This increase focus had let to a renewed love for the effective of a ‘Simulation’ as part of the screening process. Let’s revert to the oracle wikipedia for the definition: ‘Simulation is the imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system.’

Now, before asking a prospective candidate that you have in your pipeline to participate in a exercise like this, it’s important to think about the characteristics, experience and behaviours you want to evaluate.

Let me demonstrate how we used it when recruiting an Account Director for our business. An Account Director in our business would typically need to do following things;

* managing existing relationships
* identifying new business opportunities
* executing recruiting projects
* online research & sourcing candidates
* writing client proposals & formal candidate presentations for clients.
* Interviewing candidates

In order to test these skills we gave the prospective candidate the following scenario.

Test 1: New business development, Verbal Communication & Commercial Acumen.

Tasks

* Call a hiring a manager in the industry that they came from (which was not recruitment ) to identify if they had a need for a senior solutions sales person.
* Market a candidate that they had met with recently ( We asked the candidate to use their own profile as the candidate they would be selling into the client)
* Understand the clients requirements by asking the right commercial questions about the business and the position.
* Market the candidate to the hiring manager and generate their interest so they want to interview the candidate.

Test 2: Online research skills & Understanding of requirements.

Tasks

* Take the job brief and go to Linkedin
* Supply the public profile URL’s or the PDF downloads of the profiles of 4 potential candidates that match from Linkedin.

Test 3: Written Communication skills

Tasks

* We asked the prospect to write a business case on each member of the shortlist articulating the reasons why they feel they are a match for the job and the hiring managers requirements.

I recommend that when creating a simulation think ‘personalised’ and customise the simulation so that you can test the skills that are vital for that individual being successful in the position you are hiring them for.

note: this simulation was conducted after numerous phone calls and two face to face meetings.

The beauty of the world us recruiters live in today is, we now also have a whole bunch of tools (in addition to the phone and face to face meetings) to make the “social’ piece more scalable and the relationships we develop more meaningful. They are more meaningful because of the extra context and visibility we now get of our clients and the candidate community we interact with.

Okay - back to the domain.

Sales Pitch : socialrecruiting.com is a top level .com domain . It’s the number one organic result returned for ‘Social Recruiting” on Google, Yahoo and Bing and the blog/wiki gets over 55% of its traffic from Google with no advertising. This is an important strategic recruiting digital asset. End Sales Pitch.‘

The Domain is listed on SEDO - search for Social Recruiting

Anyhow - if anyone interested in socialrecruiting.com - please get in touch

Twitter: @rigesyounan

email: riges(at)peerlo.com

Shally Stekerl (The godfather of sourcing) talks about Linkedin at The Speed of Thought

Sashu Chua IBM’s emerging technology evangelist

Susan Burns

Social Recruiting Summit: Breakout 1

Enjoy!

The management team at Peerlo have developed a lot of experience building and executing job referral platforms. We launched 2Vouch a public job referral system in September 2008. Through the 2Vouch experience we learned many things about agile software development and executing online business models.

Three months ago we embarked on an ambitious plan to build a whole new platform with new technology from scratch, yes that’s right every line of code. So the Peerlo team are proud to bring you the JobGenie

Why?

We are very passionate about Employee Referrals and having talked to a number of customers we noticed that their employee referral programs were not delivering more than 25% of their hires in the best cases. The major problem were - yep you guessed it adhoc and inefficient systems to manage and track the data, lack of executive support and no structure and strategy for the ERP . So we have decided to try and solve some of these problems by building a SaaS (Software as a Service) Employee Referral Platform to enable employers to run world class employee referral programs.

Human Resource Managers or Internal Recruiters can lists jobs like they would with any job board and request referrals from their employees by department, position title or location. They can even send jobs to their Alumni. Referrers then refer jobs to their contacts via email or to their contacts on Facbook, Linkedin & Twitter. The JobGenie also provides a bunch of analytics around time to hire, cost of hire and tracking of referrals through all of the social sites.

How Much?

We have a free version that has all of the functionality of the paid version. So if you are a small company and are not doing a lot of hiring the free version would work well for you. We also have a paid version with unlimited jobs, referrers and integration with your eRecruiting tools. You can view the pricing model here

I would be grateful if you could try it out and provide us some feedback.

Thanks!

Have you used any of these? if so, your feedback would be great. I use Google Alerts and Twitter Search and find these tools really useful.

