We live in a society where it’s easy to be overwhelmed by data. It seems as if there are statistics about virtually everything, making it hard to figure out which numbers are actually important. Nonprofits are among the groups that are gathering more data  than ever, but not all of them are using the information they gather, or are not using it as well as they can.

The Importance of Google+ as a Tool for Recruitment Agencies

As a recruiter, you may be well versed in social media and its relation to your work and matching clients with jobs. LinkedIn generally is the first source for recruiters when it comes to establishing client links. If you have put off learning more about Google+, then it may be time to dive into Google’s world. You may soon find this social tool as your priority source for recruiting and looking for the best minds in the business.

Broaden Your Network

According to Google’s own blog, this social media network serves 500 million members, of which 235 million use the platform’s various social tools by way of searching for others and giving a “+1” to items in the news stream. This is the network’s version of a Facebook “like,” but it also carries the heft of showing up on Google searches. With this high volume of traffic and exploration among its members, it makes sense to start creating your own “circles,” the account network on Google+. (more…)

Candidates and hiring companies have at least one thing in common: Both are looking for the perfect match.

Skills, knowledge, and experience are the tangibles to determine a functional fit within an organization. Aspects of values and personality may determine one’s ability to adapt to an organization’s culture. Recruiters, human resources professionals, and hiring managers understand the value of assessing a candidate’s potential cultural fit. Poor cultural fit is something that cannot be resolved with training.

Cultural fit goes beyond simply getting along with fellow workers. For example, according to an Accountempts survey, “Nearly eight in 10 (79%) chief financial officers (CFOs) interviewed said an employee’s sense of humor is important for fitting into the company’s corporate culture.” That is important to the employer and the employee. If you are going to spend more than 40 hours per week working, you want to be with people with whom you can relate.

There are several methods that employers, recruiters, and candidates use to ensure a cultural match is made.

Job Posting

An employer can signal candidates by writing a detailed job posting including information about the company and its culture. The description will hopefully attract candidates of like mind and deter candidates with opposing values. Take a look at these sample postings — Apple, Kaiser Permanente, Solutions IQ. Can you determine if you would be a cultural match?

Résumé

Just as an employer communicates their values through the job posting, a candidate can share their values through the résumé.

Candidates should be careful not to go over the top. For example, résumés should focus on skills, accomplishments, and knowledge. Through achievements employees can demonstrate values such as customer care, attention to quality, and on-time delivery of projects. Characteristics such as humor and honesty are not necessary to list on a résumé. A candidate can also show compassion through community and philanthropic roles.

Interviewing

Employers may ask questions to uncover a candidate’s work ethics, personal values, and work style. This may be achieved through situational questions in which the interviewer inquires about a choice a candidate may make or how they would solve a particular problem. To determine fit, often multiple team members will interview the candidate.

Testing

Some employers use psychometric tests to learn more about a candidate’s personality traits, and how they will interact with others in the company. According to Sanford Rose, “It has been estimated that 30% of all companies have incorporated some sort of personality testing into their hiring process.”

Internet Search

Employers can gain insight into an employee’s personality by reviewing a candidate’s postings on social media sites. Candidates can learn about a company by searching online and especially reviewing the corporate website.

Job Shadowing

A trial day or even few hours is a great way to for the candidate and the hiring company to evaluate each other.

It is beneficial to the employer and the candidate to be forthright and honest throughout the job/candidate selection process. Any manipulation or false representation can result in a mismatch, which is a setback for the employer and the employee. With openness during the process, a perfect match can be found.

Here’s a sobering reminder for you: Just because your nonprofit’s Facebook page has a lot of “Likes” doesn’t mean people actually like it.

Carie Lewis, director of emerging media at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), said at a a session at the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco, Calif., that success on Facebook is no longer about how many friends you have. “It’s what happens after the ‘Like’ that matters,” she explained.

