Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome to week eight of the recruiter skill sessions in the Jobite Summer to Evolve series. Last week you had a chance to learn about how audiences can help improve recruiting results with Amy and if you haven't had a chance to view that video yet I would highly recommend going there. Today I do talk about the different audience types however Amy does a really great job of going into a lot more detail about those and so if you want to learn more when it comes to audiences and take a look at that video from last week. But for today if you're here you are wanting to learn more about the basics and building programs to develop not only your talent pool but your talent pool for the long term. So we're talking about building out these really great pipelines and what does that entail. So I'll talk about strategic planning all the way to content planning and all of those steps in between and what tools you should really be using. So in case I haven't met you yet my name is Carly Sapp and I am a customer success training developer here at Jobite. I've been here for over two years and I've been in the recruiting space for about ten and in that time I've had a lot of conversations with hiring managers, key stakeholders about what roles do we need to be building a pipeline for, what does that look like, and really how do we do it. So I'm excited to get to talk to you all today about some of those tools and forming some strategies for making sure you can do that successfully. So let's go ahead and get started. As I mentioned this is week 8 of our 12-week Summer to Evolve series and every week we release a recruiter skill session on Tuesday followed by three more days of content which I'll be discussing at the end of the presentation. Our focus today is on the basics and building programs to develop talent pipelines for the long term. For now let's look at what you'll be learning today. I'll start by discussing what is a talent pipeline and why is it so important. Then we'll get into the bulk of the session about how to plan, execute, and analyze results to successfully build a talent pipeline for the long term. Finally I'll wrap up with the summary of each step and tell you about what's coming next in the Jobite Summer to Evolve series. While most of us in the recruiting world have dealt with talent pipelines before, for anyone who might be new or really just wants a refresher, I did want to go out and find what I consider to be the exact definition of a talent pipeline. And so according to HRtechnologist.com, their article about what is a talent pipeline defines it as a ready pool of potential candidates who are qualified and prepared to fill roles within the organization as soon as they become open and available. Your talent pipelines can be a mix of internal employees and external candidates and they can also be active or passive. So by having a talent pipeline with only candidates who are actively looking, that really creates a solution just for the short term. Instead continue to seek out and nurture passive candidates who could eventually fill a future gap in your workforce. In the end by creating a talent pipeline for a hard-to-fill or a high-volume role, it's important because you're eventually going to be reducing costs and also reducing the time to fill clock. Now let's talk about the basics in building talent pipelines for the long term. At a glance, the five key areas to consider are strategic planning, so deciding your ultimate goals, figuring out the steps you want to take and the tools you want to use to build your talent pipelines. Think about questions like do you have a time frame in mind and who in your organization will be involved in the process and at what level. Next, as I mentioned earlier, you'll want to identify your audience and so we will be talking about the three types included here which are key talent, strategic and relationship audiences. For persona development, I'll talk about what a persona is and then how and why they should be created and used. Once you've decided on your audience and persona, you're able to begin content planning. This will prompt you to ask the question of what will attract and engage potential candidates. From there, you can choose how you want to message, market and target your efforts. Finally, there are key recruiting pipeline metrics that I want to help you to understand and they will also help you just visualize trends. You can see, you know, what's working and what really might need some adjusting. So personally, I enjoy planning ahead but it can seem very overwhelming if you jump in to the big picture or the end result first. So while it's important to think of the ultimate goals you hope to accomplish, I believe the first step in any type of planning is to ask these basic questions. Who, what, when, where, why and how. So who is the target audience? What roles need a pipeline? When do we start planning? Where can you locate ideal, active and passive candidates? Why is strategic planning so important and how do we know if our strategy is working? Now when you apply these simple questions to building programs to develop talent pipelines for the long term, you can start to create a strategic plan with actionable steps. So instead of reactive recruiting, you're setting up your organization for proactive strategic recruiting. If you have a CRM tool like Jobite Engage, you can start to build your qualified talent pool for current and future needs by sourcing targeted audiences and then linking these contacts to segmented talent pools and maintaining relationships to gauge future hire readiness. Another way to put these questions into action is by adopting what we call the Jobite Evolve Talent Acquisition Framework or for short you can just call it the Evolve TA Framework. The Evolve TA Framework is centered around empowering organizations to identify, prioritize and nurture audiences that are most important to your business results. So you'll hear me talk about this model a little more in my next section about audience identification, but for more information on how your company can learn from this model as a whole, I would suggest going to Jobite.com and in our resources section you're going to see a page specifically about this. And it's really important because before I move on I want to just make note there is a section that's about the three pillars of talent acquisition and there is a focus on recruitment marketing and that pillar is centered around high quality and engaged talent converting from your pipeline to active candidates. So again we have some great tools for you to be able to assess your company's talent acquisition maturity in order to identify process areas, get tailored action plans to evolve those processes, people and technologies while also tracking