talent communities

Do Graduate Recruiters need to re-think where the people they’re looking for might be found?

Do Graduate Recruiters need to re-think where the people they’re looking for might be found?

Welcome back to our 5-part blog about the factors that are leading to a need for change in the way graduate recruiters choose to engage with future talent. Last week we covered why it’s much harder to get the attention of candidates today than in years gone by.

This week, we’ll explore where those candidates are found, and the changes in play that might mean you’re spending more time and money on your efforts, however could still be looking in the wrong places.

Why? Well we know that changes to Higher Education funding mean many students now prioritise factors such as location over reputation. And the sad truth is, some of the best and brightest simply can’t afford to fund themselves through university at all. Which means that, today, the talent employers typically target is increasingly found in less typical places. However, some Graduate Recruiters persist in visiting the same universities over and over again regardless of whether they’re getting results, either because they’re asked to, or simply because that’s where they’ve always had strong relationships.

Without wishing to cause offense, is that really the most intelligent approach? What did Albert Einstein once say….?

So where do you begin?

Tools such as HighFliers and Trendence are great for getting a detailed understanding of where the communities you need to be part of can be found, and provide a good temperature check for the sentiment around your brand on specific campuses.

But is this the right approach to take in today’s social, mobile and connected world? And, what’s the Milkround actually for, if not just a vanity parade?

The whole concept of targeting ‘audience groups’ with your messaging is based largely on an out-dated push marketing model. Research has shown that push marketing is less effective – there’s too much of it going on and we’re just not tuning in any more – even more so with millennials.

So how can we ensure that our messages reach the right people and are delivered in the right way?

Let’s take a moment to think about the modern graduate. How do they choose to consume media today compared to 5 years ago? What do they care about? How much time do they spend on their mobiles each day? Where do they spend time online, and why?

The answers to these questions will differ significantly from one person to the next, and it’s virtually impossible to cater for everyone’s needs on a one-to-one basis. But, it is possible to create a communications strategy that’s informed, human and leaves people wanting more.

In order to do that, you need to be personal and you need to market in the same way that your customers want to buy

Drawing people towards you is far more potent. It’s more challenging to get right, but when you do you’ll most certainly reap the benefits in today’s future talent market. It’s the right approach if you hope to gain the trust of even the most discerning young talent.

We’re not talking about people turning up at your front door of course. And we’re not suggesting you stop turning up on campuses. We’re talking about harnessing the power of communities and how you can position yourselves within these to begin delivering your message in the right way and becoming a source of value. It’s about finding the right blend of ‘pull’ as well as ‘push’. It’s about going where they are, not where you expect them to be.

If you’re successful in pulling people towards you, you’ll need to worry far less (and spend less) about what campuses you visit and what research you use to help you locate audience demographics.

Of course, to do this you’ll need great content and messages and we’ll talk about this in more detail next week.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to comment and click the follow button if you like what you’ve read. Feel free to pop over to http://www.tonic-agency.com in the meantime.

SoMe Conference preview. What’s the Secret Social Sauce?

It’s the SoMe graduate conference & awards do tomorrow (23rd Jan 2014). The conference agenda looks great; lots of case studies, market data and a bit of looking forward to what’s next for us all too. There’s also the awards event later on in the evening – we’re short listed in several categories for a range of our work. We have our fingers crossed.

With the emphasis of the conference being on whether social is right (we hope that there are very few people that actually need convincing that they need to be active), the channels that can be used to serve content and their various merits, we’re going to take a slightly different perspective.

In the afternoon Tom is sharing the stage with Andrew from Mars and they’ll be looking at the HOW of content provision. How can we use the content generated to build conversation? How can we use those conversations to build community? How can we use social to convey our personality, our human brand, rather than simply pushing content? How does this change the dynamic of employer marketing altogether? How have Mars used this thinking to bring the people they need into the business?

We’ll share the slides we use later in the week but be warned that we’re not going to give away the magic ingredients, the secret sauce. You’ll have to talk to us to get that thinking…

Hope to see you tomorrow.

http://www.tonic-agency.com

+Tonic Agency

@tonictweeting

How can Google Communities help position employers as a source of value?

Welcome to the penultimate part of our 5-part blog on how employers can make best use of Google Plus. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading and viewing our content as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it.

Last week we shared a video blog that talked about Google Hangouts and how employers can use them to be more personal. If you missed that, take a look at the video here.

This week we’ll be discussing Google Communities, and how they can be used to help position employers as thought leaders and a source of value amongst their audience.

