Social media has fundamentally changed recruitment by allowing people to find jobs and companies to find candidates in new ways. While social media can be a powerful recruitment tool, companies must make significant investments of time, effort and money to see results. Effective social media recruitment strategies involve engaging current employees to promote openings, building online talent communities, and using targeted social media ads. The best approaches recognize that passive candidates make up a large portion of the workforce and require different recruitment tactics than active job seekers.
1. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
Social Media in Recruitment
From giants
like Starbucks
and IBM
to the local
engineering
firm
companies
are exploring
social media
initiatives
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
59F The Center
looking for jobs in a different way and many smart businesses are embracing new digital
99 Queens Road
recruitment tools and techniques to reduce costs and increase the quality of their recruiting
Central
techniques.
Hong Kong
t +852 3473 3111
f +852 3473 3100
www.talent2.com
2. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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.
So how should we utilizing this (relatively) new phenomenon? For starters, try getting clients
employees to promote the jobs rather than using a company pageto 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.
2
3. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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.
Communities already exist…
instead, think about how you can
help that community do what it wants to do
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook
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.
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.
3
4. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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).
Twitter 88%
Facebook 87%
LinkedIn 78%
Blogs 70%
YouTube or other video 46%
Social bookmarking sites 27%
Forums 26%
Digg, Reddit, Mxx, StumbleUpon 22%
Ning Sites 17%
MySpace 11%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
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.
4
5. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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.
5
6. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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
optimises 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.
6
7. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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.
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.
7
8. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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 it’s work and let you and I 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.
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.
8
9. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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!
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.
9
10. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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.
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.
10
11. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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 the most prominent groups of brand influencers
include: Bloggers, Tweeters, Texters, industry specific forum, 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
11
12. White Paper Recruitment Process Outsourcing
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!
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?
> Get involved
> Content is everything
> Stop treating candidates like candidates
in > And treat them like consumers
summary > Think outside the box
bruce.morton@talent2.com
12