We had the pleasure of hosting our RallyFwd virtual conference December 8, 2021. Along with a record-breaking turnout, our diverse speaker panel of 9 talent leaders stole the show with their incredibly detailed accounts of the tactics and technology they’re using to win talent in today’s labor market.
Topics included how to expand your talent pool with greater diversity, reframe the way your stakeholders and leaders see your role, tap into the full potential of employee stories at your company, create your professional data story, take advantage of new hiring channels and trends and more!
If you weren’t able to attend in December, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with presentation highlights to catch you up on what you missed. You’ll find more than enough below to start your new year off with a competitive recruitment edge, but for a complete picture of everything you missed, be sure to watch the full presentations on-demand here!
Rally note: With so many amazing presentations this year, we’re breaking up our highlights into 2 posts to ensure that each speaker receives the attention they deserve. Be sure to check back soon for part 2!
Adapting to the Hybrid Candidate Journey
Hanady Khourshid & Andrew Mott, CDW
Now over 2 years into the pandemic, navigating the new candidate journey still remains a mystery to many companies. Fortunately, with the help of practitioners like Hanady Khourshid and Andrew Mott, CDW is paving the way for the rest of us. In their presentation, Hanady and Andrew not only laid out what the new hybrid candidate journey looks like but also how CDW has for each stage, from awareness to onboarding, to employee advocacy.
For example, with today’s candidates caring so much about employer branding, CDW now doubles down on asking employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor about their experience working at the company. Similarly, they make sure to constantly update their Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Fairy God Boss and other profiles with fresh content offering a real view into the CDW experience. These initiatives are already paying off, as CDW was named one of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2021!
An example of the kind of content CDW produces on its blog and shares across its various channels.
Economic Conditions Impacting the 2022 Labor Market
Andrew Flowers, Appcast
The good news is that the economy continues to bounce back from where it was pre-pandemic, with employment growing at 400-500 thousand jobs per month. But as Andrew Flowers explains, prime-age employment (25-to-54-year-olds) is still down, and job openings currently outnumber the employed by 2.8 million.
This graph shows how job openings currently outnumber job seekers by 2.8 million.
Some of the most insightful and useful tidbits to come of Andrew’s analysis were the reasons behind the current state of the labor market, as well as where the market is likely to go in the future. With changing variables around the pandemic, extended unemployment benefits, the Great Resignation, a waning working-age population, more pro-employee legislation and a growing expectation of remote work, this means a lot of change for recruiters. It shows the need for recruiters to be prepared for higher volume, faster hiring with the help of technology, as well as a workforce with more power at the negotiation table when it comes to salary and benefits.
Employer Brand Strategies that Your Organization Will Sit Up and Listen To
Bryan Adams, Ph.Creative
You and your team might be over-the-top excited about a new employer brand strategy, but if leadership isn’t on board, putting that strategy into action can be a challenge. That’s exactly what Bryan Adams set out to address in his presentation, breaking down exactly how to convert a budget request into a solid business case that your CEO can buy into.
For example, start by acquainting yourself with the annual goals and other strategic targets of your organization (i.e. improve engineering department). Once you know these, you can begin to align what you’re doing with employer branding to something that your organization cares about, and therefore will listen to and prioritize. The most direct way to do this is to choose a goal important to your organization, come up with a talent-based hypothesis for reaching this goal and present it to leadership in the form of a business case blueprint.
An example of a business case blueprint hypothesizing how to solve an engineering talent problem.
Upon approval, you can then send master executive summary reports to leadership every month breaking down your progress toward this goal. Brian recommends including a master score at the top for clarity, 3 scores below breaking down this master score and your recommendations based on the data.
An example of a master executive summary you can send to leadership.
Missed Opportunities in Employee Storytelling
Lauryn Sargent, Stories Incorporated
If you’re not actively seeking out people at your organization with captivating stories to tell about their experience working for you, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful recruitment strategies available. As detailed in Lauryn Sargent’s presentation, employee advocacy gives candidates an unrivaled, authentic look into what it’s like to work for you from an employee’s perspective, and should be a priority for employers going into the new year.
Lauryn’s recipe for effective employee storytelling consists of digging far and wide for professional and personal experiences, going into interviews with a clear understanding of who you’re interviewing and why and capitalizing on candidates’ attention. By this, she means creating narrative-driven stories around areas related to your employer brand that candidates actually care about, like day-in-the-life content, DEI initiatives and tech stacks, rather than something like out-of-context quotes.
An example of an employee story produced by Stories Inc.
And once you get these stories, get as much out of them as you can! Share them with internal stakeholders and repurpose them for different channels to maximize their reach.
Using Analytics to Fast-Track Your Career
Lori Sylvia, Rally Recruitment Marketing
Did you know that 74% of candidates research employers before deciding to apply for a job or accept a job offer? This stat perfectly captures the growing responsibility list of today’s recruiters, who are now as responsible for creating content differentiating their workplace from competitors as they are posting job ads.
The problem is that Recruitment Marketing practitioners aren’t being credited for this work — and it’s largely because they don’t yet know how to prove results through data. By gaining access to benchmark and engagement data with the help of a tool like Rally Inside, for example, you can begin to understand what effect your work is having on the number of candidates learning about, engaging with and generally considering employment at your organization across your various channels. More importantly, you can then bring this data to leadership and say “look, we reached x amount more candidates or generated x amount more engagement this month compared to last month” to prove your worth.
This data also has the added benefit of constantly informing the kind of content you should be focusing on, where you should be posting that content and how frequently you need to be posting on each channel to best resonate with your talent audience.
The lifespan of Recruitment Marketing content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Thanks again to everyone who attended our Dec 8 RallyFwd virtual conference, and to all our speakers and sponsors that made it possible. Again, you can watch all of the presentations in full on-demand here.
