Hiring isn’t getting any easier. Today’s talent acquisition teams must do everything they can to attract candidates, convince them to apply, and keep them engaged until they show up on the job. In a competitive marketplace for talent, a strong employer brand is an essential component in your talent acquisition strategy – and that includes your career site.

Here at SmartRecruiters, we have a team of employer branding experts who work on our SmartRecruiters Attrax career site product. I sat down with Warren Davidson, Client Services Director, to get the scoop on how companies can improve their employer brands on their career sites. 

“You can have the most beautiful employer brand in the world, but if your career site is dreadful, it’s going to undermine your employer brand,” Warren said. As an expert in career sites and with deep experience in marketing, Warren believes in a candidate-centric approach. The candidate, after all, is your prospective customer. “Your employer brand is intrinsically linked to the candidate experience,” he explained. Warren identified the key aspects of ideal candidate experience.

Personalized, Contextually Relevant Content

“First, they should land on a job that’s relevant to them,” Warren said. “And then they should see a piece of content that reassures them that the company is DEI-friendly, or has great benefits.” He recommends content that brings the workplace to life, such as employee stories that focus on topics relevant to candidates of all kinds, whether they’re parents or from diverse backgrounds. The SmartRecruiters Attrax system uses automation to ensure relevance and personalization. “Relevant, personalized content drives better quality candidates,” he said. “It should also improve your hiring velocity.” 

Organic Traffic from Google

Google visibility is a key piece of the candidate experience that many companies miss. Google is one of the most popular places to look for jobs – and it’s free to get your jobs listed there. By adding structured data to your career website, job seekers automatically find your listings when they search. If your career site is hidden behind the wrong URL and lacks structured data, you end up paying aggregators to get listed on Google. Organic traffic from search engines to an SEO-optimized career site and job listings is a gift that keeps on giving.

Easy Application Process

Many companies lose candidates to a difficult application process. “If they get presented with a login screen, application rates drop off right there,” Warren said. A one-page application with a resume/CV upload from the cloud increases the number of applications. For jobs that are particularly hard to fill, “we have some customers who don’t even ask for a CV anymore,” he said. Candidates can indicate their experience by answering a series of pre-configured questions, which is effective for many types of roles. 

The Power of Branded Experiences

These elements add up to a big impact. “If you have Google visibility, personalization on your career site, deliver contextually relevant content, and a good application process, the ultimate upshot is that when a candidate hits the website, they feel like they belong to your organization. They can see themselves working there,” Warren said. That relevancy drives self-selection, and the ease of the application process prevents the right candidates from dropping out.

Sounds amazing, right? I took a look at some of the results from SmartRecruiters Attrax implementations. All of them had stats such as:

• Increased career site traffic
• Increased candidate engagement (more pages viewed)
• Increased number of applications
• Decrease in abandoned applications
• Increased organic traffic from Google
• Increased traffic to employer brand content
• Decrease in the source of hire  from job boards and recruitment agencies
• Increase in the source of hire from organic career site visits

The Art of What’s Possible on a Career Site

Like a lot of things companies struggle with, legacy technology holds them back from addressing the needs of the current marketplace. Updating a career site may require the work of an agency or IT team. The application process required by the current ATS may be turning candidates away. Warren said, “When it comes to career sites, a lot of companies don’t know what’s possible.”

What is possible? An SEO-optimized career site that delivers personalized, relevant jobs and content to candidates, integrates seamlessly with an ATS, and can be updated by anyone, not just website specialists. Not only is a career site a place where the visual and creative aspects of your employer brand can shine, but also it’s a place where your employer brand comes to life by facilitating a stellar candidate experience.

Successfully recruiting passive candidates requires mastering the art of persuasion.

According to LinkedIn’s hiring statistics, only 30 percent of people are actively looking for new jobs. This means 70 percent of LinkedIn users are passive candidates who are content (or at least fairly content) in their current role. So you need to do more than post a job ad to get their attention.

You need to show passive candidates that you’ve done your research. You need to convince them that life will be tangibly better at your company.  And you need to adjust your approach to make life as convenient as possible for them in the early stages of your hiring process.

Of course, there are many different factors that can persuade passive candidates, and they vary considerably from person to person. As there is no one-size-fits-all approach, recruiting passive candidates is more of an art form than a science.  

However, there are some fundamentals that apply across the board. So to help increase your chances of getting a yes, here’s are four ways to make your opportunity stand out amongst all the noise.

