It’s been my honor to work in this industry from the early job board days to today. I’ve seen so many things, helped companies make remarkable strides, and delivered some ground-breaking thinking and doing with customers. It’s been a pretty charmed career.

Back in 2008, PSC was asked to develop a nurture strategy for a major manufacturer who won a new contract. What we developed was, in the rear-view mirror, rudimentary. Of course we asked candidates to join a talent community, of course we sent them reminders to finish their application, and of course we sent them some educational messages about the nature of the work and the company. That’s what has been done for the last 14 years.

What are we doing to listen to the complaints of our candidates and pivoting? We’ve looked at the data and here’s what it told us.

The Great Resignation: The Death Star of 2022. If you have been living under a rock or had the privilege of not knowing what this dawning era constitutes, consider yourself lucky. With the COVID-19 pandemic, extraordinary disturbances in the U.S. labor market skyrocketed.

Transparency will be the thing that transforms your candidate experience and recruiting process. Get the tips and tricks here…

Organizations with connected employees show productivity increases of 20-25%. And communications are a major driver.

Ghosting…we all have been there before. Unfortunately, this blog post does not cover how to recover from the emotional heartbreak of a significant other ghosting …. *Sigh*, but we’re just not that kind of blog.

My lessons learned as I exit the world of college and enter the world of recruitment marketing has helped me see that it’s not only the career counselling office that could help me prepare for the world of work, it’s the actual companies that need me to be productive out of school.

In my career it’s possible I have personally emailed 10 million people via campaigns or automation. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes…not so much. Earlier this year, I started working with a wonderful and supportive customer who wants to try everything to see what works. Over the course of the past three months, we have sent probably 30 campaigns. These campaigns generated an average open rate of 74% and a click rate of 40%.

Last year, it became clear to be that friction is a lever we can and should be pulling in the candidate experience. I explored the concept with silver medalists and customers alike. I’ve become increasingly convinced that we have known this for some time, it’s just that we have put all of the friction in the wrong spots (applications, I am looking at you). So, I put out a hypothesis that…

A few weeks back I read yet another blog post telling candidates all the things they do that are annoying. This specific instance aside, recruiter Twitter has been spending a lot of time complaining about candidates. Trust me, I get it. Dealing with people is very hard. Dealing with people who want something is even harder. And I also get it because, well, jobs are hard. But, can we stop being so damned adversarial.

The last year has been a lot for me and the team at PSC. A lot of work, clients, joy, happiness, challenges, you name it, and whatever it was, we had abundance. That includes an abundance of a ha moments. You may have read about a few of these here, here and here. What’s really happened in the last year was I’ve realized just how wrong we are about a lot of things.

Four years ago, I was writing for Social Media Explorer and had posted this piece telling people how their social recruiting strategy is broken. Since it’s not winter (yet!), I am a lot less grumpy, but I will say some of these nuggets hold true still (#job, I am looking at you). And since I am a little more bright and sunny these days, I figured I would turn this around a bit and tell you the five things that make your social recruiting strategy AWESOME!

I believe in the Golden Rule: Treat others how you would like to be treated. Lofty right? And I think we can all agree that we are not treating our candidates in the way we would like to be treated. And yet, the “golden rule” experience line was too wordy, so baseline it is.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how we got to be so adversarial in the recruiting game. Fun fact, I started my career as a college cheer coach. But because many, at the time, didn’t view this as a full-time job, I was titled a Manager of New Student Programs (or something like that). But in reality, I was coaching an elite, division III college cheer team. These kids were a whopping one year older than me and I was charged with not only coaching them, but you guessed it, recruiting them.

It seems a week doesn’t go by without me reading another blog post or opinion piece about all the crap that candidates do wrong when trying to get a job. My favorite was a laundry list of reasons that you didn’t get the job. If recruiting is trying to be more like marketing, than recruiting, we are going to have to try a little harder. You see, I know you think these tips are helpful pieces of content, but what ends up happening is you look like the mean kids in school trying to tell the other kids how to be in the cool club.

There are a LOT of HR Tech companies out there. A LOT. And it seems that all of them have a chat bot, ahem, recruiting assistant. The problem is, this market is getting so crowded and overwhelming that it is becoming impossible to discern who does what, what’s different, and what will solve the problem that today’s TA Leaders are facing. So, let’s talk chatbots!

When my son was 6-years-old, he was discouraged. It’s a painful thing to see your child discouraged. He was little and trying to learn new things in sports. It was hard. It was almost gut-wrenching as a parent. But as his little, upset face looked at me asking what to do, I told him when he was ready, I would tell him the secret of life.

I know, I know, listicle. I hate them too, but they are easy to write, easy to read and well, easy to share. This one is all about easy. What are the easy things we can do today to boost the candidate experience? Now, there are a TON of hard things we could do like updating all of our job descriptions to be really honest about the job and who fits in at your company, but I am focused on stuff you might be able to actually implement within the week:

One of the things I have never, ever understood is why employers are so damned upset about people who apply over-and-over again to all of their jobs? First, it’s not like people actually search their applicant tracking system after the fact anyway. Yeah, that candidate record is gumming up your ATS making it so hard to find the good ones. But what if these were the good ones?!