Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

The first digital project I ever worked on was building a career website for German engineering giant Siemens. Since then I’ve been fascinated by the evolution of corporate career sites and I am currently working with a number of my clients to help them optimize this area of their talent acquisition strategy. My guest this week is someone who shares my obsession with career sites. Bas Van De Haterd is an independent consultant and entrepreneur based in The Netherlands. For the last 10 years Bas has run a major piece of research which audits the career sites of the largest 500 Dutch employers and he has a huge amount of insight to share. In the interview we discuss:     •    How to audit a career site     •    The single simple thing employers could do which would improve their response rates by 25%     •    Three areas which can be improved to give a better candidate experience     •    How to optimise a legacy ATS system to improve the application process     •    The balance between jobs, conversion and employer branding     •    Bas also talks about the development of mobile and shares his thoughts on innovation in this area. This episode of the podcast is supported by Metashift Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

In last week’s episode I featured interviews with nine people who were searching for innovation at the HR Tech Conference in Chicago. This week I wanted to continue the same theme but with more of a focus on specific trends in recruiting. My guest this week is Andy McIlvaine who is conference chair for The Talent Acquisition Technology Conference and The Recruiting Trends Conference both of which are organized by Human Resource Executive (the company behind HR Tech) and take place in Austin Texas in November. In the interview we discuss:     •    The changing role of video in the talent acquisition process     •    Candidate Relationship Management and Candidate Experience     •    The latest social media methods and Recruitment Marketing Platforms     •    Whether talent shortages are genuine and what employers can do to solve the problem     •    Unconscious bias in recruiting     •    Predictive Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Andy also gives us a taster of the case studies that will be presented at the conferences and shares what has surprised him the most as a journalist covering this sector. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Innovation and disruption are words that are used so often these days it is sometimes difficult to spot technologies that are genuinely innovative and genuinely disruptive. This seems to be a particular problem in the HR and Recruiting space. Last week I was one of the several thousand attendees at the HR Tech conference in Chicago trying to find clues about where our industry is heading. In this special HR Tech episode of the show you’ll hear from a number of people I met on my quest to discover HR innovation nirvana. My guests are: Gareth Jones from Chemistry Labs Bill Boorman from Recruiting Daily Kirstie Kelly from Launchpad Robert Newry from Artic Shores David Green from IBM Al Ademsen from The Talent Strategy Institute Chris Broderick from B .near Global Manish Goel from Trustsphere Neil Morrison from Penguin Random House We discuss everything from People Analytics to fake Artificial Intelligence and attempt to make some sense of the diverse HR technology landscape. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

One of the topics we’ve never really covered in much detail on the podcast is the role of sourcing in corporate recruiting. It is obviously something that is absolutely critical to many organizations particularly those who are recruiting in market segments that are suffering skill shortages. My guest this week is Chris Shaw Director of Talent at Meteor. Chris has previously been part of the recruiting team at Google and was part of the team who recruited 300 hires in 11 months at Twitter. At Meteor he focuses on recruiting the top 1% of the top 1% of technology talent and I’m delighted he agreed to come on the show to share his thoughts and some of the practical techniques he uses. In the interview we discuss:     •    Why turning passive candidates into active ones is always better than post and pray     •    How to identify your Hiring Bar     •    The importance of a great ATS     •    Automation and personalization Chris also gives us a step by step walk through of the techniques he uses and share his thoughts on the future of sourcing This episode the podcast is kindly sponsored by Lever, where ATS meets CRM Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

The critical role employer branding plays in attracting top tech talent to companies is something we have covered a few times on the podcast. However, what happens when you need to create an employer brand for an entire country? The Irish government recently initiated a project to do just that in order to service the growing need to import top tech talent into the Irish digital economy. My guest this week is Niall Dowling who is Strategic Director at Atomic, the marketing agency who are delivering the project and its resulting website www.techlifeireland.com In the interview we discuss:     •    The strategic thinking behind the employer brand     •    Some surprising insights from the research that reveal the motivations that drive people to relocate     •    Audience segmentation and personas     •    The importance of quality of career and meaningful work     •    How the brand has been activated and optimized for the target audience. Niall also shares the results of the project so far and offers his advice to companies looking to attract senior talent from abroad. This episode of the podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