1. Use video to strengthen your employer brand.

When it comes to attracting passive candidates, everything ultimately hinges on the strength of your employer brand. Its importance cannot be overstated. While the other tips in this article are helpful, they won’t be much use if your employer brand doesn’t resonate with what candidates are looking for. Keep in mind the most pressing question for every passive candidate is:

“Is this new opportunity worth leaving the security and familiarity of my current role?”

Your employer brand should convince them that the answer is a resounding “Yes”.  And the most influential tool for doing that convincing is video. Why? Because video strengthens the authenticity of your brand like no other medium.

Passive candidates don’t just have to take your word for it. They can see how great your company and culture is with their own eyes. Indeed, according to research by the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class companies are 75 percent more likely to use video tools for employer branding. This helps them grab the attention of great talent with much greater ease.  

Use video to give candidates a flavor of daily life inside your company. If often helps to feature employees talking about why they joined the company and the aspects of their job they like the most. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a hefty budget to make your recruitment video a reality. These days, iPhones, Go Pros, and freely available editing software are more than capable of creating a polished production.

2. Offer what their current role doesn’t.

Passive candidates are very unlikely to jump ship from their current role to take on an almost identical position somewhere else. So to ensure your opportunity catches their attention, it needs to have some unique differentiators.

When you find a candidate who’d be a great fit for one of your open roles, then it’s time to do your research. A bit of detective work should reveal at least some of the limitations of their current role. Are they likely being underpaid? Maybe the environment is a poor fit for them? Have they been pigeon-holed with limited opportunities for growth?

Once you’ve identified a specific pain point for the candidate, highlight this in your outreach. Emphasize how your role will make life easier by resolving the issue for them.

3. Invest time in genuine personalization.

Cookie-cutter outreaches save huge amounts of time. But they rarely engage passive candidates. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Would you take time out of a busy schedule to respond to a message that looks like it’s been sent to hundreds of other people? Probably not.

Personalized messaging shows people that you care, as you’ve clearly taken the time to research them. It also significantly increases the response rate. Generic templates typically generate less than 20 percent response rate. Far from ideal.

Getting into the habit of always taking the quick and easy outreach option is terrible for the candidate experience, terrible for your employer brand, and terrible for sustainable success in recruitment. Becoming great at personalized outreach takes consistent training and practice. You won’t always get it right. But in the interest of your employer brand, it’s well worth the time investment.

4. Use video interviewing to make life more convenient.

These days, everyone is short on time. So one of the biggest challenges recruiters face when it comes to hiring passive candidates is persuading them to make time to attend an interview. In reality, only a small percentage of passive candidates are willing to make that kind of commitment early in the hiring process.

But what if you could remove the barrier to entry here? With video interviewing, you can. Candidates can record their answers to a set of predetermined questions via a video platform at a time that suits them. They can do their first stage interview from the comfort of their own home. Making the early stages of your hiring process as convenient as possible will help bring more great talent into your pipeline.

From her unique perch in TA marketing, this CEO has an unparalleled view of the industry that you’ll want to see!

HR tech marketing is a pretty small niche to land on but for Maren Hogan, CEO and Founder of Red Branch Media, it just made sense. This “dyed in the wool” marketer was introduced to the burgeoning world of talent acquisition (TA) through her spouse, who was starting a recruiting agency back in 2008. Though that year turned out to be a most inauspicious time to start a company – need we recall the Financial Crisis of 2008 – the adventure did set Maren on her path towards becoming one of the leading experts in the HR and Recruiting Tech industry.

She laughs while reminiscing how Red Branch Media was intended to be a small-scale operation that would allow her to tweet from the couch. However, demand proved otherwise, and eight years later Red Branch has become a full fledged agency with 50 employees and presence at most major TA events.

Now, Maren brings her expertise to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco both a judge for the Recruiting Startup Awards and as the host of her own session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company. We talk with her today about what she has in store for us at the conference, and the role of brand in sourcing.

Can you give us a preview of your session?

My session, The Innovation Quadrant: How to Align You with Your Company, comes from my deep interest in what drives innovation within companies. I began looking at different types of innovation and building a quadrant for companies and individuals to map themselves based on the Global Innovation Index.

In our 30 minutes together, I’m going to give a simplified version of the innovation questionnaire I’ve developed, and attendees will grade themselves on a scale of A-to-D in each of the four quadrants: management, leadership, inspiration, and individual contributor.

