So, how did Ascendify, an emerging technology company, competing against the alluring cultures of Google, Facebook and Twitter, land top enterprise sales and engineering talent in Silicon Valley? By applying the same principles of social recruiting it offers to its enterprise clients through its award-winning talent acquisition platform.

Jon Bennett was referred to the company by one of the founders, and the ongoing relationship was nurtured over a period of months. Jason Ball was introduced to Ascendify, and tracked in Ascendify’s Candidate CRM module. Relationships were quickly formed with Ascendify’s existing team, advice was solicited from mutual social connections, and a decision to work together was made within a few weeks.

In what might normally cost upwards of $60,000 in executive recruiting fees, and taken 60-90 days, Ascendify was able to hire Bennett and Ball for the cost of a few meetings at Pete’s Coffee. Similarly at the enterprise level, employee referrals can help companies source candidates more cost-effectively and make decisions faster, reducing time-to-hire by several weeks.

It’s proven that employees who are referred into a company through mutual connections make better hires. They tend to perform better (in front of their connections), last longer (loyal to their connections), and fit the company culture (in an environment made up of their connections).

“Ascendify has always been successful with referral hiring,” says Matt Hendrickson, Founder & CEO. “In fact, 60% of Ascendify’s total hires have come through referrals. That’s nearly double the industry average of 28%.”

Bennett has an extensive background selling SaaS solutions for 15 years at salesforce.com, Dell Cloud Applications, E*TRADE Financial, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. His enterprise sales background and industry experience add immediate value to Ascendify’s team.

Ball joins Ascendify from Sungevity where he helped build the platform and engineering team that has generated millions in revenue and raised $125 million. With 10 years of development experience, he leads the engineering team as Ascendify embarks on the next version: Ascendify’s Talent Cloud Platform.

“We’re thrilled to have Jon & Jason onboard as we gear up for the next release of Talent Cloud,” says Hendrickson. “We hope to continue to attract the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley with deep experience in the social enterprise.”

Since launching in June 2012, Ascendify has quickly established its place as a leader in talent community technology, winning Human Resource Executive’s Top HR Product of the Year 2012.

About Ascendify 
Ascendify’s award-winning Talent Cloud Platform helps enterprises connect with talent in a more social, mobile way. The cloud-based solution combines the power of candidate management, marketing automation, and talent analytics to re-imagine the way companies recruit through talent communities. With Ascendify, companies see significant reductions in recruiting cost and time-to-hire, as well as dramatic improvements to the candidate experience. For more information, visit the Talent Community Resource Center.

The post Ascendify Leverages Enterprise Hiring Best Practices to Recruit Top Talent appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

But what if you could capture those passive candidates? By transforming your career website into an active and engaging talent community, you’ll build a pipeline of your future workforce, nurture relationships overtime, and source from your community when a hiring need arises. 

Check out the infographic to compare traditional Career Websites vs. modern Talent Communities.  

Want to learn more about talent communities? Download the White Paper: 10 Best Practices for Building a Talent Community.

The post [INFOGRAPHIC] Career Websites vs. Talent Communities appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Sorry, the live webinar has concluded. But check out the recording! 

Watch Recording

Talent community visionary, Marvin Smith of Lockheed Martin, partnered with Ascendify to share his thoughts on talent communities, and the benefits of building a talent pipeline to engage your future workforce.

 You’ll learn:

• Best practices for transforming your career website into a talent community
• Tips for making employee referrals your best source of hires
• How to determine ROI of a talent community 

The post Talent Community Strategy | Webinar appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Looking critically at your recruitment process might be just what you need to save time and money in the new year. Despite living in an analytics-obsessed universe, many companies just aren’t making the most of their recruitment process. A recent survey from ACT Bridge found 56% of U.S. employers don’t even measure the return they’re getting on talent investments.

Looking at more numbers, it becomes clear that companies need to find a better way to cut down on the costs associated with the traditional hiring process. According to a survey by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) the cost-per-hire for a company with over 1,000 employees is $4,285. Considering most companies that size hire 550+ people per year, that’s $2.4 million spent annually on recruiting. There’s got to be a more cost-effective way to find top talent.

Here are the key ways to cut down your search for the perfect candidate and save some cash in the process.

Develop Your Employee Referral Program

In 2011, employee referrals accounted for the number one source of external hires. Referrals beat out company career sites, social media, and big job boards. More importantly, referrals often make better and longer lasting employees. Referred employees are proven to last twice as long as candidates who come into your company through other channels.