1. Addict-O-Matic - instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic
2. Boardtracker - track the buzz on any keywords within popular forums.
3. Google Alerts - daily or real-time alerts delivered via email for your chosen keywords.
4. HowSociable? - measure your brand’s visability across the main social platforms.
5. Social Mention - another multi-platform visability checker, including alerts.
6. Twitter Search - Twitter’s only search is great for tracking real-time conversations.
7. Wiki Alarm - monitors Wikipedia and notifies when pages are edited.
8. Yahoo! Sideline - A desktop application that monitors Twitter in real-time for your brand/keywords

Some highlights of the survey as written in the Earth Times

‘The majority of those surveyed are planning to increase their financial commitment to social recruiting. 76 percent plan to invest more in employee referrals and 72 percent plan to invest more in recruiting through social networks while a majority say they will invest less in more costly sources, including job boards, third-party recruitment and campus recruiting. This echoes the results of Jobvite’s 2008 Social Recruitment Survey, in which 68 percent of recruiters said they would increase their use of referrals and employees’ networks.

The survey results showed that 80 percent of companies use or are planning to use social networking to find and attract candidates this year. Among those using or planning to use social network sites for recruiting, LinkedIn use grew from 80 percent in 2008 to 95 percent of respondents in 2009 and Facebook use grew from 36 percent in 2008 to 59 percent in 2009. A new addition, Twitter, ranked third with 42 percent of recruiters using the tool to source candidates. 77 percent of respondents said they use social networks to reach passive candidates who are not actively seeking employment.

66 percent of respondents using social networks for recruiting reported that they had successfully hired a candidate who was identified or introduced through an online social network, showing that the channel is not only being used, but also producing quality results.

Employee referrals and internal transfers are the most highly rated sources in terms of quality of candidates generated, however, employee involvement in referrals is still low. Only 15 percent of respondents said that they extensively tap employees’ social and professional networks for hiring, while the majority said they “somewhat” utilized employee networks. An average of one-third of employees participate in referrals, indicating there is untapped potential for employee referrals.

Additionally, recruitment and human resource professionals are using a variety of online sites to research candidates: LinkedIn (76 percent), search engines (67 percent), Facebook (44 percent) and Twitter (21 percent). Respondents reported that 24% of candidates disclose their social networking presence when applying for a job.

The survey also found that while 59 percent of respondents have conducted layoffs in the past year, more than 50 percent plan to make new full time growth hires, 35 percent will make replacement hires and 24 percent plan to add contract or part-time employees.

“Companies are in a very different economic situation now than when our first Social Recruitment survey was conducted last year. Now, not only are recruiters engaged in social networks, they are investing in social recruitment in place of more costly and inefficient methods,” said Dan Finnigan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Jobvite. “The economy has spurred a fundamental change in how recruiters find candidates and how people find jobs. The good news is that referrals and social networks provide a high quality, low cost way to hire and for that reason social recruitment will continue to grow even as the economy improves.”

Things get a little bit interesting when you ask why this is the case. After all, we are supposed to be in business and economists will tell us that people seek to maximise their own utility. So why would we want to help others?

It turns out that the reasons we like to help others are kind of complex… on the one hand there are psychological benefits - we like to feel that we have done “the right thing”. On the other hand, there is the “law of reciprocity” which states that when we do something for someone we create an obligation for that person to reciprocate (or give us something back).

This notion of reciprocity gets complicated when there are numerous people in a network. Now, helping others can also help build reputation because there are people who share views and information about others in their network.

Out of all of this comes the idea of social capital. It is a combination of your reputation, value you contribute and deliver to your network,  and lastly, how much others would be willing to do to help you too. When used wisely, social capital can be one of your most powerful assets.

Drum Roll Please…..

And my nominations for Aussie Influencers are ( yes, I watched the logies last night)

1. @mspecht Michael Specht Inspect
2. @PhilipTusing Philip Tusing Destination Talent
3. @GarethFlynnTQ Gareth Flynn TalentQuest
4. @careyeaton Carey Eaton SEEK
5. @jobadder Brett Iredale JobAdder
6. Trevor Vas HCMS

I find these cats interesting, provocative and innovative.

There are many more that make a great contribution to our industry, but I had to shorlist 5 (which was hard enough as you can tell I can’t count) and I’d like to give some special mentions to @thomasshaw and @geoffjennings for the colour they inject into the local scene too.

who’s on your list?