You’ve said recruiters need to sell a job brand – not just employer brand. Could you explain the difference between the two?

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows the culture will vary in different departments, branches, or teams within the company and that’s why it’s important to get specific.

On a super high level, employer brand is the company’s value proposition and culture. I think of it as the promise a company makes towards all levels of its employees from VP to janitor. On the other hand, the job brand will speak to the unique culture of a group within the company, and the responsibilities of the role. It’s something that you have to work more closely with the hiring manager to figure out, including understanding what type of person does well in that role.

Why is it so important to get so specific when it comes to brand?

Maybe it’s my Omaha sensibility, or just my marketing standpoint, but it doesn’t make sense to me that a company would make a commitment to hiring someone without being sure they were the right person for the job. The average salary in the US is about 62k. That’s the cost of a house here in Omaha. I wouldn’t make that investment without being sure.

Talk to me a little bit about some new sourcing channels.

Obviously, sourcing channels are always evolving, the ones that were new and innovative a couple of years ago are no longer as relevant today. When I try to discover new sourcing channels, I put myself in the candidate’s shoes. Who am I? Where do I hang out, in person or online?

When people think sourcing, they generally think ‘online’, but sometimes it works to go super old school. I had one client sourcing college students and what worked there was posting signs in bar bathroom stalls.  

Another sourcer I know just kept a pile of candy on her desk and gave out a piece to anyone who delivered a name and number. It honestly worked more effectively than any $100 referral bonus program I’ve ever seen… I guess because of the immediacy?

It just depends on who you’re looking for aka your ‘candidate personae’ and where that personae will be.

You talk a lot about candidate personae, is creating candidate personaes something that is becoming more popular now?

Anecdotally I would say yes. I’ve been talking about candidate personaes for over five years now. It used to be when I asked a group who had candidate personaes for their job no one raised their hand, now almost everybody does.

Hear more from Maren Hogan on why she’s coming to Hiring Success 19 – Americas in her video below!

From employee highlights to engaging content, your LinkedIn page should be working overtime to attract the best employees.

While most businesses understand the power of social media from a branding and marketing perspective, many of their LinkedIn pages end up as little more than a glorified “About Us.”

LinkedIn may not be as colorful as Instagram, or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it is a dynamic platform with plenty of options for building media-rich and informative pages that make an impact on visitors’ views of your company.

If your goal is to attract top-level talent, impress potential customers, and drive conversations important to your business—a compelling LinkedIn company page is a must-have. The question is, how do businesses create better LinkedIn pages?

Here are seven ways to improve your company’s Linkedin presence:

1. Cover the page basics

Before you go too far, make sure your page has all the basic information in place to make it a valuable marketing channel for your company. That means including the:

• Company name and URL
• External website link
• Company details including industry, company size, company type
• Logo (300×300 pixels is recommended) and tagline
• Company description (250-2,000 characters), utilizing industry keywords.

A LinkedIn page without this information will feel incomplete—and according to HootSuite, completed Company Pages receive twice the number of visitors of those with incomplete pages. These pages are better optimized for search as well.

2. Populate your updates with branded imagery

You’ve spent time and money creating a visual brand for your business—show it off. Consistent use of your logo and colors within your updates gives your page a professional look and helps you stand out among the 30 million other pages on LinkedIn.

3. Use Showcase pages to highlight recent work

Whatever new projects, products, or campaigns your business is working on, use Showcase Pages to provide them their own voice. This not only gives your LinkedIn a larger digital footprint, but it ensures that each initiative has a dedicated page that you can use to target specific audiences—particularly helpful when recruiting talent for a particular role or team.

You can promote and optimize these pages with keywords, just as you do with your main page.

4. Use Career pages to appeal to great talent

LinkedIn as a whole can be used for a number of purposes—but Career Pages are now specifically where businesses can promote their company culture and newly opened roles. Use Career Pages to share the story of your company through videos, photos, and employee-created content. Pages like these will help potential hires understand who your business has already hired, and why.

5. Decide on a branding strategy for your page

If the content for your LinkedIn is all over the place and you can’t seem to get consistent engagement, first settle on a branding strategy. The strategy for establishing thought leadership—sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, product how-to’s, articles that reflect your mission—is different than the strategy for lead generation—sharing upper funnel and lower funnel content like tip sheets and case studies.

