This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 16

Remember:?Recruiting Brainfood?for ever green, deep dive curated recruiting + HR content. Subscribe???

Sponsored by our friends at ?? HiPeople

HiPeople is the scientific and time-efficient way to collect verified, 360 reference feedback on your top candidates. Discover how they work, before you hire.

Our fully-automated platform allows you to identify the best talent, and provides the insights you need to set them up for success. All while reducing bias and admin in the recruitment process. Hire successfully, hire efficiently, hire fairly with HiPeople.

Request a?demo or, try it for free straightaway?here??

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Open Kitchen: Getting People To Sign Up To Your Webinar

After participating as a guest on a number of online events & webinars this year, one thing has become pretty clear to me: it's a very hard to get people to sign up for stuff.

Big organisations, with well staffed marketing departments, sometimes spending thousands in budget, are struggling to get even 100 folks to sign up, with less than half that number actually showing up on the day. These outcomes can be enormously frustrating for marketers who have the good intent of putting on educational entertainment for the industry - only to be rewarded with such poor results.

I'm not expert (always remember this friends ??) but having hosted & marketed over 100+ online events for Brainfood Live On Air, there are few lessons I've learned which might help raise registration numbers, improve 'show up rate', get better audience engagement and, ultimately, secure better returns for your marketing efforts.

Here goes:

1. Promote The Channel Not The Episode

Too many of you promote single events, when you should be promoting your channel. This basically means that you're going to have to do it all over again the next time you do an event making the ROI of doing them at all prohibitively high. As I wrote in my essay on Coasian Constraints, it is essential to keep your effort low - because you want and need to be able to do this over and over again. Think about training for a marathon - you never run the 26 miles before the race. You do repeatable distances that you know you can do week after week, before you hit the big day.

I wonder how much of this is down to using the wrong software. Zoom as default, or even stuff like GoToWebinar - which were initially designed for one-off webcasts, rather than for building a channel following. There is no option on those platforms to 'follow the channel', only to register for that particular webinar, forcing you to re-market the next time you do another show.

Brainfood Live is on Crowdcast, and because it's been going for 3 years, now has 1600+ followers of the channel. Crucially, each of these channel followers now gets notified whenever I go live, whether or not they registered for the particular show. They are pre-acquired viewers - you have acquired them once, and you don't have to acquire them again. Now not all of them are going to watch your show, but some will and it more or less guarantees a base line of no less than 100 viewers no matter what the topic of the show, so your start point is already higher than the end point of competitor broadcasts. To me, the switch of marketing focus from episode to channel is a no brainer.

Top tip: though it may seem like a small consideration, think about the software you are using to host the webinar; if there is no option for the viewer to follow the channel, don't use it.

2. Simplify The Registration Form

Firstname / Secondname / Email is all you need; I get it that the webcasting software you're using may make it difficult to configure the sign up form but how easy it is for the user to register is another seemingly trivial factor which should instead be a serious consideration of which product you choose. Why expend marketing effort attracting viewers to your show, only to then repel them with a high friction form? And don't kid yourself that you need deep biographical detail on the folks who sign - at most you're going to send them all a nice follow up mail merger and hope for a nice response. For that, you just need name / email.

Besides, once you have name and email, you generally should be able to work out the rest via some basic sourcing effort - we are recruiters after all!

Top tip: if Sales complain about the 'quality' of the leads, send them this Youtube clip ???

3. Maintain Regular Cadence of Programming

How long does it take to make a habit? 18-21 days according to contested research, popularised in particular by Jeremy Dean in his book "Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick"

The book is centred personal behavioural change, but it is possible to apply the same principles of 'behaviour automacity' to other people, as you can habituate them as much as you habituate yourself.

Source: James Clear: How long does it take to make a habit

In the end, it is nothing more sophisticated than relentless repetition.

As a content creator or audience builder (which in case you didn't know, is the new marketing), then you have to be so regular that it becomes as routine to you as to your audience. You kind of have to do this in order to get people to commit to signing up to anything. If this seems like an excessive commitment, then you'd be right - it is precisely that. But it's also a quality signal to a jaded audience which has been inundated with solicitations. They will use your 'content cadence' as a method to separate the bait-and-switch marketers from genuine, committed conversation makers. A crude signal for sure, but in the era of broad institutional distrust, viewers don't have much else to go on, so consistency becomes gold

Top tip: creating content is committing to a cadence.

4. Interact With Your Audience Whilst On Air

Nobody actually talks to the audience in any of the webinars I've guested on. It's very much host + guest (or panel), audience primarily being - you know - audience. But in the era of Love Island, Gogglebox, TikTok and Youtube Reaction channels, the nature of media consumption have changed. Audiences are not passively consuming what has been served up by publishers - they are actively participating in what they consume - it's collaborative production / collaborative consumption.

In Brainfood Live, viewers are full participants in the content of the show - sharing insight, directing conversation, even occasionally breaking categories and coming on screen as on air participants. This sense of involvement is what transforms a webinar from something a person passively consumes vs actively contributes. And you get a much more impactful experience when you contribute, meaning a greater chance of showing up, for the next time.