your progress. So again take a look at that it's a great read and I feel like you will all learn a lot but in today's session we don't have all the time to go over it in detail but hopefully you find it really helpful. Now with audience identification this can be achieved a few ways. It can be achieved by the role you're hiring for or even the location of the role. Also based on your company's current or future needs. Another way to identify your audience is to determine what type of candidate would be most successful in the role that you're building your pipeline for. So by defining your audiences this will allow you to create more relevant content ultimately improving overall candidate experience and making them more likely to stay engaged with you. If you're a recruiter listening today you probably have a specific role or two already in mind and as we talk about audience types I really hope this will get the wheels turning for how you can start to plan right away. In last week's recruiter skill session Amy discussed how using your audience can improve your recruiting results. When identifying audiences for building a pipeline you really want to consider these three types. Key talent, strategic and relationship audiences. Now when I think of key talent audiences I often think of critical jobs like in health care or high-volume jobs like a call center. I've actually recruited for both and I know how difficult it can be to reach nurses and doctors when their line of work has them constantly on the go. But also they're always going to be an essential position to have filled and while health care sees its fair share of high-volume jobs when I recruited for a call center there was constant turnover and not all turnover is bad but if you have an entry-level job where candidates tend to get their foot in the door but then they tend to also move on after a short time then you know that having a strong talent pipeline is really important to keep those seats filled with not only quantity but quality. For strategic audiences companies develop a more targeted recruitment marketing strategy in order to engage with various types of candidates to meet specific hiring needs. This can include hiring for more diversity and inclusion, military and veterans, campus recruiting or executive recruiting and these candidates will bring talent and experience that encourage recruiters to engage with them on job boards or at career fairs that are aimed for their skill set. Now with relationship audiences this has also been called lifecycle candidates and these are people that you have an existing relationship with or are known to you because of past working or recruiting experiences. So for example this could be an employee referral, an internal employee, a company alumni, maybe a contract or contingent worker or really any past applicants, silver medalist and high potential candidates. Now once you've successfully identified your audience the next step is going to be developing a persona. A persona is a fictional representation of an ideal candidate for a role. Personas summarize key information such as skills, experience, personality traits, motivations and more. For example as a recruiter if I learned that recent college grads are more motivated by company culture than by benefits packages, my recruitment marketing strategy would be to highlight community involvement, team events and really anything else that could be related to company culture for the persona of a college intern or a recent grad. Now when it comes to developing personas for each audience it's important to gather information from a variety of interested parties. Another example of this is to make note of traits and experiences that current employees have as well as prospects and silver medalists and maybe they all have something in common. But don't forget you want to also tap into other stakeholders like your hiring managers, team leads and department heads and you want to find out what they consider to be an ideal candidate for their team. Of course if you're currently using an ATS like JobVite you can always review this type of data to spot these trends and see what kind of common characteristics are there. Now your approach to persona development may be the same but your outcomes are going to depend on the role that you're building the pipeline for and the people that you're gathering the information from. And after coming up with a strategic plan, identifying your audience and creating that persona you can now move forward to content planning. In my earlier slide about strategic planning I mentioned how I like to ask the basic questions of who, what, when, where, why and how. You're going to start to notice that while you map out your content plan those questions start to have answers. So to put this into context I want to use the example of being a recruiter for a company that's looking to build a pipeline for interns. I think that will make it a little easier to understand and see how those answers are coming up. So let's say I want to hire more than one intern for the summer. Right away I identify this audience type as strategic because I'll be focusing on campus recruiting. While hiring for summer interns would be filling an immediate need for my company, there's also the potential to build and nurture those relationships and that could turn into a future hire as well. And with campus recruiting and roles like internships you can build a persona based on relevant information that would be really specific to college students or university students and that can include experiences based on classroom projects or even to be more specific you can look at what are they studying, what are their majors, what school are they attending. Now this would actually answer both who my target audience is and what role am I trying to build a pipeline for. In order to engage and attract interns I need to be able to create messages, campaigns, and recruitment marketing strategies that this audience and persona have in mind. So if you think about it the question of when to start planning I can really base that on when school's in session. Obviously I'm not going to start looking for a summer intern in the summer so planning ahead will allow me the time to carefully choose prospects versus last-minute hires in order to just fill an immediate need. Also I can answer the question of where to locate ideal active and passive candidates. If I'm hiring interns in departments like marketing I can target the business schools at a university or maybe I want to hire interns in my engineering department. I can even send out email campaigns to just engineering majors. Building a relationship with a school usually means building relationships within different branches so I would actually need to create content separately. You know what might attract