You can always change your strategy over time as your objectives shift, but don’t try to do everything at once.  

6. Write short and “spicy” updates

LinkedIn recommends you keep your updates “short, sweet, and spicy.” That means text that is 150 characters or less, with an eye-catching point of view or statistic, with relevant hashtags.

Other aspects of a quality update include: using a call-to-action, adding a quality image (in the range of 1200×627 pixels) that is branded and matches the messaging, with a vanity URL that you can use to track traffic.

Speaking of URLs: Links are important, and posts with links get 45% higher engagement than those without. That said, the occasional post without a link—meant to simply pass along a message, not send readers to your website or other landing page—can also have a big impact.   

7. Follow best practices for content engagement

It can be difficult to garner engagement for your posts—and engagement is how to expand your network to reach influencers, thought leaders, and talent. Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn include:

• Share effective, oft-shared content such as eBooks, SlideShares, infographics, case studies, how-to content, vivid visuals, and themed posts.
• Create targeted updates. You can alter your target audience by variables like geography, job function, seniority level, and more—and then post content that appeals to this narrower scope.
• Create your own, non-stock images, with stats and text embedded directly in them.
• Use free visual tools like Haiku Deck (creates excellent presentations for web sharing) and Piktochart (builds beautiful charts, graphs, banners, and other visual content).

An enticing LinkedIn page will make tapping into other people’s networks and finding great talent easy. Start thinking of your LinkedIn as an extension of your company brand, and you’ll no doubt find other ways to impress your peers, competitors, and future employees.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern which benefits are trendy and which will actually improve employee quality of life. We talk with PayScale to learn the difference.

This year Seattle Business Magazine named PayScale the top place to work in Seattle. No easy feat in the Emerald city with competition from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and the siren call of San Francisco and Silicon Valley constantly ringing up the coast. Tech talent is scarce and flighty, but also most crucial to a company’s success, according to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So how do you not only attract, but keep, this sought-after talent?

The answer for PayScale is work-life balance. “We see our employees as whole people,” says Caitlin Williams, the company’s senior talent acquisition partner. “All our benefits are designed to benefit people as people, not people as workers.”

“Yes!” agrees Chris Stiemert, director of talent acquisition. “Most of what we do is listen to our employees and learn what they need and want.”

For PayScale, employee empowerment is the north star, and they are relentlessly experimenting to see what works. Almost more interesting than the benefits they keep are the ones they leave out – and why!

How do you make sure your programs are meaningful, and not just trendy?

Chris

I’ve worked at companies that had free soda, food, you name it, but you start to realize that the underlying purpose of these perks is to keep people in the office, working. We try to focus on what will actually move the needle in terms of retention and quality of life.

Caitlin

I totally agree. I think a lot of companies focus on things that are really fun to hear about at the outset but, in the end, aren’t about genuine care for employees, or long-term productivity and wellbeing. “We Hire Whole People” isn’t just a tagline for us, and we try to carve out benefits that speak to “a person” rather than an “employee”.

Caitlin, what makes PayScale the top place to work in Seattle?

I’ve worked in several different areas of the tech industry – biotech, ecommerce, software as a service, etc. What stands out to me after three years at PayScale is how it invests in its employees in two essential ways: career/professional development, and overall health/well-being.

• Professional/Career Development: We offer an array of development courses, and we also employ leadership and career coaches that help our employees uplevel both hard and soft skills.
• Health and Wellness: This last year we opened a gym on the basement level of our building for PayScale employees. We host free weekly yoga classes and stock the office with fresh fruits and sparkling waters. The other piece of this health and wellness initiative is “Independence week”, where this year we experimented with shutting down the office for the entire week of July 4th to give folks a great mid-year reset that most workers only get during the winter holidays.  

Chris, why does PayScale take employee happiness so seriously?

We start from a place of believing that happy employees ultimately means better business. All these things—happy hours, decorating the office for Halloween, providing snacks, and offering workout facilities follow naturally from this idea and create an environment where employees feel safe and happy so we can have transparent conversations around all aspects of work.

There’s always going to be a new opportunity in this tech market. We’re competing with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Snapchat, and many others. So, of course, we need something unique, but it’s more than that – we really feel that treating employees well is the right way to run a business. Our ability to source and retain talent just proves that point further.

Meet the company out to prove there aren’t “bad employers” or “bad candidates”, there’s just “bad fit.”   

