Last week Riges Younan (2Vouch CEO) posted about the presentation he is preparing for ATC in Auckland on social recruiting and employee referral programs. He asked for help to prepare the presentation, interesting the post has not had any comments but did generate some discussions.

Following these discussions Riges has decided to take things a little further and has set up a site, http://socialrecruiting.com, specifically to help build the presentation. The idea being to use Web 2.0 and social media tools to help create the presentation.

The site is a mix of a blog where Riges can document his thoughts, and readers can comment. But it is also a wiki, this means anyone can register and edit content. There is some initial content on the site but it really needs the community to participate to develop the presentation. Don’t worry if you have never used a blog or a wiki before it is very easy. The good thing about a wiki is history is kept of every change so you cannot break it.

If you are a recruiter, hiring manager, candidate, anyone with an interest in recruiting and or social media go and make a contribution.

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting

By Riges Younan.

There is something that makes 2Vouch different from existing job boards and career sites you may have used before… The difference is that we try to expose your jobs to the top performers that are still currently employed. We know these “passive candidates” are working away doing a great job but would usually consider a better opportunity – especially when someone they know and trust presents it.

So, 2Vouch uses referrals from our members to get to this highly sought after talent pool.

2Vouch members put skills tags into the system so that we can match up the people they know with jobs. This is important for members, employers and recruiters.

Members

To help the JobGenie match up the people you know with jobs, add “network tags” to your profile. Log into 2Vouch now and add some tags. Fill in the tags that describe people you know (you don’t have to put in information about specific people, just tags that describe the kinds of people you know eg Project Manager, BDM, Software Developer).

Now the JobGenie can send you notices each time there is a job that might match someone in your network. You can review the job and see if you agree. If you pass on the job information and the person gets hired, you get paid… it’s that easy.

Employers and Recruiters

Well, if you include tags when you post a job ad on the system, it will help us to match the greatest number of relevant people to your job. This will help the JobGenie find referrers who know just the kind of people you are looking for.

By Riges Younan

We have had some good success with 2Vouch in Australia over the last 4 months. One of our plans for 2Vouch was to allow the JobGenie referral platform to support multiple countries. I would like to say that we are close to this becoming a reality.

There are a few items that need to be worked out before we can turn on international support, but we need your help. For this we have created a short survey to get feedback from users of the system.

The questions are:

• Which should be the top 5 countries that we support? - While we have made plans for a few we just want to validate our thoughts
• For our major countries what should the salary range bands be?

So please take the time to complete the survey, and if you have some local knowledge or know someone who does any additional feedback, in the comments or 2Vouch Feedback section, would be fantastic.

So watch for the launch of the JobGenie in your country very soon.

By Riges Younan

I’m preparing my presentation on Social Recruiting for the Australiasian Talent Conference in Auckland and I would like to know what questions you have about social recruiting.

What do you think about this definition?

Social Recruiting harnesses the evolution of Web 2.0 technologies and social media to communicate, engage, inform and recruit our future talent

So, it would be great if you could help me craft my presentation.

Over the next couple of months while 2Vouch will be busy launching new features, you will also see 2Vouch and the JobGenie in other places.

• First Riges Younan, 2Vouch CEO, did a guest post on Phillip Tusing’s blog Destination Talent entitled Use Social Media to engage, communicate and build relationships or RIP dear recruiter.
• Riges will be on a panel about the Future of Recruiter at the Inspecht HR Futures Conference on February 26 in Melbourne. (Disclosure Michael Specht from Inspecht is a consultant to 2Vouch.)
• Riges will also be speaking on social recruiting, and referral programs at ATC Auckland March 18-20 in New Zealand.
• 2Vouch will also be exhibiting at ATC Auckland.
• Also keep an eye out for us at ATC Sydney May 5-7 2009

You would had to have been living under a rock to miss the fact that the global economic situation is currently rather poor. The Australian Treasury released a report indicating that the average Australian family has lost thousands of dollars in wealth in the last few months.

Treasury’s broadest measure of wealth — covering shares, property and other assets — fell 9.9 per cent in real terms over the year to September, the biggest slide since the figures were first collated in 1960.

It suggests that even without a recession, Australian wealth has suffered more from the current financial crisis than from any of the previous four recessions or from the 1987 sharemarket collapse.

The trouble is not just with families, organisations are feeling the pinch as well, with up market retailer David Jones and miner BHP Billiton cutting jobs as revenue projections fall.

For the average recruiter or hiring manager when they have the opportunity to hire someone today they will experience two factors. Lots of applicants and a reduced budget for advertising.

This is when you need to use innovative recruitment practices.

Placing your job on a mainstream job board is guaranteed to get you lots and lots of candidates. But are they the best candidates and how long will it take to sort through that number of applications?

There are several ways to lower your recruitment costs.

Leveraging tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Google can help you actively target the right candidate for your positions. What is more very few of these tools require you to spend money mining their data. Yes these approaches take time, but so does sorting through 100 applications!

Of course referrals will help you save time and money.

A report by Dr John Sullivan in 2006 found that while referrals might directly cost more than traditional online job boards the other benefits far outweighed job boards.

Further referrals are also faster. Vodafone in Europe found that by focusing recruiting activities on employment brand management and employee referral, the average recruiting cycle time per hire was reduced by more than two-thirds. The “CareerXRoads 7th Source of Hire” survey supports the reduced time to hire metrics, finding that the efficiency or yield of the referral process is second to none; in 20% of the time it took 2 referrals to make the hire, and 16% of the time it took 3 referrals to make the hire.

When these other benefits are translated into business performance, significant real dollar benefits were achieved. From Dr Sullivan’s report:

Here is the scenario: (Note: This scenario omits all impacts except individual performance improvement.)

