WHITE PAPER
Automated for
the people: how
technology can bring
your brand to life
We all know robots are coming.
We live in the age of the processor
and share our homes with the
Internet of Things. Artificial
intelligence (AI) is with us today
and will be even smarter tomorrow.
The rise is inevitable.
But far from undermining efforts
to personalize the experience of
working with your organization,
perhaps the robots can help
. In
extending the power of referral
Employee referral (ER) has long been established as one of the most potent sources for economical, culturally aligned, efficient hiring. Organizations that get their ER programs working well not only bring in expert talent, but also improve the engagement of the existing workforce by acknowledging and rewarding their involvement in some way (which need not always be financial). Technology is helping to take this idea one step further. Historically, our capability to refer would be limited to the breadth of our network. While that is still largely true today, what’s changed for nearly all of us is the scale of that network. LinkedIn is, of course, the strongest example of this, but Twitter, Facebook, Stack Overflow, Instagram and others are examples of platforms which enable us to cultivate connections through shared interests or backgrounds.
So suddenly we may have several hundred, or thousand, potential individuals we can refer into our organization at any time. To convert this potential into value, we need a little help.
Firstly, we need our referral platforms to be able to share potential openings and other content with our social networks at scale. RolePoint and others are predicated on exactly that capability, giving every participating employee the opportunity to share live requisitions with either specific individuals or entire networks in just a few clicks. Of course this is great, but the real win is a platform that can also help match the skills and abilities of social networks with the requirements of our business. It’s not uncommon to have many, many connections built on little more than attendance at the same event, and it’s not likely that we will have a strong grasp of those individuals’ current situation or career ambitions. Simply sending live role alerts to everyone risks irritating your network and causing you to lose much more than a potential referral.
Matching algorithms can now deliver “scores” to predict the strength of match between role requirement and individual profile. The human remains in control, and it is with us to approve this match and make the referral. But it is a process that can dramatically improve visibility, keeping every single role and every single contact in scope when considering a referral. Being matched to a specific role should also feel much more personal than being sent a broad list of open requisitions. As these platforms improve their accuracy, they pose questions about the way referral programs have historically been established and rewarded (a topic for another day).
As seamlessness and relevancy grow in importance, it is interesting to note that some of the advanced Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) providers (more on them later) are also seeking to integrate an employee referral element, delivering consistency by retaining every communication within a single digital eco-system.
Matching algorithms can now deliver
‘scores’ to predict the strength of match
between role requirement and individual
profile. The human remains in control,
and it is with us to approve this match and
make the referral.
encouraging employees
As a skeptical public relies less and less on corporate messaging and more and more on peer reviews, the more we help existing staff “sell” on the company’s behalf, the better we fare. Many things need to align for this approach to achieve all it can, including cultural challenges and adequate training, but technology again has a key role to play.
bringing artificial intelligence
to life
Automation considers repetitive process elements that might be carried out more efficiently by a computer. This can have a transformative effect on how we recruit, and how candidates feel about the process. And it is only the beginning.
Growing investment in AI is continuing this evolution. It’s not enough to simply automate a process with technology. It should learn, seek improvements and grow smarter and better over time.
As one example, wadeandwendy.ai is being developed from a premise of making recruitment human again. Wade is a personal careers assistant, helping you find the right roles and opportunities by learning your skills, interests and capabilities. He doesn’t forget and is able to make quick, key connections between what you are able to do, interested in doing and what is available. Wendy works in-house, driving performance in talent acquisition functions by improving
communication, ensuring the process runs smoothly or facilitating group conversations (via use of the Slack communications platform) to refine a role profile or discuss potential candidates. Wendy is all about helping the process happen effectively and efficiently, which is fundamental when candidates drive the market and when many recruiters and managers are so time constrained. Wendy stops that great candidate from slipping away.
