"What Your Recruiting Organization Can Learn from Innovation in the Online Music Industry" by Steven Duque at Tri-State HRMA 26th Annual Conference
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I came away from Bill Boorman’s #TRU “unconference” in San Francisco with an analogy that emerged during my track on ‘social’ (1) recruiting: social referrals are to Spotify (2) what social media recruiting, as we know it, is to Pandora (3). This analogy may not immediately sound like music to your ears, but hear me out. The idea was initially borne after reading this Mashable article on the “brilliance” of Facebook’s new advertising strategy and recalling my recent discovery of new music via friends’ Spotify activity on Facebook. How does this relate to recruiting? At their core, job opportunities discovered through social media referrals are compelling for the same reason music discovered on Spotify is interesting. More specifically, both leverage true “peer-to-peer” relationships to help promote the discovery of interesting content—social referrals’ case, job opportunities (4). Fellow attendees at #TruSanFran offered an insightful question about my analogy: What’s the Pandora of recruiting? Social recruiting (5) as we know it—a practice largely characterized, at present, by broadcasting open jobs — was the obvious answer. Much to the chagrin of many practice leaders, the missing element of ‘social’ recruiting, as it currently stands, is often the engagement that actually makes social media powerful recruiting channels (6). Still, the general approach remains powerful: audiences opt-in to a channel (in this context, connecting with recruiters on social networks, and tacitly consenting to exposure to their updates), which can curate content based on individuals’ preferences. That leaves us with job boards, which have no better parallel than satellite radio. Candidates are presented with a wide variety of choices—perhaps too wide—and must actively “tune-in” to job boards’ and until they find what they’re looking for (7). Recruiters, as Doug Ellinger writes, are left “chumming the waters” for good candidates, much like radio advertisers can only pray that their expensive campaigns are reaching the right audience. Like their counterpart in satellite radio, it doesn’t take a seer to see that many recruiters are witnessing a decline in ROI of spending on job boards, and are moving toward the “easier, faster and more effective” solutions of social recruiting, as Ward Christman notes. So which is better — the ‘Spotify’, ‘Pandora’ or ‘satellite radio’ approach? I will dive deeper into what this means and approaches to thinking about it during the presentation.
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"What Your Recruiting Organization Can Learn from Innovation in the Online Music Industry" by Steven Duque at Tri-State HRMA 26th Annual Conference
- 1. WHAT YOUR RECRUITING ORGANIZATION CAN LEARN FROM INNOVATION IN THE ONLINE MUSIC INDUSTRY PRESENTED BY STEVEN DUQUE OF RECRUITING INNOVATION & OPTIMIZATION EVANGELIST
- 2. #socialreach @StevenDuque @BullhornReach Questions? Just ask, or email me at sduque@bullhorn.com.
- 3. Agenda 1. Foundation - The new models of music consumption - Insights in a nutshell - Why “social” makes sense” 2. On the Hill - Drawing parallels in recruiting technology - XM Satellite Radio = Job Boards - Pandora = Social Recruiting - Spotify = Social Referrals - Pros and Cons 3. In the Trenches - Strategies & tactics - Next steps
- 5. NEW MODELS THE OF MUSIC CONSUMPTION
- 8. Satellite Radio – User Experience • PROS - A multitude of channels and specific content to choose from - Channels are curated by ―experts‖ in content categories - Passive discovery of new music, after actively selecting channels - Limited mobile experience • CONS - Requires that listeners actively browse through and seek out channels relevant to their tastes - Sorting through channels that aren’t relevant to them - For full experience, must purchase relatively expensive device whose only purpose is to consume Satellite Radio content - No feedback loop between listeners and ―experts‖ - Cannot purchase music directly through channel
- 9. Pandora
- 10. Pandora
- 11. Pandora – User Experience • PROS - Content automatically tailored to listeners’ feedback (e.g., Thumbs up, Thumbs down, listen to complete track, replays, etc.) - Multitude of channels to choose from - Content pre-curated by music ―experts‖ via automation - Available across multiple platforms (e.g., web, mobile) - Passive discovery of new music, after actively selecting channels - Freemium offering - Can directly purchase music through channel • CONS - Requires that listeners actively select channels relevant to their taste and must provide feedback to receive tailored experience - Must change channels to accommodate for eclectic tastes - Lose personal touch of knowing who the ―expert‖ is
- 12. Spotify
- 13. Spotify
- 14. Spotify
- 15. Spotify – User Experience • PROS - Passive discovery of new music via known connections in environment, where music-listening isn’t primary focus - Content curated by personal contacts; prior knowledge of persons provides deeper context and relevance - Multitude of available music for active music listeners - Available across multiple platforms (e.g., web, mobile) - Freemium offering - Free integrated apps to enhance listening experience (e.g., purchasing music, lyrics, connections’ comments, playlists, etc.) • CONS - Connections’ choice not necessarily ―expert‖ - Discovery of new music depends on connections’ personal tastes - No tailored experience, aside from actively followed playlists
- 16. INSIGHTS IN A NUTSHELL
- 17. 6 COMPETING TENSIONS IN DISTRIBUTION MODELS • Searchable vs. Social • Seeking vs. Discovering • Active vs. Passive • Expert vs. Personal • Descriptive vs. Contextual • Raw vs. Filtered LIKE A SWINGING PENDULUM, TENSIONS IN PRACTICE OFTEN FALL SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.
