The EnticeLabs Blog

by Robert Merrill, Account Manager

Next month (August 2009) online recruiting will have been around for 17 years, but are we any better off today than we were back then?

Resume inundation and candidate management are difficult tasks to manage, even with the most-robust ATS or CRM systems, and the sharpest recruiters.

Manage your TalentSeekr campaigns from one web interface

But, as best-laid plans often go, the more systems and processes companies put in place to handle applicant/candidate flow, often the very goal of those systems gets lost:

“Attracting and engaging top candidates, keeping them aware and informed of opportunities, and then hiring them into the ideal role.”

There is an article on The ERE blog titled The No. 1 Frustration of Your Job Candidates where they mentioned some research from CareerXroads’ Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler that called out “four factors that influence the candidate choice.”

1. An effective targeting or the ability for a candidate to know that your organization is looking for people like them.
2. A clear engagement statement or why as a candidate I should come to work for your organization.
3. Relevant information that backs up your engagement statement.
4. The sense that I am respected as an individual during the hiring process.

TalentSeekr's Rich Media ads and engagement pages attract and entice candidates to apply for your jobs

TalentSeekr, allows a company to achieve all of these, combined advanced targeting to reach the web’s best and most niche web traffic, with a fresh, rich-media experience that candidates love:

1. Targeting: The TalentSeekr targeting system takes many aspects of the job description, and the ideal candidate profile to search out prime locations to display specific job advertisements.
2. Engagement: Without holographic 3-D* you’d be hard-pressed to find any engagement experience better than the TalentSeekr engagement page.
3. Relevant: Since the people who view the engagement page have been highly targeted in the first place, the information there is relevant and useful to the viewer.
4. Respect: Every candidate who applies through our system received confirmation of their application, and is provided directly to a client’s recruiter along with relevant information to help smooth the recruiter’s screening process.  Since candidates have been highly targeted, candidates who apply are very likely to be a match for the job–or at least someone who matches the company’s hiring profile.

Got 59 seconds? See why TalentSeekr is changing the world of recruiting (video).

Ryan Caldwell, Doug Berg, Joshua Westover

Hello everyone!

I think we all agree that the Tweetup was a fabulous success… Kudos to Jobscience! It’s always fun to see familiar faces, and we really enjoyed meeting up in person with so many of you finally! I hope you enjoy the pictures. I am posting all the pictures as a batch initially, but if there are pictures that you prefer not to have posted, I completely understand- just ping me and I can edit the deck. J I will post pictures from the Google Conference tomorrow probably, so look for another update soon. I hope everyone had a great Father’s Day weekend!

Tweetup Social Recruiting Summit '09

Even though the US Department of Labor reports half-a-million job losses in April, 2009, companies are snapping up 80% of those who have been let go.

Related to our recent post on Why Smart Companies are Still Recruiting, the Wall Street Journal published an article on the same topic, talking about how many companies are hiring, even while they still have impending layoffs on the books.

The WSJ article notes how large, multinational corporations like Microsoft, AT&T, IBM and Boeing are having to simultaneously let people go, while rapidly ramping up their workforce in other, key areas:

Boeing, for instance, plans to cut roughly 10,000 jobs in 2009, including 4,500 from the commercial-airplanes unit….

At the same time, Boeing has more than 1,500 current and anticipated job openings — in various stages of recruitment — most for mechanical, electrical, software and other engineers.
[Many Companies Hire as They Fire -- WSJ Online]

Like many companies in Boeing’s situation, the jobs they are hiring for are in different, or even new areas of strategic growth, as companies grapple with still-unknown fallout from the worldwide economic situation.  Boeing, for example, is looking to build up its defense unit, which makes military airplanes, where their layoffs are mainly affecting their commercial aircraft as well as administrative and contingent workforce.

The article continues to explain that smaller, even not-for-profit organizations, are feeling the pinch too, but find themselves in the same situation as relative behemoth, Boeing:

“A blanket hiring freeze was just not feasible,” says [National Public Radio] Chief Executive Vivian Schiller. “It’s not a smart way to run a business. The show must go on.”

