crowd sourcing

Description

When it comes to selling a job to a potential candidate, "you're selling a promise at a company rather than a product," said Brad Cook (@brcook2006), VP Global Talent Acquisition, for Informatica in his presentation "Driving Innovation in a Borderless Recruiting World" at ERE's 2012 Recruiting Innovation Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. In his presentation and in my interview with Cook, he brought up a lot of key techniques and issues that are key to transforming your talent acquisition strategy. Here's some of his advice. Know your limitations: You need to know your own organization and what it's capable of doing. You can't say your company has a fun wild culture if it doesn't. You'll have boundaries in which you're going to be operating. Ask yourself what things can you leverage within the constraints of your organization that can positively get your brand out there for candidates. Isolate your competitive advantage: There are many factors that could be your strategic differentiator such as employer of choice branding, operational excellence, candidate experience, candidate relationship management, technology enablement, and crowd sourcing market intelligence. Measure your success: What variables can you isolate to show success? You need to show ROI if you want to get more money from the CFO. Map out the candidate experience: Understand every single touch point and how you can improve it. How do you start marketing to candidates? How do we push relevant and timely information to a targeted audience to keep them warm? How do you find that source of talent and put it in a funnel? How do you prescreen the candidate? If you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution you can bolt all this stuff together. SEO everything: Every item you put online needs to be SEO'ed, such as titles of jobs and descriptions. You need your candidates to be able to find you. Job descriptions are the front world of your company. Make the text people have to read, compelling. Give them an idea of the day in the life of working at the company. You want to get the candidates juiced up. Employer brand is critical: It's a must have, not a nice to have. It's what gets you noticed and lets you stand out from the crowd. Your brand needs to be clear, compelling, a differentiator, and measurable. It's a promise that your potential employees and all your other stakeholders will care about.