- 18. 3 QUESTIONS FOR MUSIC DISTRIBUTORS • How do people make decisions about what music to listen to? • What kinds of listeners will be attracted to different distribution models? • What is the aim of getting listeners to hear your music? DIVING DEEPER THROUGH QUESTIONING, WE SEE THAT LISTENING IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.
- 19. WHY “SOCIAL” MAKES SENSE
- 20. Social Media Users by Age 62% of people on social networks are of the “professional” age
- 21. Social Media Users by Age % of 35+ # of 35+ NETWORK USERS USERS 64% 512m 61% 122m 78% 78m Source: Google Ad Planner 2011, US Demographics Data
- 22. Social Media Users by Age NETWORK AVG. AGE 38 39 44 Source: Google Ad Planner 2011, US Demographics Data
- 23. Social Media Usage by Time
- 24. Time Spent Online 8.4 hrs. Amount of time “professional”-aged Americans spend per month on social channels.
- 26. A Changing Workplace: Social Inboxes Checked Regularly All Responses Source: People—On the Go 2010 Report, Pierre Khawand
- 27. A Changing Workplace: Social Inboxes Checked Regularly Top Management Source: People—On the Go 2010 Report, Pierre Khawand
- 29. Agenda 1. Foundation - The new models of music consumption - Insights in a nutshell - Why “social” makes sense” 2. On the Hill - Drawing parallels in recruiting technology - XM Satellite Radio = Job Boards - Pandora = Social Recruiting - Spotify = Social Referrals - Pros and Cons 3. In the Trenches - Strategies & tactics - Next steps
- 30. 2. ON THE HILL
- 31. Drawing Parallels in Recruiting Technology
- 32. XM Satellite Radio = Job Boards = • PROS - A multitude of jobs for candidates to choose from - Candidates can filter their search for jobs by categories - Passive discovery of new jobs by candidates, after actively seeking • CONS - Requires that candidates actively browse through and seek out jobs - Seekers must sort through jobs that aren’t relevant to them - No feedback loop between job seekers and employers
- 33. Pandora = Social Recruiting (as we know it) = • PROS - Passive discovery of jobs, after candidates connect with recruiters - Jobs and related content curated by real people (recruiters) - Feedback loop via social channels between candidates and recruiters - Automated reposting of jobs by social recruiting platforms • CONS - Requires that candidates ―opt in‖ and connect with recruiters - Passive discovery by seekers limited to their recruiter connections - Candidates don’t personally ―know‖ recruiters, in most cases
- 34. Pandora = Social Recruiting (as we know it) = • PROS - Passive discovery of jobs via known connections - Jobs shared by personal contacts; prior knowledge of persons provides context and relevance - Feedback loop via social channels between candidates and personal connections • CONS - Connections’ not necessarily ―experts‖ in recommending jobs - Discovery of open jobs depends on candidates connections - No tailored candidate experience
- 36. 6 COMPETING TENSIONS IN DISTRIBUTION MODELS • Searchable vs. Social • Seeking vs. Discovering • Active vs. Passive • Expert vs. Personal • Descriptive vs. Contextual • Raw vs. Filtered LIKE A SWINGING PENDULUM, TENSIONS IN PRACTICE OFTEN FALL SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.
- 37. 3 QUESTIONS FOR RECRUITING ORGS • How do candidates make decisions about what jobs to consider? • What kinds of candidates will be attracted to different distribution models? • What is the aim of getting candidates to see an open job? DIVING DEEPER THROUGH QUESTIONING, WE SEE THAT LISTENING IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.
