Review of Enhance Media Online Recruitment Conference 2013

Last week Enhance Media held their 11th Annual conference; Online Recruitment 2013, The Year Ahead.

As with previous years the conference was incredibly well organised, lovely venue, slick registration (and with over 450 registered delegates you need to get that right) and teas/coffees and pastries on arrival. Also, their now traditional hard back bound delegate book with information on speakers and space for notes was very professional looking.

The line up of speaker organisations looked great; Nestle, Virgin Atlantic, Telefonica O2 and LinkedIn.

The event is very much focussed towards the inhouse market with lots of presentations on “brand”. Looking at the programme it was clear that despite the title (“online recruitment”) this was going to be an event more broadly focussed than that. I honestly don’t think any of the attending HR professionals minded though.

We kicked off with the head of HR for Virgin Atlantic Airways talking about brand, how it affects their business and what they are doing to connect to the brand from a people/recruitment perspective. Alex gave an excellent and quite inspiring presentation. Always handy to have a very sexy video to share! He didn’t talk much about their online activity expect to explain how they ensure all the messaging (facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc) is brought back to their blog as a central point of content. As Claire Faulconbridge tweeted on the day – the main message was “have one story. open the door to the brand and let people come in and explore – but with one story”

The Jobsite presentation, hosted by Mervyn Dinnen, shared the findings of their quarterly reviews into jobseeker behaviour, shifts and trends. He had data from the most recent report as well as looking at some trends from the past four years. The presentation was choc full of data and charts and it’s well worth downloading their latest report to see some of it. A few key stats were:

* 40% of people feel worse about their job situation that 12 months ago
* 65% of vacancies are advertised online
* 76% of jobseekers have a smartphone
* 38% of jobseekrs are using a smartphone to search for jobs
* 8am and 10pm are the peak times for jobseekers, on mobiles, to do jobsearches

Probably the key message from this presentation was to ensure that your sit is mobile enabled and consider candidate attraction methods that are relevant to mobile.

When I got to this point in my review I heard from Alan Whitford that he was writing a summary too. Now rather than double up I decided to benefit from his wisdom and so here are the key thoughts he had (interspersed with tweets) from some of the sessions:

Nestle, Ben Clark, Head of Recruitment, UK & Ireland
The Nestle Employer Brand Proposition: Development and Market Implementation Strategy

Ben was unable to make it in person – so Enhance and Nestle got together a video presentation form Ben, incorporating his slide deck. And, cleverly, a couple of pre-canned answers to questions that might have come from the audience, such as: “Does Nestle see an ROI from their programmes?” Answer is yes.

A couple of highlight tweets: Job seekers want “more of a career not less of a life. Share your content across channels, as a presentation on Slideshare, record as podcast, video it for YouTube, make it an infographic

Key point that came out for me – the move toward integration of Employment oriented brand with corporate brand, but without driving the corporate brands down the candidates’ throats. Integration of overall approaches to content and delivery and integration of social channels within overall strategy.

Enhance Media, Giles Guest, Director
Online Recruitment in 2013

Without a doubt, one of Giles’ best ever presentations. As the keynote for the conference theme, he tied together the extensive experience that Enhance has with finding content on the web (Google search, SEO and more), content channels and some real lessons on what companies need to do with their online presence to ensure great and relevant response.

Tied together the themes of the key speakers of the importance of brand and of having a joined up infrastructure and tools. A couple of key points:
Resourcing is fundamental for any brand.
Having the right platforms and infrastructures is vital to find the right candidates
The beauty of online recruitment is that everything can be tracked.

And finally, the theme of the year: 2013 : The Year of Joined up Online Recruitment

Telefonica, Sandra Crawford, European Resourcing Manager
Harnessing the power of the employer brand to drive transformational change

Lessons:
Engage with your stakeholders around a single vision (tough with 9 HR directors around the world)
Work with local audiences
Collaboration is key – work with individuals outside of HR. Outside agency such as TMP plus local brand team and internal brand teams
Stand firm when you think you are right, even when others are questioning your path

Contentetc, Craig McGregor, Head of Commercial Services
Using Words to Attract

IMHO, everybody who does any web (and offline) content should pay attention to these lessons.

Some of Craig’s key points.
Brand values are an emotive reflex
Job ads are not about informing potential candidates but about attracting them
Reaction, response and result all need to work in order for a job ad to attract the right kind of candidates
The job ad has 3 key areas – structure, tone and content
But copy more important than ever – content, structure, tone all contribute brand experience.
Recruitment advertising isn’t about informing, it’s about attracting.Describing what you do is the dullest way of describing a job…describe why you do it

What is job ad supposed to do?
1 make the job as attractive as possible
2 Filter out unwanted applicants

After the event Giles shared, from his perspective, some of the stand-out messages :

* The importance of the employer brand, both to improve your day-to-day recruitment and sustain competitive advantage
* The increasing value of research and data to support decision making in an increasingly complex recruitment environment
* The need to focus on the basics, including copywriting and the whole candidate experience
* The challenge of creating an efficient and effective joined-up strategy to link together the different elements of your online recruitment

I also collected some thoughts from other attendees:

“It was an interesting event, here at 3M we are at the beginning of a new journey implementing our new in house recruitment model, it was good to listen to some of the UK’s leading brands on how they have tackled some of our challenges. In my experience of attending such events I always think its a shame that the whole day is spent listening to key speakers rather than balancing the day out with some more interactive sessions allowing the attendees to get more value from the day. That said, I took away some learns from the day specifically around the importance of delivering a consistent brand message to both the external and internal audience. I will share and discuss with my team and look to capitalise on the social/professional network opportunity that we have!”  Ian Stilgoe of 3M – with whom I totally agree about interactive sessions. Although tricky with an audience of 400.

“For me, it was a day well spent. I felt that, on the whole, the speakers were well balanced and engaging. In terms of improvements, a punchier post lunch session and sticking more closely to the timings would make a difference. Picking out highlights, Giles Guest’s passion for his subject was completely engaging and I was stunned by the examples of un-joined up strategies that he gave.”  Marilyn Davidson of APSCo. (I have to agree with Marilyn – Giles’s presentation was the best I’ve seen him give so far.)

“My main take out from the day was that companies need to base their recruitment campaigns on fact not opinion. They need to start with research and understand the audience they are trying to attract. They can then target employer branding campaigns successfully to their audience via job boards.” Matt Gregory Head of Recruitment & Classified Sales @ Gumtree.com

So another success for Enhance Media.  My biggset take-away will be to ensure all the content I create is made to work as hard as possible via a VERY joined up online strategy!

 

PS, did I forget to mention lunch….. it was absolutely lovely as usual and there was plenty to go round.  I just wish they’d actually provide seating!!!

photos courtesy of Stephen O’Donnell