Best Buy, Macy’s and Target are examples of leading national retail chains that are recognized by consumers across the globe. Our ability to identify these companies based on a logo, slogan, color scheme or product line is a direct result of their extensive branding strategy. Strong branding makes it clear to the end user what a particular company is and is not. In the case of a job seeker, personal branding is used to help a candidate establish themselves as industry experts, build strong reputations, and increase their perceived value.

Personal branding typically begins with the resume to outline work history, skills, accomplishments and quantitative facts. While this is the correct thing to do, unfortunately, it requires more than a hard copy snapshot of your knowledge and expertise in order to overcome the difficult hurdle of getting noticed. According to a recent study by Burson-Marsteller and Proof Integrated Communications, 22% of Fortune 50 companies use Quick Response or QR codes as a consistent element of their marketing efforts to enhance the customer experience.

Considered to be the future of personal branding, QR codes allow consumers to access content through their Smartphones. By taking a picture of the actual code with a camera phone, QR Reader applications scan the image which directs the user to a particular web page or video. In the case of Best Buy, Macy’s and Target, these industry leaders have placed QR codes on buildings, in advertising materials and on the Internet to direct customers to exclusive video content about decorating advice, fashion inspiration and style tips.

Featuring a personal QR code on your resume is another way to lead potential employers to your brand. The resume will effectively give them an instant snapshot of your knowledge and expertise, while the QR code can go a step further and lead them to your personal blog, career portfolio, LinkedIn page or a video presentation. Of course we are not all technologically savvy, and there will be hiring managers that may not completely grasp the concept of QR codes. However, including one on your resume not only lets you stand out from the crowd, but also demonstrates your ability to stay up to date on trends and build a presence through multiple outlets.

There is no question that the future success of a candidate depends on their ability to build and develop a professional brand. Thinking out of the box can maximize candidate exposure while giving the employer yet another place to get to know them better.

Survey after survey confirms that job seekers are starved for human interaction in their quest for employment. All too often, their applications aren’t acknowledged, their phone calls go unanswered and their visits to corporate career sites feel like a solitary journey through the wilderness.

Now to be fair, this situation is often beyond the control of recruiters. They are hostage to their corporate budgets, policy and technology. They don’t cut the staff so much that each recruiter handles 50 or more  open requisitions. They don’t buy applicant tracking systems that only machines could love. And, they don’t assign more priority to finding prospects than to building relationships with them.

That said, today’s Hunger Games of Recruitment are harming employers’ brands and employee loyalty. They leave talented people – but especially top performers – feeling starved of respect and any sense of opportunity.

So, what’s to be done? How can the desolate arena of today’s recruiting process be transformed into a more benign or, even better, a more engaging environment?

The Power of Personalization

Given the very high probability that recruiting budgets and staff levels will remain depressed, any strategy to enhance the humanity of the recruiting process must, ironically, avoid the requirement for additional recruiter participation. So, how can it be accomplished?

The answer is to tap the power of personalization. We may be hostage to corporate budgets, policy and technology, but we do control our content. We can and should revise the messaging that defines our recruiting institutions to make them more respectful of individuals.

Most corporate career sites, for example, treat all visitors as “generic candidates.” Their content is seldom tailored to the unique aspirations, interests and even vocabulary of the demographic cohorts for which an employer recruits. Other than a special tab for recent graduates and, occasionally for diversity job seekers, most sites simply ignore the very real differences between sales professionals, HR practitioners, engineers, accountants and the members of every other career field.

The same is true on most corporate Facebook pages and LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. In fact, the institutions in the vast majority of recruiting processes deny people their workplace identities and, as a consequence, leave them hungry for even a modest level of individual recognition.

Overcoming this depersonalization means restyling the communications of our institutions to create a specialized sanctuary for each of the major demographics for which we recruit.  Whether it’s on our corporate career site or an outpost on a social media site, we must give the individuals in these career fields a place where they can feel at home among their peers. That means our content should use their language, address their questions and issues and, optimally, translate our employer’s value proposition into a theme that resonates with them.

Admittedly, this strategy is imperfect. It does require an investment to implement, but that commitment is far less than what would be required to staff a recruiting process for true human interaction. And, the strategy does not transform a recruiting process into an attentive and caring experience, but it does offer candidates more dignity and respect than they’re getting today.