- 38. Agenda 1. Foundation - The new models of music consumption - Insights in a nutshell - Why “social” makes sense” 2. On the Hill - Drawing parallels in recruiting technology - XM Satellite Radio = Job Boards - Pandora = Social Recruiting - Spotify = Social Referrals - Pros and Cons 3. In the Trenches - Strategies & tactics - Next steps
- 39. 3. IN THE TRENCHES
- 40. STRATEGIES AND TACTICS
- 41. Defining and refining your strategy INITIAL DECISION POINTS: ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS • Hiring Needs - Specialized vs. common skills? - Permanent vs. temp? - Immediacy vs. quality? • Resources - Budget for media & incentives? - Time & available staff? - Willing & able employees? LIKE PIECES OF A PUZZLE, YOUR DECISION POINTS WILL SHAPE YOUR RECRUITMENT STRATEGY.
- 42. RECRUITMENT STRATEGIES FOR THE SOCIAL WORLD
- 43. The Difference: Recruitment Advertising VS Social Media Controlled JOB BOARDS Monologue SOCIAL Dialogue RECRUITING SOCIAL REFERRALS Uncontrolled
- 45. Building Trust PUT A FACE TO THE COPY
- 46. Relationship Building OLD SCHOOL – Always Be Closing
- 47. Building Trust NEW SCHOOL – Always Be Authentic
- 48. Branding CORPORATE PERSONAL
- 49. Branding CONVERGENCE
- 50. ROI of strong employment brand 2x how much lower the cost per hire is for a company with a strong employment brand Source: LinkedIn, ―What’s the Value of Your Employment Brand?‖, Eda Guitekin, 2011
- 51. Utilize real relationships TAP PEER- TO-PEER NETWORKS
- 52. Social Media Referrals GOOD PEOPLE KNOW GOOD PEOPLE
- 53. Referrals Dramatically Outperform Other Sources in Hiring Efficiency HIRING EFFICIENCY 100% 87% 80% 60% 61% All Other Sources 40% 40% Referrals Average 20% 2% 0% % of Job Applicants That Offer Acceptance Rate Meet Job Requirements Source: Dr. John Sullivan on ERE.net
- 54. First-Year Turnover for Referrals is 63% Less than for Other Sources FIRST YEAR TURNOVER 12% 11% Involuntary 10% Turnover 4% 8% within First Year 6% Voluntary Turnover 4% 4% within First 7% 1% Year 2% 3% 0% All Other Sources Referrals Average Source: Dr. John Sullivan on ERE.net
- 56. RECRUITMENT TACTICS FOR THE SOCIAL WORLD
- 57. MARKET OPEN JOBS
- 58. Don’t be this guy Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job! Job!
- 59. It all depends on your variables ~60k recruiters
- 60. Expectations vary across channels
- 61. ―Social‖ isn’t a single category
- 62. BUILD COMMUNITY
- 63. Discussion GROUPS HASHTAGS (#) PAGE
- 64. Content is King… or Queen
- 65. Relevance Checklist Being “relevant” is being: Helpful Educational Informational Conversational … Add value to connections’ professional lives online.
- 66. Multimedia
- 67. MONITOR METRICS
- 68. Monitoring FOLLOW THE LEADER
- 69. Monitoring UNCOVER BEST PRACTICES THROUGH METRICS
- 70. Monitoring INFO TRIAGE
- 71. NEXT STEPS
- 72. Employment Branding Checklist Define your strategy • Research • Conduct internal research • Conduct market research • Planning • Retaining talent • Recruiting talent Build internal support • CEO engagement • Senior management engagement • Cross-departmental collaboration Plan communications • Employer value proposition • Produce communications Source: Employer Brand Institute Study, 2010
- 73. Recruitment Organization Checklist Strategically allocate resources • Allocate budget and staff based on the priority of your strategic aims • Shop, select and implement tools to make your recruiting organization more efficient and effective Build a passive pipeline • Make engagement through social media a required activity for your recruiting team • Create your own talent community on LinkedIn, and begin participating in ongoing discussions via LinkedIn groups, Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags Put networks to work • Encourage non-HR personnel (particularly, hiring managers and teams) to share open opportunities • Communicate importance of being professionally active on social channels to employees, especially HR
- 74. How We Can Help – Create Your Free Account www.bullhornreach.com Efficiency • Broadcast open jobs & content to your core social channels at once • Automate jobs re-posting • Prioritize connections to engage with Radar Effectiveness • Get a birds-eye view of social recruiting performance • Monitor proportionate amount of traffic driven by channels • Measure efficacy of update messages
- 75. STEVEN DUQUE RECRUITING INNOVATION & OPTIMIZATION EVANGELIST SDUQUE@BULLHORN.COM
Editor's Notes
- So, as you might expect, I’ll start at top: laying a foundation, upon which you can build a broader understanding of social recruiting and where it lies today.