What the article does not mention is how this simultaneous hiring and firing must be stressing the Human Resources organizations of these companies, large and small.

Engineering a vast, across-the-board employee termination program (including outplacement, exit interviews, and even the management of termination paperwork, unemployment, COBRA insurance and other administrative tasks) is a daunting enough undertaking for any HR function to manage well–especially while trying to maintain as much dignity for the employees being let-go.

Now pile that on to a simultaneous recruiting campaign in those same communities where you’ve just laid-off hundreds or thousands of people, or when you’re trying to recruit for skills or talents that you’ve not recruited actively for in the past, and you have a significant branding and recruitment advertising problem.

… Not to mention many companies’ recruiting departments have sustained deep layoffs already and are light on staffing bandwidth as it is.

I am sure this has happened in every economic slowdown, but with 24-hour news and the ubiquity of information today plus the fact that bad news travels faster than good news (just ask Spitzer, et al, Amazon or Domino’s Pizza), companies have a real dilemma on their hands when trying to re-focus* their workforce.

TalentSeekr by EnticeLabs provides HR and Recruiting departments with at least four key ways to tackle this problem in a smart, game-changing way:

• Use rich-media to engage and excite people about your company’s brand.  Help them know who you are and why they should want to come work for you.
• Leverage the power of the Internet and our unique geo/demo-graphic targeting algorithms to put the right job advertisements in front of the right people, wherever they are online.
• Leverage EnticeLabs’ buying power to ensure your employment branding campaigns reach the intended audience for much, much less than traditional or direct-purchase advertising would cost.
• TalentSeekr works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  It takes no holidays, vacations, sick-leave or smoke breaks.  It constantly and consistently self-analyses and optimizes your career ad placements to ensure the most-qualified people are looking at your most-relevant opportunities.

Many of our clients have exchanged budget away from other recruitment advertising initiatives (with lagging ROI and questionnable candidate quality) and invested those same dollars in to TalentSeekr campaigns.  The resulting candidates are on-average more qualified, and more excited about the opportunity to work for you, thanks to our hyper-targeting and state-of-the-art candidate engagement platform.

Could hyper-optimized advertising campaigns like TalentSeekr provides help your business succeed in this difficult period of recruiting?   Investigate our technology by viewing two brief videos explaining TalentSeekr, or scheduling a no-commitment demonstration by calling 1-877-2-ENTICE or by emailing info@enticelabs.com.

It’s a line from Management 101, “Your greatest assets are your employees.”

And, while the headlines on the evening news rant about mounting layoffs and the economy’s depressing statistics, the smartest, most savvy companies are quietly leveraging this downturn with expectations to come out of it not just barely ahead of their competition–they will be lightyears ahead.

Already, we are seeing signs that companies have been too fast to layoff, and now are waking up to a bitter reality that may have lost their best-talent–and their competitive advantage–in their rush to action.

Michelle V. Rafter at Workforce.com notes this trend will lead to significant problems down the road:

In many cases, companies were in such a rush to cut costs that they institute layoffs without considering the good talent they let go along with the bad, says Jason Averbook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion… Because they’re in a hiring freeze, they also laid off recruiters and stopped looking for candidates.

“It puts them at a major disadvantage,” Averbook says. “If they don’t have recruiters, they aren’t building the pipelines, they don’t know there’s good talent out there. It’s an amazing opportunity to do talent upgrades, but if HR isn’t thinking that way,” it won’t happen.

The take-away message here needs to be highlighted loud-and-clear:

“[This downturn is] such an amazing opportunity to do talent upgrades”

Smart, savvy companies–especially the underdogs in their industries–will be watching closely for an opportunity to provide themselves with major upgrades in talent–hiring people they would otherwise not be able to afford if the economy wasn’t in turmoil.

Last October, Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Buy American. I am.” where he shared an oft-quoted nugget of his investment success:

“A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

Of course, he’s speaking in business terms as an investor, but if a company’s greatest assets are really its employees, then a fearful time like this economic disaster is the time companies should be steadily trying to upgrade their workforce rather than simply let people go–or worse–maintain the status-quo.