For those who are unsure, a Google+ Community is something that resembles a traditional message board that focuses around a central theme. This could be “I love my cat” or “Manchester United fans” – literally anything. In these communities, followers can interact with other like-minded individuals while allowing the community moderator to share personalised content with that specific community.

Google+ already has a large variety of communities to choose from, whether they focus on engineering, computer science or quantum mechanics. If there’s nothing that suits your needs already, you’re able to begin building your own community and driving the conversation yourself. This can be open to the public or invitation only – whichever suits your purposes.

Communities on Google are fairly young, but as interest in G+ grows, so does the number of communities. And when you consider the rate at which the network is growing, you’d expect the current figure (100,000+) to grow extremely rapidly, largely due to the Google Eco-system, but also due to the way communities differ compared to groups on other social networks.

So what does this mean for employers?

Let’s take John, an Engineering graduate in his second year at Kingston University. What exactly makes an employer valuable to John? Is it the fact that they’ll be making him plenty of job offers in the future and filling his Facebook page and Twitter feeds with current vacancies? Or will helping John with careers advice and guidance be more helpful? How about giving John the latest thinking around an interesting Electrical Engineering project? Or perhaps sharing useful resources for him to visit online? The bottom line is that people will talk to you if they perceive value in it for them. By helping people, you automatically gain the status of a good source of value and naturally, you’re front of mind.

If you missed our thinking about how HelpMarketing can tie into your attraction and reputation strategy, then have a look here.

G+ communities allow you to develop or participate in a community conversation around a specific shared interest. This not only raises awareness around your brand, but allows you to develop authority as an industry expert, share advice and latest thinking and furthermore, allows you to engage directly with potential talent and begin following them or adding them to your circles to continue the conversation you’ve begun.

A few other nifty features of G+ communities that similar platforms such as LinkedIn groups don’t offer are:

Using #hashtags to tie posts to specific searches on the platform and to a broader audience outside of G+
Creating categories within communities to allow you to group and allocate content as you see fit
With Google Ripples you can create an interactive graphic to see how a particular post has been shared and re-shared over a period of time, useful to assess the reach your content has
Posts within a community are indexed by Google and will be found easily via anyone searching for that topic on a Google Search
As with most of the G+ platform, the ‘plus one’ gives an indication of the popularity of the content you share – a good indicator to see if your content is resonating with your community

All of the above go a long way when it comes to helping employer’s position themselves as a source of value amongst the people they hope to begin a conversation with. And ensuring you remain font of mind means half the battle is won.

Next week will be the final of our 5-part blog, and we’ll be talking about the beneficial impact of G+ on your SEO and search visibility and tying together all the features we’ve discussed so far.

If you’d like to talk to us about any aspect of G+, or simply find out how you can be more valuable to talent, then pop over to http://www.tonic-thinking.com and get in touch.

How can you use Google Circles to be more personal?

In the first edition of our five part blog focusing on G+ we asked if employers could afford to ignore what’s set to become the most used social media. In this, the second part, we’re going to talk about Google Circles and why they’re a really useful feature when it comes to delivering truly personalised content to your audience.

Quite simply a Circle is a group of friends, followers or contacts. Much like Facebook or Twitter, but with a difference. Unlike Facebook or Twitter there is no limit to the number of circles you can operate – each receiving a unique content feed. This offers endless opportunity to segment and personalise your messages and conversation to each of the communities you’ve built.

This allows you to be much more specific about what you share with each group. Facebook offers a single stream of content as does Twitter – G+ however, allows you to share engineering content with your Engineering circle, Marketing content with your circle of marketeers and information about what you’re planning to do at St Andrew’s University with your St Andrew’s University circle. You get the idea?

In context everyone wins. Your community get more relevant content – relevant posts that mean your message will be heard. And that’s a good thing – in a world where our attention spans are getting shorter and we’re demanding tailored content delivered faster, the ability to deliver information that is interesting, relevant and insightful is key to building brand advocacy.

So what’s our recommendation? Here are some ideas:

Treat your Public circle in the way it’s intended – give broad-brush information that is designed to engage and attract. You need to attract followers too.
Sub-divide the people that follow you into circles based on your target communities and develop content plans for each group
Use the opportunity to add value – see our blog on HelpMarketing for more about this
Think for the long-term. The objective here is to build engagement and then hire. Don’t simply broadcast a long list of vacancy announcements. This serves no-one and is a sure fire way of turning the people that you want to hire off.
Content is king, and delivering the right information, in the right way at the right time is something many employers find difficult. G+ Circles make that easier.