- What’s most striking about this graph, taken from pingdom via Google Ad Planner [animation], is that 62% of people on social networks are of the “professional age” – between 25 and 54. The implication: social networks are a great place to find candidates at all sorts of experience levels.
- Some of you may say, I’m only looking for more senior candidates with a high level of professional experience. Well, there’s good news. On all networks, the majority of users are over 35. Just a quick look at the numbers should be enough to convince anyone that it’s possible reach a professional audience through social networks.
- In different terms, it may surprise you to know that the average ages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are 38, 39, and 44, respectively. They’re definitely not a set of channels for teeny boppers, as popular opinion might have told us just a few short years ago.
- As you’ll notice from this chart taken from a Nielsen report released earlier this year, social media consume an increasing amount of Americans’ time, nearly double the amount of time garnered by the next two most popular online activities: online games and email. In contrast, portals – which include company sites, job boards and other free-standing websites – have declined in their time share, decreasing by 19% last year.
- In more specific terms, Americans as a whole spent, on average, 32 hours per month on the Internet in 2010. People of the professional age--between 25 and 54--spent, on average, 37.5 hours per month, [animation] meaning 8.4 hours per month are spent on social channels. The numbers are almost certainly higher, on average, for people in white-collar positions, like IT consultants.
- According to analysis released in September by Citi Investments, Facebook consumes the lion’s share of people’s time online—both among social networks and websites in general. Facebook-ing comprises roughly 16% of time that people spend online, increasing at a steepening rate, while search engines like Google and Yahoo are either increasing their shares more slowly or even decreasing.
- Interestingly,PierreKhawand, CEO of People—OnTheGo, found that, among more than 1000 business professionals, people check their social media inboxes almost as much as their personal and professional email inboxes. Among the general working population, 58% check their Facebook inboxes regularly, 47.9% check LinkedIn and roughly 22.6% check Twitter. Altogether, Khawand found, people spend 4 hours a day (half a workday) managing multiple “inboxes.” More than an hour is spent on social media a day, with Gen Y spending the most time (1.8hours).
- Among top management, the numbers shift among the social networks. LinkedIn is the most popular social “inbox,” checked by 63% of top management surveyed, followed by Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter.
- The background info on the ubiquity and pervasiveness of social media should change the way we think about the saying “If you build it, they will come,” which, some of you may recall, comes from Field of Dreams. That’s the paradigm of the searchable web, where people spent most of their time online looking for specific things. There’s been a dramatic shift over the last couple years toward the social web, where it’s more about discovery and context. So [animation]the better phrase for the social web may be: “If you build it where they are, they will come.”
- So, after taking a look from the vantage point of standing atop the foundation we built earlier on, we can now walk down into the trenches and discuss some tactics and best practices.
- Before launching into social recruiting strategies, it’s often useful to think of recruiting through social media, or social recruiting, in comparison to job boards and other forms of recruitment ads. On one hand, recruitment ads are very much in your control, a one-way monologue that communicates your messaging to candidates. On the other hand, social media are platforms for engagement and interaction, meaning that at least some of the communications are outside of your control. With your recruitment team, you’re able to exercise some measure of control over how they post to their networks. With employees you should expect to exercise less control over how they communicate. The reason why this matters for you is that passive recruiting tactics simply won’t cut it in an increasingly competitive landscape. The engagement of social media allows you to keep candidates warmer with interaction, both directly and indirectly.
- One of first broad approaches toward social recruiting I’d recommend is relationship building. At the core of social media are relationships – between people and people, brands and people and the gray area that’s emerging somewhere in between. Underlying relationships is trust, the social currency of positive interactions both in-person and online. While many business relationships are one-off and transactional, the best relationships, most will agree, are those that endure for the long haul. And so, this portion of this section will focus on strategies for building trust -- and hence better, longer-term relationships through social media communications.