an HR major is very different than what could attract a graphic designer and that might be somebody who you use in your marketing department or somewhere else. So when you think about it I really like to use the example of college students because when I used to recruit at school career fairs I'd actually meet a lot of great candidates and sometimes these great candidates just needed to wait a year before they could apply. So because I kept this relationship going I stayed engaged with them. They ended up following my company maybe on social media maybe by email campaigns but by the time that they were juniors or seniors they already knew they wanted to come work for us and so this also answers the question of why strategic and content planning is so important. As a whole I know who I want to fill which roles and what content I need to include in order not or I'm sorry to include to pique their interest but also to keep it. So by following my strategic plan with the right content built in my time to fill clock should be quick and my future prospects should be abundant. Finally the last and maybe one of the most important questions is determining if your strategy is working. So if you're using a CRM tool like Java Engage and you're able to import contacts from all of your different campaigns or events and notice I am saying contacts not candidates because they haven't actually applied yet. So what you can do is you can assign tags to contacts that could be labeled maybe as a silver medalist candidate or even future intern for some of those freshmen and sophomore people that you met but if I were to run a report on my contacts I could have a visual representation of where and when my contacts are engaging with me and then I can build off of that for future recruiting efforts. Now let's say that you remember having a large number of applicants for a role that you've been struggling to hire for recently. You can run a report on candidate sources to see what source types attracted the most applicants. For example did a higher volume of applicants come from employee referrals for some roles and targeted job boards for others or maybe you want to know if candidates are clicking on your open jobs from your career site but most of them are actually doing this from a mobile device and not your desktop. So how many of those click rates are actually turning into application completion rates? I mean all of these results can really make you rethink where and what you're posting. Let's go back to that intern example. What if I noticed that most contacts were coming through from employee referrals and very few from my email campaigns? Maybe I go in and see that actually not many people open my email at all. That could mean that I sent it at the wrong time or maybe my subject line might have been unclear. It could have looked like spam or some kind of other email. Either way running analytics on fields like source type or contact tags this can be really insightful. Now on a broader scale you can adjust your pipeline strategy by looking at your time to fill metrics by role. You might be surprised to notice that positions that were maybe once difficult to hire for have reduced their time to fill clock just because of successful recruitment marketing and continued engagement with prospects. Now for something like evergreen requisitions and these would be your high-volume roles, it's important to review the number of total applicants within a designated time frame and determine trends there. If I notice a dip in intern applications during months that have previously seen a higher number, I would need to look at the recruitment program I put in place. Did we do something differently? Did we not attend a career fair that we did last year or maybe we didn't engage with students soon enough or maybe we engage with them too soon. Perhaps we had more campaigns that just kept pipeline students warm last year but this year we were a little late and we only targeted seniors which allowed our pipeline to go from long-term to short-term. By creating these kind of reports you can really visualize where changes need to be made or you can also easily easily show just how successful your efforts have been and key stakeholders really like to be able to view those quick and fast. Now when you begin to develop programs to build talent pipelines for the long-term just think of this again as proactive recruiting and not reactive. In the end you're saving your company costs, you're reducing time to fill and to make it even more simple, really take advantage of tools that can assist you with each phase of that program development. So if your current ACS doesn't have a CRM function, again I would consider utilizing the model like JobVite, the evolved talent acquisition framework that we have and it can point out opportunities for process improvement in really every area of your talent acquisition plan. So before creating content for messages, campaigns, and job postings, be sure to identify your audience and create a persona for each. Now once you've put all of your planning into action, review key metrics of your recruitment pipeline and adjust or continue your strategy for building a quality talent pool. I really hope that you enjoyed today's recruiter skill session. I know talking about pipelines can be a pretty hot topic so I hope that you found this really beneficial and took away some key points that maybe you hadn't thought of before. Now continuing with this theme, our next Summer to Evolve event will be on Tuesday. It's our Two Talented Offer to Onboard webinar. I'm sorry, that's on Wednesday. Today is Tuesday. The next after Wednesday is a JobVite demo day on Thursday and that's going to be about offering a seamless and virtual onboarding experience and that really sets up new hires for success. And then finally on Friday we have a break room session that will be a live chat with actor Jim O'Hare. So if any of you are local and you've watched Parks and Recreation, that name should be familiar. It's Larry, Gary, Jerry. So that should be a really interesting chat and I hope everyone tunes in. Now for next week the Summer to Evolve theme is going to be about internal mobility. But if you do want a full list of events and some more detailed descriptions, like if you're intrigued by what did I just say about this break room session, I would strongly encourage you click on the link to go to summertoevolve.com for a full summer of free content. And don't forget to get social and follow our hashtag of jobvites2e and also use the hashtag. I feel like anyone who's viewed any of our videos today, it would be great momentum for you to see and connect with other people who have been using these sessions to their advantage. Now just thanks so much again for joining me today and until next time, happy recruiting.