SOCIAL MEDIA IN RECRUITMENT

Transcription

1 SOCIAL MEDIA IN RECRUITMENT Social media is hot. And for businesses it represents opportunities to connect directly with candidates on a totally different level. This is why nearly every business on the planet- from giants like Starbucks and IBM to the local engineering firm - are exploring social media initiatives. A year ago, businesses were uncertain about social media. Now it's here to stay and companies are rapidly adopting social media recruiting. Bruce Morrton Allegis Talent2 bruce.morton@talent2.com July 2010

2 Since the inception of the web there have been huge changes in how media is consumed and produced. At the forefront of this media evolution is social media - a participatory phenomenon that is no longer being used by the few but by the many, and should be considered an integral part of any businesses' digital marketing strategy. The rapid adoption of social media is having a fundamental effect on recruitment. People are looking for jobs in a different way and many smart businesses are embracing new digital recruitment tools and techniques to reduce costs and increase the quality of their recruiting techniques. Lately there has been a lot of talk (and tweets) about the social media bubble, starting with a blog post on Harvard Business Review. A bubble suggests that something has greatly inflated value, e.g., the housing bubble, or the dot-com bubble. It s not that the value of social media is overstated, it s that the investment required for getting value out of social media that is understated. This is what s relevant to recruiting: social media can be a powerful tool for finding candidates, but a) it is just a tool, one of many, not some silver bullet solution, and b) it takes substantial effort to get results. As recruiters, we need to connect with people, and social networks are a great way to do just that.

3 So how should we utilizing this (relatively) new phenomenon? For starters, try getting clients employees to promote the jobs rather than using a company page to do it. Research shows that Facebook users are twice as likely to read items on profile pages as on company home pages. Users pay more attention to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than ads. Building talent communities is another approach, but attracting the right candidates to a community is best done by soliciting the help of others. Research also shows that people are much more likely to join a community if they have friends who are in the community who know each other. So again success requires involving multiple people to help source candidates. It s all very doable, but it s going to take effort. Companies that have successful social media programs like Deluxe and Sodexho have made big investments in these efforts, and it has taken years for the programs to start paying off. Have no illusions that this is easy. Social media is about engagement, which takes time and effort and that costs money, not for advertising but in human effort. If you haven t got the time to do all that, then it s best to just pay an SEO provider to raise the visibility of your jobs and run ads on Facebook. That s an ad strategy, not a social media strategy, but you can still claim that you re using social media!

4 FINDING QUALITY CANDIDATES Recent data from the Recruiting Leadership Council indicates that for a broad sample of the U.S. workforce, 15-20% are very active and around 20% passive, with the remaining 60% showing a mix of passive and active behaviours. Further research would indicate that higher-quality and more senior-level prospects are more passive than the population at large. Regardless, this means that a significantly larger percent of the workforce is passive rather than active. This is a critical and overlooked point when developing new recruiting and sourcing processes. For example, while most companies want to focus on hiring more passive candidates, they continue to use processes that are based on how active candidates look for new jobs and how they decide to accept one over another. As technology improves (LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Proactive Employee Referral Programs) it s becoming much easier to identify passive candidates, but identifying names is not the same as attracting them, and much, much different than hiring them. Hiring high quality passive candidates makes great business sense. However, getting their names is the easy part. If you re serious about hiring the best passive candidates, you ll need to change the measures of success from speed to hire to quality of hire. SO WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS ARE COMPANIES USING? By a long shot, Twitter, LinkedIn Facebook (who we all know lots about so don t need a mention here) and blogs were the top four social media tools used, with Twitter leading the pack by only a hair. All of the other social media tools paled in comparison to these top four. It should be noted that in 2009, Facebook was in fourth place at 77% and blogs were in second place at 79%. It would appear that blogs, while still popular, are used less and Facebook is clearly growing. Owners of small businesses were more likely to use LinkedIn (70m members) than employees working for a corporation. Another interesting finding was that men were significantly more likely to use YouTube or other video marketing than women (51.2% of all men compared to only 42.6% of women).

