By now we’ve all seen the 2013 Gallup report on employee engagement, The State of the American Workplace. Words that come to mind when I re-read the report:  bummer, disheartening, bad news.  But I also wonder: what exactly did we expect? Look around you, managers, and you’ll see disengaged employees with the Zombie stare, some with the sour look of the disappointed, a few with the overly positive, can-do smile, trying desperately to make things work. A lot of this is the fault of a poor connection between managers and line-of-business employees and it inevitably trickles into a broken recruitment and communication process with potential candidates. The good news? We can change these statistics. It’s in your power to take control of your recruiting process and employer brand. The truth is most job seekers are looking for more than salary when they decide to apply to work at your company.

Can employee disengagement and bad branding be prevented? Can HR and Leaders learn to bring people back to productivity? Absolutely. Will it be tough? You know it. Will it be worth it? Yes, a thousand times. How do you start? Let’s take a closer look at employer brand.  Are you true to it in your hiring and recruiting process? How your employees represent the company’s mission and brand is as important as anything Leaders or HR says in the hiring process. Make sure the stories align well and is accurately reflecting your current brand and the overall mission.

Then look at the employee experience – What employees do everyday, the actions they take, and how they perceive the actions of their managers and top management.  As Blue Ocean Strategy Institute co-directors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest in this month’s Harvard Business Review, focusing on the acts and activities of management and employees is critical to understanding how a company operates. Actions, as our moms have told us, do speak louder than words, and in the world of work they separate good managers, and great companies and truthful branding, from the mediocre. My latest piece on Dice.com provides more information on just how much technology is changing in the world of work for leaders and hiring practitioners around the globe.

Then look at how you’re hiring: think candidate experience.  Do you force job seekers through a maze-like microsite for career opportunities, then fail to acknowledge their applications with an email or letter (spoiler alert: approximately 70% of hiring companies are in this camp)?  Do you put people through tests and five phone screens, then never follow up? If so, you’re doing damage to your brand. Smart companies know better: they’ve begun to adopt new technologies to streamline the hiring process: video, digital interviews, social recruiting and more.

A few more things can make or break employer brand and candidate experience:

Communicate throughout the process. If you do a phone screen, give feedback.  If a candidate comes to your career site, acknowledge the visit with an email explaining your hiring process. Technology is available now to make these steps easy; there’s no reason not to do it, unless you want to damage your brand.

Think like a candidate. Another timeless reminder: treat others as you’d like to be treated. This Golden Rule is especially important if you want to ensure good candidate experience. And why wouldn’t you?

Be a person first, an HR manager second. People want to deal with people. Make your hiring process as personal as you can. You’re not dealing with robots (just yet at least).

Set expectations. This is part of the communications process but it deserves a call-out. Don’t leave people hanging; let them know what your process is, when they can expect to hear back, how quickly you’re planning to make a decision.

Candidate experience is a two way street. Make sure yours is good and true to your brand, or you are setting the brand up for damage both upfront in the recruiting process and to your internal employees and stakeholders. It’s easier to maintain a good reputation than it is to rebuild it. Employer brand and candidate experience are linked, and they matter greatly to recruit and retain your talent.

This article was written by Meghan M. Biro from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.

”Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” – Henry David Thoreau 

The social web starts on Facebook. In North America, South America, and Europe, the vast majority of the entire population use Facebook. Fifty-six percent of all shared content on the web comes through Facebook and the average Facebook user spends well over 15 hours per month on the site interacting with friends, family and … the companies whose products and services they enjoy. Today, there are already over 4 million businesses on Facebook, and this direct social connection between company and consumer is changing the way consumers make decisions and businesses market.

But why hasn’t it changed the way businesses hire?

Increasingly, individuals’ Facebook identities are both social and professional. In less than five months, Facebook recruiting app BranchOut grew from 400,000 users to more than 25 million. The U.S. Department of Labor partnered with Facebook to launch Social Jobs, a platform “designed to more effectively leverage the utility of social networks in the job market.” Yet, recent surveys by EFew, Bullhorn Reach and others clearly demonstrate what you or your friends already know: jobseekers search for jobs on Facebook, but they rarely find any reference to open positions let alone an easy way to apply for a job.

Too few companies leverage their Facebook pages to identify new employees. If your company or organization’s biggest fans go to your Facebook page, will they find your open jobs?

We here at SmartRecruiters have made it easy for companies and organizations of all sizes to post jobs on your Facebook page with little effort and at no charge. Any Facebook Company page admin can install the SmartRecruiters Careers Tab and instantly display open jobs. Through the app, not only can you post open jobs, but you can also manage all applicants through SmartRecruiters free recruiting software. Plus the SmartRecruiters Careers Tab is optimized for mobile devices so candidates can easily view open jobs from any device.

