by Fiona Housiaux | Apr 26, 2018 | News
This month amid a media frenzy and ironically a lot of trending on social media, saw JD Wetherspoons’ Chairman Tim Martin announce that with immediate effect the pub chain would be closing all of its social media accounts, in order to channel its communications directly via an in-house magazine and website.
Martin said he took the decision after becoming increasingly concerned by reports of MPs and public figures being targeted by trolls and following the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal. He also expressed a view that there is an unhealthy “compulsion” among social media users to spend too much time on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Martin felt that Wetherspoons’ staff were spending an increasing amount of time dealing with social media messages and that he was not convinced that being on social media sites brought any commercial benefit to the business.
Wetherspoon certainly isn't the only company to recently remove itself from social media platform. Indeed, the call to #DeleteFacebook after the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal saw Playboy, Tesla and SpaceX delete its Facebook account.
So, you do have to ask yourself the question was JD Wetherspoons’ decision the right one? Well, no one can deny that Chairman Tim Martin knows his market, especially as his company keeps going from strength to strength, when on average 4 pubs close a week in the UK. He also knows his customers, so maybe he is truly making a stand for his customers by changing his digital policy. Or it could be a strategy based on the fact that he has previously blamed social media and in particular Facebook as part of the reason for the decline in the pub trade of recent years as more people choose to drink at home and ultimately use social media whilst doing so.
We might never know the real reasons why the decision was made, however for many the reason is very simple indeed: If JD Wetherspoons were not seeing any value in social media it was because they wasn’t using it well and their social media strategy must have been non- existent.
This argument certainly looks to have real weight as there is no doubt that engagement with their customer base was clearly low. Their twitter page only had 44,000 followers and Facebook 100,000 followers and retweets and likes were very low. It certainly does appear that their use of social media had very little strategy and was simply happening because everyone else was doing it.
Indeed, much of their activity on social media consisted of responding to customer complaints that were clearly visible on their accounts. Could these visible complaints be seen as a major reason for the move off social media by the pub chain? The official JD Wetherspoon Facebook had showed a rating of 1.7 out of five stars. 56 of the 73 reviews had the lowest ranking of 1 star. Plus, the Wetherspoon Facebook page had fewer than 1,000 likes but also attracted many negative reviews.
This all highlights that possibly Wetherspoons social media activity was not helping the pub chain sell more pints so they shut it down, oddly in the guise of doing so to help their customers, when in fact by doing so they have removed the voice of their customers.
The first place people turn to when complaining is social media, especially young people, and now Wetherspoon will no longer be able to deal with customer complaints and in fact might not even hear about them. They have chosen to dictate how their customers can speak to them, which doesn’t bode well for customer service.
The content of Wetherspoons’ social media also seemed to have very little strategy and appeared to be all self-promoting material which has very little value to customers, again indicating that the primary motive was to convert their social base into paying customers.
Now, this is where the real failure of Wetherspoons’ social media strategy appears to lie.
They simply forgot that social media for businesses is about generating brand awareness, brand affinity, brand loyalty and customer engagement any direct impact on sales should be seen as a bonus.
So, instead of quitting social media Mr Martin should have taken a long, hard look at how best to apply social media to his business, come up with an effective strategy with great and relevant content and set some very clear expectations.
by Fiona Housiaux | Feb 14, 2018 | News
You could be forgiven if you’ve filed knowing about Blockchains under must do/sort later, after all isn’t it all about finance and bitcoins and nothing to do with recruiting, staffing or HR?
You certainly wouldn’t have been wrong if you had taken this approach, as in reality although blockchains have been around since 2008, as part of the digital bitcoin currency concept, they have had little, if any, application in recruitment. That was until now.
At the end of last year, Technojobs.co.uk the UK’s leading IT Jobs Board, announced their partnership with the world’s first blockchain career verification platform APPII. This ground breaking move allows candidates to apply for roles using CVs verified by blockchains and ensures recruiters and employers know that the information is trustworthy and authenticated.
So what actually is a blockchain?
A blockchain is a digital database system of record keeping, where each entry and its details are validated and recorded across a network of decentralised computers.
The records are shared with many and everyone has access to the distributed database records (the block), however it is only shared after all parties involved have verified the accuracy of the information.
The chain happens as each block of information notes the block of information before which has a timestamp, ensuring it is impossible to tamper with or alter and everyone’s copy of the distributed blockchain is kept in synch.
