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Acacia HR Solutions focuses on helping smaller sized businesses recruit, develop and retain top talent. Sabrina helps companies recruit in one of two ways. She either recruits the talent they need or teaches them how to do it themselves.

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Google makes recruitment a priority as evidenced by everything they do. They have approximately 1000 recruiters broken out into functions such as sourcing, coordinating, college relations etc. Google executives feel that one good hire is worth 300 times that of an average hire. The CEO still approves every hire. They sift through approximately 2 million candidates each year and have a month and a half long hiring process. (source CNN Money). TAKEAWAY: Google makes recruiting a priority!

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Small businesses can focus in three main areas that require low budget and low personnel resources. Brand ambassadors, technology and social media.

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The biggest opportunity that small businesses have lies in ensuring people know what their employment brand really is. Why should people want to work for you? What sets you apart from the rest of the employers in your industry or local area? Do you have great pay, benefits or perks? Do you offer a flexible working environment where people can work from home or fluctuate their start and end times? Does your workplace allow someone to work on equipment or learn things they can’t get elsewhere? Is your business a stepping stone for a larger brand? The thing about employment brand is that if you have employees, you already have one. To figure out what that is, just ask those who work for you. The key is to not go to market with anything that isn’t true. If you have gaps in your employment brand, meaning, your executives think your benefits are great, but your employees feel differently, do not use that in your marketing. Only use information that your employees would verify when asked by those in your community. If you have a negative employment brand and a negative employee morale, fix that before ever going to market with a recruitment strategy. More on figuring out your employment brand here: http://acaciahrsolutions.com/social-recruiting-identifying-employment-brand/

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Think about all of the people that are already connected to your business. Employees (more on that on the next slide), customers/clients and vendors. All of these people know people looking for work or people that would make a great fit at your company. Your job is to make sure all of these people know that you have open positions, what they are, what you are looking for in terms of skill set and why people should want to work for you. You can post this information in your physical location if you have one or send it in whatever form of communication you use to interact with clients: email marketing, signature lines of email, sales meetings etc. The point is that you ensure that anyone who comes in contact with your business knows what you are hiring for and knows what makes you a great place to work. I bet if you looked hard enough you would find a few new opportunities to share.

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Employee referral programs are the number one source of hire year over year according to Jobvite. (http://recruiting.jobvite.com/resources/social-recruiting-reports-and-trends/) 77% of companies report investing in employee referrals in their business, yet many companies struggle with making them work. What we typically do with employee referrals is send out an email or put something in our handbook that says we offer a prize for referring employees and we hope that people will see it and respond. Sometimes the “prize” is complicated to actually get or takes too long of a time for it to be worthwhile. To improve employee referral programs think about a few different options. First, you could target the program to only those hard to fill positions or only a few times a year. Secondly, you want to make sure you are asking for the referral (not just posting about it somewhere). Think about employees already in this role or employees who you know are active in the community. Talk to them specifically about who they know that might be a good fit. Use words like “we want to find more people like you” to trigger their mind on who they might know or at the very least, give you ideas on where to look. As for referral rewards – cash is always king, but if you do not have the budget to give money for referrals I have witnessed other things that work. You could do a free lunch once a month, lunch with the CEO, movie tickets, a nice dinner out for employee and

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one more. TAKEAWAY: DO NOT JUST POST THE EMPLOYEE REFERRAL PROGRAM AND HOPE EMPLOYEES SEE IT. ASK FOR THE REFERRAL AND KEEP IT TOP OF MIND FOR EMPLOYEES.

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Technology will change the way you recruit. It helps keep you organized. It can help weed out the fluff or those who are not qualified. It can simplify. It can ensure your information is mobile friendly since so many job seekers are searching for jobs via mobile devices. If you do not have the budget for an applicant tracking systems, Smart Recruiters is a free platform that can give you what you need. If you have an applicant tracking system, I’m not suggesting you switch, but just be sure to use all of the bells & whistles you are paying for. Leverage that technology to it’s fullest ability – especially with autoresponders, managing candidate flow and job postings. Other technology that can be leveraged are online forums. You can simply search for forums related to the groups you are hiring. http://forums.cnet.com/ and http://www.developerfusion.com/forum/ are two that I have used for tech candidates. Yahoo Groups (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo) and specific groups on Facebook are also groups I have found to be great places to connect with talent. Finally, niche job boards are a great way to target your search. While the larger job boards may get a ton of eyes on your job posting, many of those eyes are not qualified. Using niche boards, specific to your position, will ensure that most of the eyes looking at your opening are qualified.

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According to Jobvite, 93% of recruiters are using or plan to use social media this year. Social media is not a fad and more and more companies are turning to it to find top talent. Social media seems overwhelming because companies feel they have to be everywhere all the time to be successful. Smaller companies should figure out the site where their candidates hang out the most, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and then camp there. Focus on that one site and do that really well. You can leverage what marketing is already doing – if your company has a Facebook page, add a jobs tab etc,. The key to social media is that there does need to be some interaction. If you are going to set up an account simply to post jobs then it probably isn’t going to work for you. You need to be able to curate content, interact with those who ask questions or interact with you. If you are looking for help with using social media to recruit top talent you can sign up for the Getting Started with Social Recruiting Guide which drips to your email over the course of two months and is designed to help you get started using social media to find talent. You can find out more about that guide here: http://acaciahrsolutions.com/getting-started-social-recruiting/

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The best thing about social media (in my opinion) is that it allows you to proactively search rather than reactively “post and pray”. This is a shot of LinkedIn, but all social sites have search capabilities. The advanced search seen here is not a paid only feature (although I do pay). You can use the advanced search even on a free account, but paying does give you a few more search options. Searching and reaching out to potential candidates allows you to reach those passive job seekers who may not actively be looking at your postings. It also saves time because you are only talking to candidates you know are qualified. If you are spending time sifting through hundreds of unqualified candidates, searching is going to save you time.

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Feel free to connect through any social channel or directly through phone or email.

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