Standout Jobs

Chris Russell and I have only recently gotten to know each other, but we’re both in the business of helping companies leverage social media and social networking tools for recruiting purposes. So we decided it’d be fun (and hopefully educational and worthwhile) to start up an online radio show.

Enter: The Social Media Recruiting Show

Date/Time: Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST

We’re running it using BlogTalkRadio which allows Chris and I to chat, but also allows others to come in and ask questions.

Chris describes the show perfectly:

The goal of this program is to educate HR people and recruiters on the evolving social media landscape as it pertains to recruiting. We encourage anyone interested to call in and ask questions about things like Facebook, Youtube, blogging or any other web 2.0 technology that can help you recruit.

Chris and I will each take a couple of minutes to introduce a topic of interest - related to social media/networking in recruiting - and then we’re off to the races. Hopefully people will call in, ask us questions, comment on news in the recruiting industry, and so on. We’ll make it as free form and open as possible. And I think it will be a lot of fun.

So come listen in (and participate!) at The Social Media Recruiting Show (Thursday, March 6th @ 12pm EST).

One thing you learn very quickly about sourcers is that they’ll try anything and everything to find high quality passive candidates. This is especially true when it comes to people sourcing for high-tech talent, which is extremely hard to find.

Geoff Peterson has an idea for using digg to find passive candidates. I chuckled a bit when I first read this because I had never heard of digg being used in this way. And I can bet you the folks at digg haven’t thought of it either…But it shows you just how forward-thinking some sourcers are; they’re looking at every and any opportunity to research and find those great technical people. And if you’re willing to invest the time and thought into new ways of sourcing talent, you’ll end up succeeding more for it.

There’s a great article in the Wall Street Journal — More Corporate Career Sites Satisfy Job Hunters’ Demands — which relates the findings of a recent study from some of the top corporate career sites out there.

The article has a number of important and positive things to say about companies that take their corporate career sites to the next level.

What Belongs On a Career Site?

“Features that respondents say they most want to find easily include detailed company and job profiles, descriptions of ideal candidates, insights into long-term career opportunities and a clearly defined application process.”

These are the basics. Candidates want more information before they apply. They’re willing to look deeper into a company to see if it’s a good fit, but the content has to be readily available.

Click to continue →

Alain Wong joined Standout Jobs a few months ago. I should have made an announcement, but didn’t get around to it. I think Alain’s forgiven me…

Anyway, Alain is taking on a huge challenge this summer with a 3,000km bike trip from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico on behalf of the Agents of Change micro-credit fund. It’s a great cause. I’m a huge fan of micro-credits and I’ve loaned money through Kiva.org in the past. And some of the folks at Standout Jobs are much more active than I am with Kiva and other micro-credit organizations.

Alain needs your help!

I’ve posted additional information about Alain’s trip and I’d encourage you to get involved.

He’s raising $3,000 for the trip - you can donate right now.

Standout Jobs has pledged to match the first $1,000 that Alain raises, and I know a couple other team members are helping too. Gary Haran for example, found a bike that Alain could use.

Alain’s trip is going to take around 7 weeks. We’ll miss him at the office, but it’s for a worthwhile cause. And we wish him the best.

Standout Jobs is hiring. We’re looking for a Senior Business Development Manager with experience in the recruiting industry.

We have a ton of opportunity at-hand, and need someone capable of turning that opportunity into reality.

You’ll be wearing three major hats:

• Business Development - Partnerships, Alliances, Strategic Approaches to Market
• Marketing - Direct Marketing, Brand Development, Evangelism
• Sales - Direct Sales, Converting Leads, Managing Team

You’ll take a lead role in all three areas. As well, you’ll have the opportunity to work closely with the team on product strategy and development.

You need to be:

• enthusiastic
• driven, with a killer instinct
• passionate
• an excellent communicator (written and spoken)
• a superb negiotator
• able to get your hands dirty
• manage people effectively
• able to sniff out opportunities and move fast
• committed and wholly interested in the startup experience

Recruiting industry experience is a must. We’re looking for someone with experience and key relationships in the recruiting industry.

It’s also important to us that you:

• are (or want to be) involved in the startup community
• understand Web 2.0, social media & blogging (and honestly, if you’re not blogging, we’ll probably force you)

This is an opportunity to build a company from scratch. We’ve only just started, and you will play a pivotal role in our success.

To apply, visit the job description on our career site and apply from there.

The race to launch Reception was intense, but we certainly haven’t stopped working on the product. And we’ll continue to iterate quickly and launch features and improvements on a regular basis. Recently we’ve launched a number of great features and enhancements related to Candidate Tracking that I wanted to share with you:

• Candidate Sourcing. When sourcing a candidate with our Talent Scout bookmarklet you can now associate them to an open position. So you might be searching on LinkedIN or find someone’s blog and decide to bookmark that into Reception. You tell the system that it’s a new candidate, put in their name and then select a job that you want to associate the person to. It’s as easy as that.

