OME's Social Media Recruitment Advice in as few words as possible

OK - going to try and summarise as concisely as possible - our current advice to recruiters (Sep 2010) on this topic. Please be aware that this by definition is huge oversimplification and generalisation but i wanted to see if i could do it.

1. Answer question - why are you doing it?
2. Do it - engage - don't come up with reason to delay - do something now
3. Its more about time than money
4. Don't outsource too much to people like us - much needs to come from within
5. But let an expert guide you, kick you off, assist where there are gaps
6. Appoint internal social media champion/s and give them external/internal support
7. Measure but accept measurement tools are not perfect
8. Don't try and do everything. Possible priority list may be LinkedIn, Twitter and micro/niche blogs, specialist forums etc.
9. Launch, engage, measure, enhance, review.....

Final Notes

• we have stopped including Facebook ads in this area, targeted cheap effective advertising fits in snugly next to all other forms of SEM and depending on your recruiting needs - if you are not taking advantage of this source - you are missing out.
• there is the massive issue of content strategy which i have studiously ignored above - it is very bespoke to each organisation - and requires more space than this list can provide
• please place any fat proposal asking for £50-70K for social media strategy roll out in the bin - you will be very disappointed

Sales Presentations - my recent bad experiences

Have received a few of these recently which it is fair to say - did not go well. I will try and group the major failings to avoid highlighting any individuals but i am always amazed that these errors still occur in 2010.
1. Sales person talking too much. Admittedly i have a short attention span but this is sooooo dull. It is not about showing off how much you know and sticking crowbarred benefits on everything. Its 2 way dialogue, exchanging info etc.
2. No real objective to meeting. equally dull as it just meanders along to no point. Is objective to close deal, get brief, update on new product. One meeting just petered out where we had all just drifted off and were all probably thinking out what we would be having for dinner.
3. Disagreeing with everything the client said. This was a one off and went spectacularly badly. The sales person just disagreed with everything client and consequently i said. Now putting aside the rights and wrongs of points made. When we have been told you are wrong for about the 4th time - your back gets up and you stop listening.
4. Going on too long. I think you should try and get 3 to 4 points across tops and ensure they are understood and then don't overstay your welcome. I think the impact gets lost otherwise.

I need to say at this point that clearly all the meetings i do are snappy, relevant and beautifully delivered......

How to Price OME's Social Media Work?

Recruitment and social media - a thorny subject - occupying a lot of OME time (not all of the team but growing for all of us). Not the place for a debate about whole topic here - let's make following assumptions for this piece

1. social media is very important now - even more so in future

2. most content should come from within an organisation - not be sourced from external supplier

3. it is NOT a short term response fix - its a long/medium term engagemenmt strategy (some exceptions to this rule)



So the OME approach can be roughly described as (not necessarily in right order)

* Agree Objective

* setting programmes up

* beginning to engage

* decide on policy for Big 3 Social Media (FB LI and Twitter)

* identify niche sites/forums/blogs

* agree ownership internally

* agree what is outsourced

* set up measurement metrics/objectives

* execute policy

* Monitor review and enhance



But we struggle to structure our rates for this correctly i think - the amount of work we do does not in any way correlate with fees. So what do we do?

1. Charge a very big day rate or proj mgmt fees? - make hay while the demand is huge

2. Treat as loss leader? Do such a brill job that we will be engaged for ever more

3. Hide fees in inflated media or content costs? Not the OME way but stuff i see in proposals

4. Bespoke every proposal - based on indvidual client profile - size of opportunity etc. Again not really us - as it means you are sizing up client on what they can afford - not what they need although quite a typical market approach i am sure.



I think our approach has drifted towards Option 2 and it makes sense as it does mirror how we have grown our business - show what we can do - then people are happy to pay higher rates due to value received. But it also means we are underselling ourselves and potentially giving away the quality work for not a lot.



So in summary - probably stay largely in Option 2 - but the rates are going up!

Future for Job Boards - possibly...

