We're introducing a new title in our webinar series for recruiters. This one is going to focus on Facebook, something I haven't done since 2008.
Facebook historically has been a terrible place to recruit unless you have a full social media marketing team pumping out content. Now, I can see it rivaling LinkedIn in terms of efficiency, if you know how to use it correctly.
The details:
Registration Link: Cost is $100. This is a 90 minute webinar live inside the Facebook site.
Guest Speaker: Jim Durbin, the Social Media Headhunter Date: Thursday, June 27, 2013 Time: 2:00-3:30PM Eastern; 11:00AM-12:30PM Pacific
For an overview of the program, check out the first video. For a comparison of LinkedIn and Facebook Graph Search, check out the second.
1st Video:
2nd Video:
If you have any questions, reach out to me through the email link or on twitter at @smheadhunter.
I'm working on a position for Danville, VA. It's forty minutes north of Greensboro and 90 minutes away from Raleigh-Durham. But it's awesome.
This is a retained search, and I'm really trying to manage this correctly. What I'm looking for is a digital native that has product marketing experience pushing products through stores, a dream of branding a product nationally, and a whole lot of smarts and energy. And you have to live or commute to Danville every day.
How to Apply: Send a resume to me or connect to me through social.
Position
AllergEase is a natural allergy supplement in the form of a throat lozenge. Developed by the entrepreneurial founder in 2012, the company reached 1MM in sales in its first year, and is currently available at retail stores across the country (including Walgreens and CVS) as well as direct for sale from the company website. The CEO needs a social media strategist/marketer to drive brand equity to consumers through the use of digital and traditional media channels. Whats needed is a savvy marketer with experience in social media branding, as well as a hard worker who recognizes theyre in a start-up role that requires execution as well as ideas. (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogging, Content Creation, Content Distribution, etc...)
Social medias role is to drive awareness, manage online expectations, and magnify all marketing programs and PR events for the company. A successful strategy will integrate tightly with outsourced PR and Marketing firms, developing a two-way communication system to improve results through information, metrics, and creative execution. A budget is in place to assist the marketer, but budget authority is still run through CEO and CFO.
Work Environment: Danville, VA Onsite each day, working on a strategic level with the CEO, and on a tactical level with remote partners globally. As the company grows, leadership and direction to the salesforce will be crucial to maintaining a commanding social media presence.
Personal Qualities Chemistry with CEO. Office partner, not a desktop drone. Experience in the consumer products industry Experience working remotely with marketing, pr, and technology Self-starter Fast thinker Detailed and organized. Risk-taker, but only if hard-working and willing to learn from mistakes Ability to stand up for best ideas Social media tinkerer Digital native
Description:
Develop and maintain a comprehensive social media strategy that defines how social media marketing techniques will be applied to increase visibility and traffic across all AllergEase brands and products
Lead the development of organization-wide social media management standards, policies and rules of engagement for social media
Define key performance indicators and implement enterprise level measurement, analytics, and reporting methods to gauge success
Explore and identify ways to integrate social media into business strategies and marketing campaigns
Apply marketing research and development methods to learn and understand emerging trends and technologies and to communicate this knowledge clearly and concisely
Develop, maintain, and market AllergEase blog
Create monthly AllergEase newsletter and manage distribution
Create AllergEase loyalty program and execute the implementation/integration into our site and systems
Requirements:
Must be willing to work out of our office in Danville, VA
Demonstrated experience and a passion for the social technology universe (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking, discussion forums, etc…)
Experience with online monitoring and measurement platforms including but not limited to Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights, Google Analytics, HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Social Mention.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Ability to work independently and as a member of a team
Ability to work effectively under deadlines and juggle several assignments simultaneously
Experience using:
Compensation:
Salary plus equity position.
Why This Is A Great Opportunity
If you've read this far, and you're interested, make sure you send me a hashtag #smheadhunter in your communication to me. Consider it a filter that you've passed. Here's the thing - if you're involved in the startup community, you know it's a crap shoot. But this isn't a crap shoot. It's a product that already has distribution. It's already growing, and is on target to hit 2 MM in sales this year (which means your equity has value from day one). What I don't need is a whiny work/balance agency burnout who will ride the product to success and then quit because Danville is in rural Virginia and not as cool as Austin or DC or San Francisco. If you're rather be poor in a big city than have a success under your belt that gives you the money and freedom to pursue your personal dream in a few years, you won't make it past my personal filter. This is a great opportunity with a successful company. You'd technically be employee #4, but working in a team that is already over 20 people. If you can suck it up and move to rural Virginia, you can be a rockstar. I'd do it myself if I didn't have a mortage and kids and was 10 years younger. How's that for a recommendation?