  

• Employee Reviews of Candidates. You can now invite employees to review candidates that have applied. Those employees can’t see any other candidates. They can vote on candidates and leave comments, making it easier than ever for teams and companies to collaborate and communicate internally about applicants. To invite employees to participate in the first place, just add them into Reception under the Contacts tab.

  

• Add Files to Candidates. You can now add files to candidates that have applied. So if they send you something via email, or you find additional information about them, just attach it to their profile in Reception’s Candidate Relationship Management Tool.
• Research Candidates. Just above I mentioned our Talent Scout bookmarklet which allows you to research candidates online and attach URLs you find to a candidate’s profile in the system. You can add URLs manually as well. The goal is to collect all information about a candidate that’s online into one central place. It makes researching candidates so much easier. In the screenshot below you can see two URLs attached to the candidate. You also see links for doing research on Google and within Social Networks. This makes it easy to find information about a candidate and then grab it.

  

• Candidate Tracking Facelift. We’ve done quite a bit to improve the interface in the Candidate Tracking part of Reception’s Dashboard. It’s now easier to view a cover letter, comments, and track files & URLs associated with candidates. And you can also message candidates directly from the View Candidate page.

  
  (Click here for full view)

We still have a few more features to add into our Candidate Tracking tool, and those will be coming soon. But in the meantime these additions and enhancements will really make the process of managing candidates through the hiring process much easier.

Anna Farmery has a straightforward, practical post on social media tactics for recruiting. For someone just digging into the realm of social media recruiting, it might take a bit more elaboration and explanation (although none of this stuff is overly complicated) … but the most important thing Anna writes is this:

You don’t need a large budget for recruitment, you need a passion for reaching the right people…

She’s absolutely correct.

One of the things that makes social media so interesting (and important) is that anyone can create success with little money. And this isn’t just about recruiting. I built up an audience of almost 3,000 RSS subscribers at my startup blog, Instigator Blog and I barely spent a thing. It was all done by leveraging social media and learning how to tell an effective story in the Web/blogosphere-medium.

And it’s not necessarily about doing something insanely viral that gets huge amounts of traffic and skyrockets you to fame and fortune (although that would be nice.) Leveraging social media is an ongoing, deliberate process. There is certainly a viral component to it, but the goals you set can be quite modest.

In the near future I don’t think we’ll be arguing whether or not social media (and by extension social networking) will be an important part of a businesses’ operations - it just will be. That doesn’t mean every company will have a blog, every person will be using Twitter, etc. — but it does mean that companies will recognize the obvious value, get past their fears of “something new” and start asking themselves, “How can I best leverage social media for my company’s success?”

Social Media Recruiting

One of the challenges in the world of social media, blogging and social networking is the growing array of tools at one’s disposal. It can be overwhelming, especially when those tools are brought into an industry, like HR, which isn’t used to such massive, quick change. The key to social media recruiting is this:

1. Build a targeted audience of candidates.
2. Turn that audience of candidates into a community.

Use any and all tools at your disposal. But don’t fret about which ones you’re using (or not.) Start with something simple, experiment, test results and go from there. I think our product, Reception is simple because it combines many of the tools in a social media toolkit (blogging, video, photos, commenting, etc.) in an easy-to-use package.

Don’t worry about looking foolish - people are incredibly forgiving when they see the effort being put in to reach them in an authentic, conversational way. Social media marketing isn’t about ramming perfectly crafted messages down people’s throats. It’s about opening the doors to your world just a little bit more and saying, “Come on in and check us out.” People want that. Candidates want that, and they won’t mind if everything isn’t perfect (it never is anyway.)

From Kevin Wheeler | ERE: We are finally seeing some really cool tools that allow any size organization to put up a great recruiting website. One of the best of the tools is provided by Standout Jobs. By using a flexible modular approach, a recruiting team can put together websites with video, pictures, blogs and many other applications. Read the full story.

We have a variety of jobs posted throughout our clients’ Career Sites, but here’s a list of some great design jobs, user interface jobs and web designer jobs:

1. UI Engineer at Jangl (Pleasanton, California)
2. Designer at Well (Guelph, Ontario)
3. Multi-Faceted Designer / Front-End Hotshot or Up-and-Comer at ZURB (Campbell, California)
4. Senior Designer at Strutta (Vancouver, British Columbia)
5. Web Designer at Freshbooks (Toronto, Ontario)
6. Interface Designer at Grooveshark (Florida)
7. Lead User Interface Engineer at Yoonew (New York, New York)
8. HTML Developer & Web Designer at Wandrian (Newton Centre, Massachusetts)
9. Website &amp Web Application Designer - Vancouver & Calgary at Habanero (Vancouver & Calgary)
10. Interactive Designer at Socialight (New York, New York)

Tris Hussey (fellow Canadian blogger) was at DEMO to scope out the Canadian companies presenting. He caught up with me after my presentation on-stage to do his own little video interview. It’s not pretty. Seriously. But if you’re desperate to see more video of yours truly, go check it out:

Video Interview: Ben Yoskovitz talks Standout Jobs

Tris did the video for Intruders TV — which has produced a lot of great video interview content amongst Canadian (and European) technologists, startups and entrepreneurs.