Want to Find a Great Job? You Need to Do More
The recruiting process is a two-way street, based on good communication, information, honesty and transparency. Companies are recognizing this more and more, and doing something about it. They’re doing more in their efforts to attract the right target audience of job seekers and get them engaged. Many companies are realizing that they need to do more with their employer brand and the candidate experience they offer. Some are hiring Candidate Community Managers.
Companies have to do more. It’s really as simple as that.
But so do job seekers…
Remember, for recruiting to work, you need both groups involved - companies and job seekers - reaching one another effectively…and, ultimately, doing more. So what can job seekers do?
Willy Franzen has some ideas on that very subject, so he started a Facebook Ad experiment. Not for employers; for job seekers. Strange idea, right? But exactly the kind of idea that resonates with the fact that connecting great companies with the right talent requires effort and an evolution in how things have been done for so long.
Willy recently wrote about the experiment in his post Use Facebook Ads to Make Employers Hunt You Down. You gotta love that blog post title!
The experiment was simple - he got a few volunteers (job seekers) to post Facebook Ads targeted to certain employers. They tracked the results, and he’s now published them in his post.
Universally, the job seekers got results. It doesn’t look like anyone was hired, but they got plenty of traction in terms of increased awareness, ex-employees reaching out (of the companies that the job seekers were targeting), current employees, etc. A number of the volunteers who ran Facebook ads went on to formally apply to the companies of their choice — one would hope that these candidates bubble to the top by virtue of the effort they’ve put in.
There are examples of job seekers doing outrageous and innovative things to stand out from their peers, but they’re few and far between. Willy’s experimenting with the use of social media and social networking tools & technology to see if job seekers can do more. It’s not enough to just throw your profile online and wait for something to happen, he’s shown that there are ways of reaching out and saying, “I’m here, I want to work for you, and this is why you should hire me. So let’s do this thing.”