If this isn't the job for you, but you like the no-nonsense approach, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn through the email listed on the sidebar.
A nice piece from Sprout Social that includes quotes from Steve Levy, and the in-house Sprout Social recruiter on how social media recruiting works.
"Conversely, a good recruiter can use social media not only as a tool to weed out bad candidates but as a way to dig for diamonds in the rough as well. Durbin says the one of the primary benefits he sees in using social media is the education and learning it provides him about the specific job and the vertical for which he’s trying to fill a position.
“Not every one of us is a ‘niche’ recruiter,” says Durbin, referring to the specialization that some recruiters have for specific industries or job titles. “If I have to recruit for a position that’s new to me, social media allows me to learn as I research and connect with potential candidates. Each contact I make tells me more about the job I’m looking to fill and gives me all the vital context I need to find the right candidate for the job.”
This post was an original for ERE.NET I wrote way, way back in December 2008. How do you think it holds up?
Way back in the 20th century, I learned an important fact about recruiters. We’re all salespeople. There are good salespeople and bad salespeople, but every recruiter has to be in sales if they are to function.
This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.
Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly.
Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.
These are uncertain times, but also exciting ones. Jobseekers, through social media, now have access to information on their would-be employers that is truly revolutionary. In addition to being connected through social networks to hiring managers and other employees, candidates can gather information on individual recruiters, staffing firms, referral programs, and even interview questions. They can do so while they are sitting in an interview room waiting for that manager to arrive. The imbalance of information has been a strength of companies, who can set wages, benefits, and generally control the employment process. Today’s job-seeker has access — and is learning the skill — necessary to balance that information. The result is smarter, better-prepared candidates with wider options as to where they work and what’s acceptable in the employment process (such as whether someone will put up with multiple interviews and long assessments).
This trend may not yet have affected your open requirements, but the strategies employed by the very top candidates are spreading to other high-quality candidates.
I know this because I, and others like me are helping train them. Every time I write about a tool on a blog or a social network, candidates have every bit as much incentive to read as do recruiters. And from my website stats, those kinds of readers are growing in droves.
A declining economy, high unemployment, and an increasing need for knowledge workers is running up against demographics, increased specialization, and social media. Recessions are supposed to be times when companies get lean and mean. They cut benefits, reduce or eliminate raises, and often use layoffs to restructure the business. All of that is happening, but the ease of finding candidates hasn’t changed. Companies sometimes get hundreds of resumes per open position, and with the implementation of ATS and database search technology, one would assume that companies could afford to sit idly by and let job-seekers come to them. Companies adopting that attitude are already hurting, and have been for years.
The Answer: Become A Marketer
You don’t have to buy non-prescription lenses and large amounts of hair gel, but will have to adjust to a world where employment branding is not a buzzword, but something that defines what kind of candidates come knocking on your electronic door. Those companies that brag of hundreds, or even thousands of resumes per position aren’t happy with their results.
Candidates looking for work blast off resumes hoping for a lucky hit, which ultimately clogs up the recruiting system, especially when you’re in an industry required to log what you’ve received and why you accepted or rejected the resume.
Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing. The new goal is getting in front of the right people at the right time, and that’s a marketing function. To be successful, it requires that every touchpoint (another marketing term) within your company be aware of how you hire and the best way to apply. Providing accurate information to channel candidates into the correct funnel is the most efficient use of your recruiting time, freeing your employees up to interview and match, rather than sort and sift.
Let’s be honest. Even with massive databases and an influx of resumes, most recruiters still spend over half their time on the job boards searching for new resumes. The reason is simple. Resumes are old the second they hit your database, while resumes posted on job boards (particularly if you search by “last posted”) show an interest in getting hired right now. The advantage of a marketing mentality, especially one of pull-marketing, is a value to all activities taken. Searches for a position today can be magnified by social media to create a long-term search engine value and online profile for your company. Unlike job boards and company websites where information appears and disappears, online marketing creates relationships that continue to bring value after a search is completed. It’s not easy, and much of this work is in its infancy, but companies that embrace online marketing through the prism of social media are finding that recruiting gets easier, and more efficient.
It’s no panacea. Marketing requires a lot of retraining and a sympathetic management who puts a priority on hiring. Marketing requires a commitment to long-term employees and long-term strategies, but the benefits of an enhanced company profile are easy to measure using onboarding surveys. Rather than simply asking where the candidate heard about the position, questions should focus on what worked to influence the candidate during the employment process. Where did they get information? What information was helpful? Who was helpful? Companies who embrace a thorough strategy of recruitment marketing will find it easier and easier to hire the best employees. Those who focus on short-term sales or long-term process-oriented hiring will find it easier to hire those who are left.