“SmartRecruiters Careers Tab application provides us with a broader candidate reach through our own established Facebook page,” said Jared McDonald, Human Resources Recruiter with Zeeco. “It essentially eliminates the need to use search firms when hiring for hard-to-fill industry positions.”

The Careers Tab by SmartRecruiters is the only entirely free way to display your open jobs on Facebook in front of the relevant audience.  People that believe in what you do, or simply love your product, naturally become the best employees.  Turn your fans into hires.

“We need to leverage technology to take recruiting back to its roots as a social activity,” said SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck. “And that includes showing your open jobs to your Facebook visitors.”

In our growingly social world, SmartRecruiters Careers Tab is as important, if not more important, than having a traditional career site. Every job you post through SmartRecruiters free recruiting software will post to your Facebook Careers Tab  (as well as to free boards such as Indeed, your traditional career site, and the option to post job to niche and commercial job sites in one click).

“We believe that a more open world is better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in his Open Letter to Investors. Recruiting can be as simple as letting the right people know you are hiring. Start with your fans.

John Sumser “published” an HRxaminer article, Star Candidate Experience in 17 steps on Jan 25.

I clicked to read it right away – intrigued – for candidate experience is not usually the focus of articles on recruiting strategy. The article was as you would expect from one of the oldest and most respected voices in Internet recruiting, John Sumser. But, 17 steps is a lot to remember. In fact, the 18^th step of the article reads, “and so on.” Then John wrote, “If this list seems familiar, it might be because it’s a seven year old piece,” which links back to a post published in July 2006.

Can’t we be more direct? Can’t we make it simpler? Can’t we make it EEEasier?

The three Es to create a great candidate experience on a careers page are: easy navigation, engage the visitor, and educate.

1. Easy navigation

All kinds of people visit your careers page.  Customers, investors, students, teachers, competitors, and, oh yes, people checking out your company to see if it’s a good place to work. Anyone who visits your corporate website may decide to check out your jobs. So, put the Careers link right up front. Don’t make people have to search for it. Don’t bury it in your “about” link, or “contact” link. If you have a great company, then, let your visitors know it’s a great place to work.

Your jobs should be searchable or listed by location, job title and job function. It should be easy to get to a specific job. Each job should have its own page ID, so that all those people who visit, are just “shopping,” but, then see the perfect job for their next door neighbor or cousin or boss and can email the URL and spread the word. Ideally your job ads should have one click sharing features to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s a key component of viral marketing. Don’t miss this opportunity to leverage web of mouth advertising.

2. Engage the visitor

The best way to engage people is with a story. We want to hear stories about real people who work there. In fact, we want to see real people. It’s easy to post videos of real employees talking about what they do and why they love working there. If you don’t have such employees, your problems won’t be solved by a great career page. Candidates want to see your people philosophy and strategy, what HR Influencers are currently called “talent management.”

Now, how do you get great stories? Engage your marketing department because recruitment is a marketing problem (to be discussed in a future article) and they understand how to connect the message to the receiver. Ask your employees to volunteer their stories. We live in a reality television age and everyone seems to be friends with the camera. Can you think of a better employee recognition program? Plus it’ll be fun (if you think making a company video can’t be fun, you haven’t seen Twitter’s Join the Flock viral video…)

Prospective employees also want to know about your products and strategy, so consider including interesting tidbits about a best selling product. Steve Jobs was a master at this. That’s why Apple’s employees are so engaged. They have a common goal of delivering game changing products.

In stories about your company’s leadership, toss the suits. Lose the formality. Theory X is passé, anyway. Show their human side with pictures and videos of them talking to employees in a real work environment. If you have great managers, let your employees brag about how much they get from their managers. If the number one reason people leave is their manager (some say, “People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.”), what do you think is one of the biggest motivators to join a team?

3. Educate

 

This is a best practice for careers sites, and job ads. Be transparent.

It will save you lots of time later and get them on the right track, even before they get their badge. What to teach?

• Your values and culture, key for new hires to know.

• Something about your industry and the competitive environment is good, too. Yes, of course, the highly motivated job seeker will do their homework be viewing your Social Media Footprint and your annual report via Yahoo! Finance, but you need to think about what any new employee needs to know to be successful. It amazes me to walk into a client’s facility and discover an employee who knows exactly how his or her job contributes to the company’s goals.

• Keep your topics employee-centric, with information about benefits and career options.

• Information about the hiring process (don’t lie!) is great, too, so that people know what to expect.