Using a proprietary psychometric algorithm, Good&Co helps companies increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and make better hiring decisions, all the while empowering millions of employees to make smarter, more informed career decisions. Good&Co was founded in 2012, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and is part of the SmartRecruiters Marketplace family. We sat down with the senior product manager, Jay Jernigan to dig a bit deeper about what makes this quirky new startup tick.

What is the inspiration behind the company?

Good&Co was built around the idea that there are no bad employees or bad companies – just bad fit. Our free apps have helped companies, managers, and employees from every industry discover their strengths and learn how to build stronger, more productive workplace relationships.

What makes team Identity so important?

Hiring mistakes due to poor culture fit have huge financial and social implications. It’s demoralizing for employees, and incredibly expensive for employers. We designed our tools to help companies seamlessly add the right talent to high-performing teams without sacrificing productivity or sabotaging chemistry. That’s why we’re on a mission to create happier, more productive workplaces – a solution that not only helps people, but eventually impacts companies’ bottom lines. Our approach aims to fundamentally fix the human capital crisis by empowering both job seekers and companies with the information they need to make smarter, more informed job-matching decisions.

On a cocktail napkin – how does Good&Co work?

Our tools leverage psychometrics research, big data, and AI to enable companies and managers to make better-informed hiring and infrastructure decisions by identifying organizational strengths, based on company culture, to boost employee engagement and reduce turnover. Good&Co’s Proprietary Psychometric Algorithm (PPA) leverages over 30 years of research in career psychometrics and psychological analysis to provide quantified, science-backed culture insights for more than 10,000 companies worldwide. In short, we’ve discovered what elevates a candidate and a team from good to great.

Ok that’s at least both sides of a cocktail napkin. What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and Onboarding?

The quantification and understanding of human capital is currently one of the least efficient in our economy. As software and social connectedness transform the old world, the inevitable outcome will be global, efficient markets for human capital. That’s because creating value, now more than ever, depends on people’s talents and a deeper understanding of each other.

At Good&Co, we’re taking big steps in that direction: using influences of big data, quantified self, psychology, and social networks, we are creating inherently valuable data assets through authentic engagement. We’re creating a people-driven system to define, diagnose and evolve environments with purpose.

How can workplace integration of new hires make or break recruitment?

We know the process of hiring can be time-consuming, and hiring the wrong candidate can be costly and hinder success in today’s fast-paced work environment. Good&Co’s Teamwork Pro gives a better understanding of a candidate’s fit within your teams, with your hiring managers, and provides valuable engagement tools to ensure that your employees are happy in the workplace.

Why is Good&Co a necessary tool for a SmartRecruiters customer?

Candidate reports provide insights around eight distinct factors of personality, showing how a candidate might interact with others, their leadership style, and their approach to work. These insights compliment a standard resume, and help you choose the best candidates to shortlist, interview, and hire in today’s candidate-driven market.

How does Good&Co compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS?

Our reports offer key candidate insights to sift, sort, and match candidates quickly for your roles, saving you time compared to other assessment providers.  

What have been some benefits of partnering with SR?

The flexibility of the SmartRecruiters TAS provides recruiters and hiring managers the ability to introduce our Candidate Reports automatically at any stage of the recruitment process. Our reports offer sample interview questions tailored to the candidate’s individual insights, so you may want to request a candidate quiz prior to a phone screen, the first interview, or when a candidate is placed in your shortlist.  The flexibility of SmartRecruiters means you can tailor the timing to best suit your needs.

How long would it take for the average existing SR user to implement?

The process to add our reports to a candidate’s profile is quite simple – just select our complimentary assessment from the assessment menu. The quiz takes less than 20 minutes to complete, and most candidates are done within 48 hours. Your results are delivered immediately after the quiz is completed.

What would you say to a recent SmartRecruiters customer unsure about further integration into the SR Marketplace?

SmartRecruiters has a strong partner support team in place that can help answer any questions you might have, the API documentation is clear, well documented, and flexible to suit your needs.  

For companies like LinkedIn, the relationship between candidate and customer is a delicate balance, hinged on employer branding and hiring experience.

In an ideal scenario, every employee at your organization is an avid user of your company’s product, and all teams—from sales to development—have a personal investment in its success. Few organizations can make such a claim, but working for a company as ubiquitous as LinkedIn means high probability your employees double as users. The same can be said of the thousands of candidates who apply to work for the networking platform, particularly at the collegiate level, which falls under the jurisdiction of Emily Campana, Director of Global Campus Recruiting.