The balance between global consistency and local nuance in recruitment marketing is a difficult issue that provokes a lot of debate. It has become clear to me from working with a number of employers in this area that there are no right answers and every company needs a bespoke approach to be successful. My guest this week is John McCall who oversees Talent Branding for Groupon in the EMEA region. Groupon has grown via acquisition in EMEA, creating a number of challenges for brand and marketing consistency. In the interview we discuss:     •    Groupon’s definition of Talent Branding and how they are positioning themselves as an employer of choice.     •    Creating a core central truth with local variations     •    Marketing effectively in multiple languages     •    The role of mobile video and social engagement     •    The importance of messaging consistency throughout the business John also talks about what is next for Groupon and gives us his thoughts on the future of Talent Branding This episode of the podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Changing established ways of thinking is difficult. Changing established ways of thinking about recruiting within large organizations can seem impossible. However, with economies fluctuating, technology improving and people’s communication preferences developing, driving effective change is a key part of the job for every in house recruiting leader. My guest this week is Samantha Ramsay, Head of Resourcing and Employer Brand for House of Fraser. Over the last two years Samantha has been systematically challenging assumptions, moving mindsets and embracing new technology to order to drive change within her organization. In the interview we discuss:     •    The difference between recruiting and resourcing     •    How fundamental change creates massive impact     •    Questioning standard practice in recruiting     •    Why House of Fraser prioritise behaviours and traits over past experience     •    Success with bespoke online assessment and video interviewing Samantha also shares her view on the relationship between resourcing and marketing and how resourcing should now be positioned in a very different way The podcast is kindly supported by Lever, where ATS meets CRM Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Employer branding has never been a more popular discussion topic with a huge amount of content and conference time now dedicated to it. However, when you dig below the surface, there is very little that addresses the day to day concerns of employer brand practitioners, particularly those working within global organizations. Working in partnership with my regular co-collaborator Mervyn Dinnen and in conjunction with employer brand solution provider Papirfly, this summer we did a piece of research design to restore the balance by uncovering the real issues in employer branding. On the podcast this week I’m joined by Sara Naveda, Client Director at Papirfly, to discuss the research and its findings. In our discussion we cover four key issues: • How to align internal and external brand to greater effect • Why employer brand becomes even more important in times of commercial turmoil • How to adopt employee generated content to grow your employer brand at scale • The importance of measuring effectiveness of your efforts, and best practice techniques for doing so You can download the full insight report here for free Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Planning and executing a social media strategy for recruiting and employer branding is never a straight forward undertaking. However, doing this within a global organization can be particularly problematic. Complex stakeholder relationships with PR, marketing and comms are a key issues as is getting the right segmentation of channels across geographies and audiences. Local versus Global is a debate I’m often asked my opinion on. My guest this week is Charu Malhotra. Charu has a wealth of experience working as an interim within a range of global organizations and has some unique expertise in building global social recruiting strategies. She is currently leading EVP and Employer Branding projects at Ferrero. In the interview we discuss:     •    The specific challenges social media presents for complex global organizations     •    Transparency and fishing where the fish are     •    Content types     •    Alignment, stakeholder relations and project management     •    Global versus Local     •    The power of social media as a research tool Charu also shares her thoughts on the future development of social media and tells us which emerging social channel she thinks has the most potential. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Over the past five years there has been an investment boom in technology products aimed at the talent acquisition market. The industry is getting more complex by the day and making sense of it is a constant challenge for corporate recruiting leaders. My guest in this episode is Jon Kestenbaum Executive Director at New York based think tank and incubator Talent Tech Labs. Talent Tech Labs have done a huge amount of work to map out and understand this technology market and has developed a taxonomy that identifies 27 different categories of product in the sourcing to onboarding journey.  In the interview we discuss:     •    How to make sense of the complex market by cutting through the marketing spin     •    Disruptive solutions versus point solutions     •    The importance of analytics     •    The Five key trends of 2106     •    Levels of innovation and tech adoption being seen among corporate employers and staffing companies. Jon also tells us what has surprised him most during his two years at Talent Tech Labs and gives his view on the likely future of the talent technology space. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes