This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 164

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Open Kitchen: 10 Variables for Impact Candidate Engagement (Part One)

I gave a talk on Candidate Engagement last week in LinkedIn's Boston Hire Connect, as a scene setter for the workshop on message composition which the delegates were to do afterward. The main theme was there were variables which influence the likelihood of a prospect responding to you. Of course there are millions (literally) of these, but I isolated 10 as being most pertinent to the workshop.

I'm going to use today's space in Open Kitchen to summarise these variables, provide citations which support the claim and then some recommendations which recruiters can use to improve the outcomes from that variable.

Love to get your thoughts on this ??

1. Status

We recruiters are very unusual people. We are the only ones who log into LinkedIn every day, usually several times a day. We are also the only people who have LinkedIn downloaded as mobile app on the phone. This is not normal behaviour, as most normal people do not regularly visit LinkedIn, which for most normal people, is a jobs site. We can often forget how episodic the job search - akin to house hunting or perhaps dating - something you do when you have not settled into a place or a relationship and but something which you stop doing once you have.

As such, because most people who are not actively looking for work, do not routinely visit this website, their job status becomes perhaps THE most significant variable to your open and response rate. Good news is LinkedIn knows this, which is why it is providing both explicit (Open to Work badge) and implicit signals (Recommended candidates) which candidates to message.

How to Improve OR: Focus on active candidates (!)

Recommendation: Segment message metrics from active to passive candidates, you are not comparing like for like. Especially important if you are managing a team, some of your members might be working on tight labour markets were response rates are always going to be low if everyone is in work

2. Employer Brand

One of the fun arguments in Recruiter Internet is the dispute between recruiters who work for name brands vs no name brands ??. We all know that name recognition is a hugely significant trigger and prospects are much more likely to respond if they recognise the employer you are working for.

I was in Montreal a few weeks ago and I had the pleasure of meeting a few ex-recruiters from Cirque de Soleil, maybe the most famous employer from Montreal. They obviously had not problem with candidate engagement as everyone was pleased to hear from such a well known, prestige brand.

However, most of us do not always work for brands which have strong brand recognition like this, especially if we operate in B2B rather than B2C space. As such, we likely feel the need to put more effort into the messaging copy in order to produce a response.

We can also work on the brand recognition, especially when it comes to EB rather than consumer brand. We should all be aware of the Cisco case study from a couple years ago, where Cisco TA felt their their EB was far weaker than it should be amongst the demographic they were most keen to hire from, and sort to resolve this by the simple (if expensive!) expedient of training their employees on how to use LinkedIn. Remember No1 - most people do not use this platform - quite a few have no idea there is a newsfeed or that you can post updates on it. A LinkedIn training course for non-recruiter employers might be the most impactful thing you could to do elevate your EB

How to Improve OR: Figure out your EB and strengthen it

Recommendation: Conduct a sentiment survey, anonymised data on what existing employees think about the business. Then conduct a survey on level of LinkedIn literacy the employee currently has. There will be something you can do between the data sets.

3. ID (of the Sender)

So here's a bit of uncomfortable news; the identity of the sender is another variable which has significant impact on open and response rate. A man sending to a man, a woman sending to a woman, a Chinese person sending to English person, a younger person sending to an older person - all of these things make a difference in whether or how the receiver responds. Most of the research conducted on identity markers is focused from the job applicant side, with the classic test case of using names which signify ethnic minority status vs names which signal ethnic majority status, with the results almost always being a handicap for the applicant with an ethnic minority name (tho dependent on minority also, there is a hierarchy here...)

There are many identity signifiers out there - this is what intersectionality means, the idea that no single identity marker can fully describe any one person - and we end up focusing on one or two dimensions within a certain context. When it comes to sending outreach, job title, gender, ethnic identity, age, location - all are identity markers which impart information to the receiver and influence the response.

In most cases, we are unwilling or unable to change these markers or would find it fraudulent or even illegal to do so, so we are most often stuck with what we have. However, given that it makes a difference, we should factor 'identity of the sender' when we measure KPI's on message conversion.

It should also be noted that the identity of the receiver is also a significant variable. We are all subject to affinity bias - feeling more secure when connecting with people with whom we share some sort of affinity - a sports team, a language, a nationality, a religion and so on. In fact, we often make use of that affinity to establish rapport in first contact scenarios, precisely because we want to escalate the relationship from 'stranger danger' to 'actually might be a friend'.

So, identity is the most complex of the variables out there and one which perhaps have least ability to control. However, we can do something.

How to improve OR: Analyse the outcomes of your outreach based on identifiers of the receiver. Do you do better with some demographics rather than others (you should)?

Recommendation: Clearly signal your interest and inclusive approach in connecting with all kinds of demographics - do this on your LinkedIn cover image or other high visibility profile area. (If people do read your message, they are likely to cross reference you in some way)

4. Date / Time (of the message)

I'll keep this one short, because we already know that this matters. On aggregate, across the whole platform, we know that messages on LinkedIn work best on Mondays, Tuesday and Wednesdays, begin to decline on Thursdays, drop really badly on Friday's before becoming effectively pointless on Saturday / Sunday.

Again a reminder that recruiters are weird - we are almost certainly the only demographic which might possibly login into LinkedIn on Saturday.

Most people who work regular shift are in work mode Monday through to Thursday before seriously flagging on Friday and then switching off for the weekend. The usual caveats apply - senior exec probably any time is a as good as any other as no time is good, shift workers, time zones - all need to be factored in, but the base line of Mon-Thurs probably holds true in the general case.

