AKA: How to use employment videos for social recruiting

Social recruiting is discussed often, but one of the lesser mentioned facets is video. While many companies know it’s something they should pursue, they don’t know how to be successful. Below you’ll find some ideas to pursue in the area of employer videos. Just a quick word of warning, I’m going to be technical at times, because the subject warrants it. However, I’m happy to help if your organization is looking to make a move into the video arena.

First off, you want your videos to be found when people search Google, right? That’s where search engine optimization comes in. It’s a methodology for getting your videos indexed in a way that makes them easy to find by searchers.

Five tips for Video SEO (search engine optimization)

1. Make the video something people want to share (more detail on this below).
2. Don’t dilute your videos by posting on multiple sites (YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc.).
3. Titles, tags, and descriptions are useful when uploading and posting videos online, but backlinks to the videos (with relevant keywords in the anchor text) are more important for search engine rankings.
4. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world and the #1 for videos. Use that to your advantage.
5. If you’re using WordPress as your content distribution platform, create a video sitemap and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools. Every little bit helps!

Now, let’s elaborate on #1 above. That’s usually the first question people have: what do the videos need to be about? Well, there are several ways to go with that, but I like to think of two kinds of people when considering these types of video: customers and potential job candidates. Think about what they would like to know about your company and give it to them!

Five ideas for your employment video content

1. Interview employees and ask what they do and what they like about the job, dept, or company
2. Get staff members to discuss the culture and how that affects what they do.
3. Ask employees to talk about their favorite benefit/perk that you offer.
4. Film the fun, unique events that make your organization special.
5. Create content that is outward facing and valuable to your industry. Hint: if you’re providing thought leadership and value at a level that entices competitors to link to you, then you’re on the right track.

This list certainly isn’t all-inclusive, but it’s a great start to generating ideas that would specifically benefit your company.

Thinking about creating some employer branding videos for your company and looking for some help? Feel free to contact me if you’re looking for assistance. 

Employment videos: how to get traffic (and candidates) is a post from: UpstartHR

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Think  this social recruiting thing is a fad? 80% of employers are using it in some form or fashion to find talent, so that theory doesn’t fly. Check out the video below for more observations from the new Jobvite report on the state of social recruiting.

Email subscribers need to click through to view the video.

• My post on last year’s survey-70% of employers perform social search on candidates
• The 2011 survey results (PDF)

80% of employers use social recruiting is a post from: UpstartHR

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Every once in a while I hear someone talking about needing a “social media policy” at work. Ugh. If you know me at all you’ll instantly guess that I’m against such things. I would rather offer training instead of more regulation. Here are four reasons you probably don’t need a social media policy at all:

• Conversations can happen anywhere. You don’t have a “parking lot conversations” policy, so why create a separate, special policy just for social media? People can do as much damage talking about your company in a crowded restaurant as they can with a Facebook post, but you don’t see anyone creating policies on that.
• Is it worth your time? Is your core business function monitoring social media or creating/delivering a product or service? You can stand over peoples’ shoulders as long as you want but it’s not going to add value to be business.
• We’re listening to the lawyers on this? When has a lawyer ever said, “You know what? You really don’t need a policy for that specific situation” with regard to the employer/employee relationship? I’m guessing never. If we listened to the lawyers and their scare tactics we’d have a handbook that rivals the size of the Alabama state constitution.
• Are they adults or not? If not, then you’re breaking a few child labor laws. If so, then we need to treat them like it. If you act like they are childish and incapable of handling themselves, then they will be. If you treat them as respectable, functional adults, then they will be (for the most part). Don’t make policies for outliers. That guy who clips his toenails on his desk? Don’t make a toenail-clipping-at-your-desk policy. Pull him aside and tell him it’s inappropriate. I’ll say it again: don’t make policies for outliers.

I’m sure there are more! What are your reasons for companies to forego a social media policy?

4 reasons you don’t need a social media policy is a post from: UpstartHR

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Recently I had the opportunity to visit Washington D.C. to work with the Society for Human Resources Management and a great team of individual contributors on SHRM’s social media tool, SHRM Connect. While some of us have criticized SHRM for moving slowly at times, it looks like they are making great strides on this project.

Check out the video below for more information.

SHRM Connect-SHRM’s Social Networking Tool is a post from: UpstartHR

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I love the idea of referral bonuses as a recruiting tool and I have a proposal in the pipeline for our leadership team to offer referral bonuses for each position (not just “key” ones). I’ve always wanted to write on them but this great post I saw the other day combined two fun topics for me: social recruiting and referral bonuses.

Here’s a word for word snag from the post. If every job ad looked like this, the world of recruiting would be wildly different.

—–

It’s our belief that growth is limited only by how much we can surprise, delight and reward our customers with software that rocks. We want to build more, faster and that’s why today, we’re announcing a new effort in bringing talented software engineers to the SEOmoz team.