Since joining in 2011, Emily has worked her way up the LinkedIn ladder, from senior recruiter to her directorial role, and gleaned an intimate look at the company’s brand, values, and social purpose along the way. To learn more about navigating the tricky balance between candidates and customers, we invited Emily to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

“We have a strong consumer brand because we have so many members on the platform,” says Campana. By LinkedIn’s recent count, over 575 million—nearly 55 million of whom are college students. “But, we’ve never sat down with marketing and asked ‘what’s our EVP’, or ‘how are we going to build content for that?’ What’s happened has been pretty organic.”

The rest, Campana says, is driven by LinkedIn recruiters. “We teach our recruiters the full story of how LinkedIn came to pass, the company’s values, what we are working on, how we believe we are changing the world, and then really dive into culture and values—we call it master storyteller.” LinkedIn then asks its recruiters to promote the company brand in conversations with candidates, in a way that goes beyond job descriptions.

“Our recruiters spend time with candidates to understand what their motivators are,” says Campana. “Then, we speak to those through our culture, values, organization, and design. This way our recruiters drive the overall brand with our candidates.”

And this step is important for a company whose product is widely recognized, but whose employer brand is not advertised so much. “Our candidates believe that they know a lot about our company because they are users,” explains Campana. “We have to help them understand the consumer side of our business, and we get a lot of suggestions as a result.” And while LinkedIn welcomes critique from users, customers’ understanding of the business is often one-sided.

“Many people believe that we are just a TA product,” says Campana, “but we also have a sales product, a learning product, a marketing product, as well as our broader mission about what LinkedIn does to help empower and make professionals more successful.”

For students preparing to enter the workforce, LinkedIn hosts career-focused events at campuses across the country, where participants can receive help with their profiles, take headshots, and, according to Tey Scott, former Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, “help them land their dream job regardless of our recruiting efforts.”

These day-long development events are held in target cities like Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco—regions with concentrated clusters of universities. By moving away from recruiting at university career fairs—a tactic that only reached about 40 universities per year—LinkedIn adopted a more scalable method that allowed the company to expand its reach to 300+ institutions.

While campus recruiting is just one facet of LinkedIn’s talent strategy, students—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers—are an important demographic for the professional network. And LinkedIn is not alone in targeting the future workforce, with an increasing number of organizations looking at how the next generation’s values and principles directly affect how companies view candidate experience, EVP, and employer branding.

Candidates can share their good or bad experiences across their social media networks, which will likely color their perceptions—as well as those in their network—as customers for LinkedIn’s products and services.

“One of the biggest pieces of our culture and values is ‘members first’,” says Campana. “And since every candidate who comes through our door is a member that’s even more important to us—their experience is not just as a candidates, but also as a LinkedIn member.”

Who better to ask about recruiting brand than the man who prides himself on being everywhere in the world that Talent Acquisition gathers? (Note: four conferences in the last month alone.)

If you’re a recruiter and you hear Big Pimpin’ come on the radio, you may think of Matt Charney. Not for any illicit activity or “spendin’ cheese”, but for his particular penchant for Jay-Z themed powerpoints that accompany most his conference presentations and his undisputed honorific of “recruiting influencer”. Which is, indeed, both big and pimpin’.

See Matt Charney in Person at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

We know Charney as the Chief Content Officer at Allegis Global Solutions, as well as Executive Editor at Recruiting Daily, but most of all, in an industry not always associated with saleable personality, he’s a proper brand – thousands of people in the HR space look to Charney for competent – at times, satirical – analysis of all things TA.

The influencer status isn’t just about his 24K+ Twitter followers. Twitter followers can be bought. His rep is thanks to years of experience building a tangible knowledge base, a real network, with real people, who trust you. Whether working for Disney, Warner Bros or Cornerstone, he built his brand on the simple but effective tool of “not being a dick”. No number of Tweet-Ks will get you that.

And today, he’s here to talk to us about how you can create your own great recruiter brand. But be warned, there are no shortcuts, no pay-offs, and there definitely ain’t no frontin’.

Tell us what ‘employer brand’ is.

An employer brand is set to create a highly polished image. There may be some tactical transparency, but very little. I think that what a good recruiter does, is take that image, and balance it out with some of the less filtered, honest, truth. The more you can tactfully walk back your employer brand to candidates, the more you are building a reputation of credibility.

