What to Consider Before you Begin Social Recruiting
Posted by Alexandra Earnley on Wed, Sep 15, 2010 @ 09:05 AM
As many of you may already know, the 4th #socialrecruiting summit happened at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA this past Monday. In the past, the summit's tagline has been "The Future of Recruiting is Social". This fall's #socialrecruiting summit tagline is different, "All Recruiting is Social". When you think about it, recruiting is an inherently social activity; you're meeting new people, engaging in a conversation with them, and interacting with them.
With social media's continued popularity, it's hard to image not utilizing such a large resource for recruiting. But it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new, wide-reaching platform like twitter or facebook and overlook other resources that may be more valuable to your company. So it's true, "all recruiting is social" whether you do it in a more traditional way or through social media. It's not a clear cut decision if one is better than the other, but there are definitely some things to consider before beginning social recruiting.
Shafiq Lokhandwala, CEO of NuView Systems, for instance, thinks such channels simply contain too much "noise," much of it a distraction, or possibly even information that could adversely influence a recruiter. He believes that there's a mix of social and professional information that can be counterproductive to recruiting. The traditional channels still yield a better fit.
Here are some great tips from Ann All for using Twitter and other Social Networking Sites as a recruitment tool:
1. Create a branded company profile and assign a dedicated person to monitor it. Consider automating tweets so job posts appear on Twitter as they become available. Not dedicating personnel to social channels is a gaffe mentioned in a Deloitte research study on online communities.
2. Don't just push out job postings. Engage in conversations with your followers.
3. Create a protocol for your job Tweets. Consider searchability by using hash marks (#) around key words. Include a trackable URL to your job posting so you can monitor the number of click-throughs generated through Twitter.
4. Take advantage of third-party applications like TweetBeep, which alerts you to tweets relevant to your search.
5. Encourage your staff to retweet job openings by providing incentives such as a referral bonus for candidates sourced through tweeting.
6. Share industry expertise and other relevant information in addition to job postings. It's OK to include some personal tweets. (Although the business-oriented messages should outnumber those, I'd add.)
7. Figure out which sites your target applicants frequent and focus on those. Lots of community college students, for instance, can be found on MySpace, said James Durbin of Durbin Media, one of my sources. Although folks in the construction industry typically haven't spent much time online, Durbin said that's changing, thanks to Twitter. "A lot of those folks have smartphones now, so Twitter can be a good way to reach them."
8. As you would in any social setting, employ good manners and good common sense.
9. Experiment with different sites to find the ones you like. Ask folks questions about the methods that have worked best for them. Such sharing is a staple of social sites.
10. Consider your company's level of exposure. You want to seem savvy but not overpowering.
11. Make sure you monitor sites to see what people are saying about you and to provide quick responses when merited.
Doing some research before beginning social recruitment is also important. If you are looking to hire someone in a marketing, PR, or a similar field that utilizes social media tools as part of their job, then posting jobs on twitter or facebook could be beneficial since the person you are looking to recruit is probably on those channels themselves.
Another important part of recruiting management is having a recruiting module with your HR system. NuViewHR's Recruiting Management offers advanced tools to assist recruiters and hiring managers with the entire hiring process, from requisitions, sourcing, applicant tracking and management, to interviewing and job offer.
Visit Recruiting Management to learn more!