New Recruitics blog post: How to Improve Recruiting Efficiency

How to Improve Recruiting Efficiency

As the recruiting landscape rapidly evolves, it’s become essential for companies to continually scout for new ways to revamp recruitment strategies.

A carefully-crafted, well-maintained recruitment marketing process casts a wide net to reach candidates within the talent pool. Then, a company can utilize technology to funnel candidates with the right skills and qualifications to support the hiring process. This helps enhance efficiency – which is essential if companies wish to remain competitive.

Spreading holiday cheer with The Nutcracker Suite EP

The Nutcracker Suite by matthurst

A synth inspired tribute to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet

Continuing my journey with re-imagining music in the public domain, this holiday season I’ve recorded my own synth-inspired tribute to Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”. This story and music always take me back to my childhood, dreaming of holiday magic and imaginative adventures, so it seems fitting to record my own cover versions in the chiptune style that was the soundscape of my youth (with more than a few gifts under the Xmas tree).

And just as with my previous release of the “1923 EP“, I’m releasing the following new songs into Creative Commons licensing so that others can remix, reuse, and adapt the recordings into something new”
Waltz of the Flowers
Dance of the Reed Flutes
March of the Toy Soldiers (aka The Nutcracker March)

I hope you’ll give my remixes a spin and share them anytime you want to celebrate – please consider it my gift to you this holiday season!

New Recruitics blog post: Using Marketing Strategy to support Seasonal Hiring goals

My latest blog post on Recruitics’ website provides a high-level outline for how employers can build recruitment marketing strategies to help support their seasonal hiring plans.

Strategic Ways to Recruit Seasonal Workers

Hiring in-demand talent can be a challenge under the best of circumstances. As this year’s seasonal hiring rush approaches however, businesses are finding themselves faced with additional hurdles to reaching hiring goals – volatility of the current economy, changes in workplace, and shifting hiring dynamics over the last two years.

As with all marketing strategy, this guide begins with market research and gathering the relevant data to create a data-driven plan.

With data, companies can understand the performance of their jobs across all sources – which helps companies plan the roadmap for success. Without quality analytics, companies might be making budgeting decisions off of intuition rather than insights – which isn’t an effective way to strategize.

To learn more about talent attraction, programatic job advertising, reaching diverse audiences, employer branding, and engaging with candidates please give my blog post a read. And thanks again to Recruitics for the opportunity to share my insights and ideas on their platform!

Kicking off the Roaring Twenties with my new “1923 EP”

One of my New Years resolutions for 2019 was to make more creative risks, and this took on many forms: photography, storytelling, even cooking. But from January 1st I had a big project in mind: making new music for the first time in nearly a decade.  A year later, I’m finally ready to share my “1923 EP” :

1923 EP by matthurst

Inspired by Roaring Twenties classics which were finally released to the public domain at the start of 2019, I set out to rearrange and re-contextualize these classics from the American songbook for the 21st century. What I came up with was a stripped-down set of songs, influenced by nostalgic sounds like chiptune, FM synths, and vintage samplers that help bring these old melodies to life.

Inspired by the Roaring Twenties, I set out to rearrange and re-contextualize these classics from the American songbook for the 21st century. What I came up with was a stripped-down set of songs, influenced by nostalgic sounds like chiptune, FM synths, and vintage samplers that help bring these old melodies to life.

But why 1923? Last year marked the first time in over two decades that copyrighted works from 1923 entered the public domain, thanks in part to lobbying by big media companies in the late 1990s. To help correct the absurdity of overly-restrictive copyright laws keeping great music from the public for nearly a century, I’m proud to share my recordings through Creative Commons licensing so that others can share or remix my music to make their own creative projects.

Continue reading Kicking off the Roaring Twenties with my new “1923 EP”

Reaching new Movember Milestones with Recruitics’ team!

As an active Movember supporter for many years, I’ve been proud to help raise money and awareness in support of men’s health issues like prostate and testicular cancer, mental health and suicide prevention.  And I’ve written before about how Movember uses social marketing techniques to promote men’s health issues.

But this year was my first leading a team of fundraisers, helping my Mo Bros’ and Mo Sistas’ at Recruitics through “no-shave November”.  What started by a post gauging interest on Slack was quickly embraced by Recruitics’ leadership and with members signing up from across our company.  We even organized a “Waffle Wednesday” fundraiser to earn donations from our hungry co-workers! Continue reading Reaching new Movember Milestones with Recruitics’ team!

Career update:

I’m joining Recruitics!

I’m excited to share that I will soon begin working with Recruitics as a Marketing Strategist! Recruitics is a data-centric recruitment marketing agency that makes it easy for the world’s leading brands to attract and hire great talent.

In my new role, I’ll be helping staffing agencies, fast-growing startups, and Fortune 500 companies attract top talent at scale using digital marketing via Recruitics groundbreaking Analytics and automation platform to help optimize job advertising strategies. I’ll be based out of our New York City office, with Recruitics recently expanding its regional growth with offices in London, Wilton, and Atlanta.

Watch the throne: Who takes the media crown during royal weddings?