This is because current employees understand your company culture and will refer only those in their network who can fit into it with ease. When you consider a bad hire can set companies back as much as five times the bad hire’s annual salary, according to SHRM, it’s not surprising referrals can lead to a savings of $1 million in training and replacement costs. So, if your company is not encouraging referrals, you’re doing so at your own peril.

To do this, first you’ll need to start investing in your employee referral program. Make the program accessible to all workers and promote it as an important aspect of your company culture. Get out there and ensure employees understand the program and its importance to your company’s future. Think of each employee as a company ambassador, touting your brand to their network.

SEE ALSO: How to Land a Job at Tumblr

Second, build a social referral program with technology that makes it easy for employees to refer their friends and family. Studies show 60% of employees would participate in a referral program if they could. However, only 23% actually do so, because their company doesn’t provide the tools or actively promote their employee referral program. If your company doesn’t make the referral process simple, you’ll be losing out on top talent because your workers just won’t utilize it.

Lastly, you should incentivize the process by rewarding employees who refer top talent with money, paid time off, or even an office points system. Make your employee referral program an integral part of your recruiting strategy and get your workers on board. This way you’ll reduce employee turnover and improve the quality of hires.

Turn Your Career Site Into a Talent Community

Today, only one out of 10 candidates visiting a corporate career site will actually apply for a job. Either they’re not ready to leave their current jobs, they don’t see a relevant job opening or they don’t want to spend 45 minutes applying. Career sites are leaking talent. A talent community allows those passive job seekers to join in 60 seconds and casually build a relationship with their future employer over time, without the hassle of applying.

Instead of hosting a group on an established forum or social site, turn your career page into its own talent community. By turning your own career site into a viable talent community, you’ll promote your employer brand while building a pipeline of your future workforce.

Next, you’ll need to keep your community active by assigning a community manager to engage with candidates. They’ll work with your marketing team to post company blog articles, industry news and rich media content that will get candidates excited to work for your organization. This person will also respond to job seeker questions, and generally keep conversations flowing. Use your talent community to post job openings, but keep the majority of conversation focused on engagement and thought leadership.

Then, you’ve nurtured a pipeline of candidates who understand your company culture and are eager to work for you. These will be the candidates ready to make a career move when a hiring need arises.

On average, it takes about 43 days to fill an open position. Utilizing your own built-in talent community, you can reduce this time to hire by as many as 14 days. The key here is to stop looking at hiring as a one-time task — instead, envision it as an ongoing talent nurturing process.

Using employee referrals and talent communities are two key ways of cutting down your cost and the amount of time it takes you to hire the best people. This way you can focus on building the team that will move your company forward.

Article originally appeared on Mashable

The post How Successful Companies Hire | Employee Referrals & Talent Communities appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

In fact, a recent survey from ACT Bridge found that 56 percent of U.S. employers don’t even measure the return they’re getting on talent investments. While most companies focus on the bottom line and look at worker productivity, many companies are ignoring the money drain of an inefficient hiring process.

To save time and money, here are the five common mistakes you should avoid:

Mistake #1: Not encouraging employee referrals
In 2011, employee referrals were the number one source of external hires. But, employee referral programs have yet to reach their full potential. As a result of poor internal promotion,  and lack of necessary technology, only 23 percent of employees are actively referring their network. However, 60 percent say they would do so if their company provided the opportunity.

The benefits of hiring internal referrals are three-fold. Referrals tend to last twice as long, perform better (in front of their friends, of course), and are more likely to have a better understanding of the company culture before signing on the dotted line. So, if you’re not investing in an employee referral program, you’re missing out on talented and loyal employees.

Mistake #2: Scrambling to fill an open req
Don’t procrastinate. Waiting until you have a hiring need before you start looking for candidates, will be detrimental to your cost-to-hire and time-to-hire metrics. Rather, the best time to be sourcing is when you have fewer jobs to fill and less pressure. Sounds odd?

Well, since the average time to hire is 43 days, and passive candidates are not going to readily apply to your job openings, you need to find a way to build meaningful, long-term relationships with your talent pipeline.

So, stay in touch, send them company news, industry alerts, and articles you think they’d be interested in. A great way to keep track of your pipeline line is through a talent community that offers activity tracking features of a CRM and lead nurturing features of a marketing automation platform.

