Developing a strong, clear, engaging employment brand can be the difference between a whisper getting whipped around in a breeze and a crank-up the volume, highly amplified message, metaphorically speaking, to attract the best talent to your organization.  That doesn’t mean you have to get out the megaphone and scream from the rooftops, but it does mean you need to get better at targeted positioning to catch the attention of prospective talent and move them to action.  EnticeLabs has a technology called TalentSeekr that will help you do just that – without having to grab your megaphone!

I had a chance to talk with Joshua Westover of Entice and Steve Fogarty of adidas about TalentSeekr and Steve’s pilot campaign while we were in Las Vegas last month for the Kennedy Recruitment conference. Here’s their story about TalentSeekr. You can read mine following the video and the last paragraph captures Steve’s results.

What’s your brand story?
Crafting a great brand story begins by knowing your company’s culture, what attracts people to seek employment with you, why people stay with you, and articulating what sets you apart from the competition.  How you engage prospective talent in your brand story occurs through a number of different touch points.  It could be your corporate career site, social networking sites, blogs, job boards, Google Adwords, video, etc.  Even the biggest and best brands need to work harder than ever to keep this a streamlined, efficient process that produces a solid ROI – converting prospects to hires.  The persistent increase in the number of channels that companies need to engage in has made this process not only more complex but more expensive, harder to manage and harder to track.

Once you have your brand story articulated there are four elements that will help your marketing and advertising strategy produce more value: positioning, reach, relevancy, and experience. Positioning is important to make sure your brand will be seen by the talent your trying to attract.  Reach is your ability to expansively target the talent your aiming for – narrow and deep to broad and deep.  Relevancy ensures that your brand is reaching the most interested, best-fit prospects based on skill, interests and work experience.  And, lastly, “experience” is providing a brand experience that results in an emotional connection that moves the prospect to action – expressing interest in your brand and career opportunities.  The ability to break through the environmental noise in order to not only reach the talent you’re company needs but for that talent to take notice and act is where the true value comes in.  Its also one of the most challenging aspects of employment brand advertising.   The days of  jobs, and job seekers, ending up in the classifieds or on a few key job boards are long gone.  Plus, if you want to reach a more passive prospect your going to need a more sophisticated approach to reach them and capture their attention.

How relevant and targeted is your brand strategy?
Through TalentSeekr, EnticeLabs offers a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning that provides companies a streamlined, intelligent approach to zero in on the talent their trying to reach.  TalentSeekr applies geographic, contextual, behavioral and social media profile-targeting to deliver the highest ROI on each of your digital campaigns.  By combining these four targeting capabilities, TalentSeekr automatically addresses positioning, reach and relevancy through location, targeted key words and site preferences (think Facebook, LinkedIn, User Groups….).  As Joshua Westover of EnticeLabs says, ” We can get as broad as a nation or as narrow as a building”.  EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a  job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy.  They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers. (examples to the right from an adidas campaign)

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand.  Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.

Does your candidate experience measure up?
So, sit back and think about this for a minute.  A prospect logs into their gmail account or Facebook profile and sees a highly relevant ad.  They click on the ad and get a cool video and pictures about your company and / or product.  They get information in another panel on the page that talks about your company culture.  Another panel may invite them to join your community.  And, there’s also a job link.  How do you think the prospect is feeling about your company and the career opportunities after that experience?  Probably pretty enticed! (yes, pun intended!)  Don’t get hung up on thinking that you need to go out and produce a professional video.  The more real the video the more effective it is in creating emotional engagement between the prospect and your brand.  Flip cameras are about $100 and create great videos.  Also, chances are that your company has some cool product videos that you could use (like the video used by adidas in their engagement page above).  If the videos are interesting and relevant to the roles your focused on then why not use them?

Are you also beginning to see how TalentSeekr serves as a brand equalizer!  While the graphics here represent adidas, a very well known and respected brand, the more relevant the placement, the better the brand attraction and the stronger the brand engagement experience.  Brands of all sizes can overcome what traditionally has felt like a “big brand” advantage to become equal in appeal and attraction strength.