Have Engineer Friends? Send ‘Em Our Way

Why should you send your engineer friends to SEOmoz? Three big reasons:

1. They’ll be joining an amazing team at a great company earning top salaries at a place that values their contributions (see below)
2. You’ll get $12,000 in cash* (OK, probably a check, but still!)
3. They’ll also get $12,000 in cash**

We’re seeking 4-5 very talented engineers (possibly more) with experience handling large-scale problems like machine learning, web crawling, building and optimizing web services (APIs), coping with large quantities of data and dealing in massively distributed systems. You can learn more about the job requirements here.

Engineers: Challenging Problems, Brilliant Co-Workers & Some Cool Bonuses Await You, Too

As part of this process, we’re making things interesting for talented engineers, too:

• If you refer/apply yourself, you’ll receive a $12,000 cash hiring bonus**
• If you’re not in the Seattle area, we can offer up to $10,000 to help you (and your family) move to the area
• If you make it to our final interview round (for a chat with our full team), you’ll walk out with a free iPad
• Start your new job right with a $5,000 shopping budget to spend on the hardware/software/accessories of your choice (for either home or office!). Need a new desk and chair set for you spare bedroom to work those odd hours in comfort? Go for it. New laptop? No problem.
• Salaries for engineers at SEOmoz are substantively above the average/median for Seattle (according to Payscale, Glassdoor, SimplyHired). We’ll be on par with the offers you get from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. in cash, and we’re even better on stock.
• Benefits at SEOmoz rock – we have a great health and dental plan (for you and your family / S.O.), we’ll cover your home Internet and your cellphone bill, 20 days of vacation time annually, transportation options, 401K plans and more.

That said, we should all be picky about where we work and where we interview. It’s not just about the salary, the bonus, the iPad or the shopping spree – there are other things that matter to us (and likely to you) when considering where to work:

• Will I be working on fun, interesting problems that will challenge me professionally and grow my skills?
• Will I learn from my co-workers and influence them positively?
• Does the company compensate generously and appropriately?
• Does my work make a recognizable impact on the company and the world?
• Am I contributing to a mission I believe in and a company whose core values I respect?

It’s my belief that SEOmoz does a solid job on all of these:

• The problems we face include “web scale” challenges – crawling, indexing and building metrics on billions of pages; collecting, filtering and making sense of millions of pieces of social data from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms; serving massive amounts of data to thousands of paying customers in a performant environment.
• The engineering team at SEOmoz is a remarkable and talented group. You’ll be side-by-side with engineers with impressive backgrounds and serious accomplishments on the product and technology side.
• We are in the top quartile of compensation for software engineers in Seattle and our benefits, stock options and perks are considerably above the average.
• What you build will have a direct, measurable impact on our subscribers – and you’ll be able to see it in the membership statistics and hear it directly through our many feedback channels (we get more than 300 messages about our products each week!). And, you won’t just be helping SEOmoz customers – our mission of making it easier for ideas to be shared on the web is carried out every day, and we have tons of great stories and feedback to show it.
• We think it’s great that Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the entire web ecosystem have built such remarkable platforms for sharing information. But, it’s hard to get noticed in all the noise and hard to know what will help make your ideas scale and spread. That where SEOmoz comes in – our software is meant to help companies and organizations of all sizes and shapes to better spread their messages in organic, white hat ways. It’s a mission we’ve found incredibly rewarding and we think you will, too.

Why Do We Need So Much Engineering Talent?

Because SEOmoz is taking off.

Today, we provide some of the web’s best and more popular software to help marketers understand, evaluate and improve their SEO efforts. In the months to come, we’re expanding to help marketers conquer all of organic marketing – from SEO to social media to blogging, local campaigns, content marketing, PR/media and more. This means huge challenges like increasing the size, freshness and quality of our web index(currently ~45billion pages, moving up to 100 billion), building a “mention” index on our Blogscape platformthat lets marketers see where their brand names are being used across the web (even if no direct links exist), scaling analytics, improving our machine learning algorithms, exponentially growing our data storage while simultaneously making things faster.

And, unfortunately (or fortunately), our requirements for engineering talent are extremely high. We interview a lot of candidates and need not only the best and brightest in challenging fields (machine learning, large-scale crawling, natural language processing, large-scale distributed systems, etc.), but folks who fit with our core values of TAGFEE.

We owe it to our customers and our mission to build amazing software and that means recruiting remarkable engineers. It’s great to be a profitable startup, but money sitting in the bank won’t do us, or our community any good. We want to put these dollars to work and build something revolutionary – we’re aiming to be the future of organic web/inbound marketing software.

Top 10 Reasons Why Should You Join SEOmoz

Because a post like this wouldn’t be complete without a top 10 list!