• The firm has 40,000 employees.
• It hires 6,000 people per year (to replace turnover of 10 percent as well as new positions created by 5 percent growth).
• The current “revenue per employee” at this firm is $250,000 (total firm revenue divided by the number of employees).
• If you shifted all hires to referrals, you could expect to hire people with a 14.36 percent better on-the-job performance than an average employee.
• That would result in an increased revenue of $35,900 per hire (14.36 percent of $250,000).

That adds up to:

• Added revenue of $215.5 million in just one year. (Because the new hires would also stay longer, the savings would continue over multiple years.)
• Even if it was applied only to two-thirds of the hires, the added revenue would be more than $140 million.

Even using a smaller example of only 400 employees, you would be looking at a revenue increase of $21.5 million. So why not start using these tools today!

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting

By Riges Younan.

As you know, even in an economic downturn great talent is hard to find and attract. Why? because most of these people are still working. So the job ad you place is largely about marketing your business as a great place to work.

This is even more important when you are trying to convince passive candidates to leave their current job to come work for you. You need to demonstrate that – for the right person – you are offering a real leap in experience, career development and benefits.

As you go about creating your job ad, think about what might interest the kind of people you are looking for. From my years working as a recruiter and speaking with thousands of executives, sales people and other professionals, some of the key influencing factors people look for in new opportunities are:

• Your reputation – what do customers and employees say about you? (yes, you can include testimonials in a job ad)
• Work environment – high achievers want to be part of a high-achieving, positive culture where they are valued and listened to. If this is what your company is like, it would pay to say so. Why not make a YouTube video to show what’s on the inside.
• Opportunities for advancement – the best people want to be challenged and then rewarded when they meet those challenges. How will you help develop the people who join your company?
• Work/Life Balance
• Secret sauce – what is it about your business (or even your current role) that makes you special? Why do people love working for you and doing business with you? Spell this out as clearly as you would to a prospective client

Professionals know what most jobs entail. Rather, follow the old marketing rule of focusing on your “customer’s” needs – show them the benefits of working with you – then you are more likely to attract the kind of people you want.

And, using the 2Vouch JobGenie, you will also attract referrers who know the kind of people you need and motivate them to pass your job on to them. (That’s why It Pays 2Vouch.)

Job hunting can be a very difficult time for candidates. Looking the the right job, dealing with recruiters, getting the interview, and finaly receiving a suitable offer.

Most jobs end up having only a few candidates make the shortlist for the interview stage. For a candidate getting to the interview stage means they are one or two steps away from a potential offer, they just need to pass the interview and not crash and burn.

The best way to get through the interview is knowing what sort of questions will be asked and then practice. Interviewers like to ask behavioural based questions, such as “Tell me about a time when you resolved conflict within your team?”. The best way to handle them is to follow the STAR method:

Situation: give an example of a situation you were involved in that resulted in a positive outcome

Task: describe the tasks involved in that situation

Action: talk about the various actions involved in the situation’s task

Results: what results directly followed because of your actions

While many questions are fairly standard you always get unique ones, and they tend to be the important ones. Coming up with a good reply to meet the STAR method can be tough.

This is where the art of story telling comes in.

Shawn Callahan from Anedote posted a really good introduction to how to tell stories during a job interview.

Job interviewers these days know the importance of stories. They know that stories give a good insight into your capabilities and experience. They call it behavioural interview technique, which is just a fancy title for collecting stories from you. So you’d better have some stories to tell that reveal your character, skills and attitude to life.

Every story we tell gives people an insight into who we are. They are quite revealing. So before you tell them to an interviewer it’s a good idea to tell your stories to a friend and ask them about the qualities they inferred about you based on the story. Is it resilience, courage, persistence, creativity etc.? You will surprised to find that a story which you thought, for example, was about persistence, comes across to the listener as arrogance. You will want to avoid those ones.

Shawn goes on the give a great step by step approach to developing your own stories. If you are in the process of trying to find a job this is a must read blog post.

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting

Sometimes you come across things that are really great ideas and then you find out that the people behind them are also really nice and good to work with…

That’s what happened to us recently when we started talking to “Work At Home Mums” (www.workathomemums.com.au). They have a great list of opportunities for people and are going to be introducing even more cool options shortly.

Soon you will start to see some 2Vouch jobs on the site and they will also be promoting us as an opportunity to their users. Which is great because, lets face it, when people leave the corporate world to stay at home, they still have their networks and we provide a way for them to stay in touch and add value.

If you are working at home - or even thinking about it - go check them out… and keep an eye out for the 2Vouch mentions.

Good quality referrals benefit everyone. The employer gets a quality candidate, referee is a better match for the role and the referrer has a greater chance of getting the referral bonus, building their social capital and protecting their reputation. A three way win.

Below are some tips on how to refer jobs they are relevant for both 2Vouch and in general.

9 Job Referral Tips

1. Don’t stick with your close contacts; think laterally research shows that most people get jobs referred by “weak ties“.
2. Follow through with the person you referred the job to, see if it fit them. If not, learn why, so next time the match is better.
3. If you know the hiring organisation talk to HR & the hiring manager, try not to be just a “mailman”.
4. Don’t overstate your influence in the process, remember you are dealing with people’s lives.
5. Don’t forget the rules, some companies, organisations and industries have specific rules that must be followed.
6. Don’t refer someones contact details to an employer without first seeking their permission.
7. As a recruiter don’t use a candidates references and contacts to find more prospects without giving them credit.
8. Don’t spam your social network with jobs that are not of an appropriate fit.
9. Make sure you only refer people who you would be proud to associate yourself with. The quality of the referral reflects on your personal brand.

By Michael Specht, Consultant to 2Vouch on Social Media and Recruiting