Tips

1. LinkedIn
   1. Profile: Make sure your profile is complete with all of your work history, education details, blogs, avatar, interests and specialties. This is your digital CV and more often that not this will be what recruiters look for first.
   2. Connect to Recruiters: Seek out recruiters that have good reputations in your industry and connect with them.
   3. Public Profile: Make sure you allow a ‘Full View’ on your public profile settings. This is critical in allowing the search engines to index your profile. Recruiters use search strings via the search engines like google to hack into Linkedin and search profiles outside of their network. So if you want to be found and you don’t have a big network switch this setting on.  To do this you go to Edit My Profile > Edit Public Profile Settings > Full View. This is normally a default setting but just make sure.
   4. Recommendations: Request recommendations from present and past colleagues, managers, partners, direct reports and customers. Having a healthy set of recommendation from credible people adds a heap of value and could be the difference between receiving the call or not.
   5. Contact Settings: Make sure you select that you are interested in ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘Job Inquiries’
   6. Phone and Email: This is controversial and probably against Linkedin’s terms of service but hey if you want to be found and contacted list your email and phone number in “headline” of your profile. If it is an issue Linkedin will contact you.
   7. Status Updates: This will keep you regularly in the news feed of the recruiters I advised you connect with previously. This also kind of gives them subtle reminders.
   8. Groups: Search the Group Directory and join Industry Groups, Groups created by companies you would like to work for or why not start a group yourself about a topic you are passionate and knowledgeable about. This is just another way for recruiters to evaluate your views on a particular subject and for you to build a network that you can share and learn with.
2. Twitter
   1. Profile: Complete your profile, ensure that your bio describes accurately who you are and what you do. My bio is ‘CEO at 2Vouch and Social Recruiting Strategist.’
   2. Avatar: Have a picture of you as your avatar, so people know who they are building a relationship with.
   3. Hashtags: ‘Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets’ you can learn more about hashtags here. Use hashtags at the end of some of your tweets as recruiters can search for specific hashtags.
   4. Twitter Search: Recruiters will do searches using Twitter Search on key words. So if you are looking for a job as a creative director then I would suggest tweeting about the fact the ‘ you’ve been updating your creative portfolio’
   5. Follow: HR, recruiters, recruiting companies and employers in the areas you are looking for a job in. Now here I mean follow and engage in conversation and build a relationship, don’t stalk if you really want to get value from twitter. As Boris talks about, some recruiters will look at the follow to following ratio and use that as a filtering tool.
3. Facebook
   1. Profile: complete your profile and ensure that you have the same detail as your Linkedin profile in the ‘Info’ part of your FB profile.
   2. Avatar: In my view, FB is a little more relaxed than Linkedin but if your looking for a job, I would ere on the side of caution and have a respectable looking avator on your profile.
   3. Status Updates: with so many social networks it’s hard to keep up with them, so a cool service like Ping.fm allows you to update all of your social networks at once. Caution: don’t tweet drunk as it will appear on your Linkedin status too. I’ve been there and it’s not a good look.
   4. Fan Pages: Join the fan pages of companies that you are interested in working for. If they are being used correctly as a recruiting tool, then you’ll be updated with opportunities that exist within that company, you can connect with and get advice from people who are currently working there and hopefully start to build a relationship with the recruiter at that company.
   5. Applications: Add job search applications: Cheezhead posted a great list of job search apps for FB here. For all the Aussies there is a SEEK one here
   6. Photos: well we’ve all heard a lot about this issue. Need I say more! Job seekers can rant about if it’s ethical to look at photos etc whilst in the recruiting process but bottom line it happens. So once it’s in the public domain, recruiters will find it. So keep your nudie and drunken shots on your hardrive.
4. RSS
   1. Use a RSS reader to get a live feed of jobs from the job boards that are relevant to you.
   2. There are a number of feed readers for RSS, Google Reader is an example
5. Website
   1. Your Name: Now this is not really ’social’, but have your registered your name as the domain name? This is a personal branding issue and not my area of expertise but Dan Schawbel has a book called Me 2.0 that looks like a good read.
   2. Content: This should include your resume and links to your profiles on social networks.
6. Blog
   1. Subject Area: If you have an opinion on something that your are passionate about like your industry, cooking, sports etc blog about it. This ads another dimension to your social media footprint and gives recruiters a more complete picture of who you are.
   2. Contact details: Mare sure your contact details are visible and easily accessible.
   3. Blogging Platforms: there are a number of them but I find Wordpress easy to use

There are many other things that I would suggest you do in your job search like networking at industry events, and with past colleagues to gain referrals from them to recruiters and companies that may be hiring but this post is long enough already.

Are you using any other social media tools for your job search?