Obviously, corporate recruiting processes have none of the violence and depravity of the fictional hunger games. But, all too often, they do starve candidates of their individuality and thus deprive them of the respect they believe they deserve from employers. Since injecting more one-on-one interaction into the experience is not fiscally feasible, the best way to correct this situation is with the power of personalization – the simple recognition of the differences candidates have worked to establish among themselves.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit Me at Weddles.com

Peter Weddle is the author of over two dozen employment-related books, including WEDDLE’s 2011/12 Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet, The Career Activist Republic, Work Strong, Your Personal Career Fitness System and Recognizing Richard Rabbit. Get them on Amazon.com and Weddles.com today.

© Copyright 2012 WEDDLE’s LLC. All Rights Reserved.

There is no doubt that one of the most essential components of success lies in your ability to carefully assess certain factors such as market share, industry trends and competition. Having a basic understanding of your industry is essential to defining opportunity and understanding how changes in the market may help or hinder your career center activity. Keeping an eye on key issues and trends in your industry can allow your association to take a more tactical approach to future marketing plans and anticipate changes in your industry that may potentially affect the successful execution of these tactics.

Association partners that consistently use third-party resources to gauge the competition and study market trends are often at an overwhelming advantage. Having a keen understanding of this valuable information will provide benchmarks for performance measurement and rationale for specific marketing tactics. Because market conditions are constantly changing so will your career center strategies. Proactively monitoring these trends will allow you to make necessary changes based on where the jobs are, how your industry is changing, recruitment cycles and average salaries.

Here is a list of free resources that can be used to monitor and forecast the growth of your career center.

The Conference Board – The Conference Board publishes the Help Wanted Online and the Employment Trends Index to provide organizations with the necessary tools to excel in business. According to the April report, labor demand continues to rise for the fifth consecutive month in a row, with online vacancies showing a significant increase in both legal and administrative support professions compared to 2011. Data found in these monthly reports is useful for analyzing the latest trends in online recruitment for both commercial and niche markets.

Bureau of Labor Statistics – The Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles economic news releases related to employment/unemployment rates, labor productivity, consumer indexes and national compensation data. Use this data to formulate revenue projections based on worker and labor information.

Jobboarders.com – Jobboarders.com is a social networking group that was specifically created for job board owners and employees. Use this resource to stay up to speed on the latest marketing strategies and learn what other association job boards are doing to attract potential job seekers and employers.

Compete.com – Compete.com allows you to monitor the traffic of nearly every website on the Internet. With the majority of employers now moving away from commercial sites, the competitive pressures in niche online recruiting are evident. Compete allows you to keep tabs on the competition and rank your unique visitors among similar niche web sites on a monthly basis.

Wanted Analytics – Wanted pulls data from niche and commercial job boards, corporate sites and newspapers. This allows you to see the total number of monthly job postings in your industry and use this data to determine what percent of the market share your career center is capturing. In addition, this resource outlines the number of job postings in your industry by employer, location and advertising source. This is a great way to see if top industry employers are in fact using your job board. If not, a marketing plan can be devised to poach these employers and offer them an incentive to use your job board! Contact your Client Marketing Manager for assistance in obtaining this data.

By now, you have probably leveraged every opportunity to ensure the overall success of your site with aggressive marketing programs designed to flaunt every new feature, special discount, job posting enhancement and impressive statistic to pique the interest of new and existing employers. Unfortunately, many hiring managers are still not aware of the overwhelming benefits of posting to a niche job board. Even though preferences have generally shifted from general to segmented in terms of finding and filling positions, habits can be difficult to break. Call it a fewer of the unknown or a personal preference, but bigger isn’t always better.

At times, it is essential for us to take a step back and follow the “K.I.S.S.” of “Keep It Super Simple” method of marketing. This requires you to focus on promoting the original purpose of your career center, what it’s all about and why it’s so important. In this case, you want to focus on ensuring that corporate members recognize the advantage of posting to a niche site and why it’s a more effective way to target and recruit qualified professionals in your industry. Here are a few key points to further position your job board as a valuable alternative for recruiting industry-specific talent.

Niche Selling Point: Relevancy

Unlike commercial job boards where hundreds of unqualified candidates may apply, a niche job board directly connects qualified industry talent to employers, so those who do apply will be much more likely to match their requirements. The goal of commercial job boards is to achieve a larger volume of resumes to attract more job postings, while niche job boards work towards attracting candidates that are the most relevant to the positions that are posted.

Niche Selling Point: Branding Opportunities

Both job listings and posting enhancements such as Featured Job Packages and banner advertisements tend to get lost on commercial job boards. Not only are your corporate members competing with other industry employers, but they are also thrown into the mix with listings and advertising enhancements from irrelevant fields, making it more difficult to brand among the people they are trying to reach.