Mistake #3: Relying heavily on job boards
Top talent is not searching job boards, and they’re certainly not going spend the 45 minutes necessary to apply at your career site. In fact, only about one out of 10 career site visitors actually follows through with application process. Companies are missing out on 90 percent of the talent that visits their career site. (And chances are, those are the top performers.)

With today’s social technology, you can make your career site into more than just a repository for job openings. You can turn your career site into an active talent community, building relationships and engaging with top candidates in your own private social network.

Mistake #4: Thinking social media isn’t an effective source of hire
Do you think social media is only for live tweeting sporting events, talking about the latest celebrity couple, or posting Instagram pictures of your lunch? Think again! Social media is a powerful and effective tool when it comes to engaging with candidates and building your employer brand. That’s why 92 percent of companies used social media to recruit last year, and the number will likely only rise in 2013.

An added benefit of social is the way it has completely transformed the traditional employee referral program. With the right tools, social referrals now work in two-ways. Candidates can see how they’re connected to a job opening and ask for a recommendation from that current or former employee. And employees can see who within their social network might be a good fit for open positions, and make referrals.

Mistake #5: Valuing direct experience more than important than cultural fit
Skills are important; no one is dismissing good qualifications. But in today’s flooded job market, there’s something to be said about finding a candidate who will fit into your company culture. Employee turnover is costly, and ill-fitting employees are more likely to pack their bags.

A recent study from the Center for American Progress showed replacing an employee tends to cost about one-fifth of that employee’s salary. This could be a steep price if you don’t put emphasis on cultural fit as well as relevant skills. Employee referrals are a great source for finding like-minded individuals who will enjoy working in a culture where they naturally fit in.

It’s not easy to hire the best, but if you avoid these five big mistakes in your hiring process, you’ll protect your bottom line and attract the top talent you need to move your business forward.

This article originally appeared on Recruiter.com 

The post Are These 5 Big Hiring Mistakes Costing You Money? appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Summary:

At its essence, a Talent Community Manager must manage & grow the community, as well as act as an employment brand evangelist & community advocate. 

Ideal Candidate:

Someone currently in the recruiting function with a marketing background – they are social media savvy and available to respond to questions in real time, keep conversations alive, and put out fires. This person has the skills and depth to handle delicate social situations in a live community. 

Qualifications & Experience:

The TCM has the ability to steer conversations down a constructive path and seed quality conversations in the community. They have excellent written communication skills and social media skills. In addition, they have a strong desire to stay up to-date on the latest social trends. 

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Drive activity, growth and engagement in the community
• Create viral content and edit guest content contributions
• Answer candidates’ questions re: hiring process and company culture
• Promote community via social media channels to drive growth
• Run email campaigns to:
  • Encourage employees to refer social connections into the community
  • Encourage alumni to stay engaged & return to company
  • Send word of new openings to appropriate community members
  • Announce latest company/industry news and job alerts
• Crisis communication management
  • Remove system abusers
  • Proactively address potential issues
• Measure and report on growth, activity and engagement of community

The post Talent Community Manager (TCM): Roles, Responsibilities & Best-Practices appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

First, let’s look at time-to-hire. On average, it takes about 43 days to fill an open job. This means your critical positions are sitting empty for over a month while you scramble to find just the right candidate on job boards, via social media, and in the mound of old applications you received last time a hiring need arose. With such a long lead time, those empty seats are delaying revenue and growth. In fact, for every empty seat, you could be missing out on up to $2,000 in revenue per day. For companies that have hundreds or thousands of open positions, that’s delaying revenue growth in the millions.

Now let’s look at cost to hire. According to the Society of Human Resource Management, a company with more than 1,000 employees is spending about $4,285 per hire. These companies generally hire around 550 employees per year, which totals about $2.4 million spent on recruiting.

How can companies save time and money in the recruiting process, while accelerating top-line revenue? We think talent communities are the answer.

By turning your static career site into an active talent community, you can build a private pool of candidates, nurture relationships with talent over time, and tap into that pool when a hiring need arises. Results include reducing time-to-hire, lowering costs, and increasing time-to-revenue.

If you’re looking to attract and engage the best candidates, here are some tips for building a better talent community:

Make Communication a Two-Way Street

Top-tier candidates are looking for information about your company long before they’re ready to apply to a job. They won’t jump at any opportunity. They’ll be looking for chances to ask questions about your open positions and understand your company culture.