1. Interesting, Challenging Problems (strategic and technical, and often on a very large scale)
2. Engineering Centric Company (development and software are the core of our company’s product and the largest team – you won’t be in the “IT department,” you’ll be a key member at the heart of SEOmoz)
3. Customer Focused Roadmap (we don’t just build things that sound interesting, we build things we know our customers want, need and use – and when we do, we get great feedback directly from thousands of paying members)
4. Transparency (you’ll always know how the company is doing week-to-week and quarter by quarter. Virtually every metric except salaries are shared throughout the organization)
5. Profitability (we’re in the black – no burning runways or panicked cries for venture capital. We’ve got a proven business model and we’ve been doubling our revenue for 3 years)
6. Excellent Compensation (We pay in the top range of salaries for software engineers in Seattle based on experience + skills. You won’t have to sacrifice pay to work at a great startup vs. a behemoth)
7. Amazing Co-Workers (Ask anyone in the Seattle tech, marketing or startup community and they’ll tell you – SEOmoz’s people aren’t just talented, they’re truly good people who care about each other and are a pleasure to spend time with)
8. Flat Organization (If you struggle against the politics and bureaucratic inefficiencies of a big organization, you’ll love it here. We have smallish teams, 30 people in total, and only a single layer of management – you’ll report directly to the VP of Engineering)
9. We Listen (Our engineers have contributed substantively to the product roadmap, to new ideas we implement, even to how we decorate the office)
10. Great Benefits, Perks + Fun Stuff (we play Xbox Kinect on Friday afternoons, snacks in the office, 401K plans, flexible and generous vacation time, a great health/dental plan and more on the way)

So, what do you think? If you were an engineer, would this posting sell it for you?

Recruiting via Referral Bonuses ($12k sound good?) is a post from: UpstartHR

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This is a tribute to the TrenchHR LinkedIn group created by my friend Charlie Judy. Recently I joined and asked a question about how to respond to people who say they are too busy to use social media tools. In less than 48 hours I had a great number of responses from people who practice HR every day and have combated this issue in their own lives. Read on for some great ideas and a lively discussion on the value of social media in the life of an HR/recruiting professional!

“But I’m too busy already…”

So, when I’m pushing HR people to join LinkedIn, start reading blogs, etc., the first response is usually “but I’m too busy already” or “I don’t have time for something else.” Looking for some good responses to those comments. I can say, “Look at me!” But that really doesn’t help my case. These people think they want to start doing this stuff, but they are talking themselves out of it before they even start. Suggestions?

