But that’s exactly what I’d like to talk about today. Because, somewhat surprisingly, there are a number of companies out there using Instagram in this way–they’re just a little tougher to find.

Let’s take a look at four companies using Instagram to recruit and retain talent–and what they’re doing right:

Marriott

• Creative idea to ask employees to hold signs of employment dates. Simple, but effective, for Marriott.
• Visual use of quotes from Marriott leaders. Similar to what you see a lot of brands doing on Facebook. Translates well to Instagram.

Yelp

• Behind-the-scenes shots at Yelp headquarters—daily-in-the-life vignettes. Yelp does a nice job here of giving job-seekers a glimpse into what it’s like to work for the company.
• Images showing progress for Yelp (NYSE shot) as a start-up company. I think this is important for a start-up as it shows growth, potential for the future and potential for employees. Remember, employees want to work for winners.
• Yelp is not taking itself too seriously—Instagram photos show personality so prospective employees know what they’re all about. It won’t work for all brands, but Yelp pulls this off well. But, even more conservative brands have a personality. Let it come through in photos.

CME Group

• CME Group lets employees snap photos for its Instagram feed—giving followers a glimpse into many different offices/perspectives. Love this idea as it also offers different kinds of shots–which give a more global perspective for a company as large as CME Group.
• Great use of historical photos to give followers a feel for the company’s roots. Loved what CME Group did here, using archived pics to highlight their history.
• Simple shots of the cityscapes the different CME Group offices are in—giving followers a sense for the markets it works in. Again, simple, but smart. What markets does CME Group work in? The cityscape shots tell the story.

Starbucks

• Starbucks links its employer branding efforts to its master brand work on Instagram—one account for both. I tend to think this is the right path for most brands. After all, how many employer branding-type shots would you really include each week? Better to work it in with the main brand account–more interaction, visibiity that way, too.
• Starbucks using Instagram to highlight its work in the community. Great use of the tool–using Instagram to showcase its hard work in the communities it serves. I see all sorts of potential for companies here on the recruiting front to highlight the causes they care about.
• Using a combination of single photos and collages to pull people in. Much like Facebook, don’t forget about the “album” format to show more than one photo at one time on Instagram. Great way to tell a story of an event or day with a collage!

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To help solve this conundrum, Software Advice asked three recruiting experts for clever questions to ask a prospective recruiter.

The experts:

• Jessica Miller-Merrell is the President and CEO of the HR consulting firm, XceptionalHR. She is also the founder and head writer for the well-known HR blog, Blogging4Jobs.
• Julie Labrie is the President of BlueSky Personnel Solutions, a Canadian recruiting agency based in Toronto. She’s worked in the staffing and recruiting industry for over 14 years.
• Jennifer McClure is the President of Unbridled Talent, a consulting and advisory firm providing services to clients in the areas of HR strategy and recruiting.

1. How long do the recruiters at your firm stay in their positions?
This question is important for two reasons. First of all, you’ll want to know if the recruiters at the firm stay on because once you get comfortable with the recruiter you’re working with, i.e. once they know your business, you don’t want to lose that rapport and have to start over from scratch with someone else.

Secondly, if there’s a high internal turnover rate at the firm, it might affect both the quality of hire they can bring you, as well as the final cost. If a recruiting agency is constantly having to find new recruiters, how can you be sure how good those recruiters are in their field? And the agency might have increased its service fees as a result of constantly losing money when trying to scout out its own internal talent. After all, a recruiting agency is supposed to specialize in finding the perfect hire–individuals both competent and passionate about their chosen career. If they can’t do it at their own firm, how can you be sure they’ll do it for you?

According to Labrie, when she hires new recruiters for her firm, she tries to find out first if they池e passionate about what they do, and if they really care. At the end of the day, I need to find out if they池e going to dig for that person.

2. How do you find great candidates?
A great recruiter should think like a marketing professional, targeting niche audiences that are more probable to be keen on a new job offer. And with only 10 percent of relevant talent actively searching for a job, an excellent recruiter will need to be proactive in the search.

First, if they’re going to find the best candidates, they’ll need to know where to look. As Labrie says of her recruiters, we don’t always get the candidates we want through job postings, so we have to be very good researchers and diggers to get the information.