Building ‘recruiter brand’ – is it that hard?

So here’s what I think it is: it’s simply being better than the people that are lazy.

Recruiters are extremely lazy, they try to automate everything and then even when everything’s automated then they spend a lot of time arguing the pedantics. Differentiate yourself by actually picking up the phone, being honest’ and knowing your industry.

That’s how you build a recruiter brand – by not being the guy who’s sending out emails all day.

How do you keep the two separate?

Don’t put too much emphasis on employer brand!

I worked for one little business called the Walt Disney Company, and everyone was like ‘oh my god, it must be so great to work at Disney.’ I had to recruit people for the office of the CFO, so we’re talking controllers, finance people, corporate strategists. And everyone in ‘the industry’ knew that Disney was not a great place to work, for money or for work-life balance… We paid 50 percent under market.

I would tell candidates, ‘If you want to discuss opportunities, then I’m the person who will call you back, I’m the person who will be there, and I’m the person who will be honest with you,’ and that was the game-changer, more so than any budget or campaign to build employer brand.

What then was the biggest mistake you made in building your recruiter brand?

Don’t think in terms of ‘how do I get Twitter followers?’ – these things don’t really have an impact.

For all these stupid influencer lists I make it onto, I think a free Mcdonalds hamburger via Clout might have been the best reward I’ve ever gotten. Focus on the relationships that matter, which are the people in your company.

How do you build/maintain a recruiter brand at a company that doesn’t care about hiring?

Almost every CEO says that one of their strategic imperatives is hiring, but they probably care more about shareholder value, and, if they’re a publicly traded company, that’s the way it should be.  

If you work with a CEO who doesn’t care about hiring, then you need to make it clear that the organization cares about the people. Because if the C-suite doesn’t look at human capital as a success metric, then you’ll never be able to change that.

When I worked at a company where the CEO didn’t particularly care about hiring, I could have gotten him on video to tell me how great the careers there were and how much he appreciates employees, but frankly, that was a lie, and frankly, he’s terrible on camera.

So instead I sought out other people with high hiring volume and really built relationships with them which in any organization takes some time – especially now that people don’t smoke. That’s where the real information flow happened.

When a young business analyst decided management consulting wasn’t her calling, she found it difficult to find career advice that spoke to her as a millennial job-seeker.

Given the average adult in the US changes jobs around 12 times between the ages 18-48, with the majority of those transitions happening in the first six years of their career –  it seemed strange that no one had created a platform to locate expert career advice, surface unexpected opportunities, and guide young people to success.

In 2011, former business analyst Kathryn Minshew became a founder and CEO when she made her dream resource a reality with The Muse website, a non-traditional job board focused on fit, culture and career advice for job seekers.

And 50 million millennial professionals visiting the site to date says ‘job well done!’

Kathryn has become something of a career guru for millennials, authoring the Wall Street Journal bestseller “The New Rules of Work,” and acting as an operating partner at XFactor Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in the next generation of female founders.

Kathryn recently spoke at the Hiring Success Conference in San Francisco about the effect of candidate experience on employer brand in an era of full transparency.

What does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Hiring Success is about creating meaningful fits between companies and candidates. At The Muse, we think more about experiences than jobs because jobs can box people in, whereas experiences set people on a path for learning and growth. But, in order to build a satisfying career—or a progression of experiences over time—both companies and candidates have to be more aware of making considerate and purposeful choices. When that happens, a meaningful fit is made, which leads to quality hires and better retention.

Where on a CEO’s list of priorities should ‘recruitment’ be?

I’ve always felt that recruitment should be a top priority because it’s so intrinsic to company culture. You have to know who you are as a whole so you can hire people who will add value and keep your culture strong as you grow.

We hired The Muse’s first internal talent acquisition manager when we had just 25 people because we knew were going to grow pretty quickly and we wanted to make sure our culture never faltered. Bringing the right people on board is imperative when it comes to reaching your growth goals, and recruiters can help you attract and engage the best-fit talent.  

What do you think will be the defining feature of recruitment in five years?

Work is about connections and it’s full of commitments. The best companies understand this and create a work experience that’s centered around some of the most fundamental relationship dynamics (values, trust, vision, effort, and selflessness). Ideally, recruiting in five years will no longer be transactional, with applicants applying through a job board and hiring managers sifting through stacks of resumes. Hopefully, companies and candidates will feel empowered to make intentional decisions about what makes a meaningful fit.