Niche Selling Point: Elite Talent

Employers need to recognize that members of a professional association represent elite talent. When posting to a niche job board, hiring managers can be assured that they are selecting from the largest pool of candidates with certifications, extensive training and knowledge available. It’s a fact – workers engage with their industry’s associations tend to be more involved and interested in their careers – your job board attracts those types of professionals!

Niche Selling Point: Reinvest in the Community

Job postings on niche sites allow corporate members to reinvest in the community with revenue generated from the career center staying with your association. This leads to funding scholarships and education programs and initiatives that will provide a wider range of relevant, high-quality talent nationwide.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) is a partner that clearly recognizes the importance of leveraging contests and promotional items to increase the candidate traffic on their job board. In this instance, ANA already had a solid national platform to ensure the success of this marketing tactic in the form of an industry event – the annual National Nurses Week celebration from May 6th – 12th. For years, this event has been devoted to celebrating nurses across the country and highlighting the many ways that they improve healthcare. Sponsored in part by ANA, the week is characterized by rallies, community health screenings, recognition dinners, fundraisers and candlelight vigils to represent the nearly 3.1 registered nurses nationwide.

When asked about their decision to run contests in alignment with the National Nurses Week, Catherine Wiafe, Senior Marketing Specialist at ANA says, “Our goal was to increase the job seeker resume database and convert unsearchable resumes to searchable resumes. This would improve the overall attractiveness of our career center to recruiters and increase job postings.” During the entire month of May, ANA allowed job seekers to register for a chance to win prizes such as Kindles, gift cards from affinity partners and National Nurses Week logo products. The contest rules for potential candidates to participate were as follows:

• Create a job seeker account on the ANA Nurse’s Career Center
• Post/update a resume
• Convert a non-searchable resume to “searchable”

In return, job seekers would receive one entry for each item. At the conclusion of the promotional period, ANA generated a report that would randomly select a winner among the contest participants. Marketing the contest using multiple communication vehicles such as e-newsletters, banner advertisements, member/non-member email blasts and social media proved to contribute heavily to the highest average email open and click-thru rates that ANA had ever seen.

Contests are yet another creative method to engage your audience. In ANA’s case, contests are now a regular part of their annual career center outreach plan. Their association has used a modest investment to revive and generate new interest to the ANA Nurse’s Career Center.

Want the spotlight on you? Contact your Client Marketing Manager to be featured in an upcoming post!

Let’s face it – your corporate partners have many options to reach qualified professionals in your industry, but they chose you over the thousands of other niche and commercial job boards. Your reputation for producing a society of industry professionals who care about their career development and rely on your association to excel has already helped you establish a level of trust and credibility. Going a step further by crafting a thank you email to employers will demonstrate your sincere commitment to customer satisfaction. After all, the relationship that you establish when an employer initially registers is just as meaningful as the one that is developed over time.

These days, receiving an automated email message after creating an online account is the standard – so why not take it a step further? Several times a month, log into your Client Management System (CMS) to access a list of newly registered employers by selecting the “New” link in the Employer section of the CMS report menu. Creating a personal email allows you to make a more personal connection that can lead to increased non-dues revenue and referrals.

The employer thank you does not have to be written solely for the purpose of expressing your appreciation. This is also the perfect opportunity to highlight important career center features, build excitement for future enhancements and offer promotional codes as an incentive for new registered employers to post (or re-post). Sending a thank you email not only reminds employers that you value their support, but it’s a reassurance that they made the right decision to recruit and attract first-rate talent from your career center.

Typically, we aren’t even aware of the bridges we have burned due to simple lack of communication and keeping in touch. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not entirely necessary to maintain a close relationship with a difficult manager from your past, but perhaps letting the bridge “sizzle” as opposed to “burn” is an appropriate way to handle a relationship that you do not wish to preserve. On the other hand, it’s important to maintain a close personal connection with any alumni networks, previous supervisors, family and mentors that you did have a stellar relationship with.

“It’s all about who you know” is a constant phrase used to describe the current employment climate. It’s no longer enough to apply for positions online in the hopes that you will eventually get a call back from the hiring manager. This is when going after the jobs that you want by leveraging your existing professional networks can play a crucial role in getting your foot in the door. While other candidates are applying for positions through the traditional method of posting their resume, you have gone a step further and developed a relationship with an insider that can help facilitate an employment connection. In reality, employers would rather hire an employee that is referred by someone in their network. This saves the hiring manager a lot of time an dis the least expensive method to obtain new employees.

Burning any bridge can come back to haunt you in the future. After all, it’s not just about who YOU know, but it’s just as much about whom your professional contacts know as well. Disgruntled people will talk and this is especially true of professionals that retain loyalty to a more specialized field or geographic area for the duration of their career. Burning that bridge is not only bad karma, but in the long run, ends up limiting your future employment opportunities and eliminating a potential reference.

