Simply Hired Blog

Target Candidates through Personalized Search

Recruiting is at its heart, a personal business. But as job seekers and recruiters turn to the web to conduct this business, some of the personal aspects are lost in the cloud. It’s difficult to learn about a person’s background without a conversation where that information is shared. So how do you add the personal into online recruitment? And how can a more personalized search help you target the candidates you want to reach?

Simply Hired works to bridge the gap between candidates and recruiters online. Information about job seekers is integrated into the site, such as their social graph, previous work experience, and past site activity. Based on this information, we deliver a highly personalized search experience to our users. This provides recruiters with superior candidate targeting to drive the best-matched candidates to your positions.

Simply Hired features that provide a personalized experience:

1. Who Do I Know®
Simply Hired’s Who Do I Know feature allows job seekers to leverage their LinkedIn and Facebook networks to get referrals for job openings at hiring companies. This feature gives users an in-line view of their connections at companies returned in the job search results and the option to message these connections. Simply Hired also personalizes a user’s search based on information found in their social profiles.

2. Personalized Search
Over time and with continued use, the Simply Hired search gets smarter—displaying relevant, personalized results based on a user’s previous job title, keyword and location searches.

3. Returning Users Homepage
After a user has performed a few searches on Simply Hired, their recent searches are displayed on the homepage when they return to the site. This provides the user with a personalized job search experience and saves them time when they return to simplyhired.com to continue their search.

4. Email Alerts
Simply Hired users can also create email alerts to receive all of the relevant jobs added to the site each day. Sponsored jobs are given priority placement in relevant email alerts, enabling employers to stay top of mind for these active job seekers.

5. Mobile
Job seekers don’t only use their computers to look for jobs – they want anytime, anywhere access. As mobile usage increases, so does the number of people using mobile devices to perform their search. Simply Hired offers apps for both iOS and Android, as well as a mobile site. Employers can tap into these tech-savvy candidates through mobile job sponsorship as well as Simply Apply, which allows job seekers the ability to quickly and easily apply to jobs from their phone or tablet.

These personalized search features provide employers with superior targeting, and the ability to reach the best candidates for their jobs.

Becoming a Social Recruiter

The numbers surrounding social media are staggering—Facebook currently has one billion active members, Twitter has 500 million accounts, LinkedIn has 187 million members and other social sites like Pinterest, Google+, and Foursquare are gaining ground.

The popularity of social sites continues to grow, especially as a channel of job search and recruiting. According to Simply Hired’s Today’s Job Seeker Report, 60 percent of job seekers reported using social networks to look for jobs this year, compared to only 54 percent in 2011. As more job seekers use social media to find jobs and connect with companies, it’s important to include social as part of your recruitment strategy.

So how do you become a social recruiter? Here are some ideas:

• Promote your company and brand through your social media channels.
• Make your company careers page sharable via social networks, and viewable on mobile devices.
• Post your open positions on your company Twitter and Facebook feeds. There are some Facebook apps that allow you to create a dedicated careers tab for your company page.
• Search for candidates based on their experience, especially on LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Participate in conversations on community and industry forums, such as LinkedIn Groups/Answers and Quora.
• Engage with candidates and industry leaders across all social channels.
• Share content about recruitment and your industry across your networks. 

One Simple Step to Accelerating the Success of Your Military Recruitment Initiative

By Emily King

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting veterans, I hear a constant drumbeat from recruiters across industries: "We can't get past the long and alphabet-soup resumes!" It takes too long, it isn't worth it, etc. Understood, and I agree. But we need a solution if we are to deliver on the promise of hiring veterans and Wounded Warriors.

The fact is that, to date, military service members are not getting adequate support in creating civilian-friendly resumes before entering the job market. The government is committed to improving this situation and is taking steps to do so but, in the meantime, what can civilian recruiters do? One answer is to parallel process the learning: while the government is working on better instruction for service members, recruiters must learn to translate "militarese." I'm all for this, but acknowledge it is time consuming, onerous, and yet another to-do on recruiters' long list of to-dos.

A better solution, I would propose, is elegantly simple and powerfully effective. Engage the veterans you already have around you. That's it. Specifically:

• If your organization has an employee resource group (ERG) for veterans, engage it as a business partner--as SMEs--to translate military resumes and crosswalk the jobs to civilian roles and responsibilities; enroll them in the screening or interview process, to establish an initial rapport with military candidates and communicate reasonable expectations. ERGs want and need to demonstrate organizational impact, and this is a value adding way to do it.

• If your organization does not have an ERG but does employ veterans, seek them out and request their assistance in the military hiring initiative. Chances are, they will be flattered by the invitation and more than happy to assist fellow veterans. It can even strengthen the bond between your existing veterans and the organization, by recognizing their value and allowing them to diversify work activities.