Users can only edit the parts of the blockchain that they “own” by possessing the private keys necessary to write to the file.
As a blockchain is not stored on a centralised server or held by any one organisation there an extra layer of security.
So what benefits can blockchains offer recruitment?
- Time and cost savings
We all want finding the best talent to be easier and quicker. However, there is simply no getting away from the fact that for every candidate there is the frustrating, time consuming and often challenging task of verifying all their details. In recent years, as the nature of how we are educated and work has changed, the task has become even more costly and time consuming. Blockchain allows an individual’s CV to be pre-verified by the candidate’s educators, former employers and accreditors prior to them even knowing about the role, affording significant time and cost savings. So before your even past the initial contact stage, or before contact has even been made if the candidate allows shared access, a recruiter can have access to all the candidate’s different jobs and work experience, employment history, qualifications, accreditations, on-the job training and education and most importantly know it has been checked and verified. Now that is powerful.
- Improvements to productivity and the candidate experience
The recruitment process can be frustrating to candidates and at times all-consuming for recruiters. By reducing the burden of a significant part of the recruitment process, recruiters can become far more productive and ultimately focus their energies on making the candidate experience the best it can be.
- Candidates can become a better fit
Having a permanent verified record of a candidate will allow recruiters to develop more and more sophisticated candidate profiles, especially as information cannot be deleted, allowing for better and better candidate and company culture fits.
- International recruiting can become easier
The need to ensure rights to work and permits can be assisted by blockchain technology, as can the need to enable overseas secure payments.
- They can become employee records
Blockchain technology can become a permanent record which employees, employers and recruiters can benefit from. Details such as skills gained, goals met, pay increases and bonuses received can give a true employment history.
This can especially benefit those who lack formal qualifications or previous work experience and all position including voluntary and contract working can be verified and recorded.
- They can become ‘smart’ employment contracts
A smart contract is simply an automation that executes an action on the blockchain when specific conditions are met.
Smart contracts can be stored in blockchains and can manage any benefit that is contingent on an achievement, such as passing an online course or achieving a target, by being automatically triggering via a smart contract. This not only makes the HR function more effective but allows for a great employee experience and can help better manage freelancers and contractors, ensuring they only get paid when their task is completed.
- Blockchains give power back to the candidates
Blockchain technology gives ownership of their data back to the candidates and allows for more privacy. The likes of LinkedIn and Facebook collect your data and store it on their own servers. If their servers go down or they are hacked you could have your information compromised.
There could even be a time when recruiters pay candidates to view their great CVs, authenticated by blockchain and held on decentralised database, instead of the job boards that hold and charge for access to their databases of CVs. At the very least, it could be an end to job boards and the likes of LinkedIn charging for access.
- They can Help with the on-boarding process
Getting a new recruit up and running involves a lot of actions: they need computer, passwords, key card access, an email account, electronic signatures, an office, a car parking pass – the list can be endless and so time consuming.
Blockchains could allow many of these tasks to be automated using smart contracts stored in the blockchains. Indeed, leading technology company Oracle recently applied for a patent to use blockchain technology to create efficiencies in employee workflows.
- It helps those working in the gig economy
Imagine having all your employment related details associated with your electronic signature in one transparent block: security access, insurance, payroll, expenses, work performance, employment history, psychometrics etc. You could gain work almost immediately, with quick payment.
While blockchain technologies clearing have tremendous potential for use within recruitment, it’s still early days and very much a ‘watch this space’ situation. A recent report produced by leading professional services firm PwC, I think says it best about the application of blockchain to recruitment and HR: “While disruption from blockchain is more commonly associated with areas like payments and capital markets, its effects on HR will be profound and pervasive.
by Fiona Housiaux | Feb 1, 2018 | News
Today no matter how focused, dedicated and creative you are at trying to reach and entice qualified candidates, it can certainly seem like an uphill battle. Let’s face it, the best talent have so many options and choices and they know it. Plus, are they really looking? The likely answer is no.
However there is a strategic route you can take which is subtle not aggressive, can do wonders for your employer branding and can even make the most passive of candidates respond, as they feel it’s bespoke to them. Plus, because it’s focused on small but highly targeted numbers, it’s super cost effective as well.
Welcome to the latest hot topic in recruitment – ‘geos’ – and it’s having some impressive results so far – put simply it’s location based advertising for recruiting.
So what are Geotargeting and Geofencing?
The first thing to know is that they are often lumped together and used interchangeably.
