Adway at ATAP’s Global TA Day

The Association of Talent Acquisition Professional (ATAP)’s Global TA Day was held on September 1st, and oh what a day it was! 

We celebrated in true Adway style, sending our very own Sara Dalsfelt, Senior Advisor of Digital Talent Acquisition, to speak at ATAP’s all-day, insight-packed virtual event with an amazing lineup of industry experts. 

The topic?Upleveling the Human Aspect with the Help of Tech. 

If you weren’t able to make it to Global TA Day, don’t worry. We have all the key takeaways right here. This session is for anyone who’d like to: 

• Increase the diversity of new hires
• Attract “hard-to-find” talent
• Reduce reliance and spend on agencies
• Build a sustainable pipeline for the future
• Increase the quantity and quality of candidates
• Get off the boring, under-performing job boards 

What do We Mean by “Upleveling The Human Aspect With The Help Of Tech?”

To understand this concept, let’s start with why tech helps. Social media serves as a great example: 

• There are nearly 4.5 billion people on social media.
• Most of us spend an average of 2 hours and 30 minutes on social media per day (that’s compared to 1 hour and 30 minutes eating!).
• If someone used social media consistently from 16 years old until 70, they would spend 6 years of their lives on social media! 
• Social media is the natural digital habitat of coveted passive and active candidates. 

The Benefits of Social Media for Modern Recruiters 

When you look at the above data, you might begin to see: social media and recruitment are a match made in heaven! You have a huge, captive audience who’s able to spend years of their lives engaging with your company. 

Social media can be used for everything from enhancing the candidate experience (it’s their digital habitat, after all), to getting the best candidates into your recruiting pipeline, to reducing your reliance on expensive agencies and building a sustainable pipeline for the future of your company. 

Here are two more key benefits of using social media in recruiting: 

1. Social Media helps with you with Unbiased Recruiting.

When it comes to creating paid ads for recruitment on social media, there are several strict policies in place that ensure biased targeting based on personal attributes (age, race, gender, etc.) is not permitted.

1. Job advertising on social media lets you reach more diverse candidates. When thinking about which talent acquisition strategies actually work to strengthen an organisation’s diversity & inclusion goals, social media is one of the best places to start. While a diverse pipeline of passive candidates is sitting at their desk, on their couch, or even commuting to their current job, they can be interacting with your employer brand from right where they are.

Treat the Candidate Journey like the Customer Journey

There’s a lot to learn from the e-commerce industry when it comes to acing the candidate journey.

Let’s use an example from a travel agency who’s designing a multi-step customer journey on social media. Their goal is to advertise the ultimate Maldives beach trip so their target audience (you!) will buy a package: 

• Days 1-3 of the Customer Journey: As you browse through social media, you see photos of the beautiful Maldives beaches and begin to get intrigued by this enticing destination. 
• Days 3-6 of the Customer  Journey: You receive a series of ads about the Maldives that talk about it being the “best best best!” 
• Days 7-10 of the Customer Journey: You see a testimonial from a family of four who LOVED their experience. 
• Day 11 of the Customer Journey: You see firsthand reviews and ratings of how awesome the Maldives experience is. 
• 2 Weeks Later: You see another ad, this time with a discount designed to get you to lock in a deal for your new getaway!  You click right there in the ad and book the trip. 

So, what can TA learn from the e-commerce industry? Design a candidate journey that’s just like a customer journey! 

If you want to build a fantastic human TA process online, here’s what you do: 

• Day 1 of the Candidate Journey: Present the initial job offer for the company. 
• Day 3 of the Candidate Journey: Show engaging ads of people who are participating in a training and the real honest truth about their experience at your company. 
• Day 7 of the Candidate Journey: A testimonial pops up in the feed from an employee whose career growth is exploding in real time. 
• Day 10 of the Customer Journey: Rave reviews from Glassdoor appear to highlight what employees are really experiencing. 
• 2 Weeks Later: The job opportunity is there for the taking, and the candidate can apply in the ad itself with less than one click. 

It’s all about making it easy, enticing and authentic for the candidate. That’s how you close the job requisition.  

Use Social Media to Help With Employer Branding

Aside from the many benefits social media has in recruitment marketing, it’s also an incredible tool to help boost your employer brand. 

When it comes to employer branding, with social media you can: 

• Use complete transparency to sell your employer brand - this is what your people are actually experiencing. 
• Include testimonials and videos of your employees that tell the story of your organisation. 
• Highlight what a typical day is like at your company. 
• Spotlight what career growth really looks like. 

And it all culminates with capturing your unique brand essence in your social media job ads and allowing candidates to apply right there, right then, right where they are. 

Evolve from Candidate Attraction to Candidate Seduction

Candidate Seduction is your way to win the war on Talent. How?

A decision to end a well-paying job after almost two years in a pandemic to take on your job offer takes both trust and time. During this time, it’s critical that you reach out with smart, useful information and employer branding at the exact right moments, to nurture and seduce your candidates in their digital habitat where they spend all their time.

The result? 

1. You won’t miss out on the very best candidates. 
2. You will influence people who, at this very moment, don’t know what their next career move is. 
3. You save time finding talents and spend time meeting them. 

Tap into Your Social Media Network’s High-End Talent 

At the beginning of the ATAP session, Sara posted a link to the audience members as a little test on hacking social media and talent pools. She asked them to “like” and comment on the post, tagging someone who would be interested in Global TA Day, preferably a person who works in TA or recruitment. 

At the end of the session, the experiment results were in! Sara showed, in real time, how this little trick can DOUBLE the impact on your company’s job applications, reaches, and clicks on your job and employer branding ads. 

The results of engagement with the post in just 30 minutes?:

• 150 likes
• 100 comments
• 10 000 + views

The results 1 day after? Over 7000 views, + 150 likes, + 100 comments. Imagine that engagement on all your job ads and Employer Branding ads? Wow! 

Here’s how you can tap into your colleagues’ networks to attract better candidates to your job ads:  

1. Publish your job ad on social media with the help of TA tech or manually.
2. Share your job ad on your personal social media feed. It’s especially important for recruiters, hiring managers and team members of the role you’re advertising to share this ad as well. 
3. Write a personal text on the post about why it’s a great opportunity to work at your company. Make it authentic. No one likes the ATS-generated post you throw up in your feed! 
4. Get your colleagues to immediately react, comment and share the ad as soon as it goes live. 
5. Have them share how long they’ve worked at your company, why they’re still working there and loving it, and to tag their networks to get quality leads intrigued and involved. 

The goal is to set up a process where your colleagues can share and interact with the ads as much as possible to capitalize on their great networks! 

Our Top Two Global TA Day Takeaways

1. Be hands off as soon as possible.  The sooner you involve social media, automation and data-driven processes, the wider and more inclusive your Talent Acquisition funnel will be. 
2. Behavioral targeting on social media can tell you who’s right for the position and lets you leave your gut feeling for further down the funnel. This means more time for recruiters to interact with warm candidates and have a more human  candidate experience. 
3. Recruitment Automation is the backbone of value driven Talent Acquisition. 

Welcome to TA in 2021 and Beyond! 

Hello. It’s great to have you here. In 2021 and beyond, it’s officially time to stop sourcing cold candidates at the top of the same old funnel. 

It all starts with stopping the recruitment bias in its tracks and upleveling the human aspect of recruiting by leveraging the powers of social media.