Itzbig Named a Most Promising Startup
Wednesday January 30 AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--There are many ways that corporate recruiters and employers can reach out and attract working professionals, who are highly qualified, yet ordinarily not looking for other job opportunities. Here are a few of those ideas, courtesy of industry expert Hank Stringer and itzbig (www.itzbig.com), the interactive job matching network.
1. Preserve the candidate’s privacy. There are many services that allow people to connect and meet on the Internet in safe ways. Match.com and eharmony.com both figured out what was acceptable and what is not. Safe, accountable, relationship-making services work, where talent knows what is happening and can maintain control of the relationship. Working professionals will explore opportunities if they can review opportunities confidentially, interact anonymously whenever possible and verify the employer’s identity before disclosing any personal data.
2. Start the recruiting process with mutual self-disclosure. Internet-based job services should facilitate exchanges between professionals and employers. During the exploration process, professionals should be able to select a position and location and see initial job matches before requiring additional information, especially personal information. As they provide more skills and experiences, value is provided, with each selection, in the form of higher-quality matches jobs. Web-based job services will continue to evolve to support social exchange.
3. Develop your employment brand for IT Professionals. Encourage internal IT employees to develop whitepapers that help other IT professionals do their jobs better. Post the whitepaper on your company website and embed a “check out the great careers at XYZ company!” link. For even broader talent acquisition, post the whitepaper on IT directory content distribution sites like TechRepublic, or any of a dozen blogs that publish white papers.
4. Tap into your company’s marketing organization. Most corporate marketing departments have invested time and money into building their company’s database for direct marketing purposes. Why not collaborate with marketing to target those individuals that have “opted-in” to receive additional correspondence from the company and invite them to look at available job opportunities. It’s also provides a great opportunity for companies to extend their brands through recruiting efforts.
5. Go where IT professionals go “on” and “offline.” Kick off your search-engine marketing efforts on engines like Google. Build targeted keyword ads for certain skill sets. Look for banner advertising opportunities on association and user group websites and explore newsletter advertising opportunities. Attend and sponsor local and national user groups and associations. Many times, your own employees are members of these groups and they are always looking for corporate sponsors for their local meetings or national events.
6. Profile your best employees. Create employee personas to help communicate to HR and others your ideal IT employees and compare jobs seekers to your “star” employees. Use personas to broadcast your needs across other functions in your company, in your advertising and other talent acquisition marketing. It’s “humans” that attract like-minded individuals, not job descriptions.
7. Be crystal clear about what you’re looking for. Often technology recruiters mismatch potential employees to positions because they don’t fully understand what the employer is looking for or what the employee has to offer. Obvious mismatching can be very frustrating for the recruiter and the talent. There are new online recruiting tools that help supercharge the recruiting process through job profiling and a multi-point structured data approach. This allows talent to create detailed profiles that include skills, work experience, education, etc., which match, score and rank against your company’s job requirements.
8. Keep your opportunities fresh. Employers post jobs on the job boards where talent filters through page upon page of job, but never find what they’re looking for. Often times the opportunity is no longer available. Even if the position is still open, the employer uses an old, inefficient process where submitted applications and resumes go into a “Black Hole” and are never properly considered.
9. Focus on the relationship. The truly excellent talent is generally not looking for work right now. They’re happily and successfully employed. It’s the relationship that matters and that will give you a advantage over the competition. To build your relationship with talent, take time to listen to what they are looking for in their career and in life as well. While it may be inappropriate to probe personal issues, take note of those that the candidate shares with you - these are issues that they feel relate to their career path. Make sure you "stay in touch" foster a relationship that allows you to really tune in to their needs.
10. Be Gracious. It’s important to remember you are often times prospect’s first contact with your company, so it’s incredibly important for that “face” of your company to be a smiling one. In a world where a lot of people have simply forgotten how to treat others the right way, the recruiter who approaches his or her relationships with graciousness wins the war for talent.
About Hank Stringer
Forecasting a talent shortage back in 1994, Stringer and a team of entrepreneurs started Hire.com. The company was the first to use an ASP business model, leveraging the Internet to scale and automate interactive recruiting relationships and processes. Stringer went on to co-author Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. He remains active in the recruiting industry and is involved in several cutting-edge technologies.
About itzbig
itzbig is the first private network to allow working professionals to save time while safely exploring career opportunities. By focusing on quality and efficiency, the company’s innovative approach rescues job seekers and employers from drowning in large quantities of poorly matched data.
For more information on itzbig, call 512.879.3550, or contact us.
Interested media should contact Holt Hackney or call (512) 478-8858, Ext. 115.