• If your organization is new to hiring veterans, mind your external network for those with more experience. My guess is that you are within two degrees (at most) of separation of someone who can help you get answers. They may not share proprietary practices with you, but they may be able to direct you to resources or offer solutions.

I believe that the efforts of civilian recruiters, combined with the efforts of the government, can together move the needle on unemployment among veterans. Recruiters need help removing organizational barriers to success, and implementing realistic practices to accelerate success. You can call it leveraging intellectual capital or institutional knowledge, or you can just call it picking up the phone and talking to some folks. Either way, engaging your existing employees with military service is a solution I hope you’ll consider, because the upsides far outweigh the investment of time. 

 

Emily King is a nationally recognized expert on the transition from military service to civilian employment. She has worked extensively with veterans and civilian hiring organizations, and is a frequent speaker at industry events including SHRM and ASTD.

Hot Job of the Week: Interpreter

By Annie Favreau

Looking for a job with a future? This series profiles in-demand careers and expanding professional fields. Here’s our latest pick:

Interpreter

What’s involved:
Whether specializing in Espagnol, Afrikaans, or American Sign Language, interpreters play a key role in cross-linguistic communication. 

There are two types of interpreters: simultaneous (who translation while a person speaks) and consecutive (who translate only after a person has completed one or more sentences). Regardless of the mode, your basic task is to convert a spoken phrase from one language to another. However, it’s more than a direct word-for-word swap. Interpreters must also express each sentence’s full meaning, explaining cultural references, slang, and other expressions can’t be translated literally.

Interpreters work in a wide variety of fields—including the medical, legal, political, scientific, and entertainment industries. You could assist patients as a healthcare interpreter, fly around the globe to facilitate multi-lingual business meetings, sign the lines of a play for deaf audiences, or translate between government officials of different countries.

Why the job outlook is good:
The job prospects for interpreters are expected to increase by 22 percent through 2018—a rate that is far faster than average. This jump in demand is mainly due to the growth of global business partnerships and the increase of US citizens who speak English as a second language.

What training you need:
For this job, you need to be fluent in both English and another language. A Bachelor’s degree is often a requirement, and some organizations expect a Master’s degree in interpretation or translation studies. However, if you have the right language skills, many organizations will provide on-the-job training.

Show me the money!
The US Bureau Labor of Statistics puts the average salary of an interpreter between $29,000 and $52,000.

 

Annie Favreau works for Inside Jobs, a career exploration site that helps people discover and pursue a career that excites them. Check out the website for more information about interpreters or join in the conversation on Twitter.

The Valuable Transferable Skills Veterans Bring to Employers

By Jean Muller and Margaret O'Brien

A career in the military is not your average career. Because of the military's unique working environment and mission, veterans acquire unique skills and qualities that employers desire – and that give them an advantage in a career search.

Veterans are some of the most sought-after people in the workplace for a number of reasons. Perhaps the three most prominent reasons include their code of ethics, reliability, level of education.

• Code of Ethics: It is difficult to conceive a better-vetted group of individuals than veterans. Veterans often have incredible clearances. This means they've already gone through a rigorous process of background screening and character evaluation. Now, whether a company chooses to utilize an individual's clearance isn't really as important what the clearance says to a potential employer. It clearly marks the veteran as trustworthy and able to handle high-level information that wouldn’t be given out to many individuals. This, clearly, is an asset for veterans seeking a career change.
• Reliability: Veterans are exceedingly reliable. They come from a culture and workplace that values action and follow- through. Consequently, if they say they're going to do something, they're going to do it. If a timetable is established, it will be followed. Of course these are real advantages in the military workplace, but they are also highly sought after traits in the private sector.
• Education: Veterans, as a group, are highly educated. Veterans at all lengths of service have hands-on technical skills and advanced education. Quite often veterans hold advanced degrees. In particular, 15-20 year veterans increasingly go beyond their bachelors degrees and acquire and masters or doctorate-level education.

Unique Working Environments, Unique Skills

Employers know well that veterans have numerous other advantages as employees in addition to the quality character traits, and technical and managerial skills listed above. With the diverse needs of the military come diverse military jobs, and so various veterans will find their specialized skills are also highly valuable to potential employers. Because of this, don't forget to highlight these skills as well. In the end, though, the unique characteristics fostered by a career in the military that might seem run-of-the-mill to an individual surrounded each day by other dedicated service members may just be the characteristics most valued by a potential employer.

 

Jean Muller and Margaret O'Brien are the brains behind the success and expertise of Career Search America, a recently-launched website dedicated to helping veterans transition from military to civilian careers. With a combined 25 years of experience of career coaching in the "real world," they are excited to expand their services online.