best practices Five ways for recruiters to stay ahead of the social curve

Transcription

1 best practices Five ways for recruiters to stay ahead of the social curve 15

2 There s no question that social technologies have a significant impact on how businesses function today, but do you know what those impacts are and how to prepare for them? A surprising number of companies are not equipped to take advantage of these changes giving those that are a distinct competitive advantage. Social technologies are evolving rapidly and impacting every part of the business from how companies market and sell, to how they accelerate innovation, to how they hire and manage people. In this best practices guide, we ll look at how recruiters are borrowing techniques from the marketing team for using social technology, the influence of social technologies on finding talent, and some practical ways to stay ahead of the curve that will improve recruiting results. The rise of recruiting marketing Marketing teams were some of the earliest adopters of social technology. They realized quickly that social technologies add another marketing channel that enables them to get closer to their target audience, with more targeted messages. More recently, recruiters are using many of the same social marketing techniques to find and engage candidates for open positions. This proactive strategy is the relatively new practice of recruiting marketing. Already, tools and solutions are available that empower organizations to perform recruiting marketing, so they can take advantage of new channels and relationships and remove much of the guesswork in attracting the right candidates. Recruiting marketing involves the use of an intelligent, interactive, and multichannel approach to building relationships with the best candidates. In essence, every new job opening becomes a campaign that uses search engine optimization, mobile support, and smart posting functionalities to automatically distribute to the right channels. This powerful way to reach the right candidates at the right time is already proven. The demand will only increase for tools that help companies systematically build and maintain relationships by using sophisticated automation and social technologies. This approach means less work for recruiters and better return on investment. But if you haven t jumped on the recruiting marketing bandwagon yet, what s the best way to get started? You ll want to evaluate the tools and techniques you use to find candidates today and see if they can support the integration of a more social marketing approach. While you re doing that, you can also take steps to update your recruiting processes. 2

3 Practical preparation for the changes ahead What practical steps can business leaders take to enhance their current and future recruiting strategies? Many simple things can improve employers relationships with their candidates. 1. Give passive candidates an alternative to completing an application. More than 92 percent of candidates on a corporate career site don t apply for a job on their first visit. They come, they look, they leave. To capture more of this passive candidate traffic, companies should add functionality to their site that says, Not ready to apply yet? Give us your address and we ll keep you up-to-date. Some companies get more than 10,000 people a day to sign up for these updates. Cultivating and nurturing this talent pool is one of the single biggest areas of cost reduction within companies because it taps people who are already interested in them. 2. Consolidate recruiter contacts in a centralized talent community. Recruiters might engage a candidate on LinkedIn, but instead of keeping in touch with the candidate through that social network, recruiters should ask to add the candidate to their company s talent community. Most candidates will say yes, and then recruiters can recruit strategically, in addition to having all their candidates in one place. Previously, the people who had the largest network won, but now everyone has the same network through social media. Knowing how to use these platforms to reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time will determine which companies will be the most successful in the future. 3. Consider a mobile audience. Have you ever looked at your own career site through the eyes of a candidate searching for a job? How much of the career site is dedicated to information about your company, versus easy access to your open jobs? The list of open jobs is often well hidden among the other data about the company. Now try linking to your career site from a mobile device. Can you still find the Open Jobs link? Is it easy to search or scroll through the list? Mobile traffic to career sites is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in certain industries (such as retail) and certain countries (such as India). You don t want to lose this traffic because your career site doesn t render or isn t easy to use on a mobile device. Consider what you can do to make your career pages more mobile friendly. 4. Don t forget about your internal talent pool! Online tools have made it easier for employers to recruit new candidates, but they also have made it a lot easier for employees to find and pursue new opportunities. Because everything can be vocalized immediately online, people have a heightened consciousness of how companies treat employees good or bad. This awareness is a good thing for employers, because it challenges them to actually be employers of choice rather than just saying they are. If your employees are ready for a change, make sure they know about opportunities within the company. Your recruiting strategy should be connected to your strategies for engaging, developing, and retaining your current employees and that your systems and processes are interconnected. Some of the best candidates for your open positions are going to be working for you already. Don t overlook them! At the very least, make sure any improvements you make to your recruiting processes consider your employees as well as external candidates. 5. Be sure your recruiting strategy is connected to a full talent management strategy. What skills or competencies are you using to measure your employees performance? Are you using those same competencies within your hiring process? What tools are your employees using to collaborate and communicate about their work? Can they use these same tools to collaborate within the hiring process? Most companies still use to send resumes around and to gather feedback on candidates. With a fully integrated talent management system, you should have the ability to share key data across different functions; e.g., competencies across performance, learning, and recruiting; and collaboration tools across all the HR functions. 3

4 Only with an integrated platform can you begin to identify at-risk employees early and remedy the situations making these people unhappy. Reduce the burden on recruiting by reducing involuntary turnover. A single source of truth for employee talent information gives employers the opportunity to redeploy people to new groups, give someone a new manager, or find a new project for them to work on. You ll need a full talent management team and a comprehensive, integrated talent management platform to get a true picture of the state of your workforce, including where you need more talent to meet future needs and where you have talent that might be better utilized elsewhere. Position your team for recruiting success With the rise of social networks, social collaboration tools, and recruiting marketing techniques, recruiters have had their hands full keeping up with the changes in their profession over the past few years. Given how critical the recruiting function is to the health and growth of any company, you ll want to be sure that you are giving your team the best possible tools to attract, engage, and select the talent you need. About SuccessFactors Recruiting SuccessFactors Recruiting optimizes workforce performance by getting the right people into the right roles faster. The world of recruiting has undergone a significant shift, with an explosion of new tools and channels to find candidates. Most traditional recruiting solutions are only addressing a part of the challenge selecting the best candidates. SuccessFactors Recruiting is the only solution that is designed to help you attract, engage and select the candidates that will drive business results. We do this by combining an intelligent and social Recruiting Marketing process with a mobile and collaborative selection process to create the only Recruiting Execution (Rx) solution on the market the prescription (Rx) for better hiring. 4

5 About SuccessFactors, an SAP Company SuccessFactors, an SAP company, is the leading provider of cloud-based Business Execution Software, which drives business alignment, optimizes workforce performance, and accelerates business results. SuccessFactors customers include organizations of all sizes across more than 60 industries. With approximately 15 million subscription seats globally, we strive to delight our customers by delivering innovative solutions, content and analytics, process expertise, and best practices insights. Today, we have more than 3,500 customers in more than 168 countries using our application suite in 35 languages. SuccessFactors Global Headquarters 1500 Fashion Island Blvd., Suite 300 San Mateo, CA 94404, USA 15 TOLL-FREE PHONE FAX EMEA APAC successfactors.com