The Archives

I’m not gonna get political here except to say that McCain
is old as dirt. He knows nothing about the economy and even if he brings in
Romney to be VP, I don’t think he would relinquish much control to the VP office.

As for Obama, his campaign’s been impressive at marketing
the candidate but I’m afraid he’s just a bunch of hot air. Sure he gives a
great speeches but I could see his lack of experience lead to the reversal of
some policies that I believe are keeping us safe at home and my PATH train from
blowing up as I commute to NYC every morning.

But I digress… the reason for this post is to point out a
move by the Obama campaign to leverage social media to engage voters and drive
site traffic; something employers need to better understand as they look to
engage talent and drive traffic to their career sites.

If you’re looking for new ways to attract and engage talent and
drive that talent to your career site to apply to jobs, watch and video or further
engage in your employer brand in some other way, take a tip from the Obama
camp. Leverage LinkedIn Answers.

What is Obama doing?
His campaign is asking questions related to their agenda.
This is building interest in Obama, engaging voters, attracting them to the
campaign’s site and probably generated new fund raising leads. Obama’s question is currently featured on LinkedIn users’ homepages. It leads to this question which links to this landing page on the Obama site.

What can employers
do?
Simple. Here are 5 Social Media Tips for Recruiters looking
to leverage LinkedIn Answers.

1. Be active in the LinkedIn Answers community
and add value

Being an active
member provides credibility. Remember, answering questions often provides
better site traffic and branding than asking questions. Don’t ask questions
like, ‘Anyone want to work in sales.’ Only answer questions if you can offer a
decent answer.

2. Always include a link to your career site
or relevant landing page

The Obama camp
linked to a landing page with a lead generation for and video. This is a
perfect example of what to do.

3. Never pitch.

We know. Your
company is a great place to work. I’ll figure that out on my own. Let your
answers stand on their own.

4. Try to get your employees involved,
measure success and reward

Install analytics on your site so
that you can see where you traffic is coming from, when an employee is
responsible for answering a question and leading traffic to your career site,
compensate him/her. Bonus the employee if he/she achieves an expert rating in
any category.

It’s not as hard as you think to
put value on career site traffic. Think about it. You can look into your job
board stats and payments and figure out what you pay monster, cb or hotjobs per
job view or site visitor.

Look into it. Figure out what you’re
currently paying per visitor. Set aside some budget, taken from your job
boards. Id suggest taking it from monster since hotjobs and cb are beating up
on them and are therefore less flexible to day with pricing.

Take that added budget, put it aside
for rewarding your employees’ efforts in linkedin answers that drive traffic to
your career site. Review traffic at the end of the quarter and compensate those
employees whom were most active or whom generated the most traffic.

5. Monitor the LinkedIn Answers RSS feed for terms related
to your niche

With rss you can
keep tabs on the questions and answers that are most valuable to you and most
likely to provide the best return. Subscribe the high value feeds. This will
keep you from having to search for topics all the some and sift through the
same clutter.

That’s it.

Yahoo! Answers works well too, but I’ve found the LinkedIn
audience to be less spammy, more engaged and more qualified.

If you have questions or something to add about your own
experience with recruiting with social media and answer service like these, be sure to comment.

You can read the my answers on LinkedIn Answers here.