- One of the interesting things about social media are that they’re personal. Or, in other words, they’re designed to help us communicate our identities. Our profiles are means for us, as users, to author our own online identities. As as a recruiter, one of the worst things you can do is have a sparse or non-existent profile info – for example, your profile photo. It’s the first step in communicating who are to candidates, a first step in earning their trust. As you post messages and updates, which I’ll discuss in greater detail later on, candidates will want to know who is talking to them. Upload a picture, fill out your professional and educational history in great detail, explain who you are. All these actions contribute to your putting a face to the corporate copy that accompanies the listings you’re sharing, and conveys the message that candidates are communicating with a real human being, which is big differentiator from job boards, where many candidates complain that they feel as though they’re putting themselves out into the ether of the application process, where no one may be listening.
- Some of you may be familiar with this iconic screenshot from Glenngary Glen Ross. Many of you at staffing agencies may even use ABC as a personal mantra for the way you approach open reqs: Always Be Closing. In the world of social media, where trust is currency, this adage doesn’t apply.
- Instead of ABC, the mantra of the social web is ABA: Always Be Authentic. It’s hard to build trust without keeping it real. [animation]Even big companies can do it. Take, for example, the Twitter handle @ComcastCares, initially run by Frank Eliason. The strategy was simple: use Twitter as a customer service channel to address complaints and disenchantment with Comcast’s services head-on. More broadly, engage people with helpful information, and don’t hide from the public conversations that may, at the outset, be negative.
- In the world of business transactions, efforts to build long-term relationships between a provider of products, services and/or ideas and a potential consumer of those things, as many of you may know, is best known as “branding.”In the broadest terms, on one hand, there’s corporate branding: the identity-building and communications efforts of companies, organizations and institutions. A more recently emerging idea is the notion of personal branding, which has drawn much of its momentum, in recent times, from social media’s empowerment of individuals as publishers, broadcasters and larger-than-life personalities who purvey products, services and ideas.
- As social media have evolved, audiences have grown and, along with them, the opportunities, we’ve witnessed and are witnessing the convergence of corporate and personal branding. Social media hinges on interactions, whose effects rely, as mentioned, on trust. So, in order for companies to engage people through social media, many have made the move to rely on the strength of individual employees’ communications and communication styles. Conversely, as individuals – independent consultants, gurus and the like – have increasingly utilized social media for selling their wares, they’ve developed corporate-like online identities or personal brands. As recruiters, you’ll likely want to fall somewhere in between. As representatives of your company’s or client’s opportunities, you must be an authentic person in your social recruiting efforts, while adding value to people’s online experiences, if you want them to listen, as increasingly cynical consumers are much less likely to engage with content that adds little to no value to their online experiences.
- A strong employment brand can have a significant impact on your consultancy’s or client’s bottom line. According to a survey conducted earlier this year by LinkedIn among roughly 2,300 US corporate recruiters, companies that have a strong employment brand enjoy significant cost savings with a lower cost per hire (over two times lower) and lower employee turnover rates.And, a strong employment brand is crucial for attracting passive candidates. Research indicates that passive candidates switch jobs for different reasons than active candidates. For one, passive candidates place a higher value on company culture and may even put culture fit above compensation and benefits.Active candidates, in contrast, tend to be more drawn to companies that offer strong growth prospects and opportunities to develop their skills. In the world of recruiting IT consultants, this is especially relevant, given the growing competition. Building a strong employment brand is essential to standing out from the pack, especially if you’re recruiting for a small- to medium-sized consultancy. It’ll be difficult to compete with the immediate recognition of an organization like Sapient or IBM, but where you can win is by playing on what makes your company or organization a unique place – whether it’s the opportunity, the culture, the compensation or the like.
- That said, there’s a limit to how far yours and other recruiters’ networks will be able to spread word of your open opportunities through social networking. For one thing, your networks will likely resemble those of many salespersons -- meaning, most of their online connections will be characterized by a salesperson-to-prospect type of relationship. Instead, I recommend fostering help among hiring managers, consultants with the specialized skill sets you’re hiring for, and business contacts to leverage their true peer-to-peer relationships that characterize most of their networks. Even though their networks are probably smaller than a recruiter’s, their online connections are grounded in real relationships that foster trust more naturally than recruiters can with people they barely know. Taking a closer look at a typical consultant’s networks, you’ll find that they largely consist in past coworkers, former schoolmates and other consultants. Chances are their connections – especially would-be candidates who are passive – are going to monitor their updates more closely than they would a recruiter’s updates.And, for hard-to-fill positions that require specialized skill sets -- which, I’m sure you’ll agree, are most, if not all, IT consultancy jobs – consultants in your referral network with similar skills sets can be your best strategic weapon in reaching high quality, relevant candidates. Chances are, for example, a consultant with vast knowledge of migrating an enterprise to the cloud will know a consultant with similar experiences than you or I would.