This post is prompted by a really interesting (to me!) debate started on Matt Alder's blog here about whether Job Boards will die off in same way as print classified advertising is. My thoughts on this are as follows
1. All media need to innovate and improve their product - better search, better user experience etc. If products don't do this - they will be thrashed by the competitors forget about any seismic marketplace changes.
2. Job Boards do 2 main things - connect employers/recruiters to candidates (and vice versa) and provide a searchable CV database.
3. The CV database model is fragile i think - via LinkedIn and other methods of online profiling (which social may/is developing at at a pace. Job Boards don't add any value in its CV database (there are good and bad search tools i know) and this product has been ruthlessly exploited by rec cons and not touched by direct clients. Like a plague of locusts - the rec cons having stripped a database of its ripe fruit will move on to the next host (LinkedIn. industry forums etc) .
4. But the core ad model is a beautifully efficient way of connecting recruiters to candidates. In 10 seconds from mobile device or PC - a user can get the top 10 most relevant current jobs delivered to their screen. He/she can respond via email in about 30 seconds and be back on Facebook. I am not ignoring the approx 5 issues about process above (bad search, too easy to apply, lack of quality in jobs, lack of quality in applications. But as a method of getting consumer to provider - it is staggeringly efficient. and efficiency and speed work online.
5. Now the thing that (many) job boards have never cracked is the browser, the passive candidate (the semi mythical quality candidate who you can access via beautiful high impact branding placed where that user consumes media). I fundamentally believe this is the huge gargantuan opportunity that a lot of our social media work can begin to deliver on. And being as the job boards have been rubbish at this historically not sure they will miss out too much.

The above is oversimplistic and all your advertising, engagement and employer brand impacts on each other but if you want to recruit and you put up great web/search friendly content in the right place with a super efficient response mechanism -the job boards (and PPC) will continue to deliver for you in coming years.

NB with proviso that someone somewhere is coming up with something so brilliant that any long term prediction can make fools of us all!

Times/SundayTimes and Rec Advertising

OK - the paywall went up this week which means we now have to pay to access the editorial content here. Now i am slightly conflicted in that i want to support innovation and new business models (OME, in its way, has completely re-written what a successful rec ad agency might look like) but.....
Our job is to plan and buy the best media for our clients and the redesign and re-launch of their sites have the following issues.
1. If you have to register (lets forget paying for time being) - many people won't bother - speaking personally i wouldn't bother unless there is information data and content that is not available elsewhere. Does the times site have this? i really don't know. Therefore traffic is and will be down - this is fact not conjecture. Therefore response is and will be down - fact not conjecture.
2. At same time - the times and Sunday Times have split sites. Now for last 10 years - users have been going to timesonline to access jobs and adverts for senior executives. Now - no rec con can advertise on Timesonline and no job above £40K salary. So the user goes to where the relevant jobs have been for 10 years - searches and gets zero ads returned. Result - the user goes elsewhere...
3. The damage here would be lessened if there was proper signposting of where users (indeed recruiters) should go next - instead its a maze and requires a lot of dead ends and clicks to try and find what you need. Not a shock to anyone but the digital user is a lazy person who wants instant gratification not to have to think about where should i go next?
4. If you are gong to make this sort of change - you had better have a big marketing budget to persuade people - i have yet to see this.

So all this is without looking further at damage of a paywall - my overall thought is - i love the Times/SundayTimes as a media. i really like the people we deal with but this appears to have been done without putting the recruitment advertiser or candidate anywhere near their thoughts. And the really silly thing is - i reckon you can solve some of the issues above in a day but will they do so before real damage is done??

Marker Post to end of B2B Print Media

It did not warrant much comment and i only noticed it this morning but Personnel Today's print edition is no more -it was a rock solid big margin product for most of its 22 years existence and now its gone. Not much of a prediction but next 6-9 months will see it joined by a host of other B2B print products. Much sympathy if people have lost jobs but an inevitability.
I also see that Trinity Mirror's(national and regional newspaper publisher and owner of some "interesting" digital acquisitions) Sly Bailey has announced 25% reduction in journalist jobs, 41% plunge in profits. I would not wish to be personal but this is from a person who said decline in print classified revenue was cyclical and would return - still good to see that at the same time she has awarded herself a performance related pay rise of £676,000. Nice work if you can get it.

Motivation and the Business Owner

A rare moment of self analysis and honesty - we set up OME 4 years ago and we are doing very well at the moment but....
1. My own personal motivation is not quite what it has been - it just does not feel very exciting at the moment
2. We weathered storm of 2009 and did fine and have come out of it very healthily - so also lack the best motivator of them all - sheer terror that you will lose everything and the shame of failure (always found this to be my chief driver!)
3. We have a team in place who can do all the things i do but actually are better at doing what they promise to do - so don't feel the whole thing would fall down without me. In fact can absolutely say the whole thing wont fall down without me
4. Plenty of medium/long term things i should be doing but due to factors above - cant quite get round to doing them - this is chiefly around topic of business strategy and potential investment

Now apologies for navel gazing - and i know i will snap out of it soon and this is not exactly a major problem but as Arsene Wenger once said (probably) " who motivates the motivators"