Why You Should Develop Department-Specific Recruiting Content For Your Website

As the job market hopefully continues to recover, it is imperative each enterprise do all it can to attract the best talent. One of the ways this can be accomplished is through a top-notch careers page on your website.

A careers page populated with the right content shows candidates your company offers a great work environment, fantastic benefits, and above all, a fun culture that fosters innovation and advancement. Testimonials from employees, a strong list of benefits, and pictures of company events can all be very impressive to the right candidates – especially the ones you are really hoping to bring onboard before they accept a competing offer.

If you have the means to create them, videos of employees talking about your company’s culture and videos of past company events like holiday parties or company outings can help seal the deal with the best candidates. But, I bet I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, and hopefully, have already implemented.

So, how do you set your company’s career page apart if everyone already knows to include all of the items I’ve discussed above? I have a pretty simple solution, though it is going to take collaboration between H.R., Marketing and some of your other departments as well as the expenditure of some resources – both human and capital. But, in the end, I feel you will be really glad you took this extra step.

I say it’s time for businesses to stop having just a single careers page and single recruiting video that acts as a catchall for every candidate. It’s time to start developing recruiting content specific for different areas of the business. It’s time for enterprises to not only have an overview page in their careers section, but a careers page for every one of their major departments such as sales, marketing, product development, etc.

Let me explain the benefit of these specialized careers pages through an example. Your candidate is a seasoned marketing veteran and she’s decided this time around, she is going to take however long it takes to find the perfect opportunity. She goes to your site and sees the generic company video that has the CEO and the CFO talking about how great the place is and all the benefits of working there. She sees the product demo video that explains what you sell. She reads a little about the culture and a little about the executives. You feel your careers page stands out because it even has some pictures and videos from a couple of last year’s employee-focused events.

Then, she goes to your main competitor’s site and in their Careers section, she finds links to department-specific pages like Marketing Careers, Sales Careers, Developer Careers and Finance Careers. She clicks on Marketing Careers and there she finds a video of the CMO talking about the overall marketing strategy and vision, and what it is like working in their fast-paced, highly-appreciated marketing department where the CEO is still closely involved in the company’s day-to-day marketing operations. She reads testimonials from Marketing Managers, Graphic Designers and even a Marketing Coordinator, all touting the company’s innovative work and fabulous culture, and explaining how much they love working in your competitor’s marketing department.

When it comes time to accept an offer letter, which company do you think this industry-leading marketing veteran is going to choose? The company that threw up a general careers page, or the company that took the time to explain to her what it is going to be like working and thriving in their marketing department?

I know it might seem like some extra work and you might be at a point where you are trying hard to reduce costs, but the enterprises that really want to attract top talent are going to need to put forth that extra effort and expenditure when it comes to building out the careers section of their website.

Photo via Negative Space

Balancing Tasks in the Real World vs. the Digital World

I was recently pondering the complexity of our technology-driven world and how many of us lead two different yet parallel lives - one in the real world and one in the digital world. Now, I’m not talking about those crazy catfishers who pretend to be someone else, but your everyday person who constantly struggles to allocate their time between both worlds.

Let me give you a little insight into what I’m talking about: It’s Saturday morning. I have two separate to-do lists, and I must decide which of the two to start. The garage floor needs cleaning, my car needs a wash, the living room could use some dusting and there are a few do-it-yourself projects around the house that need tending – a few wall scuffs that need to be painted and a shower door that really could use some re-caulking. On the other hand, I need to make some Facebook cover images for the coming week, archive and back-up my computer files, get a jump on reading some trade articles so I can schedule my Hootsuite posts, and as always, there’s more than a few articles in my head I would like to get down on digital paper. So, which world do I work in today – the real world, or the digital world?

And, if it isn’t hard enough to make a choice between these two worlds, I also need to work on some things that bridge the gap between them. I have hundreds of old pictures and other mementos I have been scanning over the past few years in my spare time just to ensure their longevity into our years of ripe old age. Nowadays, we have all these digital memories backed up to our “clouds”, but most of us are just one house fire away from losing all of the memories we made back when we had these things called cameras that exposed light to film and provided us with paper real-world pictures that aren’t backed up to the sky like their new digital counterparts. And being a writer, not only do I have pictures that could be gone forever thanks to a little Fahrenheit 451, I also have a good deal of early writings I still need to introduce to the digital world.

And thus, this is the conundrum in which I find myself whenever I set out to get some things done. Spend too much time organizing, archiving and backing up computer files, and the scanning of pictures and digitizing of hand-written items doesn’t get done. Spend the day scanning or typing and dust starts to gather on all the furniture. Spend the day cleaning the house or completing other tasks in the real world, and that inbox and those social media alerts sure start to stack up. What is a first-world, pre-artificial-intelligence-brain-implant human who still must interface with some type of electronic device in order to get something done in the digital world supposed to do?