So use your talent community as a place where communication moves in both directions. Encourage great candidates to ask questions. Then make sure you answer these question in a timely, brief, and informative manner. By making communication a two-way street, you’re turning your talent community into an active place, where candidates feel like they’re being heard.

Develop an Inclusive Community, Not An Exclusive One

You can’t afford to ignore segments of the candidate population. You want your talent community to be made up of all possible candidates. These could be internal employees, passive candidates, active job seekers, and even company alumni. The more diverse your talent community is, the better populated it will be with rich content, quality conversations, and a high-caliber talent.

Encourage Referrals

The power of the employee referral is a critical component to a successful talent community. After all, referred candidates are 40 percent more likely to be hired than blind applications, according to a recent New York Times story.

Given the inside perspective gleaned from your current employees, these referral candidates will better understand the company culture and the demands of the position. So it should come as no surprise referrals tend to stay twice as long.

The trouble is, only 23 percent of employees are actively referring their network because 60 percent say their company doesn’t provide the means to do so. If you’re not encouraging employee referrals, you’re missing out on a prime source of new employees who are more likely to fit the company culture, and perform better.

Share Relevant Content

A great way of getting your talent community engaged is to share relevant content about your company or industry. Emailing company news and milestones — in addition to new job alerts — will give interested candidates an inside look into your organization and plenty of reasons to return to the community.

You should also share interesting articles about trends impacting your industry and encourage talent to discuss and share their thoughts. A smart comment about an important industry trend might help you discover a candidate with outside-the-box ideas and top-quality thinking about the issues of the day.

Make Connecting Fast and Easy

Most importantly, you want the process of connecting with your company to be fast, easy, and painless. You don’t want to force interested applicants to spend hours filling out endless forms. Instead, candidates should be able to express interest by simply joining the community in less than 60 seconds.

Communication between candidates and internal recruiters can be made easy by shortening interactions to the size of an average tweet. (That’s about 140 characters for the hashtag-phobic.) This way, asking and answering questions becomes easier for both sides of the equation.

Transforming your career site into an active talent community will allow you to build relationships with your future workforce, long before the hiring need arises. More importantly, what that means is accelerated time-to-revenue and reduced cost of hiring.

This article originally appeared on ERE.com

The post 5 Ways to Build a Better Talent Community appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Take a look at the latest trends for social media and talent communities, offered by five experts in technology:

Building talent communities through social media

More and more of our customers are looking to leverage the power of social media to distribute their jobs directly from their applicant tracking systems to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In 2013, I expect this distribution of careers and job content to continue – and for employers to begin to spread their brand and culture more and more via social media, to complement their job distribution via social media. It’s not an “either/or” situation when it comes to job distribution to garner clicks versus culture and employment branding for recruiters , it’s a “both/and” scenario – and HR Directors and VPs of Talent see that value, and will continue to focus on job distribution and branding even more in 2013 to build talent communities and distribute their jobs throughout social media.

Yair Riemer, VP of Global Marketing, TweetMyJobs & Internships.com, The Social Exceleration Network

2013 will be more visual

In 2012, visual media became a much more important part of the digital conversation with the rise of mostly visual social sharing communities like Pinterest and Tumblr. This social technology trend looks to continue in 2013. When it comes to HR technology, the importance of visuals will increase.

2013 will be more community-oriented

The rise of social media shows just how essential community is in every aspect of our lives, even when it comes to technology. Using talent pools and social media recruiting will continue to dominate the technology marketplace in 2013. New tools helping job seekers and employers connect socially will make it easier for companies to build up their pipelines of talented candidates for current and future positions.

Josh Tolan, CEO of Spark Hire

Smart social recruiting

Certainly in our space we’re seeing a major trend of treating social recruiting and employee referrals as a serious source of hire, in terms of reducing reliance on the solutions provided by ATS’s, and a deep understanding that this area warrants its own attention.

The typical ATS solution for social recruiting and referrals is a “post a job on a wall” button. That doesn’t make sense at all. These buttons aren’t used by employees, and when they are, posts quickly disappear in the flood of other posts.

Smart social recruiting leverages that data in social networks, personalized messaging, gamification and automation, in ways that are deliberate, targeted and non spammy.