Lewis went on to present research that revealed an average 90 percent of people who click “Like” never visit the page again, so it’s imperative for your organization to come up with reasons for users to want to read your content. As easy as it is to click the “Like” button, it’s even easier to click “unlike” or “hide content.”

How do you make content more interesting for users? Lewis suggested the following tips:

• Answer everyone.
• Connect with your über-fans.
• Maintain a consistent voice.
• Provide exclusivity.
• Create your own memes.
• Plan it out; but be flexible.
• Don’t be so serious all the time.
• Make real-world events social.
• Use photos and video.
• Show people how their time, money and efforts make a difference.
• Pay attention to feedback.
• Make friends, cross promote.

The annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management is underway this week in Atlanta.

As it typically does, the event is a huge draw for HR professionals worldwide. Thousand attend the multi-day event that offers hundreds of workshops and sessions and training programs, and a show floor measured in acres.

For the recruiting community, especially for independents, there’s not as much of a focus on talent acquisition. This year’s conference is no different. Of the more than 300 sessions, 16 are designated for recruiting and new media. The emphasis is on how social media is changing recruiting and how recruiters are using social media to attract and hire talent.

Particularly for solo recruiters and small firms social media is an underused and even less understood tool for attracting candidates. Even for brand building and marketing — a topic covered by Randstad’s Joanie Ruge at the Fordyce Forum a few weeks ago — social media is being undertulitized.

However, your corporate brethren have been experimenting with social media for years, finding it not only a powerful tool for building employer brand, but an effective means for building a pipeline of engaged, talented potentials. It’s true that only a small portion of annual hires are directly sourced via social media, but the influence of social channels is significant and growing.

No wonder, therefore, that SHRM has paired recruiting and social media as one of the multiple focus areas for this year’s conference.

One noteworthy session is Brian Glade’s, The Quest for Global Talent. He’s managing director, Global Strategy and the Americas, Association of Executive Search Consultants. He’s discussing global sourcing and the trends in executive recruiting.

It wouldn’t be a SHRM conference without at least some fireworks, which, as has been the case the last couple of years, is being provided by the SHRM Members for Transparency. The organization said it would field a slate of candidates in a bid to remake the organization’s board of directors.

John Hollon, editor of our sister site, TLNT.com, detailed the announcement from the SHRM conference where the insurgent group opened its campaign and released the names of the first four candidates.

Yesterday, LinkedIn clarified efforts to contain the 6 million password breach that occurred last week. In an e-mail to the media the company summarized its work to secure the site.

While there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger to member accounts (and LinkedIn confirmed this), there was concern about how the breach occurred and how the company would respond to prevent future breaches.

According to the e-mail, by June 7th (a day after the breach) LinkedIn disabled the impacted user passwords. Customer service teams reached out to those users explaining how to reset their passwords. As of yesterday, there had been no compromised accounts. LinkedIn also made sure to say there has been no impact on sign up numbers or with people leaving the network.

LinkedIn also clarified that passwords are now both hashed and salted (previously, they had only been hashed). In case you think this turned into a conversation about breakfast food, Joe Basirico, director of security services for security innovation, explained the difference in a post last week:

What could LinkedIn have done to protect you from your own poor password choice? Well, they could have required a Password Policy, but everybody seems to hate those. They could have also added Salt. No, not that salt, this Salt.

In software we call a chunk of random data that we add to passwords “salt.” Since your password is so easily guessable it’s likely it already exists in somebody’s Rainbow table so the lookup would be really quick and easy. We want to make them work for it. So for each user I generate, say, 10 extra random characters to add to each password. This means I generate some random characters “7%bKeVm!fN” and add that to your password turning it into LvBieber7%bKeVm!fN. If I do this for every user the hacker has to generate a rainbow table for each user independently.

If you want to get into the specifics of the security measures, that post (and the thread on Reddit) is a great start.

LinkedIn didn’t reveal how the breach occurred or what measures are being taken to prevent a future breach. However, the company said it’s working with law enforcement and taking unspecified security measures.