- Beyond these reasons, however, referrals through social media provide a unique opportunity for you as recruiter for IT consulting is to harness one of your most valuable assets in employment branding: your people and the personal networks that they’ve already fostered. Referral programs driven by social media can empower employees to share what makes your consultancy or client such a unique place to work, in a more authentic way than corporate copy. Tapping into the voices of employees or people familiar with your consultancy, whom candidates know and trust, will be more authentic, powerful and effective than social media broadcasting performed by a recruiter or HR professional – people whose explicit professional purpose is to attract and recruit candidates.
- To make the ROI case even clearer, I’ll provide a couple stats. According to Dr. John Sullivan, for example, the more referrals a recruiter receives, the more efficient the hiring process becomes. You can save a significant amount of time and energy by sourcing hires from referral programs, as opposed to other sources.
- And, referred hires are far less likely to leave a job – either voluntarily or involuntarily – in the first year, compared to hires from other sources. And, as most of you already know, better employee retention leads to much lower costs, in addition to lessening the amount of work recruiters must do.
- As you launch into your social recruiting efforts, you need to move beyond merely spreading the word of your open and the core competencies of your consultancy. Frankly, both your jobs and the consultancy’s capabilities are going to be extremely similar to what’s across the board. Instead, focus on what makes you different. As alluded to earlier, one of the biggest differentiators is culture, which is largely shaped by your people. Make your messaging personal, and highlight the things that only you have, which, at first blush, will be your people, your clientele and success stories.
- And now, I’ll take a deeper dive into some of the tactics that you and your recruiting team can employ to help build your employment brand through social media.
- The first and most obvious thing you can do is market your open jobs.
- But, doing a good job at marketing your open jobs isn’t as simple as just posting them to your social media profiles. That’s certainly a part of it, but only a fraction of the story. One hypothetical I like to suggest in conversations with our clients is to ask them to imagine that they go to a party, and all that they do is talk business. Chances are, at the end of the night, they won’t win the popularity contest. The same is true of social media and social recruiting. [ANIMATION]No one wants to be this guy: the person whose only updates are about open jobs. You’re going to burn out your networks, and no one’s going to like you, not to mention want to listen to what you’re saying, even if you’re talking about an incredible opportunity at an amazing company.
- While it’s not an exact science – as each person’s networks and business objectives differ – this graphic provides a general schema for approaching broadcasting to yours and your recruiters’ social networks for recruiting purposes. Most of what you broadcast should be interesting, relevant content that engages your connections’ interest. The aim is to earn their trust in you as a credible source of relevant information. Less than a third of your recruiting team’s updates should be about your open jobs. So, if you’re posting a lot of jobs, you should also be posting a lot of content! And, to further aid the cause of building credibility, you can also feel free to share some of your successes. That said, be sparing with these types of updates; braggarts don’t tend to be the most popular people either.
- And, how often you should post is largely determined by the social channel you’re using and what people’s expectations are on that channel. Think of it like this: Facebook is to Twitter what TV is to Print Media. People watch TV in real-time and get annoyed when they see the same commercial immediately after the next. If you saw that happen on TV, chances are you’d put the TV on mute or change the channel. In contrast, on Twitter, people tend to flip back and forth between tweets and can search for exactly what they want, much like people’s experiences of flipping through a magazine or newspaper.
- Also, we often look at social media or networks mentioned as if they’re all the same – that one can apply a one-size-fits-all mentality to strategies used to leverage them. We know, however, through detailed analysis that people’s behavior on different channels differs greatly. A few explanations of this graph:On Facebook, people click on things they see in their newsfeeds, for the most part, explaining why most traffic driven from Facebook is immediate. On LinkedIn, people just aren’t following updates as frequently. On Twitter, people are using the search tool to unearth jobs posted in the past. We’re also finding, interestingly, that Twitter is driving the most traffic toward open job listings.
