Collaborate 2011 Recap

Last week, 200 professionals in Recruiting, Talent Acquisition, Staffing and Sourcing all arrived in Minneapolis for 2 days of learning from their peers and experts in the industry about the latest innovations in Recruiting technology.  Collaborate 2011 consisted of 53 Learning Sessions with speakers such as Jason Averbrook at Knowledge Infusion, Michael Marlatt - Recruiting Consultant and Mobile Evangelist, and Founder of mRecruitingcamp, Michael Long at Rackspace, Stacy Van Meter at Deluxe Corporation & Lou Adler from the Adler Group.  In addition to the sessions, a Geek Bar was available where clients could leverage the Jobs2Web experts to get solution to their recruiting challenges.

Many people walked away with their heads spinning from the plethora of content.  Some of the quotes were “Leaving feeling like I was at an amusement park, exhausted from all the exciting innovative content” and “Great networking & ideas around recruiting – information overload.”

So what made this a great conference?  If you ask the attendees, they would say rich targeted content.  Many walked away with actual “To Do” lists.  Some of those lists contained action items for the client to perform.  Others were joint action items for the client and their Jobs2Web Client Strategy Director or Client Manager.

I believe a great conference is one that gets you excited, one that leaves your head spinning with a number of new ideas and best of all one, one that allows you to walk away with an action plan!  I see way too many people who attend conferences talk about the great ideas they learned, but then they never implement them.  This year at Collaborate, we hosted a Client panel about their journey in implementing new ideas & technologies.  These clients articulated where they started with Jobs2Web, why they decided to add a specific product or service – and how that paid off.  Most importantly, we heard about what they learned and why you as a client should take a similar journey.

Thank you to everyone who helped make Collaborate 2011 such a success. We hope to see you next year at Collaborate 2012!

How Well Do QR Codes Work In Recruiting?

Have you seen these before?  It’s a 2D bar code most referred to as a QR Code.  For everything you ever wanted to know about QR Codes, go here.  And for some great QR Code stats, see this Hubspot post.

Pull out your smart phone now and scan the image below using a bar code reader application.

One of our clients, a fortune 500 restaurant chain, was looking to hire management level personnel for their stores.  What they did was put posters on the front door of their restaurants in 2 major markets (Indianapolis & Chicago).  These signs had some quick verbiage advertising Manager & Supervisor level jobs and in order to apply to scan the QR Code with their mobile device.

Scanning the QR code directs the candidate to a landing page with the opportunities listed for that store.  Rather than fill out an entire application, the candidate simply joined the Talent Community via their mobile device, by filling in their contact information.   The Talent Community then emailed a link to the jobs to the candidate so they could apply online via their computer at a more convenient time.  Two great things happen here: The candidate took immediate action, and our client benefitted in capturing their contact info in lead form and were able to track the metrics.

For the months of January – April, 463 candidates in Indianapolis have scanned the QR Code.  An amazing 146 joined the Talent Community which is a 32% conversion rate!!  Not too shabby seeing that most Career Websites only have an 8% conversion rate.

For the months of January – April, the Chicago QR Codes have generated 724 candidate scans of which 192 or 27% went on to join the Talent Community!!

Do you know of other success stories involving QR codes & Recruiting? Keep your eye out for ways that they are being used!