Transparency in the Recruitosphere:

Prior to the omnipresence of electronic networks, employers had relative control over what candidates knew about them. Through advertising and job fairs, you could own your message. Should negativity arise in the press, you could exercise damage control via public relations. In both cases, the media and its recipients were a known quantity.

As for your own employees, while you couldn’t vouch for what they said during happy hours, you had a fairly firm handle on what went within your walls. You could monitor rumor mills and counteract them with carefully worded memorandums. Through Employee Referral Programs (ERPs), which remain among the most effective attraction and retention tools, you could enlist your troops as “brand evangelists,” profiting from sharing the good news about your company.

In short, you and your allies in the media had command of “Push Communications.” It wasn’t always perfect, but even when the system went awry, you could trace back the cause and remedy it.

Today’s Recruitosphere describes a drastically changed environment. Traditional “lines of communication” have given way to a “spherical,” always-on “surround sound.” Control of what is known about your workplace has increasingly shifted to the job candidate, who can “pull” what they need to know. Horizontal peer-to-peer communications create communities of practice that link your employees with comrades in their field. As information about you becomes common knowledge, mastering “Pull Communications” becomes imperative.

The never-satisfied employee and always-seeking job seeker. The Recruitosphere environment intensifies an attrition battle, in which retention issues are growing. In a recent Monster Work/Life Balance Survey, 89 percent of all respondents said they wanted to change jobs. Added to the uncertainty of baby boomer retirements, such a “fickle base” can lead to significant skills gaps that threaten your corporate mission. Consider also the financial reality of having to spend on average an extra one-third of an employee’s salary to transition a new hire. “Cost of vacancy” looms as the new threat to the bottom line.

In this fray, recruiter webloggers can both fuel discontent and lure your employees away. On unofficial employee blogs, disgruntled staff members can rant about your working conditions. Although “freedom of expression” is not a guaranteed right of an employee, monitoring official blog comments alone would be a huge undertaking. And these official blogs make employees visible targets for email from interested job seekers.

Meanwhile, converging broadband and mobile technologies have expanded the “skinny” on your workplace beyond water coolers and watering holes. Job seekers can get collective peer-based reviews of your organization as easily as choosing a restaurant via the Zagat guide. For example, members of the Vault (www.vault.com) have access to 67,849 employee surveys for 5,825 companies. They can get insider information, based on the Vault’s independent research, including salary ranges. Within a short time, they can compare you and your offerings to your competitors. To stay in the game, employers must learn how to use network technologies not to obscure, but to reveal.

In an article on the trend towards “Radical Transparency” (Wired, April 2007), Clive Thompson notes that “network algorithms do not favor the cagey and secretive.” In the “Reputation Economy,” a small number of bad blog posts can greatly hurt. “But,” says Thompson, “if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of sites linking to you and commenting on you, the law of averages takes over, and odd are the opinions will be accurate: The cranks will be outweighed by cooler heads. Again the Net awards the transparent.”

The candidate’s information age: “pull” tools for transparency. Push media, such as newspapers, magazines, network television and cable, tend to be highly centralized, hierarchical and expensive, e.g. 40 percent of newspaper costs involve manufacture and distribution. Pull media, such as the Internet, search engines, peer-to-peer sharing, email, text-messaging, decentralize control into the hands of the individual at virtually no cost.

Not surprisingly, according to The Week (January 7, 2007), in the twenty years from 1987 to 2007, total daily circulation of U.S. newspapers declined from 60 million to 43.7 million. The LA Times has seen its readership drop by 25 percent since 1996 alone. Meanwhile one in three Americans “pull” their news from the Internet. Most important, only 23 percent of those under 30 rely on newspapers as compared to 60 percent of those older than 30.

Recruitment has followed this trend. In the second quarter of 2006, for the first time, online recruitment expenditures surpassed print: $5.6 vs. $5.5 billion.

Print’s strategy has been to get on board the network. Hence, some 18.6 percent of the online expenditures above went to newspaper websites. Over the past months, this trend as accelerated as metropolitan newspapers and job boards make pacts. Although these alliances between major metropolitan newspaper chains and the leading job boards may appear formidable, pull media easily finds a way around them. Today niche vertical industry and geographic job boards abound. If you want a nurse, you can skirt the combines and go on nurses.com. Similarly Robert W. Baird, American Express and NASCAR are among the many employers fishing for local talent on floridajobs.com.

In a still further manifestation of “pull media,” many job seekers are simply “googling” their next job, perhaps from their mobile phones. At the Aspen Institute in 2005, Shona Brown, Google vice president for business operations, described their entire organization as a “pull company”: “We largely hire for intrinsic potential, much more so than we do for specified expertise. Of course, we have ratios in different areas, where we’d like to have different types of expertise, but the reality is we don’t have a specific set of jobs with specific set of requirements. We troll for the world’s best talent, and we have a variety of ways to get such people to self-select us.”

Interactive media makes this “trolling” possible, Instead of casting nets, involving much waste, you can tailor your tactics to “hook” the precise individuals that match your needs. But what about self-selection when you’re confronting the newly knowledgeable job candidate?

Traditional push communications, geared to capturing attention and seeking immediate action, has never rated high for transparency, which is essential to compete for candidates. Job switching is stressful even for proverbial hopping Gen Yers. Job change at any stage of life requires leaving one set of relationships for another, moving from a level of comfort to an entirely new frontier, altering lives outside of work, sometimes to the point of relocation.

