resounding ‘no’ was the response. Another said ‘yer Google’.  I may not have found the answers to my own questions but what I did find was a great deal of respect for the silent assassins, digging up candidates that no headhunter or job board could possibly find.  I learnt that used properly technology allows you to avoid the gate keeper altogether. If you are working in the sourcing area either as an agency or in-house recruiter, I would strongly recommend you contact Katherine to see if she is prepared to unveil some of her magic tricks to you and your team. If you want to contact Katherine direct you can do so via her Linkedin profile uk.linkedin.com/in/katharinerobinson or via Twitter as mentioned at the beginning of this article.