Dear Barb:

Michael P., San Jose, CA

Dear Michael:

Recruiting has been, is, and always will be a relationship building business. It’s difficult to build a relationship communicating only by email, text, or IM. I believe you have to use all means of communication, but I also believe every third contact should be a telephone conversation! In this competitive market you want to elevate your client relationship from “one of many vendors” to the status of “trusted advisor.”

Clients will give more business to individuals they trust and like. The more you allow clients to talk about themselves, discuss their challenges, or complain – the more they will like you! You can pick up buying signs or issues during a phone conversation that you can’t in an email. When I speak to audiences of Corporate Executives, one of their biggest complaints is they only hear from us when we want something. I explain that we are workforce/workplace experts and they find that surprising. It’s important that we communicate consistently with key accounts whether or not we are working on a current opportunity.

Regarding Facebook and LinkedIn… LinkedIn is valuable if utilized properly because you can learn inside information about companies and connect with prospective candidates and clients. However, unless you are a full time researcher or sourcer, research on Social Media sites is not done during prime time. As an owner, I will never believe that having Facebook minimized on a computer is in my best interest. Facebook is normally used to play with family and friends!

Some of you may think it’s old-fashioned to pick up the phone and have a conversation, I’m telling you it’s the most effective way to consistently hit your production and income goals! I agree with you 100%,Michael!

Would you like to Ask Barb a question? Email her at support@staffingandrecruiting.com. Each month in The Fordyce Letter print edition, Barbara Bruno answers questions from individuals in the Recruiting Profession. We will bring you some of these Q&A responses from Barb each week on FordyceLetter.com.

Most every nonprofit out there wants to expand its presence to social media in some form. Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, organizations want their message to be adapted to this medium. Yet no matter how good your content is, a social media strategy will not work without an active audience.

The key to building up an audience for your social platform is to have relevant content. If you write about things on your blog that people want to read, chances are you will attract followers. If you haven’t already, start reading about search engine optimization (SEO). This is the process of strategically inserting “keywords” into your blog posts so that major search engines, such as Google, will pick up your posts. Here are some hints on how to best use keywords:

• Insert the keyword that your post is about (i.e., fundraising) into the title of your post.
• Use that same keyword somewhere in the first paragraph.
• Link the keywords you use to the web page where you want to drive traffic (it helps if the URL of that page has the keyword in it).

When a nonprofit wants to share photos from a recent event, they tend to turn to Facebook and other social media resources. There’s another site out there, however, that can be just as useful for photo sharing.

Social media plays an important role in today’s world, especially in business. It’s almost unfathomable to find a business that doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. It’s easy enough to set up your online presence, but it’s a little bit harder to get people to listen.

Thankfully, “a little bit harder” doesn’t mean “impossible.” The nature of social networks means that every follower you get can potentially lead to many more. This is because each person “liking” your page will conceivably tell his/her friends to also follow you. Sounds great, but this is all moot if you can’t get many people to care about your page in the first place.

A lot of people using social networking sites tend to over-think it. They try to get too fancy and end up with few followers. In truth, the key to building an audience is to post things that are relevant and useful. What’s interesting to your followers? Why not ask them? Before making the first post on your new blog, engage your supporters on what kind of stories they want to read. When you get a good enough sample of answers, start writing about those topics.

Even with brilliant content, it’s difficult to attract supporters to a
site that no one else is following. Reach out to your staff and other
core supporters of your organization and ask them to follow your tweets,
or “like” your Facebook page –and to invite their personal friends.

Having an active community is another good way to get people to show interest. Let’s face it — nobody wants to be a part of a page that has no interaction. Try asking questions to your supporters in addition to sharing links. The whole point of social media is interaction with the audience, and there’s no better way to do this than starting a discussion.

The most important thing to remember is to be honest when participating in any of these discussions. There will be things you just can’t say, of course, but don’t be robotic. People like to know that the individual they are talking to is an actual human being.