Is brand intelligence on your side?
TalentSeekr also gets smarter with age. The longer a campaign is run the more data TalentSeekr has to refine your positioning, ensuring that your receiving the highest ROI.  While TalentSeekr can be applied successfully to specific jobs it’s even more effective if you think of job categories and integrate your marketing strategy with a talent pipelining or community building strategy.  Think about the power of this integrated with your talent planning strategy and CRM tool! Through the Talent Seekr dashboard (below) you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns.  TalentSeekr automatically reallocate advertising dollars so the brand placements that are driving the best traffic (not just volume but relevant traffic) will receive more impressions and in the end you’ll have a highly relevant pool of prospects and a data set that will inform future campaigns.  You can also work closely with the EnticeLabs team and play a more active role in how ad placements are reallocated.

(Dashboard shows sample data for demonstrations only)

In the first campaign Steve ran through TalentSeekr for adidas they focused on a very difficult to fill position.  In fact, it was a position that in the past had required outsourcing to executive search.  Within two weeks adidas had attracted a number of highly relevant, top quality candidates and converted one to a hire and filled the position.  The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.  Relevancy rules!

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Adaptive Talent Strategies:

Designing an Approach to Excellence in Talent Attraction, Planning and Management

How effective is your talent strategy in supporting the business needs of your company?

Are you aligned with your company’s business strategy?

Do you have the information you need to anticipate the key skills and competencies that will competitively position your company?

Read on to learn about the workshop and how to register. I hope to see you there! Susan

The Workshop:

Excellence in recruitment and talent leadership is a critical business function for leading companies regardless of industry, size or geography. Alignment, agility, speed and creativity are essential for building and executing an adaptive talent strategy. Here’s what your workshop experience will look like:

• We’ll begin by exploring top-line trends and influencers affecting talent acquisition and management strategies.
• You’ll be introduced to a flexible model that serves as a roadmap to developing a holistic and adaptive framework.
• We’ll actively discuss key steps and decisions to develop and apply a roadmap from which you can approach broad-sweeping or more targeted components to support a successful and adaptive strategy.
• And, we’ll delve in to a situational planning exercise to leverage our collective insight and your learning experience.

Expect to be an active participant in small and large group discussions. Through collective learning and expanding the boundaries of our minds and capabilities we’ll define and redefine excellence in recruiting leadership.

Key takeaways include:

• Balancing the needs presented by today’s business environment while simultaneously building a future focused strategy;
• Delivering enhanced value through the recruitment function;
• Leveraging your employment brand to attract and retain top talent; and,
• Incorporating CRM, workforce planning, community and social media tools to enhance results.

When: July 8^th from 2:30 to 6:00 with networking reception to follow. Snacks and refreshments provided by Avature.

Where: Hosted at the Intel Campus (exact details shared with confirmed registration)

Who Should Attend: The workshop is designed for recruiting function leaders, senior recruiters and talent strategists working within a corporate environment.

RSVP: To register for the event contact Susan Burns directly via email or phone 503.381.9292.

Note: The workshop is designed to be a small event to maximize learning and is limited to 50 people. Initially we will confirm only two people per company but if space is available will add accordingly.

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The ability for companies to move quickly is more important than ever before.  Change is constant. Uncertainty is a reality.  Complexity is on the increase, and the need for agility is rising as a core organizational competency.  We’re living in a new business environment being shaped by shifting talent patterns, increased competition, shorter business maturity cycles and lower barriers to entry, just to name a few.  These are the elements shaping today’s and tomorrow’s business ecosystem and your organizational talent capability.  Your organization’s ability to shape an adaptive talent strategy and proactively develop response capability will allow you to harness these influencers and gain the upper-hand.

 An adaptive talent strategy provides you with an architecture to meet the evolving needs of business and develop a value-oriented talent function. Complex? Actually, it’s simpler and more streamlined than what you may have today. Expensive? Developing an adaptive talent strategy is more cost-effective than not developing one. Will it mean we’ll have to change how we do things? Oh, yes! But, what doesn’t require change? The cost of “standing still” or not adapting may be less expensive in the short-run but over the long-term the cost of not adapting will cost you considerably more, and quite possible even the survival of your talent function or organization.  And, more often than not, change is good.  The hardest thing about dealing with change is getting over the initial shock that you need to change.  Once your open to new ideas and new ways of thinking an entirely new set of possibilities emerges.