5 JOBS2WEB Managing all of these channels can appear daunting, enter Jobs2Web. Jobs2Web is an interactive recruitment marketing company who use interactive marketing technology to help their clients efficiently find better, engage better, and know better candidate activity from multiple channels of recruiting. In many ways, recruiting is marketing and more than ever these tools are essential. This product helps develop and harvest all recruiting channels to quickly build quality into the talent pipeline and lower operating costs. Recruiting channels might include, but are not limited to, search engines, social networks, employee referrals, past applicants or recruiter networks. Today, managing these different channels is only accomplished with too many overlapping vendors and heavy lifting for employers. This can be costly and hard to measure results. This single solution called the Recruitment Marketing Platform enables these capabilities and simplifies that complexity. How candidates and companies use technology to find and interact with each other is quickly changing. The economy has only accelerated that change and there are tremendous opportunities for employers. By using the Recruitment Marketing Platform you can unleash the power of your career site and job content to attract new talent from multiple online channels, including the major search engines, job aggregation sites, free job posting sites and social networks. This candidate traffic is driven directly to your career site and ATS system to apply.

6 TALENTSEEKR More often than not, the best qualified candidates are already employed and not necessarily looking for new jobs. Certainly not on job boards like Monster.com or HotJobs. So if the best candidates won t seek out job openings on employment sites, the jobs need to seek them out. That is the idea behind TalentSeekr, which is essentially an ad network for jobs. Companies fill out what jobs they are trying to fill in what locations, then TalentSeekr creates and tests multiple ads across the Web social networks, blogs, forums, search engines, you name it. Based on the response rate and quality of the applicants that come through the ads, TalentSeekr optimizes the mix of ad types (banner, text, video, creative elements) and placement. (Watch the video below to see how it works). If more qualified applicants are coming in through LinkedIn than Facebook, it readjusts the mix. (In fact, LinkedIn makes a lot of money through recruitment ads on its own site in much the same manner. TalentSeeker is attempting to apply the same principles in a more distributed manner across the Web). The company was founded in August 2007 and already counts among its customers Dell, GE, IBM, Adidas, Reebock, Google, and Microsoft. TalentSeekr s approach takes longer than filling a job on Monster, but if you are looking for 3,000 SAP consultants, it could be a better approach. If you are looking to just fill a single position quickly, you are probably still better off with Monster or some other job board. Hiring managers get a dashboard (see screenshot), which shows the number of ad impressions, clicks, and ultimate applications resulting from the ads, as well as the geographic distribution.

7 HOW ARE SMART COMPANIES USING THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA? If you want to know smart things to do you should watch what the smart companies are doing! Trust GOOGLE to use the viral power of social media to attract and hire engineers for their R&D Labs. They hired space on a billboard on Highway 101 and posed a pretty tough question (see graphic). This flew in the face of billboard marketing, which usually mandates extreme simplicity due to the short exposure time and distraction of piloting a vehicle in traffic. Then again, it was more like one of those "buzz" campaigns - few people will attempt to solve it, they'll just get to work and say, "What the heck was that billboard for?" (and someone will tell them). They hired some very clever engineers for an ad budget of less than $10,000! Those clever folk over at INTEL also know a thing or two about viral marketing. They also know how to make great advertisements. A winning combination. They have their own channel on YouTube (free, anyone can set one up). They have a great following for their creative ads and post them on to Youtube prior to general release and let the power of Social Media do the work and let viewers send link to our networks, linkedin, facebook etc with a simple push of an icon. Now that is clever in itself, but what they also do (and this is the genius), is manage their Youtube channel so that every time anybody looks at an advert they see all of their job ads, which are also videos right next to the ad they are watching.

8 NICHE SITES TRACKED.COM is the only site in the world where business data, communications and connections come together to enhance your business life. This outfit are actively organizing and analyzing as much information as possible about the companies, industries and business people you want to know about and enabling you to share it with your colleagues. This site offers a unique mix of features and tools that combine massive data sets and streaming news with the ability to connect with other businesspeople and share your thoughts, interests and ideas. This is a totally new community where you can connect with high profile, high earners in a business forum, watch it grow! STACKOVERFLOW.COM is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers, regardless of platform or language. It s 100% free and doesn t require registration. Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML,. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free. And fast, very, very fast. Check out how many programmers have their profiles on there!