If they can provide you with a specific strategy for sourcing these passive candidates, McClure says it’s essential to find out how they will engage them. once they find the people, how do they connect with them, build rapport? Do they understand what the candidates are looking for to make a move? And how do they sell them on the opportunity, especially if it’s a passive candidate who they found when they weren’t actively looking?

3. What’s your strategy for determining if a candidate is a good cultural fit with your client?
In recent times, culture fit has been a buzzword amongst recruiters and HR experts, and with good reason. According to the authors of Who: The A Method for Hiring, one in three of the CEOs interviewed cited inappropriate culture fit as the primary reason for hiring mistakes. It seems that employers would agree that it takes a lot more than work experience to get the job.

As an employer, you should be sure to determine if your prospective recruiter will take your culture into consideration when sourcing candidates. To do this, McClure recommends asking things like, tell me about the best culture that you’ve ever worked in. What made it really enjoyable for you to work there? Where’s a place where you didn’t fit well, and what was that like?

However, before the recruiter will be able to assess a candidate’s compatibility with your culture, they’ll need to understand it. Inquire how the recruiter would go about doing that. As a baseline, Miller-Merrell says that most third party recruiters will probably go through a checklist, or they’ll spend some time with you on the phone, or they’ll do some research on the Internet to get a sense of who you are as a company.

Of course, it’s important to note that no matter what recruiter you hire, you should work with them in tandem. You’ll have to do your part to make sure they have all the resources they’ll need to do their job, and find you the best new hires for your growing business. As Labrie notes, for recruiters that’s important when we’re trying to recruit for the company culture is that [the employer] shares everything, absolutely everything, with us.

If you do your due diligence, ask these questions before hiring a recruiter, and participate fully in the process once you’ve engaged their services, you should be set to find great new hires for the positions your growth has created. And with the recruiter’s help, you should be able to focus on what you do best, and keep the company growing.

The search box has been made more prominent, and it has a new drop-down that lets you access saved searches and history. Under that is the activity feed. There’s also a new feature on the right called “People You May Want to Hire.”

Here’s what it looks like:

LinkedIn’s Elizabeth Burstein writes in a blog post:

Its “look and feel” more closely resembles LinkedIn.com, which makes the user experience more intuitive and simple. As LinkedIn Talent Solutions’ Head of Product Parker Barrile noted during today’s homepage launch event, “Most recruiting products are outdated and designed for CIOs, not recruiters. Fortunately, the consumerization of the enterprise has begun to infiltrate the recruiting industry and is influencing a new generation of products. Consumerization means putting the user’s priorities first.”

This idea motivated the Recruiter homepage redesign; we sought to build a tool that functions like a consumer app in the front, but has the power and rich feature set of an enterprise tool in the back. Let’s take a closer look.

LinkedIn lets you take a tour of the new design here.

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I went to school at UCSC and graduated with a double major in business management economics and psychology. When I was in school social media, enterprise social software, emergent collaboration, and anything related to the future of work was not taught. Facebook was just getting started, Twitter didn’t exist and neither did many of the enterprise collaboration platforms such as Jive, Yammer, Chatter, and dozens of others.

Experience used to the the hot commodity to get a good job. When I graduated from UCSC even the entry level jobs I was applying for were asking for 2-3 years of experience and these were basic jobs. I was always candid during my interviews and told the people interviewing me that even though I may not know how to do something that I’m sure I could figure it out. Experience, experience, experience, that’s all I would ever hear.

Today experience is no longer the primary commodity. Things are changing and evolving so quickly that experience is becoming less and less relevant. New jobs are emerging that didn’t exist a few years ago and so experience for them is irrelevant. Instead what is more valuable today is the ability to learn new things and then apply them in order to solve problems. Anyone with an internet connection has access to limitless information to help them learn about anything and everything they want. However as Friedman points out in his article, we spend too much time getting people to be college ready instead of innovation ready.

According to Friedman:

“Today because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.”

The future employee must have the skill and will to learn.

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This especially doesn’t make sense for employees who have long commutes. When working with a client (with hundreds of thousands of employees) we found that one employee was commuting an average of 4 hours a day which is the equivalent of a part-time job. Assuming a very conservative hourly salary we found that a potential $52,000 was being wasted on commuting time on just this one employee. We were quite surprised to find that in this particular office branch commuting 3-4 hours a day was actually typical for other members of the team as well This quickly starts to get into the six-figures. Ask around, you will be surprised how much time your friends and family members spend commuting, and for what?