If it seems like Harry and Meghan have taken over your social media feeds, or you’ve been sucked in to the wall-to-wall news coverage about the Royal Wedding, you’re not alone.  No matter whether you live in the U.K., commonwealth countries, or even in the U.S.A., it feels like the whole world is on edge for the Windsor family’s next wedding. You might even call it the most anticipated wedding since Robb Stark married Talisa (although hopefully with a happier ending).

And this is nothing new – back in 2011 I used Nielsen’s analytics tools to measure media buzz about Harry’s older brother Prince William marrying the future Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.  Surprisingly we found that American news outlets covered that Royal Wedding more frequently than their UK or Commonwealth counterparts. Back then William was most mentioned in social media, except in the UK where Brittons were abuzz about the people’s princess.  Overall Americans made the most noise about the Royal Wedding in social media, although Brittons had a higher share-of-voice on the topic, which seemed to be on everyone’s mind up to the big day.

It seems like history is repeating itself for Prince Harry, so I thought it might be fun to take one last look back at the first Royal Wedding of the social media age: Continue reading Watch the throne: Who takes the media crown during royal weddings?

Speaking at the United Nations

This week I lived out a lifelong dream of speaking before the United Nations! I was honored to deliver a statement on behalf of HelpMeSee​ to the 50th Commission on Population and Development.

HelpMeSee statement to UN at CPD50

In April 2017, I was honored to deliver a statement on behalf of HelpMeSee​ to the 50th Commission on Population and Development. Lean more at: http://www.matthewhurst.com/2017/04/speaking-at-the-united-nations/

As part of my role managing communications and content marketing at HelpMeSee, I often write speeches/statements and build presentations for our leadership. Late last year I took on responsibility for managing our global NGO’s membership with the Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC), participating in membership events and submitting HelpMeSee’s initiatives in support of the UN’s agenda to support public health and sustainable development. I was thrilled when our submissions were approved, so when our CEO was unavailable to speak I was nervous but excited to present our statement before the the committee at the UN’s headquarters in NYC.

To read the full transcript of the speech and statement, please visit HelpMeSee’s website.

World Sight Day petition

Today is World Sight Day, a global holiday established by the UN’s World Health Organization to raise awareness about eye health and bring attention to blindness and eye health. To celebrate, today HelpMeSee submitted over 12,000 signatures to our petition calling on the United Nations to support an increase of training for cataract specialists needed to treat the millions of cataract blind around the world.

According to the WHO at least 20 million people are blinded by cataracts, despite the fact that sight can be restored by a low-cost surgical treatment, mostly due to poor access to health care in developing countries. Earlier this year I took on a new role as Content Marketing Manager with HelpMeSee to tackle this growing global health issue, including helping raise awareness and activism through this petition.

As part of my new role, I was asked to help represent HelpMeSee at the UN, using our NGO’s special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council. Then we decided to combine our UN advocacy with another common marketing goal: growing our list of supporters (and maybe leads as future donors) for email marketing outreach. So we partnered with Care2, a leading social network for philanthropy and activism, to share our UN petition with their growing audience.

Bringing it all together was our marketing funnel: we built a series of landing pages to share the petition, designed to convert interested advocates into active petition signers who would join our email database. At the top of that funnel we utilized our Google Ad Grant, available to any non-profit to looking use AdWords’ search engine marketing tools, to introduce thousands more to our cause through relevant search ads driving to the petition. This campaign worked in tandem with Care2’s support, adding 29% more signatures above our 10k goal! Along the way I learned more about tools like Unbounce and MailChimp then I ever thought possible, and HelpMeSee qualified to Google Ad Grants Pro (4x the total funding) by optimizing search ad spending to 99% efficiency for consecutive months.

I’m proud of the awareness we raised and support we’re building towards a critical public health challenge, and now I’m looking forward to delivering the thousands of signatures we gathered to the UN! But it’s not too late to add your name to the list- you can read the full petition and sign today here:

Sign Petition: Join The Fight to End The Leading Cause of Blindness

More than 20 million people are needlessly blind due to untreated cataracts. Tell the UN: I support training of cataract specialists in the developing world. (11947 signatures on petition)

Joining HelpMeSee, the Campaign to End Cataract Blindness

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the HelpMeSee as a Social Media Coordinator beginning next week! In this new role I’ll be managing social media with daily updates and engagements to support fundraising for this global health care non-profit organization.

Founded in 2010, HelpMeSee is a global campaign to end cataract blindness, which is the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide.  Over 20 million people are needlessly blind because of cataracts, and a further 82 million who are visually impaired will eventually go blind because they cannot access treatment. Cataracts can effect people of any age, race, or background, with women disproportionately impacted and less likely to be treated.  Most of the cataract blind live in developing countries, where there is a shortage of cataract surgeons trained to provide sight restoring treatment for the millions of people in need.

Fortunately HelpMeSee is developing a solution- using virtual reality simulators to train the thousands of cataract surgeons needed to fight blindness.  Continue reading Joining HelpMeSee, the Campaign to End Cataract Blindness

Content Marketing, Communications, and Social Media Strategy