If you want to have a quick look at Circles being used intelligently, then I’d recommend looking at what Cadbury achieved with their ‘Tasters Circle.’ It’s a great example of a community that was quickly built and united by the same passion.

Cadbury went on to further engage this community using another of Google’s handy features – the Hangout. We’ll be looking into those in more detail next week.

If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime, or simply want to keep up to date with our latest thinking then why not add us to one of your circles at +Tonic Agency Ltd? Alternatively you can visit http://www.tonic-agency.com for further contact details.

How useful is Google + when it comes to building talent communities around your business, and can you afford to overlook it?

When Google+ launched in 2011 it turned out to be a damp squib. It was described by many as the party that nobody came to and came in for a lot of criticism. However, 2 years on and perhaps it’s fairer to say that G+ wasn’t a failure at all. It was just a little slow off the blocks.

Now that there’s a party that we can all join, how can employers take advantage of the functionality to build brand and community? How can we use the rather nifty functionality to take advantage of what could be the most powerful tool in your armoury for having conversations with the people you need.

The answer’s quite complex and certainly more than we could cover in a single blog. So, we’re tackling this in a five parts. Each week we’ll cover some of the individual features that G+ offers its members and look at how others have successfully used the site to their advantage.

But is it really a party that we want to be at? Is the kitchen full of interesting people or should we come back a bit later when more people have arrived? After all, a social network isn’t very social if nobody’s using it, is it? We’ll, something that might surprise most of you is that G+ is actually the second largest social network, behind only Facebook.

In May 2013 it had 343 million active users. This means that people were regularly sharing content with the public, their circles and updating their profiles. That’s a 33% increase from the same point last year meaning that it’s outpaced Twitter for growth.

What’s even more interesting is the fact that this growth only looks set to increase. As this research from searchmetrics shows, by 2016 G+ could well take its place as the most popular social network.

It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. It’s free, clean and streamlined. Not to mention the unique features it offers its users and the fact that one password gives you access to all of Google.

If you have never been on G+, I’d suggest taking a few minutes to activate your profile. You don’t need to set up loads of new information – if you use YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs or any of the Google suite, then you simply need to enter the same username and password.

We’re not saying G+ is the be-all and end-all. There’ll always be a time and a place for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But G+ sits in nicely in it’s own niche:

G+ is where you speak with people that you’d like to know.

Next week we’ll talk to you about Google Circles. We’ll explore what they are, how they’re used and what you can be doing to build individual talent communities that are united by the same passions and interests.

If you’ve got any questions about G+ in the meantime then why not get in touch with us at +Tonic Agency Ltd or visit http://www.tonic-agency.com.

Everyone’s talking about big data

In a rather marvellous article (Recruitment 5.0: The Future of Recruiting — the Final Chapter ), published recently, Matthew Jeffrey and Amy McKee of Autodesk lay out their vision of the future (see here if you’re interested). It’s a good read, but you may want to get a cup of tea before you begin.

Their article is the latest in a series that charts the evolutionary journey of recruitment as it’s moved from a process primarily about building relationships (1.0), through a developing over-reliance on technology (2.0), which pushed the candidate away and then back again (3.0 & 4.0). The future, they argue,will see employers able to re-forge their relationships with the people they need by understanding their needs in detail, tailoring the way they interact with them accordingly.

One of the main points here is that there’s now the technology and data available to do this – data that’s derived from the information about our preferences, motivations and behaviours, the data that we all leave behind us as we go about our social media led lives. Of course there are those people who’ll argue that not everyone has a social footprint – but then you’re reading our blog, and we know you are, so there! But don’t worry; this is not as ‘big brother’ as it sounds. The fact that we leave this data trail behind us is good news.

Good news for the employers that embrace this changing environment. They’ll build communities of engaged, talented people that they can approach when the right role becomes vacant, reducing the time and cost of each hire to their business. They’ll be able to communicate the human nature of their brand through the relationships they build – hiring more of the right people based on fact and understanding. In effect they’ll become talent spotters and talent managers rather than advertisers or recruiters.

Good news for us all as job seekers too. Our world is more social and more mobile; we want and demand information when and where we want it, and if employers can cut through the clutter because they understand us better, we’ll be getting what we want too. It’ll be easier to spot the employers that suit us and make informed decisions about our careers. A real win-win situation.

We’re big fans of Matthew and his work, and hope that you have a chance to read his article. It ties in with our thinking and the way we work to uncover our client’s unique human brand, building conversations and relationships that benefit us all.

So, have a read, and if you’d like to begin a conversation you’ll know where to come.

Tonic-agency.com