Way back in the early days of social media hiring (2006-2008), having a blog with 1000 visitors or a twitter feed with a few thousand followers was all you needed to get company attention. Companies looking to hire a social media expert had little to go on, and views, visitors,a nd followers were the metric they needed to feel confidence.
Because we were early adopters, we got press. Television, site links, speaking opportunities, and more site links led to a power law distribution where the rich got richer and the poor quit blogging. And then we discovered how foolish we were. Social media in the public sphere was growing faster than anything in the business world, and the need to communicate with real audiences with money outpaced our ability to self-promote.
Blogs were overtaken by Twitter, which was overtaken by Facebook, then by a dozen other sites including YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Fame was still important, but companies had matured to figure out that fame didn't equal money. Fame became the minimum acceptable level to get an interview, instead of the golden key to unlock the riches of a social media job.
I'll stop the teasing. Here are what I perceive as the minimum to get hired. A few caveats before we get started. B2C is different than B2B. National is different than international. And multiple accounts lends a weight that single accounts do not (So Facebook +LinkedIn +Instagram beats a single Twitter account, unless the Twitter account is huge).
Social Media Strategist/Specialist/Consultant
A combination of at least three of the following
LinkedIn: 500+
Facebook: 300+
Twitter: 1000+
Pinterest: 100 images
YouTube: 30 videos, 100+subscribers
Blog: 6 months of archives, updated within two weeks of interviews.
Important: Cross links to all of your social channels to give the impression of depth
Marketer with responsibilities that include social media.
Multiple accounts, updated weekly. Can substitute the company social media properties if you're the sole author.
Non-marketing job with social media responsibilities
A single platform that is actively updated with regular content about the business/industry/company.
Entry-level social media:
Either a Facebook account with 200 friends or a Twitter account with 500.
Youtube/Pinterest/Tumblr: Something with a lot of content and action. Number of followers/comments doesn't matter as long as you show you are prolific and not immature.
Director and above (below the C-suite)
Useful To Have:
Blog with intelligent content, updated in the last month.
LinkedIn account, if it is complete, needs 500+ contacts.
Facebook/Twitter: Useful for being sourced by media and recruiters, but it's more important to understand what the accounts do for the business.
Senior Executive
They don't care about your personal accounts unless there's something bad in there.
These are of course minimums across industries, and your mileage may vary, but this is a good baseline for understanding if someone has even a basic level of understanding of social media. Note also that these are primarily personal accounts - which although they don't necessarily correlate to business performance, do speak to your willingness to be involved in learning (which requires doing).
And a final note. In the inteview, the more you champion your knowledge, the higher those numbers go. It's not a particularly good interviewing question, as results matter more than numbers (and are easily gamed), but if you're talking about how good you are, just know the interviewer will have a har time distinguishing between your personal social media stats and your professional ones.
First off, it's a nice bit of marketing. Timed for the Tuesday/Wednesday before SXSW, the Hut captured a lot of online attention from media and bloggers looking to get the first big story out of SXSW. Utilizing the hashtag, #becauseimgreat, Pizza Hut hopes to pitch themselves as great brand for digital talent, similar to what Pepsi does each year in partnering with hot start-ups.
So first, kudos for a marketing/PR win, for a restaurant franchise that isn't supposed to be as nimble or as young as chains like Cane's or Chipotle. It really speaks to the merging of marketing, recruiting, PR, Customer Service, and Social Media that has been accelerating in recent years. Getting double duty out of a recruiting stunt is a win for the brand team.
As for the actual project, the goal of hiring a manager of digital greatness, I have two main thoughts and a list of the negatives.
Thought #1) Do they actually want to hire?
I'm the Social Media Headhunter. When I reach out to a candidate through a public social channel, I have to be careful not to use my moniker in a way that can get the candidate in trouble. If I start Tweeting job orders to a marketer, they can't exactly respond to me without notifying their company that they are looking. Will this be the case in Austin? A four hour window on Sunday, but a very public one where people stand in line to get their shot at 140 seconds of fame. There's no word if the video will be posted on social channels, or if others in line will record you in the open space. Public interviewing could be awkward for the employed. That's high risk for someone who probably is at SXSW on the company dime.
Thought #2) 140 seconds is plenty of time to pitch yourself. Today's brands have to react quickly, and someone who can't pitch themselves in 140 seconds is probably not swift enough to land the job. And there's this to consider - the average resume gets less than seven seconds of time before it's rejected. 140 seconds, rather than being a short window, is 20 times what your competitors would get sending in a resume.