However, whilst there are similarities, they are different targeting strategies and should be used for specific campaign objectives.
Geofencing delivers ads to everyone entering a specific area. Geotargeting delivers ads only to certain individuals who meet specific criteria when they enter a fenced area.
Geofencing draws a virtual, wireless fence around a location and delivers ads to their devices, whilst they are in the area and after they’ve left.
Targeting business areas, universities, geographical events, or entire neighbourhoods on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google Search Network are good examples of geofencing.
The important thing to remember with geofencing is that the minimum radius on all platforms is one mile. That means you can’t target a single local business without getting all users within one mile. This is where Geotargeting comes in, as it allows you to limit users by targeting a specific demographic.
Geotargeting allows you to deliver ads to people who meet specific targeting criteria, which can be as broad or specific as you want, and are inside a defined radius. You can target based on demographics, behaviours, interests and a person’s location. Geotargeting can also exclude specific locations.
Geo-targeting can be used a number of different ways. For example, maybe a conference is happening where a group of targeted candidates will be arriving in a location.
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in the US has recently been successful in recruiting neo-natal nurses using geofencing and geotargeting. After sourcing a list of suitable candidates and identifying the locations of where they lived and worked, they targeted candidates entering a specific location, including other hospitals in the area and those who were likely to be neo-natal nurses. The end result was that the hospital heard from 3 to 4 candidates a week when before they rarely received an application from a single candidate.
Using geos allowed them to be more effective and cost efficient and as the system automatically collects data from the user’s mobile device the hospital can continue to advertise to them, even when the leave the geofenced area.
Trucking companies are also utilising geofencing to target areas around truck stops to send recruiting messages to truck drivers who are always in short supply.
Whilst using geos for recruitment may be in its early stages, it is becoming clearer that by entering the space where candidates live and work can be a better use of recruiting resources and recruiters’ time.
by Fiona Housiaux | Jan 25, 2018 | News
Today, the sheer volume of endeavour involved in talent acquisition can overwhelm many organisations and recruiters. Whilst advancements in technology have certainly helped and we’ve become quicker and more efficient at finding and handling candidates; these advancements haven’t guaranteed success in one of the most important areas of today’s war for talent – the candidate experience.
Step forward artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically the chatbot. By utilising its human communication abilities, recruiters competing for talent can raise candidate communicate and engagement standards without adding extra burdens.
So what is a chatbot?
They have already being predicted as a replacement for apps; indeed Microsoft chief Satya Nadella has gone as far to say “Bots are the new apps!” Put simply, a chatbot is AI software that can have intelligent conversations, for example, it can ask candidates questions or even answer their questions.
It can be seen as the ‘human face’ of AI and no it won’t replace humans. In fact, chatbots will make recruiters lives easier, ultimately speed up the recruitment process and allow human skills to be utilised for more strategic and crucial functions within the recruitment process.
The chatbot can deal with the more administrative/process repetitive tasks and can become the key and primary communicator with candidates, especially in the early stages of recruiting. Most importantly, a chatbot can maintain the levels of communication required when trying to offer the best candidate experience possible.
You might be surprised to know that chatbots are not an altogether new phenomenon. The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks saw a 40% increase in traffic to the live chatrooms of the US Army’s recruiting website goarmy.com; amounting to a staffing cost of approximately $4 million a year. The answer for the US Government in 2006 was to utilise technology developed by the FBI and CIA a decade prior and Sgt Star, the US Army’s virtual recruitment chatbot soldier, was born. Today Sgt Star happens to be one of the most recognisable soldiers in America, currently does the work of 55 human recruiters and has answered 10.5 million questions in 2.8 million chat sessions.
This means on average, Sgt Star is engaging with more than 1,550 potential candidates each day, creating a great candidate experience.
So how can chatbots help the recruitment industry?
- They can improve the candidate experience – chatbots can talk and engage with large numbers of candidates, answering any questions presented. This allows recruiters to focus their time on more strategic tasks whilst the chatbot handles the pre-screening. The time between the candidate submitting their CV and being contacted by the recruiter can also be greatly reduced and during the application process a chatbot can maintain contact and provide a great candidate experience.
- They save everyone’s time – a lot of a recruiters time can be spent on the lengthy process of qualifying candidates’ skills, experience and qualifications. A chatbot can eliminate unsuitable candidates and provide the recruiter with a list of pre-qualified candidates.