What really takes time and might shift the game is that AI is being taught how to communicate, how to chat in a window like a human and ask questions like a human. Conversation allows them to
understand the nature of a role and the capabilities of an individual. This capability is what makes Wade & Wendy, and their ability to remove robotic processes and support human communication, the possible future of recruiting! Read more here. and enable sharing of that content in just one
or two steps. Features include prewritten status updates, a choice of social media channels and availability on desktop and mobile. These platforms are built to remove every practical obstacle that might stand between your brand stories and the networks of your people. Beyond the requests we make to support talent attraction, there are associated benefits that even the most time-pressed executive will find difficult to ignore. Cultivating your personal brand continues to grow more important and is achieved using the visibility of social media and the simplicity of self-publication to build our online reputation. Such tools are designed to help make the latest thinking and content available quickly on a topic-by-topic basis. They can play a huge part in raising individual visibility and credibility. The dotted line is that it can also have the same impact on the reputation of the business. Think about how your view of an organization can be affected by the online presence of its leaders with out-of-date profiles. What does this say about the organization? Do you want to work there? Do you want to award them your business? Like it or not, the collective social footprint (both in scale and messaging) is an increasingly critical factor in how an organization is
perceived as a place to work. Starting — and often ending — with Glassdoor, businesses are facing the challenge of accepting that while they may own the brand, ownership of how that brand’s reputation is constructed and maintained is an entirely collective effort.
personalize even when
you’re not there
Today’s candidates are more inquisitive than ever. The success of Glassdoor and the growth around the development and deployment of an employer brand are both, in part, effects of interacting with an audience that has a thirst for information and an expectation that they will find it. Not being a part of the conversation is no longer an option.
But candidates are also looking for something that feels personal to them, something tailored to their wants and questions. Chat platforms such as Brazen enable organizations to offer this sense of personal interaction at scale. As an example, many forward-thinking companies are reassessing their historic campus recruiting strategies, where they sink the majority of their attraction budget into big-ticket events on 10 to 15 (of the same) campuses. Social mobility, gender balance and an interest in broadening junior talent intakes have the potential to similarly broaden the number of campuses from which an employer may recruit.
Innovations such as PathMotion can help you do this at arm’s length. Run through Facebook, it enables you to set up and run group chat events focused on a particular topic or one-to-one conversations between candidates and employees. They can be marketed via Facebook and other channels, and attendees can engage from the comfort of their desk.
From a candidate point of view, the benefits extend beyond convenience and access to brands they normally might not have. Of course the events offer the opportunity to anonymously ask the awkward, difficult questions that might otherwise prevent you from applying or continuing the conversation. It also provides a chance for the ultra-shy to be
Online events provide a rich transcript of
fresh content to share, as well as useful
insights on areas of the process or the
business that pose most concern to
potential candidates.
on areas of the process or the business that pose most concern to potential candidates.
Brazen has a similar approach, centered on establishing and running a series of chat-based events conducted via whichever mobile device you are happiest on. It is text-based, simple to use and specializes in the kind of informal conversation that particular candidate groups find most natural. Other providers offer similar interaction opportunities. If we want to engage with a candidate and begin to build a meaningful relationship, we need to find a way to communicate. This means opening a channel and being available on the platform or device that best suits them, not us. Our brand has to be about convenience for our candidates, not ourselves.
building long-term relationships
If we are doing our jobs well, we will always deliver more superb candidates than there are live vacancies. Our brand attracts them or our sourcing capabilities draw them in. Either way, it’s important we provide a healthy pipeline from which a final choice can be made.
What then of every candidate unlucky enough not to get the offer? These are the so-called silver medalists — highly qualified and of real interest to the business, but thwarted by another candidate who performed slightly better. What also of those great candidates with whom we engage but whose time to join us is yet to come?
listen and learn
The world has never been noisier than it is today. With so much being said, and shared across so many channels, it is a huge challenge for any organization to accurately and consistently keep on top of those conversations. Not to do so is becoming less and less an option because the power of these myriad conversations to affect every element of your business — from the value of your stock to your ability to attract future workers in the right numbers — is growing rapidly. Fortunately, technology is available to help you pull this wall of noise into individual conversation strands, giving you the chance to listen to every single human voice that has a story to share about you and your business.