You have traveled the world extensively. Did you gain any insights which have played into your approach to employer branding and recruitment?

I’ve traveled or lived in over 60 countries in the last 15 years, and I’ll say this about both travel and employment: they’re highly subjective. Whether something is a one-star or five-star experience depends on whether your expectations and needs match with reality: what were you looking for, and did you receive it?

Travel rating sites work because we can assess the type of environment we’re seeking, and then we can rate a property or experience based on those expectations and parameters. It’s unbelievable to me that we have no common language to talk about types of company cultures. I’d like The Muse to change that.

You speak often about millennials and job branding. What do you find millennials want to see?

Authenticity. Millennials want to see that your employees’ experiences are in sync with the message your employer brand is putting out there. So if you say you support learning and development, or value work-life balance, they want to see those statements reflected in company reviews or validated by employee testimonials. They want to know that what they see is the real thing.

How can companies better appeal to millennial candidates?

Millennials want to feel like their career has real purpose, so when they look at potential employers, they’re looking for a place where the mission and values match their own, or where the learning opportunities are substantial.

For companies, this means using your employer brand to authentically show candidates what you’re committed to as an organization. It’s also an opportunity to encourage employee advocacy by asking your workforce to share their stories—even if it’s something as small as posting about an exciting work event on social media.

In terms of company culture, what are the most common mistakes companies make?

Trying to be everything to everyone. When companies aren’t being authentic, it creates a ripple effect in the culture, so this really goes back to hiring, because every new person who joins your team has the power to change your culture.

It’s OK if your company and culture aren’t for everyone. Know your audience and appeal to those best-fit candidates.

With around 80 locations across the US, Canada and Europe, Equinox has become the benchmark for high quality gym and fitness clubs around the globe. Central to the companies philosophy is creating bespoke experiences with their customers, providing ample face-to-face time with highly trained expert professionals.

Hiring success for this kind of human-centric business is therefore of critical importance. The employees and their knowledge are the very product Equinox is selling and to achieve this they need to find and hire the best people and best experts possible.

Equinox uses a decentralized system which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who may often carry out many other activities on a daily basis.

How To Ensure Consistent Excellence?

Although this approach provides the flexibility local managers need to keep their branches staffed, it also comes packaged with some inherent challenges. Most importantly is the concern a highly decentralized approach will suffer from a lack of consistency in the long-run.

The high quality standards customers have come to expect are central to Equinox’s brand and business. Several, or perhaps even a single, poor hire in one branch could potentially cause ongoing brand problems, especially considering they primarily court luxury customers with high demands.

Another issue concerns the tools Equinox needs to fulfil this hiring goal. The core strength and value of the company comes from the knowledge of its trainers and professionals in relation to their chosen speciality. It’s unlikely this professional knowledge will be possessed by full-time recruiters and hiring managers. Therefore, it makes sense for Equinox to allow its trainers, nutritionists and instructors to be involved in the hiring process. For this to be effective, they need to have access to an easy to use platform that economises their time. After all, the last thing an Equinox trainer wants to do is spend hours trying to work with clunky software in a backroom.

Turning Your Experts Into Hiring Managers

To solve this problem, Equinox joined SmartRecruiters in 2013. Here’s why they haven’t looked back:

• SmartRecruiters has collaboration as a keystone of the platform, allowing hiring managers from across the country to conveniently discuss candidates. This was particularly useful for Equinox, since knowledge from other branches could be brought into the hiring process if it was not available locally.
• The platform is also incredibly flexible and mobile, allowing trainers-cum-hiring managers to recruit on the move, saving them vast amounts of time and allowing them to concentrate on other daily responsibilities.
• The use of SmartRecruiters’ customizable scorecards allows for a consistent assessment process to be used across the company. This ensures local managers, while having the freedom to work on their own, also adhere to the high quality standards demanded.
• All of these factors, combined with SmartRecruiters’ support for social media and one-click-applications, results in a great candidate experience which supports the brand Equinox wishes to project.

After teaming up with SmartRecruiters, Equinox quickly saw an increase in applications — to the tune of 45 percent. Additionally, they saw an increase of 9 percent in terms of new hires, while 80 percent of individuals who saw a job posting applied to it.

To find out more about how Equinox found hiring success with SmartRecruiters, check out the full case study, Equinox: Hiring The Best Personal Trainers For Every Fitness Club.