Allowing employees to work from home is easier said than done though. In order to make this happen organizations need to have the proper technology in place as well as the proper attitude toward working from home. There are many collaborative solutions that support flexible work environments but if it’s something that management frowns upon, then of course nobody will do it. Unfortunately not all managers are open and receptive to the idea of building a collaborative organization where employees can work from flexible work environments, I believe these managers either need to be educated on the benefits or simply let go…period.

Organizations should seriously consider allowing their employees to work from home for a few reasons:

• Employees can still get access to the same information and the same people as they would if they were physically in the office
• Employees are actually happier and appreciate the flexibility to place their life first instead of their work first aka LIFE-work balance
• Organizations don’t need to waste time and money on commuting when employees could use that time to actually get work done
• Employees can actually be more productive when working from home because they are allowed to work when it is convenient and optimal for them instead of when they are forced to
• Employees feel more engaged at work and passionate about the work they do
• Employee turnover rates decrease since people enjoy working for organizations that offer flexible work environments
• Organizations who force employees to work 9-5 from home are seen as out-dated and stale
• It’s good for the environment

However, the greatest reason for why organizations should allow their employees to work from home/flexible work environments is just simply common sense. In today’s age do we really even need to discuss and try to justify why employees should be allowed to work from home? Seriously? The technology exists to support it in a way that previously did not exist and the corporate mentality of hierarchy and command and control is being destroyed.

Research is also plentiful on the subject:

A fairly recent study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee which was published by the National Communication Association found that:

“Employees who telecommute the majority of the work week are more satisfied with their jobs compared to those working mostly in the office because working remotely alleviates more stress than it creates.”

Here’s another interesting study which found that:

Letting one employee work half of their time out of the office saves company’s about $10,000 per year and the employee up to $6,800 per year and about two work weeks worth of time due to using less gas, and avoiding parking, food, clothing and other costs.

Here’s another piece of research from Stanford: which eliminated a few amazing statistics:

We found a highly significant 13% increase in performance from home-working, of which 9% was from working more minutes of their shift period (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from higher performance per minute. We found no negative spillovers onto workers who stayed in the office. Home workers also reported substantially higher work satisfaction and psychological attitude scores, and their job attrition rates fell by over 50%.

This goes beyond collaboration, social business, enterprise 2.0, or whatever you want to call it. Quite simply this is about the future of work and if you think that the future of work is about people sitting in cubicles from 9-5 then you are going to be in for a rude wake-up call.

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Of course, “diverse” means more than just race. It can mean gender, age, religion, background, physical ability and more.

However, if you do have a varied group of employees, sometimes the differences seem more obvious than the similarities. You’ll need to find ways in and outside of the office to build a team that works well together.

At the same time, a trust building weekend at a luxury hotel may be more than most small businesses can afford.

The trick is to find activities that fit your budget, foster relationships, and help create positive, lasting memories.

Here are ten affordable team-building exercises that can help that don’t require you to hold hands, do trust falls, or sing Kumbaya:

1. Play hooky for the afternoon.

Take the team out for an afternoon at a local pool hall or bowling alley. Both are affordable, and you can probably find ones that do and don’t serve alcohol, depending on your company handbook.

2. Start a Book Club

As is the case with most book clubs, make sure that each employee gets a turn at picking a book. This can be something that’s held monthly in the lunchroom or done after work.

(If it’s company sponsored, you may want to set some ground rules, like 50 Shades of Gray is off-limits. And poorly written.)

One important thing to remember—from book clubs to gardening clubs to jogging clubs—this can’t be company mandated, or end up in the employee’s permanent file based on whether they join or don’t join.

The moment they feel that this is a forced death march, morale plummets.

3. Get outside.

Depending on where you live, you can find some great outdoor activities.

We recently had a day out at an archery range run by L.L. Bean’s Outdoor Center. While few of us had a lot of experience playing with a bow and arrow, it was a fun morning out of the office, and we all had some good stories to tell afterward.

If you are going to do a physical activity, make sure it’s something that everyone in the company can take part in. A day of rock climbing or spelunking may not mix well with a sedentary work force.

4. Volunteer together.

Whether it’s a Saturday in a soup kitchen or working with Habitat for Humanity to put a roof over a needy family’s head, pulling together for a cause can turn even the most cynical of your work staff into an old softie.

Plus, you’re doing something good for the community.

5. Lunch & learns.

Bring in an expert and enough pizza to feed the group once a month. Maybe one month you bring in a financial planner to help people set up their 401′s and 529′s.

The following month bring in a dietician who creates unique meal plans for each employee. After that, hire an extreme couponer and learn how to find the best deals online and off.

Make the meetings optional, but throw in the pizza as an enticement.

6. Get the whole family involved.

Plan an afternoon picnic at a local park and invite spouses, kids, and significant others to join you.

You can ask someone to arrange some kid games like kick the can or spoon races. Make sure you pack some Frisbees, footballs or playing cards in your trunk, depending on your staff.

7. Root for the home team.

OK, taking the team out to a sporting event can get pricey, but it doesn’t have to be tailgating at an NFL game.

Most cities have a minor league team in one of the major sports. Near our offices there are NASCAR races every Thursday during the summer, and the Sea Dogs, Red Claws and Pirates play baseball, basketball and hockey, respectively.

There’s even a roller derby league.

You might be surprised what’s around and what’s affordable.

8. BBQ at the Boss’s House.

Make it a potluck and ask everyone to bring his or her favorite childhood dish.

Yes, you might get six dishes of American Chop Suey, but at least there will be leftovers.

While catered events are nice, potluck gives the event a more relaxed, intimate feel.

9. Play games.

While not all employees relish the idea of playing games—whether over lunch, after work or at a retreat—generally once it gets started the competitive juices take over.

Make sure that the games are team-based, and find games that require diversity in a team, like trivia or Pictionary.

10. Ask your employees what activities they want to engage in.

The best activities that bring a team together come from the bottom up. Ask your team for input and suggestions on what you could do as a company.

Over the past few years the flyte crew has gone bowling together, practiced archery, and taken a day cruise on a wind jammer…all suggestions that came from my employees.

Now it’s your turn…what affordable team building experiences have you been part of, and how did it turn out?

Rich Brooks
Don’t Try This At Work

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In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned how perhaps if there would be a major challenge for the corporate world of today with regards to social media tools is not how some of those firms keep blocking their use, but it’s more the assumption from knowledge workers that if they get blocked, like they are doing, apparently, right as we speak, they are receiving a significantly loud and clear message from their employers that all of these social tools are to be used for private and personal reasons. And they do that eventually, resulting in people switching off the work context of living social and just apply it to how they do interact with their family members, friends, relatives and acquaintances. Essentially, personal, private use.

A missed opportunity on its own, if you ask me, because when those very same firms decide to start their own social business journey(s) they are going to find out how they are facing a much tougher challenge with regards to adoption of these social tools, because their employees won’t just see the connection anymore. “Remember? You told us we can’t use these social networking tools at work, so we are not going to start now” is what most folks would probably say. And that reluctance can surely undermine whatever efforts you put in place to help drive that adoption. It just won’t happen.

In the past we have seen some very insightful articles on the topic of whether employees do really waste time at work with social technologies or not, or other relevant pieces where, if anything, they are offering plenty of sound advice as to why businesses should not block the use of social media tools; on the contrary, they should promote them quite heavily, if anything. Perhaps my favourite article so far, at least, from the ones I have read over the course of time would be the one from TechRepublic by Jack Wallen under the title “10 reasons NOT to block social networking at work“, which, basically, covers some of the most compelling reasons as to why businesses, again, should not only encourage the use and adoption of social technologies, but embrace the many perks behind it.

I am not going to reference each and everyone of them, for sure, but I thought I would just go ahead and share a listing of them, as a teaser, to see the kinds of perks that embracing social networking tools and letting your employees be not only responsible, but accountable for using these digital tools to get work done in a professional and responsible manner could do for the business. Your business. To name:

1. “Morale
2. Reputation
3. Communication
4. Advertising
5. Collaboration
6. Social Research
7. Skill Building
8. Transparency
9. PR
10. Networking”

Needless to say that in the world of Open Business my favourite perks of embracing social networking tools in a work environment would be those of Transparency, Collaboration, Networking and Reputation from the list shared above. More than anything because those would be some of the key ingredients towards provoking that particular business transformation that has been in the making for perhaps a bit too long already. Who knows.

Businesses today are starting to look more how they can become more authentic, more transparent, more unique on how they do business, on how they can help differentiate their brand. After all, we all know and fully understand how people do business with people, so the more transparent, open, collaborative, networked those conversations and interactions can well be amongst knowledge workers in a world where you have to work really hard to earn the merit and reputation with your customers and business partners, blocking social networking sites is not going to be very helpful for your overall mission, i.e. becoming a socially integrated enterprise.

As Dan himself concludes: “Social is the new normal. You are the antithesis of collaboration […]“. Actually, I would go even further. Social is the new post-normal, as my good friend Stowe Boyd wonderfully described just recently in a couple of very good articles describing what it is like. But it gets better, because if you have a bit over 30 minutes I would strongly encourage you all to have a look at the recent presentation he did on the topic at the Meaning 2012 Conference in Brighton, UK, that I blogged about recently and which was, without any doubt, one of the best presentations from the entire day and perhaps one of the best from the whole year. Watch through it and you will see what I mean. Here’s the direct link to the video clip and the embedded code if you would want to play it right away:

So, there you have it. Next time someone approaches you and comments on whether they should block the use of all of these digital tools in the Open Business era, or if you engage in a conversation with people whose companies have already blocked the access to these social technologies, remind them how we are living in the Social Era whether they like it or not, in case they may not have noticed it just yet, and how we will be keep moving forward. With or without them.

It’d be their choice.

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Before getting to the roles, let me clear up a misconception about SEO. In reply to @markshaefer, I pasted the following two tweets:

The gist of this conversation is that SEO haters, as I call them, have the wrong conception of SEO. SEO is not about trying to get an unfair advantage in Google in order to drive traffic to your pages. Though it is sometimes practiced this way, regular readers of this blog know well that what we call “black hat” SEO is self defeating. White hat SEO is about growing a loyal audience by building useful content for them. It just so happens that search data is one of the best sources of audience analysis. Far from being a “plague of the web,” SEO is the primary way we succeed as Internet marketers, where, by SEO, I mean white hat SEO.

Learning your audience and providing the content they’re looking for when they search is job one for Internet marketers. In my experience, SEO quickly devolves into gray hat SEO if it is seen as a job only for SEO consultants. In those cases, the SEO consultant just does after-the-fact optimization on a page, which typically conflicts with the way the page was originally developed. Hence the audience who lands on the page from search will not get what they’re looking for, will bounce at a high rate, and ultimately the page will fail.

White hat SEO requires every role in a web development team to have SEO skills. The skills might be slightly different depending on the role. But everyone on the team needs to understand the goal of their development: To attract an audience to the site that finds the content useful and ultimately becomes a loyal customer and advocate for the brand. Because search is the primary way we attract this audience, SEO is a vital skill for everyone on the team.

1. Product Owners

By product owner I am borrowing a term from agile methodologies. In agile, the product owner sets the priorities for development and validates the work for the stakeholders. In scrum–an agile methodology used in my company (IBM)–the product owner manages the product backlog and helps the team build doable stories and tasks in two-week “sprints.” It goes without saying that SEO must be a priority for the product owner if the results of the work are optimized for search.

In my experience as an SEO consultant on agile teams, my primary task is helping the product owner write stories in the product backlog that support the search optimized experiences the team builds. I then use my best Toastmaster skills to convince the product owner to prioritize the SEO stories. For example, one of the teams I consult with has a repeating link building story. The gist of the story is to build a wiki resource for related teams within IBM (PR, social business, and related web teams). The point of the wiki is to help them learn the most relevant links on our site and the appropriate anchor text for those links.

2. Content Strategists

In my experience, content strategists have a love/hate relationship with search. Those who love it, understand how it can be used to help them build more relevant content for their audiences, which is the goal of the content strategist. Those who hate it are laboring under one or another version of the myth expressed by @markschaefer. When they think of SEO, they think of all those pages they landed on that had nothing to do with the intent of their query. They blame SEOs for this, when they should only blame black hat SEOs and perhaps search engines.

For their part, search engines have continually improved, especially since Google Panda, to seek out and destroy pages built by black hats. What remains is a system that mostly rewards good content strategy practices. Even where search engines leave something to be desired in the results, more and more content strategists are learning how to start with keyword research and build personas, journey maps and content plans based on keyword intelligence. At least this is the brand of content strategy I train in the course of my consulting work. The result of this kind of content strategy is white hat SEO.

3. Information architect (IA) or User Experience (UX) Specialist

The information architect (IA), sometimes also called a user experience (UX) specialist, traditionally builds wireframes that ultimately lead to web experiences. These are important, of course, but all they express is what the experience will look like when it’s done. In order to build experiences that tend to attract the target audience through search, the IA must understand the whole experience, where this typically begins with search and ends with the audience achieving their goals. This requires IAs to get out of their comfort zones and start thinking outside of the wireframe.

In my experience, IAs are initially the hardest people to convince that their work needs the perspective of an SEO consultant. I have often had to counter the myth that if someone searches for information, it is a sign that the IA has failed. The truth is, most users prefer to search than trying to dig through mega menus of options. Our brains can parse seven plus or minus two pieces of information at one time. After that, we are overwhelmed with options. In those cases, we revert to search. The more we overload users with information, the more they revert to search. This is why search query volumes are growing faster than the rate of new users on the web. Information overload makes search necessary.

Once I get over that myth, IAs become my greatest advocates on the team. I think this happens because they are trained to look at data when evaluating their work. Heat maps and other click data are the life’s blood of the practice. When I show IAs search data, especially the part about how users who come from organic search convert at rates 10 times greater other referral sources, they’re hooked. They then want access to all the keyword data they can get their hands on to make sure we build the experiences their audiences are looking for through search.

4. Designers

Designers are also typically resistant to SEO when I first start working with them. Their primary interest tends to be designing cool-looking sites, rather than easy to use sites. If you’re interested, I have documented such an encounter at my other blog, writingfordigital. When I have been successful convincing them of the importance of SEO in their design work, it has typically started with this quote from Steve Jobs:

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

When they consider that the whole experience typically begins with search and continues to the audience achieving their goals, they start to make SEO a priority. In the age of Google Panda, this means giving a wide berth to static text above the fold, where the content strategist can tell the audience what the page is about and why they should care. It might run against their grain to allow text to take such a prominent place on a page. But they will do it and live with it when search results start coming in.

5. Web Development Lead or Webmaster

Most web teams need a single point of contact to manage the actual coding, testing and release of pages within a site. That’s what I mean by web development lead, though they are sometimes called a webmaster. These folks don’t tend to resist SEO because so much of their work has been the purview of SEOs in the past, who typically came in after the fact to make a site more available to the top keywords. Still, I spend a lot of time training these folks in the proper use of human-readable URLs, the importance of minimalist metadata, and the appropriate use of JavaScript. Of all the roles in a typical web development team, this one has the biggest chance of messing up search results. My main job with these folks is making sure they understand how not to do it.

These are just the five most important roles within a development team that require SEO training. Next time, I will discuss five roles outside of the web development team; namely, PR, social media managers, advertising, branding and naming and market research. In future posts, I’ll discuss the kind of SEO training needed in the executive suite.

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Yesterday, I sat in a HubSpot “Tech Talk”. The topic was “Technical Interviews”. The idea was to share ideas and best practices across the product team so that we can better find and recruit great developers for the team. HubSpot has had a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to technical recruiting. We’re fortunate to have Paul English, founder/CTO as a friend (he’s hands down the best recruiter I’ve ever met). Paul was kind enough to be “CTO for a day” at HubSpot. And, because Google Ventures is an investor, we’ve been able to have a Googler from their recruiting team spend a few hours with us, reviewing our practices and giving us tips for how we can improve them.

Ideas for Creating An Awesome Candidate Experience (CX)

Here are some ideas for what I think would make a great candidate experience. Many of these ideas are implemented at HubSpot — and I’m hoping the others will get adopted too. We have some work to do ourselves, but we’re passionate about building an amazing product team in Boston.

1. Decide to do it. The first step in creating a great candidate experience (CX) is deciding that it’s important. Just like you’d commit time and energy for creating a great UX for your product, you need to devote some calories to iterating on your CX and working had to make it exceptional. There are a number of reasons you should do this:

a) Recruiting great people is hard — and competitive. All things being equal, on average, if you can make the candidate experience better, you win. People will often take positions with lesser known companies simply because they had a great interviewing experience.

2. Focus on the entire experience. Designing a great candidate experience is not just about doing interviews well. A great CX starts from the moment a person connects with your company (like your website) all the way through the point that they are delivered a decision — and every step in between.

3. Measure it to improve it. It’s not possible to create a great CX without getting feedback from candidates. What I’d suggest is a simple NPS (Net Promoter Score) style survey at the end of the candidate interviewing process. The survey asks exactly two questions:

a) On a scale of 0-10 how likely are you to recommend that a friend or family member interview here?

b) Why did you give us that score?

You don’t have to use these specific questions — the benefit is that NPS is that it is simple, and widely used as a way to measure customer satisfaction (or more accurately, customer delightion). We use NPS in a variety of ways at HubSpot — including measuring the happiness of our customers and team members.

Some quick notes on collecting this feedback: First, It should be collected before a final decision is delivered, so you get unbiased data. Second, it should be made clear to the candidate that they are doing you a favor. There’s no harm in telling a candidate exactly why you’re asking for this feedback. In almost all cases, the candidate would likely see this as a positive signal. It shows that you care.

4. Interviews are both a buying and selling process. One of the mistakes inexperienced interviewers often make is behaving as if their job is only to “be convinced” by the candidate that they’d make a good hire. As a result, they often have an “edge”, aren’t particularly friendly, and don’t do enough to make the candidate feeel comfortable. That can be a bit disconcerting for the candidate, and creates a sub-optimal candidate experience. As an interviewer, your job is two-fold: One, make a rational judgment as to whether you think this person would be a good hire for the team. Two, ensure that the candidate wants to work at your company. It’s both a buying and a selling process (not just buying). As it turns out, great people always have options. Even if they’re not a good fit and you decide not to hire — you want them to leave with as positive an impression as possible. They may have friends or family that are better fits. Quick mental hack: Pretend like every candidate you don’t hire is going to become a future potential user/customer.

5. Be at least a bit organized. Yes, you’re a startup. Yes, everyone’s already working away furiously and interviews are often an unwelcome irritant. But, that’s our problem — not the candidate’s problem. Spend some time devising at least a simple process to ensure that meetings are scheduled appropriately, the candidate knows what the process is (and how long they’ll need to be there) and always, always, always make sure they’re feeling comfortable and welcome.

6. Make speed a feature. Just like great UX, a great CX is about speed. Faster is always better. I’ve never met someone that thought: “Boy, am I glad those folks took 2 weeks to get back to me on an answer…”.

7. Have a “guest” tablet available for candidates. Make sure it’s already on your WiFi network, the home page in the browser is your company website. The idea is to give the candidates something productive to occupy their time with while they’re waiting. They can even play Angry Birds, if they want. Nothing’s worse than sitting in reception, not knowing what the guest WiFi password is, and having to twiddle one’s thumbs before an interview.

8. Don’t repeat the same topics. Be organized enough that if the candidate is going to go through multiple interviews, you don’t have them cover the same topics multiple times. That’s annoying and a waste of time. If one interview focuses on their front-end development skills and how well they really understand jQuery, then perhaps the other interview should be more about work style and thoughts on team collaboration.

9. Have a clear feedback/rating system. You need to have a clear internal rating system so that interviewers can express their overall take. If the person is an absolute no-hire, that should be clear. So, your scale could be: absolutely no hire, leaning against, neutral, leaning in favor, absolutely hire them. One important point while we’re on this topic: The rating scale is not about the person — it’s about whether this person should be made an offer at this point in time. I’ve sometimes seen people give a “high” rating (because the person was really, really good — and interviewed really well), but then later heard “but I wouldn’t hire them.” The reason for the interviews is to make a hiring decision. Said differently, the ultimate return value of the function is a boolean hire/no-hire NOT awesome/good/not-so-good person.

10. Learn something. Make every effort to learn something from every candidate. Just because you’re on this side of the hiring table and just because you may be more experienced does not mean you can’t learn something from every candidate. You can. Try to draw out a particular passion that the candidate has. Perhaps a recent epic debugging victory. Or, why their editor is the One True Editor To Rule Them All. Doesn’t matter what the topic. Find what they’re passionate about, and genuinely get them to teach you something about it. (If they’re not passionate about anything, you’ve got a problem).

11. Teach something. Whether the candidate gets an offer or not, they should have learned something from you. They need to walk out smarter than they walked in. (Note: This does not mean you spend 50% of the interview telling them about the proper Pythonic way to do something).

12. Be transparent. Make the conversation open. Let the candidate ask questions that are on their mind. It could be about team dynamics, work style/hours, financials (growth, cash, etc.), product strategy, dev philosophy, whatever. Be honest. If there are some things you can’t answer, be honest about that. But, try to be as transparent as possible — it makes for a much better candidate experience.

