The Problem With Recruitment Hacks | @ThisIsWillSims on The #SocialRecruiting Show

Use recruitment hacks ethically!

On this week’s show, we invited Talent Acquisition Manager, Will Sims on to talk about ethical recruitment hacks, using automation to enhance human interaction and to compare his beard to mine – there was only going to be one winner!

Will started his recruitment career at Spring Personnel (or was it Office Angels?), focusing on permanent recruitment before making the switch into in-house recruitment in 2010, to avoid making “endless business development calls”. This career change offered the experience to recruitment across the Nordics market and explore his interest in tech and automation. Fast-forward to 2019 and Will is now a freelance Talent Acquisition Manager, and he’s still exploring the use of tech for good.

Katrina opens with a curveball question, asking how you could improve your first contact, if you’re an agency recruiter trying to engage an in-house recruiter;

“I’d like to see something more tangible as opposed to the standard CV-laden email, looking at comments I have made in the past and link that to your pitch along with a bit of humour.”

Using the bot for good

Defining recruitment hacks Will tells us, “although I use the term hack, because it’s universally recognised, I am in two minds about the word. It’s essentially a shortcut – you’re shortcutting a process”.

I first met Will at a Chatbot meet-up in 2017 where he was talking about the use of this tech to enhance the candidate experience and he provided us with more insight into what inspired him;

“LinkedIn and CV’s were pretty flat and I noted people building Bots for business but not for recruitment.”

The current iteration of his Bot “on-boards people to my Facebook group by asking pre-qualifying questions” and “that helps me learn and target things for the group”.

We also challenge Will on automation and he tells us how he used a Bot for engaging with Graduates and how through this automated process he is “still able to nurture them and drip-feed content” and how he got “some good feedback”.

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Will talk about:

• Improving your in-house recruiter first contact 
• Tips for independent in-house recruiters
• Using Bots for fact-finding and sharing content  
• Using automation for volume recruitment 
• Should you automate feedback collection? 
• How to manage your ‘information chaos’