People will come in and out of your life and it’s important to begin and end the relationship on good terms, because you never know when you might see (or need) them again. Remaining conscious of the golden rule of networking is the best way to guarantee long-term success and reshape the way that you connect with potential employers.

Searching for career opportunities through niche job boards is the new standard for both industry partners and talent to reach a specific target audience. Advertising professional development opportunities on your career center makes sense. Candidates are already looking to your association job board as a more focused resource to avoid irrelevant job listings, demonstrate active involvement in the industry and ensure proper positioning among leading employers. Enhancing their experience to include professional resources will not only play a role in creating strong association loyalty, but will also boost career center traffic and turn your site into a one-stop resource center that members will go to further their careers.

Both your association and your career center should be working together to provide a multitude of resources that help your members pursue job opportunities, align with their career goals, and explore career options. Your members rely on your association to provide the resources to help them grow. Go beyond the standard job listings by adding some of the following professional resources to your career center:

• Industry articles/publications/white papers/workforce reports/market trends
• Blogs
• Webinars
• Career tips (interviewing, salary negotiations, resume writing, etc)
• Career success stories
• Career paths in your industry
• Continuing education offerings
• Online courses and/or workshops
• Professional networking (association events, career fairs, social media connections, etc)
• Articles from Peter Weddle
• Internships/volunteer opportunities
• Mentoring/leadership programs
• Awards, grants and scholarship opportunities
• “Ask the Expert” advice section

By offering a host of career resources, your association demonstrates a strong commitment to advancing professional development and redefining the way that professionals search for opportunities and manage their careers.

Pinterest® started their development in 2009, and has become a fast growing new kid in the social media block. Right now their focus is engaging individual users, but participation as a business is quick and easy. Pinterest’s mission is to connect the world with things they find interesting. Consider pinning content that is related to your association’s industry to drive traffic to your career center now.

Your members are looking for content, because they want to learn anything and everything about the industry your association serves. Engage your members with content that is relevant to your association by considering doing one or more of the strategies below.

• Think about your links. Link back to your association’s career center and encourage people to follow your organization on Pinterest®.
• Visually appealing. One of the cool things about this newer social media tool is that it visually displays things that you are interested in on your “pinboard.” However, it doesn’t have to be visual, and you can always pin a stock photo, or your association’s career center logo.
• Promote your Pins. Your members are engaged with all things related to you. Show them that you have a presence on this new tool when you host events or conferences. This can result in a surge of followers.
• Don’t self-promote. The core business goal when using Pinterest® is to build a community by providing resources. As a professional society or association, you should be intimately familiar with providing resources that matter to your members.
• Show them the way. Provide guidance to your member followers by creating links for “newbies.” This tool is easy to pick up and driving traffic to your career center doesn’t have to be “hard” work.

If you do establish a presence for your career center, make sure you’re being responsive to any comments that your members leave on your pinboard. Questions on social media marketing for your career center? Please contact your Client Marketing Manager.

Members look to your association for both their talent search and career management needs. Driving traffic to your career center can be as simple as creating online banner ads. Online banner ads are effective when they are executed properly and don’t involve a lot of heavy lifting.

Attracting new employers or job seekers to your career center doesn’t  have to be a full time job. Put banner ads to work for your association when you use one or more of the following best practices:

1. Planning – Determine where you are going to place the banner ads and the number of impressions you are trying to achieve. A great place to start is with sites that your association manages, such as blogs, social networking communities or even event websites. Perhaps there is a specific community for recruiters in your industry? Getting exposure there would be ideal to attract new users.
2. Keep It Simple – Establish a clear message that is short and concise that doesn’t make users work for the information. For example, if your call to action is to post a position and receive a free featured upgrade, make that clear and short. Or perhaps you want job seekers to post a resume, either way keep it simple to capture their attention.
3. Avoid Obtrusion – Generate an ad that doesn’t take over the entire page. Most users will leave a page if an ad overtakes the content they are trying to get to. Avoid this and your banners ads are sure to succeed.
4. Placement – Create banner ads that will be placed on the border of other web pages to get the biggest bang for your buck. Ads that appear in other places on sites tend to achieve the greatest number of impressions.
5. People – Design your banner ad creative with images of people. Member career center users will relate directly to people who appear to be similar.

Banner ads help create brand awareness among users who may not already know about the value of your association’s career center. Start placing banner ads in highly visited websites in your industry and you will reap the rewards. Questions on banner ads or overall marketing strategy? Contact your Client Marketing Manager today.