13. No leading of the witnesses. If you’re having multiple people interview a candidate, you need to make sure that the early interviewer(s) don’t unduly influence the later ones. This is important for a couple of reasons: One, you want multiple viewpoints, not the same viewpoint multiple times. Second, from the candidate’s perspective, if they feel like they got off on the wrong foot in the first interview, you want them to have a reasonable chance of showing off their awesomeness in the subsequent interviews.

Warning: Controversial Idea coming up: One of the top areas of debate regarding technical interviewing is wheter you should “fail fast” (or not). Let me set this up with an example: Lets say you invite a candidate in for 4 hours for a series of interviews. Lets say after the first interview, the interviewer is absolutely sure that this candidate is a “no hire”. What do you do?

a) Thank them for their time and stop the interview process? The advantage is that you’re not expending further (very precious) developer time, when a decision is already made. The downside is that this is kind of disheartening and deflating for the candidate. If they were scheduled for 4 hours and you send them home after the first hour, that just doesn’t feel good.

b) Continue the interview process? The advantage is that it’s (arguably) a better candidate experience. You might even suggest that the later interviewers might like the candidate so much that they convince the first interviewer to change their mind.

My general leaning is not completely cut-off the interview process. Having said that, there are a few things I’d try:

i) One, when inviting candidates in, make it a time range instead of an absolute number of hours. Example: Please schedule 3-4 hours for your visit. That way, you could reasonably end the interviews without going through the full “maximum” time.

ii) Build a reputation for being super-selective, but fair. Be honest and open about this in the early conversations.

iii) Consider offering a $100 Amazon gift card for “early exits”. Be transparent and honest. “I just don’t think we have a good fit here and doesn’t make sense to put you through more interviews.” UPDATE: I reconsidered this one. The more I thought about it, the cheesier it sounded.

14. Get them to code, but let them pick the language. Coding exercises are a critical part of the interviewing prcoess. There is no substitute for getting a candidate to do a quick coding exercise (either on a computer or on a whiteboard). The intent for this exercise is not to test proficiency with a particular language — but to see if they can “think in code” — and how they go about doing it. My advice is to let the candidate pick whatever language they’re comfortable with (amongst the mainstream languages available, like Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Javascript, etc.). Any of these mainstream languages are more than powerful enough for a coding exercise, and even if you’re not completely proficient in a langauge, you’ll still get a sense for how the person goes about thinking about a problem and manifesting a solution in code.

15. Do a friendly follow-up after the offer. Generally, you’ll have someone extend the offer in some formal or semi-formal form. In addition to that, have one of the designated interviewers follow-up with a quick email (perhaps with a “cc” to the others they met). Something like: “Hey, thanks for vistiing HubSpot. We’d be thrilled to have you join our merry band. If you ever want to grab coffee or a bite to eat, just drop me a note. I should probably tear myself away from the computer every now and then anyways…”

What’s Your Take?

Whew! That was a much longer article than I originally intended. Now, it’s your turn. What do you think would make a great candidate experience? Any tips or lessons learned from your own experience you’d be willing to share? Please put them in the comments.

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Oh, and by the way, if you’re an awesome developer (or know one) in the Boston area, you should know about the Boston Battle for recruiting great talent. Hint: There’s potentially $10,000 cash in it for you. Why not take HubSpot’s own Candidate Experience for a spin? I promise you won’t regret it. If you’re awesome, you can email me directly (dharmesh @ hubspot dot-com), with a link to some evidence of your awesomeness.

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Look forward to reading your comments and feedback. As added incentive, if you share something that the community finds particularly insightful or useful, will send you a $25 Amazon certificate. No limit to the number of “winners”. Ready? GO!

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A new infographic from Compliance and Safety offers a multitude of reasons why HR needs to be more involved, along with examples of why it’s a good idea over a bad one.

Some of the statistics from the infographic include:

• 91% of recruiters use social networks.
• Almost half of U.S. companies block their employees from accessing social networks.
• While Goldman Sachs invested in Facebook, it bans its employees from accessing the site.

There are some interesting takeaways from the infographic, but the key message (and one that all brands should be seriously thinking about) is workplaces actually become more effective and innovative if social media access is encouraged.

Don’t let your brand be one of the archaic ones.

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