Top 5 mistakes the recruiters do in the social media:

• 1. Ignore. It was the most common mistake, but finally people are realising that the social media is not going to “go away”. When other people talk about
  you in the social media – it is ALLWAYS the best to be a part of that communication.
• 2. Publish only jobs in all social media channels. At some stage that did help your SEO. Well, have you not heard of Google Panda and Google Penguin? Those two Google updates have worked hardtop fixing that social media spamming effect on the search engine results. Today it does nothing for you but annoys the people who get bombarded by your jobs postings and are checking the ways how to get rid of you in their social media channels.
• 3. Publish your jobs in the social media and do not check the applications in that same channel? If you tweet your jobs on your jobs are tweeted automatically, jobseekers will apply and ask you questions in twitter. Very few recruiters are actually even aware that they should or could check what people are asking in those channels. If you job is posted on your Facebook wall, one would expect a recruiter will respond on the engagement from the job seeker on that same Facebook wall. The social media is like any other communication channel. Like email or a phone. You send an email with a question (I have a job, do you want to apply?) and a job seeker responds (Yes, please). The worst a recruiter can do is to ignore a job seeker. Why? It is all in public here. You can pretend you have deleted someone’s email, but you can’t hide of someone ‘talking’ to you on your Facebook wall.
• 4. Put the (password protected) link in the tweet or a Facebook & LinkedIn status update like: “Check my cool jobs in the Box https://www.box.com/files#/files” When you click on the link, that site asks you to register first.
• 5. Tweet “Follow me” in twitter. – this one puzzles me completely! Only people who follow you see your tweets in their streams. Why SPAM them with the “Follow me” tweets?

 

Candidate driven market is a phrase one hears from the recruiters when their usual sourcing channels dry up. It is happening now in most countries with the job sites. People expect a bit more from a web site but just a directory listing that a job sites mostly are. In the recruitment agency dominated markets like UK and Ireland, it really isn’t that exciting looking at the job descriptions that do their best to hide who the employer is, where exactly the job is, what is the salary offered, and anything else that could actually make the job advertisement attractive to the potential job seeker?
 
 
Candidate Driven jobs market
 
 
No applications on your jobs advertised on job sites and your own site is a reflection of the different expectations of the visitor of any site on the web today. Why on earth do you think anyone would like a web page with a sterile job description and click the ‘I Like’ button? Why would anyone share it to his friends? “Maybe I know someone?”. Well whoever I know I would never send to a vanilla job spec without any real info about the job or a company itself.

 
 
No application to your jobs advertised does not mean that there are no candidates around. Even dressing the issue nicely into the lovely phrase ‘Candidate Driven Market’, doesn’t help the fact that your attraction, advertising & sourcing technique is not working.
 
 
Recruiter Driven jobs market
 
 
You should control your industry as much as you can. Influence, participate, network, communicate, publish, share, lead, innovate, comment, ask, answer, organise, … be active. