Posted by: By Ed Powell, Monster Government Solutions
It is important to recognize that the attraction, recruitment and hiring processes for government are essentially establishing a “buying transaction” with citizens. Job seekers have so many choices, industry vs. government, government vs. non-profit, federal vs. state or local, agency 1 vs. agency 2, job announcement 1 vs. job announcement 2. Also, today’s job seekers go to the internet FIRST to research alternatives using available information.
Most agencies make the mistake of addressing seekers as a uniform or homogeneous population with the same needs and requirements. That is a mistake because many seekers are making a serious life decision based upon on the information that is available on the internet. Ultimately, each seeker will make job and career direction decisions based upon “best value,” which could include agency culture or mission; most interesting job assignment; job location, work schedule and other quality of life considerations; perceived job stability; salary, benefits or promotion potential; etc.
The best response to that understanding is for agencies to consider hiring as a “selling transaction” requiring market research, packaging, branding, marketing and closing, including segmentation and differentiation messaging that communicates across all of the targeted segments of the multi-generational workforce.
Agencies need to address this demand for agency-specific information and “branding,” possibly including different landing pages for different demographics so that messaging can be properly tailored to the different populations (students, mid-career, core occupational specialty, executive.) This researched, tested and tailored messaging is your “value proposition,” essentially why the job seeker (“buyer”) should select your job in your agency over all others!
The first step in any competitive buying-selling transaction is reaching out to potential and qualified “buyers.” Job posting sites alone do not provide ready access to the best-practice outreach tools that could promote agency brands and locate hard to reach populations.
While announcing an opening on a job board provides great visibility to “active” job seekers who have time and effort to expend in looking for a job on a daily/weekly/biweekly basis, it lacks the outreach capabilities to locate “poised” (infrequent seeker) or “passive” (rare seeker) populations that comprise the bulk of workforce, including the highly desirable “top talent” in the diversity, mid-career and executive ranks.
Reaching these populations requires outreach where top talent visits and congregates, like:
• professional associations,
• niche, interest-based affinity sites,
• social networks,
• other professional profile and resume data bases and
• content sites enabled with behavioral marketing.
Modern behavioral advertising tools (like Monster’s Career Ad Network – CAN) can seek out the right job seekers where they congregate on the web or scan actually segment and differentiate among the web surfers and target your job ads to just the right person.
Wed, Aug 25, 2010
Federal