Hosting a forum for customers to help each other can significantly reduce support requests — and save companies heaps of money.

Recruitment Marketing is a critical component of diversity recruiting. Discover the 3 recruitment marketing content ideas that attract diverse candidates here.

Individuals and organisations can get lost in branding. It’s a personal thing. Naturally you’ll want your brand to reflect your organisation, and do so in a consistent, accurate, and ideally positive way. But the truth about branding is that it doesn’t really matter what you want your brand to be about – all that […]

Unnecessary stress hurts interviewee performance. However, increasing transparency reduces most cand

Stories Inc. shares expert ways to communicate your real culture to job seekers & help candidates self-select with a unique company mission.

"The researcher Wendy Wood has found that fully 43% of our behavior is habitual, made up of repetitive actions that occur regularly and outside our awareness."

It reduces the odds of dismissing qualified female candidates simply because men come to mind first.

When, why, and how do consumers cope with a status threat by choosing to “pivot” to alternative domains?

Just about every consulting firm, CEO, hiring manager, and recruiter believes there is a significant shortage of qualified people, especially for positions requiring artificial intelligence experts, machine learning gurus, data scientists, and some engineering categories.

A Five-part Blog Series by Allyn Bailey Part 5: Time to Replace Nurturing with Purposeful Engagement Plans Keeping candidates warm and eliminating the candidate black hole experience have historically been the key objectives of recruitment marketing nurturing programs. The goal has been to keep cand

Conventional thinking says that a good interview is a pressure-cooker situation, where candidates are put to the test. But at Atlassian we’ve realized that the traditional way of doing things is not the best way of doing things and we’ve begun to ask ourselves some questions. How well have we set candidate expectations? How prepared […]

Guess who lies the most during interviews? Yes, you are right! How do I know you’re right, without even finding out your answer? Because everyone lies during interviews! Hiring Managers lie. Interviewees lie. HR lies. The Recruiters lie. Everyone. Lies. The Wall Street Journal recently did a piece on all the lies and the types of lies that happen during ... Read More

2021 may bring some normalcy back to the workplace, but some changes are going to stick. Here’s what you need to know.

Here's a fun story! You spend months launching an EVP, you build our comms and messaging and candidates seem to really respond to it. Recruiters are using it, talking about how collaborative you are as a culture, how supportive you are. Your words show up in the job postings, recruiter outreach, comms messaging and everything is going great! Then the candidate you've convinced to interview based on that idea of collaborative culture meets your hiring manager who stares at their phone the whole interview. your efforts have been wasted! Worse, that candidate is going to tell everyone on a rating site! This is all to say, don't forget the power your hiring manager has to adding to your employer brand. Which also means, you need to engage them and get them on board. So here are some thoughts on how to educate your hiring manager.

File under: the little things make a big difference. How to write a disposition letter (most people call them rejection letters) that doesn't make people mad.

We're reached peak-recruiting. As anyone with any real skill and a LinkedIn profile will attest, we've entered a world where recruiters can spam and annoy anyone with very little effort. It's time to pivot and reinvent your recruiting away from spamming and messaging and move towards building relationships. It's time to reinvent your recruiting.

Some interesting data from Talent Board on what candidates long for in their candidate experience. Spoiler: while most of us are focusing on sexy and cool programs when candidate really just want to feel like they've been heard.

Usually, when we wonder, "why did someone apply and interview only to walk away from the offer?" we think about the question on an individual level. What was the issue with that person or interaction? But when you look more systemically, you might see that things like messaging, branding, and candidate experience timeline have just as much of an impact. CNBC asks why 50% of offers end up being rejected.

Want more evidence that ignoring your employer brand's impact on corporate sentiment is costing your business sales? I thought you might. It's good stuff to keep in your back pocket when someone forces you to justify your existence.

What are we getting wrong about attracting and hiring diverse candidates? That we treat them like they are special. Instead, focus on giving them a concrete and tangible reason for them to choose you. It's a pretty compelling argument.

I'm glad I finally get to link to an article on "how to enhance your candidate experience" without having to complain that there's more to candidate experience than "white glove." In this piece listing three ways to support your CX, the overarching theme is to provide and deliver more useful information to the candidate. Be it social signals, formal messaging and relationship-building.

The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships. There are three parts. In the first part you need to diagnose The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships.

Tom Peters (one of my professional heroes) once said to a room full of executives, "Benchmarking is stupid. You pick the current industry leader and then launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whomever was best five years ago five years from now." (He once told a room full of American automotive executives that, having spent millions in design and research to launch the Dodge Neon, "Congrats, you invented a 1986 Honda Civic.") So you have a sense of my bias against benchmarks: They care pictures of the past and too many people seek only to recreate someone else's past. That said, SmashFly just launched its own benchmarks for recruitment marketing. (Fair warning: you get to the top of their benchmarks by doing all the things they think you should do, not because you necessarily do it well). Takeaways? Engage with candidates honestly, transparently and deeply and you'll always be ahead of the curve.

Maybe we simply reject the concept of "rejected candidates" and think of it as "talent recycling." Maybe changing the label will get companies to start to realize that the process of enraging a hundred people (who talk VERY LOUDLY to their own communities, I assure you) just to find one person to whom to make the offer (which will be rejected 40% of the time!), is insane. To that end, FireFish has some rudimentary (and yet somehow NOT standard practice in most companies) ways to get more out of your recycled talent.

I have yet to find a professionally satisfying "talent community." Why? Because "community" speaks to two-way conversation and most talent communities are email blasting tools with new labels on the tin. But I have to imagine that we must (by now) be on the precipice of actually getting talent communities right. Why? Because companies around the world are finding the value of building communities of customers and prospects, so that thinking will trickle down to us at some point. Right?

This article should arm you with a better argument with tech recruiters and tech hiring managers at to why their normal way of hiring is deeeeeeply flawed. I point it out because tech recruiting is one of those places that doesn't always embrace the power of employer brand, and when you read this article, it should become pretty clear where the disconnect it.

Yes, we all talk about hiring or recruiting funnels, and maybe we have heard that we're supposed to communicate different things at different stages of the funnel, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone show you what that might look like. This example over at Hubspot is more consumer focused, but it gives examples of how to communicate at the various stages of the funnel based on what someone's motivations might be.

What do job seekers care about in a pandemic? Based on multiple company's TA chatbots, it turns out that 47% of people asked what the company's response to COVID was, roughly double the number of people asking about hiring. This suggests that prospects are twice as interested in understanding who the company as they are in learning about a job. Second take: If a huge percentage of your traffic comes in via job posts (job-focused), maybe preemptively tell them about your COVID response up front?

I love talking about rejection letters (sorry... disposition messaging ...rolls eyes...) because they are deeply impactful messaging opportunities we tend to phone in. Which is why I loved this article about how Intel re-designed its rejection experience (and it is an "experience," is it not?).

Some nice pre- and post-lockdown (unsegmented) data points on how employees and candidates attitudes have changed. Biggest takeaway: remote is no longer a nice-to-have (so... maybe you need to have a chat with leadership and HR about making this whole WFH thing a real thing).