A free tool to host docs for your leads and candidates

A tool to help Recruiters share info with leads and candidates

For the past year or so, I've been playing around with a document hosting/sharing service called box.net. Basically, box.net allows you to upload docs - pdf, word, excel, powerpoint - to their server, and then share those docs with people via the web.

Why would you want to do this?

• First, some docs are too large to email. You may have some high resolution docs that your marketing team created, or a full color recruiting brochure, or a non-proprietary powerpoint that your execs created for a conference...all things that you want to share with leads and candidates, but all large. Too large to email. With box.net, you can simply email them a link to these downloadable files instead.
  

• Second, if you're like many corporate recruiting departments, you may struggle to keep the latest versions of your application forms, background check release forms, driving directions to your office (for interviews), etc all in one place. With a service like this, you can keep only the most recent, approved versions of the docs stored online (and even password protect them if you don't want just anyone to find them).
  

• Third, with box.net's integration into Linkedin, you can now allow leads and candidates who find your profile (a lot of active candidates are leveraging Linkedin these days to find recruiters at their target companies) to directly access similar files. So active and passive candidates now get direct access to your marketing materials. Just one more way to expose your recruiting messages without lifting a finger.
  

• Fourth, if you're a candidate, box.net would allow you to upload your resume, portfolio of work samples, letters of recommendation, and more to your own linkedin page, for recruiters or hiring managers to access.

Box.net is free for a basic account, which allows you to host 1GB of docs. Details at www.box.net

Want to see how it works? Login to your Linkedin account, then find me - John Vlastelica - to check out my profile and access a few documents I uploaded yesterday.

Note: I take no kickbacks or commissions from box.net or any vendors. When I recommend a service, it's because I like it, not because I'm incented to market it.

Employment Branding

I'm going to risk preaching to the choir here...

I believe companies build their employment brands one candidate at a time.

It's borderline amusing to me when people start talking about employment branding, and they immediately go to their "ugly careers site" and their "lack of a good tagline" and don't discuss their recruiting and interviewing process. Come on!?!

Now, there's no question you should have a quality careers site, and - I suppose - some sort of tagline (although most of those are so silly and generic - they're all some sort of take-off on "Imagine the possibilities" or "Come join the winning team", aren't they?)

To really build a great employment brand, though, I think most companies would be better off investing their time and money in their candidate experience. I've been able to meet with many new hires and survey current candidates (both as an in-house corp recruiting leader and consultant), and I'll tell you what - there's usually quite a bit of room for improvement. And the things we can do to impact our candidate experience often have an (admittedly hard to measure) exceptionally high ROI on our employment brand.

I'll talk about how you might baseline your current candidate experience, identify opportunity areas, and some of the lower hanging fruit (relatively cheap and easy) things you can do to improve candidate experience in future posts.

In the meantime, tell us: Are you measuring your candidate experience today? Do you have any insights into the way your improvements to candidate experience have improved your employment brand? Please share. We'd love to hear what you're doing.