9 GITHUB.COM is the best way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, create issues, and monitor development with all of your public and private code. It is an extremely fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software. This is site is full of those programmers who love to get involved and join in. There are lots of them! NEW FACEBOOK APPS Two relatively new apps on Facebook that address employment from opposite sides, and in that sense, they are sides of the same coin. Hire My Friend helps your Facebook friends spread the word about their job hunt. Work For Us lets employers post their jobs to their Facebook pages. Now if only there was an app that matched the Work For Us jobs to the friends who want to be hired. Oh wait. There is. Jobvite Source does that for jobs, matching the opportunity to employees and friends and tracking these posts (Jobvites) as they get passed along. Work For Us is different only in that it doesn t do any matching or tracking. What it does, and does very well, is to post job openings to a company Facebook page, producing a job list that bears a striking resemblance to a bland job board post. TechCrunch, which recently wrote about this, says the Work4Labs, the start-up that built the app, has already got 2,000 companies to download the app. It works this way: You sign-up either as the friend in need or the friend who helps out. Answer a few questions about the job seeker to create a mini-profile, provide a LinkedIn address, and connect it up to your Facebook page (or ask your friend to do so). It creates a status post that notifies your network.

10 REPUTATION MANAGEMENT Despite many successes, it s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true that corporations can own or control their employer brand image. The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived. While it is still possible to heavily influence perception with well-managed efforts, significant growth in social media, peer-to-peer content publishing, and online rating services have shifted a majority of the power away from the corporate employer brand manager to the masses. The shift in power renders all but the most strategic and well-executed efforts virtually ineffective. To those who actively engage and publish their story, their perception is reality, even if the experiences that led them to their perception are not common. Their points of view are often emotionally charged, personal, and therefore, significantly more trusted as fact by those you need to influence than corporate, generic dribble. Odds are, the people most influencing your employer brand are people you have never met. OTHER PEOPLE NOW OWN YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND IMAGE* While many product brand marketers learned long ago that if the experience with the product didn t match the brand positioning, consumers would revolt, few in the world of recruitment were paying attention. Many may ignore or discount the facts, but the truth is that a fundamental shift has occurred, and like it or not, the years of putting forward a brand identity not tied to reality are over. THE NEW OWNERS OF EMPLOYER BRANDS The new owners are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance. The array of contributors grows more complex daily, and

11 the most prominent groups of brand influencers include: Bloggers, Tweeters, Texters, industry specific forume, Reputation Management sites, where there are numerous what your employees are saying sites like Vault, the forums at Indeed, or glassdooor.com and vanno.com that specialize in sharing messages about what it s like to work at a firm with individuals considering employment. While most make some attempt to validate that the comment contributors have worked or currently work for the organizations in questions, not all do. Prominent firms like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Starbucks have been targeted by unfriendly anti-firm websites that exist merely to spread a combination of real, half-truths, and untruths about the firms. If you were to fact-check most blogs, Tweets, or YouTube videos, most would be considered fallacious. Yet survey after survey shows that most individuals in general (and generation Y individuals in particular) believe peer-produced content over traditional news or print media content. You can bemoan this fact all you want, but statements on your corporate website, in your employment ads, or in press releases will almost always be viewed as less credible than a comment from a blogger who is passing along an innuendo that might have no basis in fact *Dr. John Sullivan USING SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS INTERNALLY Chatter is best described as a real-time Collaboration Cloud. It is a brand-new way to collaborate with people at work. Where the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you so you're always in the loop. It gives you everything you need to collaborate at work With Chatter, it s easy to work together and know everything that's happening in your company. Updates on people, groups, documents, and your application data come straight to you in your real-time feeds. You can; share securely and collaborate instantly, stay on top of what matters most, gain insight and make smarter decisions and, most importantly, join the conversation!

12 And finally the giant of them all, TWITTER. With over 100 million members, collectively writing more than 50million tweets pr day Twitter overshadows all other social media sites. Therefore as you d expect, a multitude of companies have sprung up on the back of twitter and most companies now have their open vacancies displayed on twitter. They will have either posted direct, or more likely, the positions have been posted there by aggregators such as mentioned above or indeed.com. Amongst the better twitter search sites are TweetMyJobs.com. These sites allow you to receive notification of jobs, typically via your mobile. TweetMyJobs has around 10,000 targeted job channels with open positions from over 7,500 companies worldwide. The advantage they give job seekers is you only have to sign up once for multiple company Twitter channels. TweetMyJOBS is the only Twitter job board that provides instant notification of open positions and has more Twitter Job Channels than any other job board in the world. SO, WHAT ARE THE BIG IDEAS? IN SUMMARY: - GET INVOLVED - CONTENT IS EVERYTHING - STOP TREATING CANDIDATES LIKE CANDIDATES AND TREAT THEM LIKE CONSUMERS - THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX bruce.morton@talent2.com