 Adaptive talent strategies are based on alignment and clarity around the organization’s strategic business directives.  They succeed when there is active dialogue between the business units, finance and talent acquisition leaders during the strategic business planning process.  In too many instances, recruiting becomes a just-behind process. If the talent acquisition leader is not part of the business planning discussion then the organization is already at a disadvantage and successful implementation of the business strategy is compromised. Now, granted, its up to the talent acquisition leader to ask the right questions and then develop an effective plan to ensure support and success.  The key here is involving talent acquisition early enough in the conversation to shift from reactive tactics to value-oriented strategy development and implementation.  When the talent acquisition leader has sufficient information early enough in the planning process they’re able to effectively allocate resources, structure their team, make investment decisions, and guide the company’s strategic directives by providing critical insight into the availability of talent.  This conversation becomes the pivotal point in developing an adaptive talent strategy. From here, the company can benefit from increased clarity. 

Three other key components that shape developing an adaptive talent strategy -  

Know the talent you have
Visibility into the company’s existing workforce should be easily accessible for the recruiting function.  Knowing where the strengths, weaknesses and gaps exist informs external recruitment. When the talent acquisition leader has this information they can more effectively develop a recruitment strategy and direct resources by partnering with their organizational development peer to identify the key skills and competencies needed to support the organization. An internal talent management system can deliver a number of benefits.  It brings efficiency to the talent planning process and facilitates the movement of talent throughout the organization to meet the needs of employees and businesses.  If employees know they have opportunities to pursue elsewhere in the organization chances are your going to improve retention. External recruitment should always be informed by the internal gaps and talent plans to make smarter investments and decisions when pursuing new talent.

 Develop a talent plan
Clarity around workforce structure guides how the organization shapes thinking about talent today and in the future?  Which roles need to sit in a specific geographic location and where do you have flexibility to pursue the best talent regardless of location? Where can you infuse elasticity in your workforce through part-time, contingent and job share roles? When do you build and when do you “buy” talent? How do you broaden reach by identifying where work can be done outside the organization and engage collective collaboration to generate ideas and drive innovation?  What is your plan for knowledge transfer? How will you prepare for a maturing workforce with different needs? What does the supply and demand look like for the talent you need to support the strategic business directives? For which functional areas and roles do you have a recruiting core competency and where will you outsource recruitment to a third-party? These are just a few of the key questions that should be asked in developing a talent plan to guide recruitment.  Without having clarity around these types of questions and the resulting impact on your organization, chances are you’ll experience significant talent pain points over time rather than operating as an adaptive, value-oriented talent function. 

Leverage technology
In addition to an internal talent management system, a CRM tools is a key component to building an effective suite of recruiting technology solutions.  The CRM serves a number of critical needs.  It supports the recruitment function’s ability to manage communications, build relationships, integrate state-of-the art sourcing capability and provide visibility into the readiness of your talent pipeline.  This last benefit, visibility into the readiness of your talent pipeline, is key to supporting an adaptive talent strategy.  You’ll be able to provide better guidance to the business partners and make smarter decisions around how and where you allocate resources to external recruitment.  The Reports screenshot to the right, courtesy of Avature, provides an example of the benefits gained when you have visibility into your talent pipeline.  You know the readiness of talent and the depth of your pool by type of talent needed.

This will begin to provide you with an idea of what shapes an adaptive talent strategy.  The benefit to the organization is enhanced support of the strategic business directives by improving alignment, opening up an active dialogue early enough in the planning process, and anticipating the types of talent needed.  The benefit to the talent function is improved clarity around strategic business directives, the ability to be more planful in developing and implementing a supporting strategy, and the ability to deliver greater value to the organization. The ROI can be significant. You’ll realize the benefits of reduced third-party recruitment fees, reduced time-to-hire, increased recruiter productivity, reduced marketing / job posting costs, and increased efficiency in the movement of internal talent. The remaining elements  - employment brand and networks, metrics, and internal communication will be covered soon.  You might also want to take a look at the model on the home page to get a visual image of the framework for an adaptive talent strategy.

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