- Now we're going to turn our eyes towards
the recruiting function because this is
a very special relationship between
an HR professional, the recruiter, and a candidate.
Somebody who's not even an employee yet.
And I think this is a key place to begin this discussion,
because you begin a relationship with an employee
before they even joined.
The very minute they come in contact with your brand,
your talent brand.
How do they think about it?
How do they engage with it?
And very frequently it'll be in a digital channel.
So, from a recruiter's point of view,
thinking abut this relationship,
you have to think about the talent brand.
And how are you developing it?
And I think a very smart thing for an HR person to do
on the recruiting side,
is to go talk to your counterparts in marketing.
Because they have been living and breathing how
to create experiences,
how to create brand in digital channels
for over a decade now.
And they can take a lot of that great learning
and bring it into the HR experience,
into the candidate journey,
and be able to mark out where in that journey
are things not happening as smoothly as they could?
Where are the places where you can use digital
to bring people though those hurdles?
And across those barriers?
Another key area that's changing while recruiting
is the actual relationship with candidates.
Again, how did you find them?
It was through networks,
maybe you knew somebody, somebody would refer you,
and then also how would you stay in touch with them?
Now with digital you can identify a much broader swath
of people and you can also approach them in ways
where it's not an overt outreach to them.
But you're nurturing a relationship by giving them content,
maybe through your Linkedin page,
maybe through content on your website associated
with talent brand.
But I think the most interesting area is how you can change
and transform the relationship between a recruiter
and a candidate.
We know now that people who are actively looking
for their jobs are far and few between.
Most of the people who you actually want to hire
are the passive candidates,
the people who aren't looking for a job.
One organization I spoke with talked about how
they were nurturing a relationship with a PhD,
who was working at another company
and this went on for years.
They both knew that this would be a great opportunity
for that person.
But the timing wasn't right.
So the recruiter,
rather than bombarding that PhD with lots of emails,
just stayed in touch,
very light touches, through social media.
Through digital channels.
And could see that the timing was right.
That things had changed in this person's life,
and could put the right outreach to that person,
at the right time to be highly relevant to them.
What digital does,
it transforms the way we communicate.
The way that these relationships are formed,
but also the nature of these touches.
Instead of being something that's hard
and difficult to do,
especially with artificial intelligence on it's way,
we can now programmatically understand when people want
to be reached out to,
and to reach out to them in a very smart
and relevant way.