I was recently reviewing a blog post that mentioned a service called Brizzly, in which the article mentioned many of the great features of the brizzly service. I decided to check it out, and watched their intro video. What amazed me was that Brizzly was basically all about building simple features that Twitter hadn’t gotten around to.

Is there a real business here? Are people willing to sign up for any new service that layers in a “nice to have” feature set on top of Twitter. For Brizzly, where’s the revenue? Is it the “We’ll get eyeballs and then monetize later”  prayer?

The problem with a lot of new services, such as brizzly, is that they aren’t providing real, sustainable,  value to consumers,  and in the end, I’m just not sure where this type of incremental feature improvement gets us.

Start up companies need to get over Twitter and start innovating in new spaces. The web is much bigger than Twitter!

I’ve been following the mobile space for a while now…there’s just a tremendous amount of innovation that’s going on in this industry with the Iphone, Palm Pre, new Nokia phone, etc. I personally use the Iphone…I’m still using the 1G version I bought 2 years ago and getting ready to upgrade to the 3GS, now that I can purchase it for $199.

Anyway, i was  watching Charlie Rose the other night and they had the CEO of Sprint on, explaining Sprints Strategy, new phones, etc. At one point Charlie asked how the Palm Pre was fairing against the Iphone in terms of adoption. I’ve read a lot of stuff on the Palm Pre…seems like it was doing pretty well. But the CEO basically said, and i’m paraphrasing,  “It’s not fair to compare any other phone to the IPhone, what Apples done is put themselves in a totally different league….the Iphone is the Michael Jordan of the mobile industry”…I thought that was quite a compelling statement, coming from the CEO of one of Apples competitors.

With Android and other phones coming out, there’s sure to be a ton more innovation, but it’s hard to see how Apple doesn’t continue to dominate the smart-phone market.

We just announced a new SmashFly Channel Partner today. Esika Infotech will be distributing our WildFire platform in India. Esika  is also a channel partner for the Taleo Enterprise Talent Management  system. The two systems, when used together, provide companies with an unparalled leading edge recruitment solution.

We’re very excited to be working with Esika to bring our WildFire platform to the India market.

You can read more about it here: http://jucy.ws/M2QE

Marvin Smith at Microsoft posted a great article over on ERE entitled “Sourcing Insights: No more Apply or GoodBye”. The point of the article is that companies need to start having conversations with all potential prospects, instead of the current rigid apply process they force people through today.

The majority of people you want to reach are going to be a different stages of interest in your company. Many just aren’t ready to apply, or aren’t willing to spend 40 minutes filling out the 6 page application form on your careersite. Our metrics show that only 15-20%, on average, actually complete the apply process after clicking “Apply” on a job board or social networking site. That means about 80% of your audience is leaving, and you’re saying “GoodBye!”. It’s time to give them an alternative!

Marvin does a great job of explaining how Microsoft builds communities out on the current social networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn, and also builds their own community to allow prospects stay engaged. This is the heart of our WildFire recruitment marketing platform, what we refer to as our “Recruitment marketing database”. By leveraging a marketing databas in conjunction with all your recruitment activities, you invite prospects to stay engated with your company, and then become able to leverage that database as a new source of candidates for future jobs.

I was excited to see this article because it really explains WHY a company needs to leverage a recruitment marketing platform like ours…you need to start building relationships with people!

Business week has an interesting article about how the social networking sites are changing how people search for jobs. You can check it out here

What’s interesting (but probably should be expected) is that job searches are up everywhere on the web, including the traditional job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

Still, the landscape is shifting as more and more users rely on social networking sites to find there next gig.

We just announced that Autodesk has chosen to use our WildFire Platform in combination with their Taleo System. You can read the press release here. http://bit.ly/AutoDeskPR

Autodesk is a truly global company, and we’re excited to have them use the full platform across their entire organization!

 

We’ve been hard at work on our WildFire Platform for over 2 years now…adding key services to round out an already very feature rich service.  We’ve been so busy in fact that we’ve spent very little time updating our messaging and core value proposition.

As we continue to demo our platform to both large & small companies, one resounding theme that we hear from prospects is that we’re different. Our name is different. Our approach to recruiting is different. And as our clients find out, our results are different too. Recruitment is shifting into a specialized marketing role…and companies are increasingly realizing that they need a different approach.

This is why our new tag line is “Recruit Different”. We truly offer a different, unique, and we believe, BETTER way to perform all your recruitment marketing from one platform. To that end, we’ve updated our website with our new messaging and also added new content to better explain core pieces of functionality companies gain when they start using our WildFire platform.