Top tip: if you're hosting or guesting on a webinar, take some time to directly address the audience whilst on air - not pitching at them, but talking with them.

5. Respect Your Registrants Inbox

We all know it is high risk to sign up to anything. It is emotionally similar to accepting a LinkedIn connection request from someone you don't know - you're morbidly waiting for the sales pitch to arrive. Remember this when you market your channel - whenever you're asking for somebody's email, you are asking them to trust you with their inbox and they have low expectations of what you're going to do with it. You never want to meet this morbid expectation.

Your only aim should be to deliver a great experience which justifies the risk they took when they registered. And if you have chosen the platform which allows them to follow your channel, then tick that box because that is audience building and therefore successful marketing in this new era of collaborative media production.

Top tip: when people have (justifiably) low expectations, doing nothing actually becomes a positive act

So good luck in your webinars, they are totally worth doing - we need more conversation, not less but do make sure that you are not spending energy and effort in a suboptimal way. Low turnout can quickly degrade your morale if you let it.

I hope this has been useful - let me know if I can be of any further help if so. Anyways, that's enough time in this particular kitchen, onto the lounge ??

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's in the News?

The biggest news last week is the announcement by 130 countries of agreement in principle for global tax harmonisation, with the notable exceptions of Ireland, Estonia and Nigeria voting against. The rate looks like it's going to be 15%, above the 12.5% corporate tax rate which Ireland has held since 1999.

The 'race to the bottom' on corporation tax rate was the way in which national economies competed to attract location agnostic global corporations to set up shop in those places. The impact won't be immediate, but the downstream impact on hiring should be obvious, as the advantages of low tax rate regions begins to disappear.

LinkedIn 'data leak' of 700 million records, rather sensationally reported by Restore Privacy, who have uncovered an illicit attempt at selling such data.

LinkedIn deny that it's a data leak, pointing out that most of the data has simply been scraped from the website. The harvesting seems to have come from exploiting LinkedIn's API - the consequences of which will surely be even more stringent tightening of said API, a threat to any tool which is currently dependent on it.

Zoominfo explicitly get into the recruiting business with the release of Zoominfo Recruiter.

One of those 'can't beat them join them' moves, US recruiters in particularly have long used Zoominfo as a core platform for candidate sourcing - now they can do it via a better interface. Interesting to note that the claim that there are 63 million direct dial phone numbers in this system - wonder whether the availability (and legality) of maintaining this data is the reason why US recruiters are more phone based.

If you are a recruitment service provider or technology business and have any news to share,?comment below,?this is your application to get into next week's addition of This Week, In Recruiting. Make sure to @ mention me so that I see it

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's On Offer? (New Segment)

RecFest 2021, July 16th, 10.15am - 5.00pm - 75% off next 10 tickets only!

Agenda is up and it's a great line up - going to be first in-person event for 18 months for the likes of Dave Hazlehurst, Hannah King, David D'Souza and many others. Hosted by the one and only Bill Boorman, this is the right event to mark the return of events, which have been sorely missing. Best news of all? Use promo code BRAINFOOD for a massive 75% off all ticket prices. It's going to be ￡25 to attend. So, if you're vaxxed up and want to reconnect with others in industry, register here

I'll be there, following D'Souza on the main stage. As usual, the worst spot in the line up ??

If you are a recruitment service provider or recruitment technology vendor have any?exclusive?offer for the community,?comment below?with your offer in order to be included in next week's edition of This Week, In Recruiting. Make sure to @ mention me so that I see it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What's Going On?

What Does the Future of Healthcare Recruitment Look Like?, July 6th, 10am

No industry has had greater challenges over the past 18 months than healthcare. What will the future of recruiting for this sector look like? We're with Michael Blakely, MD of Equitas, Paul Foran, HR Director of RCSI Hospital Group and Rebecca Bridger, Founder of Hatching Ideas. Must attend for any recruiter in the healthcare space - register here

Brand & Culture vs Efficiency?- July 7th, 11.00am

Delighted to host this panel discussion with?Christine Ng, Talent Acquisition Partner (Financial Times),?Neil Denton, Director of Recruitment (CapGemini),?Darren Topping, Director of Solutions & Insight (Lorien) and?Richard Matthews, Head of Talent & Resourcing (The Co-op Bank). What is the optimal time-to-hire? Can we be too quick to offer? How do we manage the tension between due diligence (for both parties!) and efficiency? It's going to be a fantastic debate between some great pro's in the industry. Register?here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep116 - Recruiting in China 2021, July 9th, 09.00am BST / 4pm CST

As part of the Global Tour where we visit different parts of the world to learn from the recruiting experience specific to local markets, Brainfood Live is delighted to present Recruiting in China in 2021. It's a massive recruitment market and one perhaps one which is wilfully misunderstood. We're with Anne-Marie McCaughan, Greater China Recruitment Head (GlaxoSmithKline), Beecher Ashley-Brown, CEO (AJINGA.com) and James Morley-Kirk, Founder (China Select). Daxtra CEO Sergei Mak in the co-pilot seat. Don't miss this folks - register here

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to @ mention me so that I see it

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who's Available?