Not to mention, the type of person who would excel at a job with the title, "Manager of Digital Greatness," is going to be good on video, have clear ideas, and most important, they will prep ahead of time. It's very possible that Pizza Hut will find some very polished candidates that serve as the face of the digital team, and SXSW is the place to do it.
Negatives:
No one knows the salary. Salaries vary wildly in this space, and in offering a public interview, they are going to skew young and underpaid, instead of experienced and well-paid. That's a problem, because the job description is a serious one (serious as in requires more than a good attitude and an Instagram feed).
Hiring based on personality is not the same as hiring skillsets. Actors exist for a reason. They're good on camera. Are they hiring an attractive, on-camera personality, or are they hiring a competent digital manager. It's not clear, which means candidates won't want to waste time standing in line.
Timing: A lot of the corporate types that go to SXSW come in Friday and leave Sunday. They can't take the whole week off, which means if they are there for only a short time, are they willing to lose a few hours in line to shoot a public interview? A more efficient pitch would be extending the video interviews to allow confidential submissions before and after the fact, including mobile videos. Including a personalized QR code on business cards would allow them to broaden their search and provide the confidentiality the best candidates need.UPDATE: A Forbes article on the subject gives more detail, explaining that they will be doing Google+ interviews after the fact, and that candidates will be evaluated onsite from their LinkedIn profiles.
CONCLUSION:
Big win for Pizza Hut. It doesn't matter if they hire someone or not, because they already got the press. And they could get lucky. If they are able to hire, they'll have a fun story to send out for their next media story - the hire they made at SXSW.
You got the call. A recruiter saw your local profile on Facebook, tracked you through Twitter, and loves your Instagram feed. He wants you to come in and meet with a marketing manager to discuss a role as their social media strategist. He wants to know salary, metrics, and what you would do to make their social media investment a success.
What do you do?
In 2006, when I first started selling social media services to companies, I'd pick an hourly rate (starting at $45 then, the same as for copywriting), and then I'd charge a set-up fee that included setting up a blog and doing minor design. Facebook and Twitter weren't really in the public mind at that point.
Clients who said no either balked at the price (thinking it was going to be a hundred dollars a month), or balked at the idea of having someone else writing for them (at the same time not having the time to write themselves). Those who said yes got content. As to the cost, rather than pitching it as an added expense, we compared it to their SEO, online directory, website maintenance, and yellow pages budgets. They were already spending that money, so we showed them how the money spent with us would provide better results.
What's funny is that is a strategy that still works. Companies, especially small businesses, know that social works because they see their competitors doing it, but many are still locked into doing business the old way. They dutifully hand out money to Superpages, or online directories, or SEO companies that "submit their sites to Yahoo, Bing and Google." Others pay a PR firm to submit press releases to the newspaper at a hefty fee. To successfully close a client during an interview, you need to understand what they're spending money on, and then pitch what they'll do differently.
Start Here
Asking questions about money can be uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as doing $5000 worth of work for $500 because you didn't uncover the real budget. Ask these questions.
1) What do you spend money on now?
2) Ask for everything - events, photographs, website, SEO, call centers, consultants, charity events, magazine ads, newspapers and radio advertising, professional organizations, networking events, conferences, print shops, directories, and mobile apps. I've discovered that many clients don't consider these categories of spending as marketing. They certainly don't consider it social, which means they won't bring it up if you don't. While your main goal is idenifying budget, you also want to know what content they have that you can repurpose. I've seen client spend close to six figures a year after initially telling me they spent only a few thousand on marketing.
3) Once you've uncovered as much as you can, ask how they feel about each. With social, your plan is to magnify their results through content. That means weeding out the bad, while adding more to the good. There's an old adage about advertising. It goes, "I know that I'm
wasting half of my budget. What I don't know is which half."
Clients spend money because someone sold them before. This means they don't want to stop spending that money because it means they were sold a bad product. If you ask them what they want to cut, they probably won't tell you. Your job, is to show them how the social media services you provide are better than their old services. If you're smart about it, you'll pitch it as replacement technology instead of the "right way" to do business. Technology is supposed to be upgraded. Couching your sale in technology terms lessens the sting of cutting old spending.
And whatever you do, don't cut their budget. Unless they specifically look to lower their budget, don't suggest it. It's far better to use the money correctly than it is to cut it as a benefit (you get no credit for saving them money unless you replace what they're doing for less. And if you're so cheap, they won't buy because they'll see it as a gimmick).
What Comes Next: Graphs and Grids
This post started to run long, so I split it into two parts. The next part will show you how to differentiate yourself, while this one is all about discovery.