Advertising, which as a medium was shaped by superficial attractions, often inspired by impulsivity, cannot adequately persuade individuals to make this kind of “life move.” Candidates are looking for transparency into an organization, to the leading to a level of genuine trust. Such trust requires a greater abundance of information that appeals to multiple personal needs.

Whether you advertise in traditional or new media, messages must become more educational, i.e. they must anticipate the questions asked by active and passive candidates. At a time when news and entertainment are becoming increasingly interchangeable, recruitment communications must move in the opposite direction. In other words, human capital communications, even when using the same tools as consumer marketing, necessarily imparts more information. Only then can it cut through the undifferentiated, me-too, positioning to reach an understandably cynical audience that easily deconstructs commercial media.

Consequently, present communications trends for recruitment and retention emphasize media that can naturally tell a more ample story.

The anchor website: a hub for action. The careers website has evolved from a “button” to become the primary conveyor of employer brand as well as the up-to-the-minute index to your job opportunities. The careers website can only play this central, strategic role if attention has already been given to a research-based employer brand accompanied by an overall strategic plan. This plan should give attention to the site’s entire online and offline eco-system, from which it must draw visitors. Several trends are important in this regard:

• A user-centric methodology for customer satisfaction. Poor navigation that makes accessibility difficult for any user can over-ride mission statements that employees are your most important asset. Fortunately, you can approach site creation with a proven multi-step process that leverages best practices for similar sites. You can test these sites in real-life lab situations, where respondents must retrieve typically sought-after information and accomplish tasks. After the site has gone up, you can follow up with online customer satisfaction surveys such as those of ForeSee Results.
• Attracting visitors: search engine optimization. Slip one of your job titles into Google and see what comes up. You might be surprised to see how much of your traffic is clicking their way to your competitors. To get these people to your website, you need a sophisticated Search Engine Management program. Ideally, the incorporation of appropriate language and meta-tags (elements embedded in website code) can steer people to your site without the necessity of paid results. Long-term, as new entrants, such as Wiki (see “Google’s Worst Nightmare,” Business 2.0, April 2007), threaten Google by promising more focused results, you future proof your site with indigenous tags.
• Joining the blogosphere. According to Jupiter Research, nearly 70 percent of all corporate website operators were to have corporate blogs by the end of 2006. With the balance of power shifting to candidates, these blogs can provide intimate insights into your organization. Since blogging is for the most part a user-generated activity, engineered content can be viewed with suspicion. Hence many companies give their bloggers relatively free reign provided they stay on focus, understand their audience, observe certain rules of etiquette (not posting sensitive information or slamming competitors) and, above all, communicate well and regularly.

Emerging tools: RSS, Jobcasting and Second Life. In Pull Communications, recruitment tactics take their cues from the seekers, adapting to their styles of connected life:

• RSS (Real Simple Syndication), RSS feeds allow subscribing candidates to receive notice of openings on their desktop.
• Jobscasting: Attrition frequently derives from conflicts with managers. Yet prior to one-on-one contact, job seekers rarely have an opportunity to scope out the chemistry with superiors. Jobscasting, an online audio or video program that can be downloaded from your Internet site to iPODs, MP3 players, many cellphones or computers, lets candidates hear from managers directly. Backed by a script, prepared by HR, our management can talk about the kinds of individuals they are seeking as well as about themselves, their team and the working the environment they foster.
• Second Life. In January 2007, Fortune magazine reported that the “most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life.” In case you have yet to create an avatar and venture into its imaginative universe, Second Life (SL) is a “3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” Since opening to the public in 2003, SL has grown to a population of more than 5.2 million from around the globe. TMP Worldwide is presently setting up a venue for online careers fairs on TMP Island. Beyond the basics of interviewing, SL offers opportunities for real-time virtual employee testimonials, maximum flexibility with career events, interactive 3-d virtual office tours, real-time live chats with avatar recruiters, new hire orientation training and work simulations. You can explore a genuine, well-rounded and meaningful contact with your potential hires and employees.

Using technology to measure and improve. A key advantage of pull communications is that anchor websites provide a platform for metrics. You can analyze traffic in terms of branding impressions, registration, applications and subsequent disposition of resumes in the hiring process. Analytics can determine which media and messages are working best for cost per application (CPA), and, when integrated with an applicant tracking system (ATS), cost per hire (CPH). An example is TMP’s Campaign Management Premier with its Metrics Gateway that gives clients a real-time window on a recruitment campaign.

Conclusion: Thriving in the Recruitosphere. Recruitment has seen a Copernican revolution in which the top job prospects no longer revolve around organizations. As the individual centers of the Recruitosphere, candidates have access to abundant information. Adoption of Pull Communications can help you provide authentic, credible input into their career decisions. Correspondingly the integration of new online tools as well as the effective use of traditional media can afford you an opportunity to engage candidates in dialog. Throughout the process, you can use digital tools to achieve unprecedented metrics to lower expenditures and improve results. At a time when maintaining a stable, qualified workforce is challenging, you can be the transparent purveyor of information that appeals to both job seekers and your employees.

TMP Worldwide is the nation’s largest independent recruitment advertising agency and the only one that has been ranked among the 20 interactive agencies.