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.
Category Archives: Work
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.
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” :
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.
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
What is Public Relations, and Why It Matters in the Social Media Age
It’s been said that Public Relations has a “PR problem”; while the majority of people aren’t sure exactly what a PR does, almost all of them seem to have a negative impression of my profession. So when people ask about my career and I tell them I work in communications and marketing, their natural follow-up is usually “what does that mean?” Contrary to one popular misconception working in PR is not synonymous with the “Press Release”, which is just one tactic in the arsenal of a Public Relations professional. In fact working in PR has so many connotations that the PRSA led a rebranding effort in attempt to help redefine our work, or at least clarify what we do in the most transparent way.
Most would call my work in Public Relations, although depending on who you ask, you might get a different answer; in grad school we called it Public Communications, which helps distinguish our responsibilities are not limited to working with the press. If only my colleagues knew that calling myself a PR rep was the best shorthand for all the work our profession does: everything from researching public opinion, to crafting marketing strategy and crisis communications plans, to writing press releases and blog posts, to media relations and publicity which our profession is best known for. Continue reading What is Public Relations, and Why It Matters in the Social Media Age
Hitchhiker’s Guide: Mapping the Consumer Media Universe
The media universe is constantly expanding, so as consumers adopt more devices and gadgets their usage of how they watch, shop, and connect continues to evolve; today the media universe revolves around the consumer. As the media landscape changes, PRs, Advertisers, and Marketers must navigate this new media universe, understanding not just all the gadgets consumers own, but also how they use media across devices to form their own behaviors.
Working with Nielsen’s data to provide insights into cross-platform media usage, I helped design the 2012 Consumer Usage Report from concept through completion, including the above inforgraphic meant to help navigate the media universe just in time for CES in January 2013. Using the common marketing metaphor of the “universe”, meaning all people in the target audience, this visualization provides a snapshot overview of the US media market. Visualizing the media universe as a solar system of planets (devices) which revolve around the sun (consumers), this infographic maps consumer ownership of digital devices (computers, mobile, tablets, etc) and devices connected to the TV (cable/satellite, game consoles, etc). Pulling these devices together is gravity, illustrated by how are consumers spending their media time, and some may be surprised that the overwhelming majority of time spent (150+ hours per month) is watching traditional and time-shifted TV.
At the same time consumers’ media habits are rapidly changing, and the media universe continues to expand to incorporare new devices akin to a technological big bang. During 2012 smartphones became the majority of mobile users in the US for the first time, and nearly 1 in 5 households now owns a tablet computer. Social media usage continues to grow, and while many more consumers are using it on the go most still connect to social networks using their home computers. And for cord-cutters like me who get much of their viewing through online stream sites, it may be surprising to learn only 4% of households own IPTV sets, but with 56% of homes using video game consoles it seems likely at least a few are watching video on Netflix and Hulu on their TVs as well.
To learn more about the how consumers use tech and media in their daily lives, please download the full report from Nielsen’s website. And to see more examples of infographics and data visualizations I’ve worked on, check out my portfolio on this site.
Re-launching MattHurst.com
About a year and a half ago I created MattHurst.com as a social networking hub, which I hoped would help make a more personal connection to a new audience while uniting my social media profiles on a single site. Initially the site drew some interest from my friends, even earning me a few kudos from other social media pros, and shot to the top of search results for my own name. But over time the micro-site did not sustain interest, or at least did not attract many visitors to the site.
It’s hard to know exactly why the site didn’t receive much traffic, but one trend I noted was that most visitors to the site came directly, rather than through search or referral links. Using Google Analytics I conducted an audit of the site’s performance, and found the site not only had fewer visitors than expected, but that visitors to the page didn’t spend much time – often less than 1 minute. Since the site didn’t host any original content but rather aggregated my social media streams, it seems that the site didn’t offer visitors any compelling reason to stay on the site once they arrived. In short, the site failed to achieve my goal to connect with a new audience.
While it’s disappointing that the site didn’t attract as much interest as I’d hoped, like any good online marketer I knew I needed to change the strategy based on my measurements of how people used the site. So last week I relaunched MattHurst.com, using my Tubmlr site as a new means to connect with would-be visitors. Starting with over 1000 posts I’ve published over the last 3.5 years updating this Tumblr blog, the new site offers original, compelling content I hope will interest readers/viewers.
My new site also gives me an outlet to connect with people in a different way than my professional blog at MatthewHurst.com, by serving as an outlet for my interests in infographics, internet memes, and cultural commentary that might not reflect my professional brand as much as my personal tastes. And as before, I’ll be keeping a close eye on my site’s performance, and making any adjustments necessary to meet my goals
How to use Facebook to promote your personal brand
With the recent update on Facebook to both personal profiles and pages using the Timeline interface, many brands are reevaluating their marketing strategy on the social network. Likewise individuals promoting their personal brand should consider updating their Facebook presence to take advantage of these new opportunities.
Recently I’ve written about how timelines can be used for visual storytelling, and likewise Facebook’s new design lends itself well to creating social narratives out of photos and status updates, especially by highlighting key events in our lives. Timeline’s changes to personal profiles gives individuals greater control not only of what information is shared publicly vs privately, but to highlight their own accomplishments and personal stories with friends both new and old. And because we know most employers look for Facebook profiles of job candidates during their evaluation, it’s critical to make sure your timeline reflects your personal brand.
Timeline also changes the Facebook pages for brands, and earlier this year I converted my Facebook Open Graph application (for this website) to a full-fledged page. Facebook pages can be built for personal brands to share career accomplishments and insights with like-minded professionals, which might otherwise come across as spammy to your friends; one of the top reasons people are unfriended is for sharing too much work-related information. Many brands have used applications to customize their pages in the past, but now Timeline will become the public face of these pages, allowing them to create more engaging stories which reflect their history. So far I’ve added my work history and career accomplishments to my Timeline, showcasing my professional development for all to see, with the most recent stories highlighed at the top of my timeline (a bit like a blog).
For example, here’s how I use my own Facebook page: Continue reading How to use Facebook to promote your personal brand