This is the space where YOU can be freely promoted to 14K+ recruiters / HR managers, if you are looking for work.

No takers last week, so I have to back fill the image space with another picture of myself. If you agree with me that we need to see less of this, comment below and be the person promoted in next week's issue!

If you are on the market or available for extra work,?comment below?with the ideal type of job you are looking for (job title, type of company, contract type, location). Don't forget to @ mention me in it so that I see it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who's Hiring?

Key Account Manager, Real Time, Sydney, Australia

Senior Candidate Manager, Real Time, Sydney, Australia

Lead Strategist - Recruitment Marketing, Proactive Talent, Remote USA

On Demand Technical Recruiter, (Contract), Proactive Talent, Remote USA

Recruiting Operations Consultant, (Contract), Proactive Talent, Remote USA

Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist, OLX Group, Berlin, Germany

Tech Sourcer, Russian Speaking, 3-6 months contract, Ultra, Tallinn, Estonia or Remote Europe

Talent Acquisition Manager - Business (m/f/d) (German speaking), Personio, Munich, Germany

Senior Talent Acquisition Manager (m/f/d) (German speaking), Personio, Munich, Germany

Talent Sourcer (m/f/d) (German speaking), Personio, Munich or Remote Germany

Talent Acquisition Manager - Product & Analytics (m/f/d), Personio, Munich or Remote Germany

Talent Acquisition Manager Engineering (m/f/d), Personio - Munich or Remote Germany

If you want your job freely promoted in this newsletter next week,?comment below?with the link to the job. No third party jobs or links to third party sites. Don't forget to @ mention me so that I see it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Whose Story?

Maury Hanigan, CEO of SparcStart has been a great supporter of Recruiting Brainfood. I asked her to join the Brainfood Tribune and was delighted when she said yes. Maury chose to write A Letter To Her 13 Year Old Self. Read Maury's story here

If you have a story to tell and want to get involved in the Brainfood Tribune, comment below with your request to be included. All readers are welcome to contribute.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who's Moving?

Etienne Besson, emerges from semi-retirement to take up a position as Employee Support Manager at Frontify. Welcome back to the coal face Etienne!

Gareth Jenkins gets a promotion to Head of Technical Delivery at Checkatrade. Great to see members demonstrate their provenance across different industries. As a manager of a 70+ person department, I am sure Gareth will still have a contribution still to make for us in the hiring space.

Joey NK Koksal gets a promotion to Talent Acquisition Partner at PVH, the company behind Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and others. Congratulations to Joey - one of the biggest supporters of brainfood channels - relentlessly consistent!

Maria Lembke joins Gorillas as Team Lead Recruitment, after nearly 3 years at N26. Lots going on with Gorillas, hoovering up some outstanding tech scale up talent. Expect more moves like this in the coming days.

Samantha Lisik joins Miro as Senior Tech Recruiter, after completing her contract at SumUp. Another ex-N26, quickly become an incubator for tech recruiting talent for the Berlin scene.

Daniel Szarbó moves up to Manager of Tech & Product Recruitment Central Europe at Just East Takeaway.com, another German scale up on a tear

Carolina Veiga gets a promotion to Global Head of Tech Talent Acquisition at HelloFresh

Bobbie Morel gets a new gig, as Human Capital Manager at KPMG

Gary Gangi, moves to Reddit as Manager of Technical Recruitment, having previously worked at ServiceTitan and Live Nation

Jason Roberts joins JP Morgan as Executive Director, Talent Acquisition, having previously lead recruitment functions at Accenture, Randstad, Cisco and others.

If you have made a senior exec appointment to your business,?and feel the wider community needs to know about it,?comment below?with the details and see it featured in next weeks issue.?Don't forget to @ mention me in it so that I see it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Are You Doing?

Roy Baladi continues to do amazing things making recruitment and job discovery accessible to most in need. The latest fork of the Jobs for Humanity project, Jobs for the Neurodivergent released last week

How does this work? Main element is the provision of coaching for employers on how to connect with and fairly assess the neurodivergent. Seems like something we all should take an interest in getting

Peter Gold, after nearly 4 years with Cornerstone OnDemand as EMEA Solutions Director, launches a new consultancy service - Mr ATS - aimed at companies looking to implement the most important core system for their business. Not many better qualified to provide this advice than Peter - highly recommend you get in touch before making any decision on this critical piece of kit.

If you are doing something new,?comment below?with what it is and share a link to where you want people to go. Don't forget to @ mention me in it so that I see it

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

End Notes

OK that's it.

Going to be hard to concentrate on work for the folks in England, Spain, Italy and Denmark this week - we go to the semi-finals of the EURO2020 tomorrow and Wednesday. Massive credit to all the squads who have got this far, but in particular the management of the England team by Gareth Southgate has been a highlight. He has stood resolute in his defence of his previously misfiring Captain, Harry Kane, been notably inclusive in his promotion of the players who have not made appearances on the pitch to date and been very clear and unambiguous in his support of the players stand against racism.

Hat tip to Gareth Southgate - I hope it comes home for him as much as for anyone.

Cheers

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of?Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.