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Social Media Enabled Software That Drives Successful Staffing and Recruiting

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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, You Tube, WordPress, Blogging — that we are in a new era of multi-channel, highly-personalized, news, lifestyle and information distribution is enough to make a good recruiter or staffing professional cry.

So much chafe, so little time…

How do you manage all of those streams of information? How do you easily and effectively search for candidates across so many different sources? How can you possibly track all of your own job order related postings and activities to determine what works and what doesn’t? There aren’t enough hours in the day. And you don’t have the time to waste — you have orders to fill. You need solutions that reduce your effort, while helping you separate the chafe (all the junk out there on the Internet) from the wheat (all the good candidate and employee information you need for recruiting).

Enter Bond International Software and its three staffing and recruiting software packages: Bond Adapt, Bond eEmpACT and Bond StaffSuite.

Each of these three products is uniquely designed to help harried staffing and recruiting professionals better manage their time by reducing the effort it takes to keep up with virtually anything related to social media and your staffing and recruiting business.

For example, from within Bond software you can record candidates’ online profiles on LinkedIn and other social media sites so that you can develop a better understanding of their fitness for your job orders. You can also easily send job postings from within the software to your own site and, at the same time through RSS feeds, to your own social media sites to aid in recruiting with less effort.

But there’s more. It’s not enough that you can track candidates or customers through their online social media profiles or post jobs or send news via RSS feeds. With Bond recruiting and staffing software you can also develop and implement tracking and reporting that helps you understand the effectiveness of these efforts. You can determine the ROI of your social media campaigning.

Like to find out more? Call us at 800-318-4983 or click www.bond-us.com for more information. We look forward to helping you put social media to work for you!

Will LinkedIn’s New Recruiting Tool Replace Job Boards?

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Keep that recruiting software tuned into LinkedIn. The online professional network is about to get better for recruiters, job seekers, and – yes – even employed professionals not looking for a new job.

LinkedIn’s new tool, which is scheduled to launch in just a few months, is called “Talent Pipeline.” It’s an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter, which is already one of the best online recruiting tools out there. Supposedly, companies will also be able to use Talent Pipeline as a free-standing program, but I have a hard time imagining anyone using it that isn’t already using Recruiter.

With one of the largest databases of working professionals or passive candidates, this new tool could seriously displace job boards.  Instead of job seekers chasing jobs, LinkedIn will make it easier for recruiters and staffing professionals to find and engage the select few qualified candidates they are most interested in.  No more looking for a diamond in the rough as recruiters and staffing professional will now be able to sort through a field of diamonds and transfer the best candidates to their own staffing or recruiting software for nurturing.

Here are the Talent Pipeline highlights:

  • One Stop Shop. Leads from virtually any source will be culled, organized, and updated in one place. The recruiter, of course, gets to set the search and organizational parameters. The program will also enable you to develop one profile from many sources, so data from John Smith’s company won’t be separate from the data drawn from his LinkedIn profile.
  • Easy Sharing. Despite their penchant for competition, independent recruiters know that sharing information is the lifeblood of their work. Recruiting companies and recruiting teams also benefit from well-developed internal information networks. Talent Pipeline promises to provide easy-to-use-and-customize sharing platforms.
  • Intuitive Interface. From the demos I’ve seen, the profiles are full of crucial information but still easy to read, even at a glance. And the program as a whole seems to be fairly easy to pick up. No doubt, LinkedIn (and others) will release a bunch of free training videos when the new service comes online.

I can imagine some recruiters saying, “But I already do all that via LinkedIn and other recruiting software.” That may be true, but I’ll bet that it takes a lot of time and effort to get the important data from two, three, or more different programs. Like a lot of great software, Talent Pipeline promises nothing terribly new in terms of outcome, but a much easier way to achieve that outcome. (Need an example? Look no further than Microsoft Word. Almost everything I produce with Word could be done with a typewriter, editing pen, and some basic graphics tools – or three different programs. Word simply makes it a lot easier to get the product I want.)

Maybe I’m excited about Talent Pipeline because I’m a staffing software geek. But I’ll bet that, in just a few years, recruiters around the country (and world) will wonder how they got along without it – kind of like word processing programs today.

Can Your Back Office Staffing Software Talk To Social Media?

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Regular readers of this blog know that I’m big on staffing software, social media, and staffing software that maximizes social media.

So of course I want to ask, “Does your back office staffing software talk to social media?” By which I mean,

  • Does it seamlessly integrate with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – the three most important social media outlets for staffing professionals? You need to be able to easily import search results from these social media channels into various databases. You also need to easily move text – usually, some form of marketing text – to these outlets.
  • Does it allow you to set up automatic social media tracking and reports? Do you know, for example, how many people searched for a particular kind of job? Do you know how often people are talking about a particular company and what they are saying about it? Do you know how your competition is using social media? If not, you need better staffing software.
  • Does it allow you to easily use other social media outlets? No one knows how big Google+ is going to get, and no one knows what the next short-lived or long-lived social media phenomenon will look like. But you need to be ready to jump at social media opportunities as they arise, and that requires staffing software that’s social media friendly.

I’m still surprised that a lot of staffing professionals don’t really use social media. Maybe they have a Facebook and LinkedIn account, and maybe they tweet on a regular basis. But they don’t take advantage of the tremendous information gathering, information sharing, and networking opportunities afforded by it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Old habits die hard, and some of those old habits still pay good dividends in the staffing world. And it really is just a matter of time. Staffing professionals (including the “older generation” of people like me) use the internet and email today better than they did five years ago, so they’ll catch up with the social media revolution eventually – or retire before they have to. Speaking for myself, I prefer revolution over retirement any day!

Have questions about staffing software, recruiting software, and other tools for the staffing industry? Contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

All the Little Birdies

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If your staffing business does not have a Twitter account, it may be time to give in and get an @ handle.  There is of course the obvious reason to join: Twitter allows recruiters to post quick links for open jobs where many candidates can see them. What else though?

Actually, there are several major ways a Twitter account can benefit your business. I found a great article on Social Media Magic http://socialmediamagic.com/blog/7-reasons-business-twitter/ about how you can use Twitter to your business’ advantage. The article discusses the impact your branded Twitter page can have on followers and brings up a good point; followers can experience your brand on Twitter. By visiting your website they can see your brand and find out about your offerings but with Twitter they can experience your brand as a living and communicating entity that is trying to actively engage those that they service.

Creating a specialized Twitter page with graphics (not from Twitter stock) and your company’s logo is relatively simple and inexpensive. See our Bond-US branded page here http://twitter.com/BondUS.

So what are you waiting for? Get tweeting!