Well, let me share a little trick that helps me work on all of my to-do lists – the real world, the digital world, and the bridge in between – just about equally. And ironically, my trick uses a very old technology to help me deal with balancing my digital world tasks with those in the real world.

The first thing I do is maintain lists of the tasks I need to complete in each of the two worlds as well as the hybrid tasks, giving me three separate lists of tasks. I maintain my lists in an Excel spreadsheet stored in DropBox so they are accessible anywhere. If you choose to try my method and you’re not a fan of Excel, you can maintain your lists on your phone, or even on that ancient tool our ancestors called paper. Whatever media you choose for maintaining your lists, just make sure they are easy to update, and above all, can be easily and promptly accessed when you think of something to add. I’ll often make a note on my phone when I think of a task, and then transfer that task to my spreadsheet the next time I open it in Excel. This helps me ensure I don’t forget anything that needs to be added.

Then, with my three lists handy, when I have some spare time to get things done, I pull out my hourglass. Yes, I said hourglass. What? You don’t have one?! I told you I used a very old technology. I turn the hourglass over and start on the first list. When the sand has run out, I turn the hourglass over again and start on the second list. And – you guessed it – when the sand runs out again, I start in on that third list. I then repeat the process over and over again, going from the third list back to the first list until my free time has run out.

I don’t always start with the same list, but tend to start with the list that is either the most pressing or has the most items. There remains some subjectivity in this method in terms of what I start with, but if I adhere to the hourglass’s time and switch when the sand runs out, I find at the end of the day, I have worked on all three lists and made progress in the real world, digital world, and the bridge in-between.

Of course, in these modern times, you can use any clock you possess – the one on your cable or satellite box – the one on your phone – the one on your microwave – the one on the solar-powered floating radio you use in the pool – the one on your laptop or other device. Use any clock and this method will work just as well. As for me, I found that without the physical running out of the sand, I tacked on extra minutes to finish a little more on the current list, and those minutes would add up to extra hours, defeating the purpose of the method.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if you’re midway through an oil change or painting a wall, or scanning a picture, or responding to an email, go ahead and finish out the task, but be sure you don’t linger on one list to forsake the others. Just be reasonable, and a little disciplined, and you’ll see this method can work well for helping you split your time between your worlds.

Images via Gordon Johnson and WikiImages

The Failed Promise Of Social Media

Social media platforms have not lived up to the promise or the hype when it comes to connecting enterprises with their customers. Remember when we were told social media was going to replace email, and we were going to be able to easily reach our customers through their feed by posting to our own social media pages and feeds? That sure seems laughable now!

I recently read a sponsored content piece in which the author was touting his ability to quickly and easily obtain 20,000 Facebook likes for any enterprise or individual for less than a nickel each. What a great service if they were quality likes from actual potential customers, but even if they were, post something to your Facebook business page and less than 5% of your new 20,000 devout Facebook Likers will see that message.

That is, of course, unless you click on the link from Facebook that allows you to promote your post by paying them some of your advertising budget. But, that is not what social media originally promised us, is it? We were supposed to be able to connect with customers in a wide-open forum of engagement and friendly conversation, but instead, we find ourselves in a pay-to-play, hope-they-see-my-post-somehow world where we are all questioning the benefits of actually maintaining a Facebook company page, especially for smaller businesses. Clearly, the promise of using social media to easily and cheaply connect with customers was never delivered.

So here we are, in 2016, living in a time warp like it’s 2005, or 2001 for that matter, and the only way we can guarantee our message even stands a chance of getting through to our customers is via email or direct message. If you’ve got some extra time and are looking for a new hobby, maintain that Facebook page for fun, but if you want to actually reach your customers, keep turning to your email platform and any type of direct messaging you can find that yields actual customer responses.

It’s time for businesses to get back to the basics of creating engaging email campaigns that provide messaging and content geared towards their customers and the challenges they face. It’s time to connect with customers, colleagues and partners on LinkedIn and use the platform’s great direct messaging feature to stay in touch. It’s time to stop posting to social media and hoping our message gets seen and instead, return to more traditional methods of contact so we can actually get our message in front of the people we’re trying to reach. 

Screen capture by William L. Savastano

A Guide To Constantly Working

Are you the member of your family, group of friends and league of associates that is constantly working, and constantly deflecting the notion that working too much is unhealthy for your body, mind and relationships? While I have been fortunate enough to not run into this too much in my life, I know a lot of you so-called "workaholics" may run into a lot of flack for "working too much". So, to help you out, I've created a guide based on some principles that have allowed me to keep constantly working while maintaining my health, sanity and personal relationships, and also, still live a happy, balanced life.

Click here to read A Guide to Constantly Working.

Photo by Ruslan Burlaka via Pexels