Check out our updated Website here …SmashFly Technologies

In Part 1 of this blog post, I provided the overview of how & why web commercials should be leveraged in a companies recruitment marketing activies. Our WildFire web commercial technology allows companies to MARKET their companies and their jobs to both active & passive candidates anywhere on the web.

When you consider that social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook  make it easier than ever before to actually reach that ideal candidate for your job and/or company, you need to start to think about your messaging and how to engage the candidate. Sending them a link to your job description or company website ain’t gonna cut it! Enter “Web Commercials”.

What is a “Web Commercial” ?

What is a Web Commercial? Simply put, it’s the idea of creating a targeted multi-media message that betters sells a candidate on your job or company. Let me be clear that a web commercial in this definition doesn’t necessarily mean a “video”. It means leveraging images, text, audio, video, and other tools to create a better marketing tool to engage with passive candidates. If someone finds your link on Twitter or Facebook and clicks out of pure curiousity, you need to engage with them, grab their attention, and ultimately get them to TAKE action, such as providing you contact information, or otherwise indicating they’re interested in your company. In the 4 examples below, make sure you click on the “apply now” button to see how our “pipeline builder” service makes it extremely easy for a passive candidate to opt into future contact with your company. At a minimum, you want candidates to engage with you!

When building the technology, we knew that some companies would have existing media they could leverage, such as a corporate video, or a “day in the life” type of video. Other companies would have nothing. So, we needed to support both existing content and allow the creation of new content. In addition, we wanted to base the technology on existing tools…tools that companies are already very familiar with. The idea being that, a company could create content with just their existing resources and existing tools.

However, we also realized that many companies would be looking for our expertise to help them craft their own web commercials. They would need help with messaging, content, editing, graphic design, and video production if required. So, we’ve been busy forming strategic partnerships that allow us to offer a company as little or as much assitance as they require. A company may already leverage a company like TMP or JWT for their creative advertising…that works fine with us…we can easily plug in existing content into our solution. Or a company might just want help with the messaging/graphic design…or for us to come on site and shoot and produce the video. Our web commercial technology & services enables all the above scenarios.

To put this in context, we’ve put together a fictitious company and fictitious job to demonstrate how companies can use this technology to create their own web commercials. They range from using a simple Image, all the way to a multi-media video production. Each one is explained below. Remember that these are just examples to showcase raw concepts… they weren’t done professionally except for the last one! When creating your commercials,  the sky is the limit on what can be created.

The IFC Corporation 

Consider the following scenario. A Global financial services company called “IFC” that does business in 4 countries and has a new job opening for a “Senior Comptroller” to head up accounting across the 4 offices. We’ve put together 4 VERY different web commercials for the same scenario to show how simple or sophisticated a web commercial can be…leveraging different tools and different levels of assistance from our team. In each example, the candidate first lands on the “commercial” page, but always can jump to the “Job description” tab.

For all 4 examples consider that you came across the link to the Job Ad through any standard number of channels, such as you saw it while searching Google, received an email from the company, or saw a facebook/twitter status update that caught your attention. You click the link to investigate.

Scenario 1: The ”display banner” style commercial
A web commercial could be as simple as an on-line display banner that conveys something about the company or position that resonates enough with the candidate to grab their attention. This is such an example, a simple image that highlights the work environment and might grab a casual users attention. This banner could be created by your inhouse marketing team, or you could leverage our team.

IFC seeking financial executive to run Global Comptroller team

Scenario 2: The standard “PowerPoint” style Web commercial
We’ve built in the ability for companies to create standard powerpoint presentations, and then dynamically convert those to our Flash Based web-commercials. In this example, we get a VERY basic powerpoint presetnation that a hiring manager and/or recruiter could put together in a matter of minutes and upload to the system.  You’d clearly have something more compelling than this, but it showcases using powerpoint + narration feature to provide the audio.

IFC seeking financial executive to run Global Comptroller team

Scenario 3: Custom messaging + PowerPoint style Web commercial
In this scenario, IFC contracted with our marketing team to write a simple script for this web commercial…which is VERY cost effective and could be used/modified to fit many different types of similar jobs. The company then had an internal resource put together a simple powerpoint with some music to create a new unique commercial.