What can be done?

Both traditional and innovative recruiting methods can be employed to ensure you are consistently attracting top-talent to your organization.  Many organizations, however, faced with tight staffing budgets and limited recruiting manpower, are seeking ways to simultaneously drive up awareness to potential candidates while driving down the costs associated with acquiring access to that talent.

Innovative solutions like TalentSeekr by EnticeLabs (see video introductions) leverage technology to help companies attract more candidates in less time, and increase their exposure to potential future customers and employees, for much, much less than current marketing or recruiting campaigns cost.

EnticeLab’s clients are filling their workforces with some of the most creative and talented people their industries can offer… at a fraction of the acquisition costs of other methods.

Hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky put it this way:

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

So… in this downturn, is your hiring strategy on the bench, or out there fighting for even more goals?

By Robert Merrill
Director, Account Management, EnticeLabs, Inc.

There’s a lot going on around here, and some of the great news we hear almost passes unnoticed at times because we’re collecting so much buzz and attention these days.

So, this post is just an attempt to take a brief pause and look back at what interesting things have been said about us lately.

John Sumser

For starters, there is no question that when John Sumser said TalentSeekr, EnticeLabs’ innovative candidate attraction engine, is a recruiting industry “game changer”, people in the recruiting industry listened.

Including Peter Clayton, producer/host of Total Picture Radio: The Voice of Career Leadership who interviewed EnticeLabs’ CEO Ryan Caldwell in depth about the company’s products and vision. You can download the entire show here (mp3 file) or read the full-text transcript on TotalPicture.com.

Other recent interviews we’ve had include Ryan Probasco and Grant Gordon, technical leads on the EnticeLabs’ products, talking about the technology we employ on the Couchcast* radio show.

Beyond that, we gave a presentation at LaunchUp, there was also an article about Caldwell and EnticeLabs in the Marriott Magazine, and we were named both a Startup To Watch and received a Digital IQ award.

Wphew! That’s a lot going on. Good thing we have some expert flat-tire repairmen on staff** in case anything goes wrong…

* Robert Merrill, co-host of Couchcast, has recently accepted a position with EnticeLabs.
** Inside joke

What if you could have candidates read every word of your post or email?

Think about this for a minute…what percent of your postings are actually read from top to bottom?

What percent of your content on social networks, user groups, forums, or other areas are actually read from the first word to the last?

What percent of your candidates brush you off or seem disinterested on phone calls or physical meetings?

I am assuming most of you can’t answer that and if you can I am willing to bet your answer will be, “They are not reading all of it.  They are not hanging on to my every word.” Read the rest of this entry »

Our CEO, Ryan Caldwell, was invited to present at the HCM Investor Forum in Las Vegas last week as a top start-up in the space.

He had the chance to talk with a lot of great people, including top level recruiting industry expert John Sumser.  It was a great meeting, and John had this to say about it:

http://www.johnsumser.com/2009/01/enticing-entice-labs/

The article focuses on TalentSeekr’s targeted advertising automation and ROI centered feedback tools.

We’re incredibly excited about what TalentSeekr means for sourcing and recruiting, but don’t take our word for it: go check out John’s take.

Utah Business Magazine threw a great party today for the Digital IQ Awards.  The best of the best from around Utah gathered to honor the most innovative and forward thinking companies in the state.
Read the rest of this entry »

In this recent article, Lou Adler leads out with a bang:

“Progressive companies are now implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) sourcing programs to ensure they have a ready pipeline of top talent once the economy recovers. This will provide early adopters a significant competitive advantage and an increased share of the best talent.”

Read Full Article Here: http://www.ere.net/2008/11/07/use-a-cross-functional-perspective-to-implement-a-just-in-time-sourcing-strategy/

Here at Entice, we spend a lot of time combing the web to keep up on the latest and greatest in the HR world. We find great information every day, so we thought we’d put together a section on our web site to post some of it.

We’re launching it with a few links to some great articles about running a thriving HR department while economic times are tough, what with the downturn and all.

Check out the “Resources” section up top and have a look.