Ben Eubanks

• Charlie Judy, SPHR, CPA • “Your loss.”
• Richard Sherman, SPHR • When I hear the wee voice in my head saying the same thing, I work on making the time for one thing each day. Read one blog, check one group on LinkedIn, read one article in the business section…just one thing. Folks need to see these things are helpful to them, and not really very time consuming if they are looked at as moments, not that they must become a social media guru (or do the gah-jillion things you manage to do each day, Ben). And, I would bet most of the people who say they don’t have time are doing at least 2 things right now they shouldn’t be. Someone else could do them, or they are not valuable tasks to their day. Change out one of those things to take the time to get connected. Or you can always say “your loss” – Charlie’s got that right!
• Bonita Martin • I would recommend starting with Linkedin first. My comment to potential connections is that it is a “professional Rolodex”, a way to keep in touch with past and present professional connections. That usually gets them to at least check it out. Sharing content from groups or “liking” postings about content should get others interested, maybe even those who are too busy.
• Dave Ryan, SPHR • So let’s assume that someone’s plate is full… is there one or two things a day that you are doing right now that you could stop doing? Are you perfoming some job ritual or other repetitive task or job that could just go away. My guess is yes. There now take that time and use it for some new media activities. Then you won’t be too busy like Ben!
• Crystal Peterson • I’m with Bonita. Tell them to try LinkedIn first. I think it’s the most professional site and the easiest to get acclimated to. And then have them start joining groups like this and engaging in conversations, checking out the blog links, etc. I’ve found that when I start talking blogs and Twitter, their eyes glaze over. It’s like one more thing to add to an ever-growing to-do list. So I don’t do that anymore. . Start slow. One thing at a time. Get ‘em hooked.
• William Gould, CEBS, SPHR • So is everyone here suggesting that you have plenty of time? Don’t answer that question, I already know the answer. To me, it’s not a question of time, but rather a value proposition/priority. That point at which the perceived value exceeds the little time it takes to connect with peers all over the world is when anyone will become curious enough to figure this SM thing out. To answer your question Ben, I’ve told people that I didn’t think I had the time or inclination to get engaged for quite some time. But I am sure glad that I did. This has often lead to their follow up question of, “why are you glad?”
• Caryn Sarvich, SPHR • I like the idea of starting with LinkedIn and have found it an easier sell to colleagues as well. I’ve shared tips and shown people how easy it is to link accounts to combat “I don’t have time to check a variety of places for content” and suggested use of an RSS feeder to have favorite blog content delivered to a home page for quick review when moments pop up. I schedule time to read and digest content – before work and a few minutes at lunch. It’s professional development and it’s way less expensive than most conferences. ps- My admiration and respect for those who are consistently delivering great content!
• Charlie Judy, SPHR, CPA • Do you all keep your social media outlets up in the background of your computers (and do you check in from time to time/participate from time to time) during normal working hours or do you get caught up only when you’re off the clock? I for one keep it up and jump in and out throughout the day – I see it as part of my job and my professional duty (not quite sure my boss would agree, but I think it’s too important not to). What do you do? Don’t worry, your boss isn’t part of this group.
• Richard Sherman, SPHR • I don’t leave mine running in the background, but I jump in and out during most workdays, just to keep the pulse. I have Grand Plans to get really in-depth when I get home…but that often falls aside when faced with food and silly tv. But I agree, Charlie, that it’s part of our work – and a much needed connection for me as a soloist.
• Crystal Peterson • I keep mine up and running in the background and try to jump on and check it throughout the day. I don’t always have time to chat but I try to click through links to open them so I can get back to reading them at some point and RTing them out. Doesn’t always work but that’s my goal. I also see it as part of my job and professional duty. I’ve learned so much from my social media peeps and have gotten some great ideas from the blogs, the chats, and the off-line conversations. It is worth the time and the effort!
• William Gould, CEBS, SPHR • It depends. If I am doing super exciting work at my desk – like building compensation and budget files (I apologize to those who actually like numbers) – then I will keep things open for an occasional and welcome distraction. Most of the time I will check in during the day from my iPhone. I decided a long time ago that I was not going to play the clock watching, hours counting game. I get paid to deliver results, which almost always includes work from home and on my days off. So, I don’t see a need to apologize to anyone for checking Twitter during the day, or reading my favorite blogs while I eat a sandwich. But, I also have a great boss who doesn’t worry about that kind of thing.
• Etienne Besson • To get back to the initial question, I noticed lately that more and more people start showing an interest in social media. Their mean concerns are indeed “I don’t have time for this”, but also “what’s it good for?”. One colleague who wouldn’t dream of using Twitter or Facebook was very impressed when he realized how easy it is to reconnect to former co-workers via LinkedIn. The other thing I usually try to “sell” is that a LinkedIn profile with more than just your name and current job is a great mix between public CV and business card. This is becoming important since more and more candidates and potential business partners get used to checking you out online before the first meeting. Like Ben said, “look at me” isn’t the best strategy, so at first I don’t recommend joining Twitter or following blogs, although I’m always itching to
• Stephanie Kempa • Especially for those “in the trench”, we are busy. Too busy for social media, too busy for exercise, too busy to breathe some days. So the best advice is do what you can, even if it’s only a little. The rationale I give is that social media is emerging fast, and it will be part of the workplace. As HR professionals, you have to engage in it now, so you can understand it well enough to work with it, to leverage it, or to prevent it from causing issues in the workplace. And I ignore advice that says if you can’t blog (or tweet) often, don’t bother. I have plenty to read in the meantime if my favorite bloggers aren’t posting and tweeting. Charlie, on your second question I keep the work-related stuff running in the background and check on occasion as a mini-break from what I’m doing. Like William, I’m in a more results-oriented work environment.

Click here to follow the discussion or to add your own thoughts (must join the group to contribute). (Disclaimer: you have to be an “in the trenches” HR pro to join the group. Charlie is upholding the purity of the concept and has the backing of his audience on that!)

Do you have a reason of your own for not using the available social tools? I’d love to discuss!

But I’m too busy for social media… is a post from: UpstartHR

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It’s been almost two whole months since Victorio and I announced Project:Social, and we have had an amazing response. So far there have been three mentees matched with someone who can teach and guide them in the ways of the social media world. Those groups have been our “beta” testers, and we have received some good feedback from them on their experiences.

I even got to plug Project:Social during the SHRM Leadership Conference social media panel. What a great way to help the volunteer leaders in SHRM to learn how to use social media!

Anyway, our participants have also been prolific, from cross posting on blogs to sharing topics/ideas and more.

Lisa and William

The HR Version of Match.com

Project Social: Why Should I be Social Now?

Dave and Laura

5 posts by Dave on his P:S experience

5 posts by Laura on her P:S experience

What you can do

Go here to sign up if you want to be mentored, if you want to mentor, or if you’d like to know more about the program. We are opening up at the beginning of the year to everyone that wants to participate, so get in while the getting’s good.

Social media mentor update (Project:Social) is a post from: UpstartHR

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