IFC seeking financial executive to run Global Comptroller team

Scenario 4:  The “Custom Video” style web commercial
In this scenario, the company has decided to leverage our creative team to create and produce a custom video commercial, which could be constructed in such a way to be re-used across many different types of job positions. In this scenario, our video team went on site to the IFC location to shoot some footage, our marketing team created the appropriate messaging/script, and we had our professional actor provide the voice-over work to create a highly professional video.

IFC seeking financial executive to run Global Comptroller team

The goal of these 4 examples is to provide you with an overview of all different ways you could create and leverage web commercials in your own recruitment marketing activies. 

To learn more, visit us at http://www.smashfly.com , email us at sales@smashfly.com or call us at 1-888-282-3092

That’s the title of an interesting blog entry over on Sillicon Alley insider. It’s an interesting read…basically making the point that , from  a branding perspective, display Ads are generating significant traffic, even if the user doesn’t initialy click on the display Ad itself.

This matters for several reasons in the recruitment marketing space. 

First, we currently offer Keyword text Ads via the Google AdWords system. From within WildFire, recruiters can create their text ads, specify their keywords, and place the Ads automatically as part of a larger recruitment marketing campaign. And of course, we measure the performance centrally in our system.

But we will be extending that to online display Ads, and allowing companies to place targeted graphic Ads through the Google Ad Network, which feeds a LOT of sites. The fact that display Ads can really be usefull in drive brand awareness AND getting your recruitment marketing message out there…this article holds relevance.

Second, if users DO click on the display Ad…you’ll want to bring them to something a bit more compelling then your job description or company website. Leveraging our web commercial technology, you have a one-two punch. Grab their interest with the Ad, and then when they click through, use the web commercial to entertain, inform, and turn them into a potential candidate.

This is an introduction to how “Web Commercials” fit in with recruitment marketing. We’ll define and provide examples of web commercials in Part 2 of this blog. Now…a brief overview of the landscape…

Introduction

Recruiting is a people business…the best recruiters know that recruiting is about building relationships, gaining trust, and helping the company & the candidate find the best fit. No matter what technology comes along, or what social networking site pops up…this will still be how recruitment works into the future.

But, technology can and does provide critical tools for recruiters to help them start new relationships & build those relationships over time.  Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have opened up a whole new set of channels for companies to reach out to candidates and  ”passive” candidates in particular…those people who are not looking for a job, but are always happy to hear what opportunities exist. These passive candidates are increasingly active on one or many of the social networking sites. So, the difficulty in REACHING these candidates with potential job opportunities has been greatly reduced.  

The wrong tools

The traditional Job Ad that most companies rely on today, the Job Description, was meant for reaching Active candidates. When you read a standard job description today, it feels more like a document designed to discourage applicants…listing requirements and qualifications to weed out most applicants. Very little, if any of the job description tries to sell a candidate on the company or job.

If you’re not looking for a job, the job description is an irrelevant document. No-one will read it, because they aren’t looking, thank you very much.

So, without a job description, how do recruiters reach out and try to engage these passive candidates? Well, just like they always have done… on the phone, emailing, and now tweeting and with facebook updates with the goal of personally reaching out to candidates and trying to engage with them. They are analogous to your company’s sales team…using inside sales reps to smile & dial, while outside sales reps are meeting prospects, schoomzing and otherwise trying to build relationships. That part of the recruiting process will never go away…you need people talking with people.

A gap in the recruitment process

However, staying with the sales analogy…even though you have all those sales people actively reaching out to prospects, companies ALSO employ a marketing group…whose goal is to drive the marketing message, get the word out to large numbers of prospects, and otherwise generate leads for their sales team. The same should be true for recruting…companies should have a recruitment marketing strategy/focus to help drive their recruitment marketing message to better sell why the company is such a great place to work, why this specific job is so great and why a passive candidate should at least take the time to learn a bit more.  This is a real gap in most companies recruitment efforts, because they lack the tools, technology, and expertise to create and execute on a real recruitment marketing initiative.

The solution: Tools & technology specific to recruitment marketing

A recruitment marketing platform, and Web Commercials in particular, are meant to provide the solution to allow companies to quickly and cost effectively create and start executing on their own recruitment marketing effort…driving “qualified leads” to their recruiters and making the whole process much more efficient.

There are many aspects of a recruitment marketing platform, but the focus of Part 2 of this post is to focus on the web commercial technology in particular…and how companies can leverage internal resources and media as well as tap our technology and expertise, to craft, execute and measure custom recruitment marketing campaigns.

Part 2 of this post will be published tomorrow, which will include 4 different examples of how a company could create & leverage web commercials on their own or in combination with our team.