- They retain information – not only do they maintain a positive relationship with the candidate they provide recorded information to the recruiter when they do meet the candidate. They don’t forget things and they never forget to write anything down.
- They manage diaries – they allow recruiters to delegate the daily admin of setting up calls, meetings and interviews.
- They answer all the questions – all the FAQs that get asked over and over can be answered through the simplest of chatbot, again saving recruiters valuable time.
by Fiona Housiaux | Dec 12, 2017 | News
When Google for Jobs launched in the US earlier this year many saw it as welcome help for one of the hardest tasks facing any business: finding the right employees. Google for Jobs is one of Google’s first steps into the recruiting space and has been launched initially in the US, although it has high hopes of moving into other territories very soon.
Google’s aim is to make the job search process easier and ultimately far more accurate, by utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to refine searches and provide tailored results.
So what is Google for Jobs?
According to Google, Google for Jobs ‘uses machine learning to understand how job titles and skills relate to one another and what job content, location, and seniority are the closest match to a jobseeker’s preferences.’
To do this, Google has partnered with job recruitment giants such as CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn and Glassdoor and the result is a streamlined job search engine that sorts and collects listings from all over the web and puts them in the hands of jobseekers in one place. Google for Jobs is very similar to what Indeed offer currently.
You can’t directly post adverts on Google for Jobs as it is not a job board. It’s an enhanced search feature that aggregates and features job postings that are already published on job boards and career sites, in a dedicated space at the top of the search results on Google.
Driven by artificial intelligence Google for Jobs is all about data, specifically all the personal data that Google collects about the candidate from the web. Drawing on a candidates browsing, search, location and online document storage history, Google for Jobs can form a picture of you, your aspirations and experience and in return deliver personalised and bespoke job opportunities.
At a glance you can see details including job title, location and have access to further details such as job descriptions and even use Google Maps to see how long the commute will be.
There are two main ways to list roles on Google for Jobs: by using a job site that’s integrates with Google for Jobs or by integrating your site directly with Google. The likes of Facebook,
LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Monster are already integrated with Google for Jobs and new posts on these platforms will also appear on Google for jobs as standard.
The other way to get your job listings to show up on Google for Job is to edit the HTML of the job postings on your career site and Google can then index your postings onto Google for Jobs.
What does this mean for recruitment companies?
Google for Jobs will certainly mean change. We will have to wait and see what the changes will be after Google for Jobs is launched globally, however it certainly will have an impact on the way we recruit and how applicants search.
The good news is we still have time to get organised before the UK launch of Google for Jobs. The bad news is that a recent survey found that 50% of the websites of the country’s largest recruitment firms are not set up for Google for Jobs to read and therefore their job postings will not be shown in the personalised search results, when Google for Jobs launches in the UK. This figure is worrying as Google for Jobs could launch anytime and if the largest firms aren’t ready then it is very unlikely that smaller firms will be.
As we have already said Google is all about data, and this data needs to be given in a structured format that Google can easily crawl through. Monster, CareerBuilder and LinkedIn use the same mark up on their pages as Google for Jobs, which allows them to serve more jobs in a structured way than most other websites and makes them an obvious target for Google to trawl through and use on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
Initially the priority has to be changing how we format our web pages so Google can interpret the information in order for it to show up on Google for Jobs in the first place.
There are concerns that users will be less likely to click on organic listings within the SERPS and just go straight to the Google for Jobs search feature rather than scroll down and look for alternatives, although we will have to wait and see if these fears become reality. There is the potential that recruiters will just rely more heavily on job referral sites to drive traffic through to their recruitment sites, this could be a risky and expensive mistake.
However, there is greater potential if recruiters focus on developing their brand and candidate experience to ensure that candidates return to their sites and they build long term relationships. A positive candidate experience will become even more important.
Google for Jobs has certainly allowed us to start considering a world where people could find more suitable jobs faster and where employers get fewer but more appropriate candidates, which can only be a good thing.
One thing we do know for sure is that Google is best placed to lead us into AI and machine learning for recruitment. After all they are experts in understanding our search terms and providing meaningful results, this is what Google does best, so applying it to recruitment is a natural move. However, Google aren’t the only ones trying to dominate this sector, Facebook is making advances as well and it doesn’t end with Facebook. In addition to the biggest search engine in the world and the most popular social network, popular job boards and career site such as Monster, LinkedIn and Glassdoor are also trying to help us find jobs using AI and machine learning, which will continue to make for interesting times in the recruitment industry for some time to come.
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