Ziv Eliraz, Founder & CEO, Zao.com

Talent communities will create a social renaissance at the corporate career site

Career sites will be transformed into active talent communities as employers learn to connect with top talent on the candidate’s terms. This includes: one-click applies, remote video interviewing capabilities, opportunities for two-way communication, social referrals, and more. The best talent expects respect, transparency and ease as they make critical career decisions. Only those employers that deliver an outstanding candidate experience
 at the career website will capture the best talent.

Matt Hendrickson, Founder & CEO, Ascendify

More emphasis on social, not just through LinkedIn but as other major social networks move more into this space

It is no secret that LinkedIn has had a meteoric rise to prominence in the job space, but the importance of social tools is becoming apparent across more avenues. Facebook recently launched a job search tool that aggregates jobs from external sites and adds a social layer. Twitter has long been a place to connect with people in your industry and this channel will become more important as traditional job search methods lose their appeal. Expect to see traditional job boards partner with existing social networks or develop their own social tools (e.g. ratings, recommendations, social connections to the company, etc.) to complement their current offering. As most career coaches will tell you, it is just as much about who you know as what you know, and these social elements enable job seekers to build their network in a targeted manner.

Ben Wise, Co-Founder, SpringTern.com

This article originally appeared on Recruiter.com 

The post 2013 Recruitment Technology Trends – Social Media & Talent Communities appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Jobvite for applicant tracking: Jobvite does not look and feel like your typical enterprise ATS. The design of its user interface is inspired by social networks, so it’s familiar, easy to use, and intuitive. Plus, integrations with modern technology like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook, and Google calendars allows for a seamless workflow, without launching extra applications.

LinkedIn Recruiter for sourcing: Boasting over 175 million users, LinkedIn is the ultimate professional social network. The Recruiter feature is a must-have to access users who you wouldn’t otherwise be able to contact outside your network. The refined search filters and bulk InMail templates are great for contacting candidates at scale.

HireVue for video interviewing: This leading digital interviewing platform was also awarded Human Resource Executive’s Top HR Product of the Year for its mobile app. HireVue has focused on the candidate experience — giving job seekers the flexibility to interview from home, on their own time.

Indeed for job distribution: This job board aggregator has perfected SEO strategy, with results usually within the first five rankings on top search engines. We give special credit to its resume search tool that makes it really fast and simple to search the 70 million job seekers in its database.

HireRight for background screening: Its Applicant Center™ also has the candidate experience in mind by letting candidates see the criteria for which they were evaluated, and provides a mobile site for candidates to check status of paperwork and electronically sign documents. HireRight says it has seen candidate dissatisfaction rates decline by 56% as a result.

TMP Worldwide for recruitment advertising: Winning more than 50 awards for its top clients this year (ESPN, Capital One, PwC, and more) TMP earned the title of the world’s leading recruitment advertising agency. AT&T received ERE’s award for the Best Military Talent Program, and UPS received ERE’s award for Most Strategic Use of Technology.

In addition to these improvements in the hiring process, we’re anticipating talent communities will also play an important role in helping companies nurture talent over time. The lighter touch, more social online engagement of a talent community is exactly what candidates have been looking for (at least, we of course hope so).

What other innovative talent acquisition solutions are you planning to check out next year?

This article originally appeared on ERE.

The post 6 Best-of-Breed Solutions for Talent Acquisition in 2013 appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.

Our research shows that 88% of candidates prefer to make career choices and apply to jobs at a corporation’s own career site*. Yet, most career sites are in need an overhaul to attract the best talent in a more social way online. Today’s corporate career sites are usually limited to a static listing of jobs which creates an impersonal, transactional approach to hiring. And, as result of a long, complicated application process and the candidate’s fear of never hearing back, companies connect with less than 1 of 10 candidates who visit their site. More often than not, the best talent is getting away. In order to capture both active and passive candidates, companies need to engage with all visitors to the career website and build relationships over time. This means eliminating any barriers to entry and delivering a stellar candidate experience.

The fix? Transform a career site into a social talent community. Corporations are beginning to realize that in addition to leveraging social networks like LinkedIn, they also need to adopt new tools that enable them to be social at their own corporate site.

Here are 10 ways that companies can transform their existing career website into an active, engaging talent community.

What’s your opinion? How do you think a talent community can transform career sites in 2013 and beyond?

The post What Does 2013 Hold For Talent Communities? Here Are The 10 Ways They Will Transform Career Sites appeared first on Talent Community | Ascendify.