last week…
It was really encouraging to see such an attendance with a really good mix of both Corporate organisations and industry specialists at the Enhance Media Online Recruitment Conference - 2009 The Year Ahead. With more and more corporate HR Departments attending events such as this one, it makes you feel that the “digital age of recruitment” has really started to happen!
The Conference kicked off with Luisa Mauro from You Tube demonstrating how video and You Tube have taken the Online world by storm. You tube is the second largest search engine which certainly gets the grey matter going when considering your marketing or employer brand campaign. She raised some interesting points on the right and wrong ways to promote your brand using video
Some of Luisa’s guidelines:
1. Link it into the rest of your corporate branding
2. Make it engaging in the first 10 seconds & keep it short and sweet to maintain attention
3. Be specific - 1 video for 1 objective
4. Think of the audience - who are you talking to?
5. Be clear about what you want the video to do
6. Review
She definitely motivated a large proportion of the audience to look at their online video strategy for both recruitment and corporate branding.
Workcircle were up next: Simon Appleton and Tony Jewell went to great lengths to present indepth methodology on Google Ad Campaigns. For those who don’t know The workcircle, they are a vertical search engine (an aggregator) and by working with job advertisers the aim to promote your vacancy on google search engines by using the pay per click marketing and therefore reducing the spend for the advertiser…. There were moments when the brand was slightly over-indulged, but overall a really useful presentation if you understand Google Adword Campaigns.
5 useful tips to extract from their presentation:
1. Don’t get hung up on the Cost per Click! Consider your Cost Per Action (CPA) = Cost of Advertising / Number of Action
2. Job titles & tags work well, but use every conceivable key word associated with that title
3. Use the API function to edit and set bids for key words & consider the “long tail”
4. Utilise Search Engine Management - Review ROI & CPA, spot spikes & trends, refine and change campaigns daily
5. Deep link your adverts, keep it contextual and use ad campaigns to re-inforce your other online marketing efforts.
Revenue Science presented by Jeremy Mason was next. A really interesting presentation and showed the power of behavioural targeting and its place within the applicant attraction process.
I imagine that most employers (unless you are a serious online marketeer) would need a quick summary of what Behavioural Targeting is:
“Targeting groups of users with advertising and content based on anonymous previous activity and attributes.” Jeremy Mason
I am sure we will be seeing more about Behavioural Targeting in the next few years as determining how to reach an audience will continue to challenge marketeers and this internet science will certainly help carve out some of the answers
Key tips from the presentation included:
1. Target an audience because of what they consume
2. Follow an audience after they have viewed a listing
3. Target users based on declared profiles
4. Communicate with your publisher very closely to ensure you target the exact audience you want
Giles Guest from Enhance Media (hosts of the Conference) gave a very compelling presentation with some firm definitions on web 1.0-3.0, what is happening in online recruitment now and some rather “interesting” takes on what online recruitment may look like in the future.
Quick Overview:
1. The evolving development of the web from 1.0 - 3.0 is due to; the number of people on the web, speed of connection, new technologies and information.
2. How the semantic web shapes online recruitment today can be seen in a number of recent developments such as; more direct recruitment, understanding our audience better and a better candidate experience.
3. The future of online recruitment will move to a “find” not “post” market, whereby as almost everyone will be online, everyone will be “findable”……
Facebook presented by Josh Smithstarted the afternoon session off. With the growing phenomena of social networking and facebook currently leading the market, there are a number of methods to demonstrate that by using their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns, organsiations now have a great opportunity to interact with thousands of users.
Key Points & Tips
1. 14m+ UK users / 50% return daily for an average of 25 minutes / Daily reach of 7 million UK users
2. Targeting users can be drilled down from simply geographically through to their interests / groups and applications & direct traffic to landing pages on your website / groups and pages
3. Interact with fans through wall posts etc to define and promote recruitment programmes, make comments on videos, add events to calenders
4. Display ad platforms and not just a classified jobsite
5. Use images and not logos & try to keep with the feel and culture of facebook in your adverts.
6. Create different adverts for different target groups with different landing pages so that you can “sell the job” to the right audience
7. Keep it simple, advertise to your target audience in the most relevant way
Bracknell Forest presented by Janet Berry, really went into detail about how the council were using online recruitment and the challenges they had faced. Really promising to see a public sector organisation embracing Online Recruitment and with a saving of £200k in 2008, it’s a really good case study which I am sure many other government organisations could take a tip or two from.
Bracknell Forest have over 800 vacancies per year and last year only 30% of these vacancies were advertised in the press. They have mainly used Jobsgopublic.com website and their own with the use of micro sites to give further job information. Selected jobs go on DigiTV
They have recognised that there are many barriers to attracting Gen Y’ers to the council and to create age diversity and effective work force planning, Bracknell Forest feel the need to portray a more up to date image of the council.
As such, the council now publish their jobs on facebook, twitter, You Tube & Flickr to interact and appeal to a different audience. The advantages of doing this are; its free, easy to implement, information can be re-used and they can use it in employer branding. There are still a number of challenges, which Janet was open and honest about probably one of the main limitations they face is that access to facebook is denied within the council so all activity has to be done outside of office hours. But, through promotion and word of mouth with their own staff and ongoing monitoring in how they spending their recruitment budget, they are certainly leading the way in the public sector!
Finally Steven Finch from Daxtra Technologies finished off the conference. I was quite looking forward to this presentation hoping to glean a few insights into how parsing technology could be really integrated into the recruitment process. Unfortunately, the majority of the presentation was geared around the recruitment process (on quiet a basic level). There was a little bit of an overview of multi search (ability to search many databases from one single point) but overall did not really glean much and left me quiet disappointed.
I hope that a employers & recruiters some of the highlights I have listed here will be able to help you when looking at online recruitment and web 2.0 to attract applicants and would certainly recommend the event next year.
Thanks Enhance Media. Continued optimism and long tails for 2009 & looking forward to 2010 the Year Ahead!