- Beyond marketing your open jobs, one of best things your organization can do, from a social recruiting standpoint, is try to build a community. Communities are merely social relationships that form among many people. In the case of recruiting, the aim should be to build places where candidates can interact not only with companies and their representatives, but also each other. The popular term you’ll hear a lot these days is “talent community.”
- And, one of the best ways to start a community is to create discussions. On LinkedIn, it happens in the form of discussion threads within LinkedIn groups. On Twitter, people use hashtags, or what most people know as the “pound sign” to hook their tweets into bigger ongoing conversations. Or, they do this to create conversations of their own. As many of you may be unfamiliar with this concept, I’ll dive a bit deeper. Basically, I’d think of hashtags as a method of making your tweets findable. So, in using them, think of hashtags as ways to mark your thoughts on Twitter with common terms people might use to look for comments of the same ilk. On Facebook, leveraging update messages on your Facebook page – whether it’s your personal profile or your company’s corporate page – and replying to comments on your updates is the most common way of fostering discussion. That said, one of the biggest reasons that people participate in communities is that they want to learn something or improve their lives in some way.
- And so, it should be clear why content is king – or, depending on perspective on things, queen. Just as your discussions in-person are successful when centered on interesting, relevant points. The same is true of your discussions on social media.
- Here’s a checklist of characteristics I’ve noted that make messaging “relevant” – and hence, engaging. Being “relevant” is being helpful (you can help them find jobs), educational (you can teach them ways to make themselves more attractive candidates), informational (you can share word of recent industry-related news or events) and conversational (you can respond to something that they’ve communicated as being on their mind). The list certainly goes on, but the bottom lineis that all of these things add value to people’s professional lives online.
- And, to make things even more interesting, one of the great aspects of social media versus other forms of communication is the multimedia messaging that’s at your fingertips. Share links to articles, videos, pictures and audio content that your connections would consider as relevant. Multimedia in your communications will activate different parts of their brains and will help you pique their interest.
- The last tactical area of leveraging social media for your recruiting efforts that I’ll discuss is monitoring – that is, watching, assessing and making decisions based on the information you’re gathering.
- The first thing I’ll recommend that you do is follow the leader. Who’s doing a good job at social recruiting in your industry? Who are the thought leaders that pique your interest as a professional? Who is driving innovation and getting attention from the candidates in the industry for which you’re recruiting? Find out who these people are, and connect with, friend and follow them immediately. Watching and learning from their online behaviors, engaging them in conversation and re-sharing the content they’ve already created will not only help you decrease your learning curve in what makes for engaging content, but will also save you time and energy in finding good content to share with your connections. If you’re at a loss for what to say, retweet and re-share what the leaders are broadcasting. And, you may even add value to your own online experience as a professional along the way.
- Secondly, identify best practices by taking a look at the metrics that measure the results of your efforts. Use tools to help you figure out what’s working, what’s not working and where you can improve your social recruiting efforts. Taking a look at the hard facts can provide clarity on what your work through social media is actually yielding. Ultimately, your best practices are going to be contingent on your unique situation. Testing different approaches, monitoring the results, and tweaking your efforts based on your results is best way to identify what your best practices are.
- And thirdly, you can use social media monitoring to help you decide what information is most important to you. Cutting through the clutter of your connections can be incredibly difficult, if you have even just a couple hundred individuals in an online network. Ask yourself – what does success looks like for you? What do you want to accomplish? And, finally, what steps do you need to take to get there? Monitoring both what others are doing and what your results are yielding can help you make more informed decisions about what matters most to you as a recruiting professional.
- Having a clearly defined strategy is the most important factor in achieving employer branding objectives. That’s the takeaway from the Employer Brand Institute’s Global Research Study of more than 2,000 companies.Capturing and conveying your employment brand – the identity of your company or organization – can be tricky business. Thankfully, the Employer Brand Institute’s Global Research Study, conducted among 2,000 companies identified a number of tactics toward building a strong employment brand, which I’ve distilled in this list. I’ll go ahead and distill it even further.
- Thankfully, there are tools like Bullhorn Reach that can help you become both more efficient and effective in your social recruiting efforts. Bullhorn Reach can help you broadcast and automatically re-post your open jobs until they’re filled, prioritize which connections in your networks are most important to engage, and monitor the results of your social recruiting efforts, in addition to helping you share content while getting the word out about your open jobs. You can get started for free and learn more at bullhornreach.com.