How to Improve OR: Focus on outreach in the early part of the week, shift to non-outreach related work for Thursday / Friday

Recommendation: Through in the odd randomly timed message. When there is a clear trend to follow, it is always worth while introducing some chaos into an overly ordered system.

5. Channel

LinkedIn is primarily a desktop / laptop platform. It was created by Reid Hoffman in the early 00's for exactly the demographic of white collar knowledge worker, whose days were spent mostly looking at screens and typing into keyboards. However, the majority of the people on this planet - the majority of current and future job seekers - do not perform this type of work. We have variously described these workers are 'front line', on-premise, manual workers. In the Covid era, we called them 'essential workers', which is the most accurate description - these are the people who keep society moving. For these workers, the desktop / laptop is not the primary device, it is the mobile phone.

The global adoption of the smartphone has been astonishing. For those who were introduced the mobile tech before Apple debuted the iPhone in 2008, we would be astounded to know that less than 15 years later, over 90% of internet users had such a device. Not eveyone has a laptop, but almost everyone has a smartphone.

We also have a much more intimate relationship with the smartphone. We touch it 100+ times a day, it is always in arms reach, we panic when it is out of line of sight. Quite a few of us sleep with a smartphone, right there in bed. Very few, if any of us, sleep with our laptops!

The smartphone is a device which we now have a close-to-cybernetic relationship with. We can't do without it, stare at it a lot and - with the movement of AI onto the phone - we will soon be spending more time with it than ever before.

As such, it is a much more powerful moment to connect with someone over a mobile connection vs a laptop one. Exchanging WhatsApp details is much more intimate than exchanging email.

I am saying all this because we need to choose our channel wisely; the laptop remains default, but only for knowledge workers. And if we are seeing that email / Inmail starts trending down no matter what techniques we employ, it is likely that it is because people at large are spending more time on phone vs laptop.

How to Improve OR: write for mobile, even if sending via laptop to laptop. We are self training ourselves to favour mobile-like messaging

Recommendation: Develop the skill of concision.

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

Founders Focus - Ep42 - Up close and personal with Tycho van Paassen, Co-founder, VONQ, Weds 15th May, 12pm BST

Founders Focus is the series where we get up close and personal with the people who are changing the world of work with their technology products. VONQ have been at the forefront of programmatic / job ad distribution, yet often doing so in the background and have far more impact than people might realise. Delighted to have persuaded founder Tycho van Paassen to talk about his founder journey. We're on Weds 15th May, 12pm BST. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep257 - Recruitment Automation Tips You Can Do Right Away, Friday 17th May, 2pm BST

What we need is examples. We have talked about AI & automation in recruitment for over a year now since the advent of ChatGPT, but so far too many of us have struggled to move beyond experimentation into transformation. Lets get some experts in to tell us how to do it. We're with Martyn Redstone, AI Automation Consultant (PPLBOTS), Bret Feig, VP Talent Acquisition (Zip Co), Mike Wolford, AI Implementation Consultant (Eponymous) & friends - register here

Founders Focus - Ep43 - Up close and personal with Reiner Bruns, CTO, Scotty AI, Weds 21st May, 12.00pm BST

We continue with Recruitment Automation, this time with the idea that perhaps a company might actually solve a great deal of the optimisation problems for us. That is the huge ambition of Scotty AI - a recruitment assistant which will accompany recruiters at every stage of the hiring process. Imagine becoming the x100 recruiter if you had Agentic AI which could take on your workload. Lets talk to the guy who is building it, Reiner Bruns, CTO of Scotty, in Founders Focus Register here

How to Build An Effective Employer Brand Ambassador Programme,

How do we improve an organisations 'recruitment capability'? The role of the recruiter in this framing is not just to do all the work but to find ways to activate GenPop to actively support the hiring, whether through EB, brand advocacy, referral promotion and the rest. Think about what this means: if we can get 1% improvement from every colleague when it comes to recruiting support, we would have a significantly improved hiring capability. Lets figure out how to do this: we're with Alex Her, Head of Global Employer Brand (GoDaddy), Vicki Saunders, Founder (EVP Consultancy), Charu Malhotra, Global Talent Attraction Leader (ex-Unilever) and Sam Davies, CEO (Real Links). Register here

AI Skills & Tech Talent Summit, Thursday 23rd May, 1-5pm, The Royal Society, London

What is the state of software development in the era of AI? Perhaps the one sector which stands to be most impacted by artificial intelligence is the sector which did most to bring it about. We're going to review data points from thousands of employers on what skills they are hiring for, how they are assessing for them and what this means for tech hiring. NB: this is for TA AND Tech Leaders, so if you want to bring your CTO, say so...register here

How to Make Data Driven Recruitment Decisions in SME's, 28th May, 2pm.

Data Driven Decision making - DDD - was the way in which TA would move away from gut feel hiring and toward the a more objective, fairer and more efficient way of doing things. Can it be done in an SME? And if you're the solo recruiter, what do you need to do in order for it to be effective? We're talking about this in the next episode of the Tribepad Gro series. 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 at mention me so that I see it

Who's Hiring?

Recruiter for SpaceX? I need to do a show on space hiring - one of the growth sectors surely, though I suspect the employment rate is low. Anyhow, more new recruiter jobs every day scrapped from around the world on employers own domains. Check it out here

End Note

Back in the UK for next few weeks and looking forward to being around for a bit. Anyone off to Whitstable this Thursday, I look forward to seeing you all there, even though it will only be a single day / night for me there.

Everyone else in London, lets hope the weather returns to some decent sun like we had this weekend.

Have a great weekend.

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.