Organizations such as Brandwatch or Sprout Social offer the capability to monitor your brand and specific keywords across social media channels, reporting on important areas such as trending themes, sentiment and share of voice against select competitors. You can also leverage actionable insight for recruitment and attraction teams. Such information can be a genuine value-add for colleagues across other areas of the organization, right up to the C-suite. While an individual can be disregarded or ignored as a lone dissenter, the ability to generate trends around topics and recurring commentary can be hugely important and compelling. It can — and should — be the catalyst for business change; a sign that you are listening and prepared to act.
Using platforms such as Meltwater, you can extend a search beyond social and into news media. These innovations allow you to select parameters such as specific channel, territory and timeframe; nurture their careers, until the time is mutually
right for them to join.
Of course, this is in essence a database, something many large recruiters have had for years. These are huge repositories of partly qualified candidate profiles, people we met at events, CVs imported from external databases and many other sources. And for any number of years communication has been pretty impersonal and sporadic, leading to candidates disengaging and data on them swiftly becoming outdated, failing to account for life or career changes. This may have helped clear some tasks from a recruiter’s desk but will have done little for the candidate experience.
Today’s CRM platforms such as gr8 People, SmashFly or getTalent are built much more around the idea of genuine community
building. The technology now exists to slice your talent database into a vast array of different pools and to share with them content that is relevant, targeted, even exclusive to them. Competition for great talent will extend to these community hubs, where strong people will be targeted by multiple brands with competing promises. Individuals will make decisions on whether to join or leave one of these communities based on a perception of the value they receive.
Such systems also have an important role to play as the nature of relationships with our employers shift. As companies rely more and more on a growing capacity and desire to flex their workforce, engagement with an audience of temporary contractors, gig workers and highly skilled freelancers is becoming more and more critical. The employment tenure may be short-term or infrequent in nature, but to ensure you are able to maximize the power of their impact, the relationship with them should be ongoing and ever deepening.
To help facilitate these more dynamic types of employer-employee relationships, systems now also enable two-way conversation, changing the nature of the candidate from very passive to dynamic, involved and engaged. CRMs today add a high level of value that is highly personal and human.
export it all into a highly visual dashboard; and share insights across stakeholder groups regardless of their level of understanding. Why is this insight important? It can help you pick out all the headlines (good or bad), but the real value is being able to track which publications and journalists are mentioning you and the subjects covered. Spotting trends here can indicate how successful your communications strategy is in translating the topics you wish to be known for in your target communities. The greater the overlap, the better the job you are doing.
This is all about taking huge volumes of information and making them personal — to your organization and to individual voices across social or news media.
the point is it’s personal
And that really is the point. All of these technologies are about adding elements of personality, individuality or humanity into a candidate experience that
sometimes feels like it has become too automated and efficient. Candidates now expect it from all their purchasing experiences. Personalization enables us to go places that would otherwise prove impossible. It shows our successes and highlights our failures in detail so we can do something about them. It knows us, even just a little bit.
Businesses that are best at attracting and engaging candidates and then helping them perform and advance can leverage these employees as ambassadors. Because they represent so many varied success stories, their experience can help create tailored messages for every interested candidate. The technology now exists to make that a reality, whatever the size of your company.
When it comes to technology, we often envision it leading to a cold and impersonal experience. The reality is that given today’s HR technology landscape, if you want to deliver an experience that feels very human, you need to embrace some robots.
atificial intelligence (AI)
Wade & Wendy
candidate communication employee engagement/advocacy referral platforms RolePoint
employer branding technologies included in this research
employer brand fitness test
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about Randstad Sourceright
Randstad Sourceright is a global integrated talent solutions leader, driving the talent acquisition and human capital management strategies of some of the world’s most successful employers. We help these companies discover and develop their “Human Intelligence Advantage” by quantifying the true impact of their talent strategies.
Our subject matter experts and thought leaders around the globe continuously build and evolve our approach and solutions across Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), Managed Services Programs (MSP) and Integrated Talent Solutions.
Read more at randstadsourceright.com
about the authors
Michel Stokvis is the managing director of Randstad Sourceright’s Talent Innovation Center. With more than 20 years in the industry, he has deep experience in RPO and MSP solutions, having served on both the client and provider side. His previous roles have spanned across numerous global markets and provided an opportunity for him to work with a variety of companies in many sectors.