The overall goal is to communicate why great people want to work at your company. Don’t muddy the message with HR compliance speak such as “we are committed to a diverse work environment” and “we are an equal opportunity employer.” If your HR exec insists on such messages, put it in the fine print at the bottom of the page. If you want a diverse workforce, then show pictures that prove your commitment to diversity. When candidates read the “commitment to diversity” blurb, then go to the “leaders” page and see and read little to no diversity, candidates will think the company is lying. If you want to attract the right kinds of people, then look for ways to broaden this depiction of your company culture. Don’t be afirad to ask your marketing department for help.

Pat Sharp, The Talent Architect blends strategy, technology tools, and assessment tools with marketing magic to create unique talent solutions. Past and current clients include: Motorola, Deloitte, TiVo, and Cloudscaling. Visit The Talent Architect or drop her a line at pat@thetalentarchitect.com.

What a year 2011 has been! Since our launch at the end of August, SmartRecruiters has continued to release integrative and in demand sourcing functionality. In our quest to be easy, smart, social, open (and entirely free), here is:

The Countdown of the 5 Best Hiring Made Easy Features:

5.  Predictive Recruiting

Based on the job boards chosen, the sourcing indicator considers your job, industry, function, level, and location in order to give the percentage chance that you will get enough good qualified candidates to make a hire. This real time data driven approach will help you find the needle in the haystack (while searching through less hay). This feature is still in beta, but SmartRecruiters is thrilled about its potential to find you great candidates from right places.

“We are excited for the growth and data driven direction of the sourcing indicator,” says CEO Jerome Ternynck. “As they say, ‘In God we trust. All others bring data.’ ”

4.  Job Manager, the WordPress Plugin

Job Manager is the cool and easy plugin to post jobs within your WordPress environment. This plugin automates the posting of relevant jobs on any web page while leveraging your existing style sheet, and letting you filter jobs by location and/or department. When posting jobs, Job Manager maintains the integrity of your brand. All candidates are consolidating within your SmartRecruiters software for easy candidate management. Download Job Manager.

3.  Post Jobs to the Best Tech Job Sites

Direct posting to the leading programmer communities, designer communities, market leading publications, and job sites for the tech industry. Seasoned analyst of HRtech market strategy and editor of HRexaminer John Sumser said, “this is impressive.”

2. Careers Tab, the Facebook App

Turn your fans into hires by adding a “Careers” tab to your existing Facebook fan page to display your current job openings there. The are more than 800 million Facebook users, and in the last year, 50% of job seekers have visited Facebook to look for a job. Any job you post via SmartRecruiters will be automatically posted to your Facebook fan page as well. In the social web, your Facebook company page is your website. Download here.

1. Mobile Career Sites

“For employers, mobile is the new paradigm shift. SmartRecruiters Mobile Career Sites are a great way for candidates and employers to connect on mobile devices,” stated Michael Marlatt, a mobile recruiting expert and founder of mRecruitingcamp.

With 50% of internet traffic soon coming from mobile devices, it’s rather important to give people an easy access to jobs from a tiny mobile screen. Your SmartRecruiters Careers Page: www.smartrecruiters.com/companyname now has a mobile style sheet so that when someone accesses it via a mobile device it automatically adjusts itself to display your job list and individual job descriptions in a nice and easy format. This innovative product development has been featured in InformationWeek – “Help Wanted 2.0: SMB Recruiting Goes Mobile” and Business News Daily – “Savvy Recruiters Are Mining the Mobile Marketplace for Job Candidates.”

As an Open SaaS company, we are committed to rolling out the best features to all of our customers at no cost. Here are all of our product updates. SmartRecruiters expects even bigger things in 2012!

Our new website went live yesterday WITHOUT a Careers page and it was all my fault. It was a painful decision considering I’ve been building career sites for others for as long as they’ve been around. However, we weren’t ready with the content and I certainly didn’t want to put the usual corporate blah blah that you often see on Career pages.

Then today, in the middle of the #ZeroUE craziness, someone asked “What’s a CEO most critical skill?” and I immediately answered “Recruiting” of course. There is some truth in it, the ability to acquire (and keep) top talent is probably the most important skill any manager should possess.

So, with that in mind, I went back to my “draft content for Careers page” and tried to put something together that would:

1. Properly translate what it’s like to work at SmartRecruiters

2. Clearly express our employee value proposition

3. Be attractive for the right kind of people

Here is what I got:

Why work at SmartRecruiters?

Although this page is entitled “Careers”, it is probably more of a Quest that we offer. Smartrecruiters is a start-up with a Vision [make hiring easy] and a Cause [eradicate unemployment].

Don’t see a job you like, no worries. You can connect with us on facebook or twitter. We’ll keep you posted the minute something comes up.

So what do you think? Cool, not cool? Effective, not? I think I am going to publish as is but I’d love your comments and feedback.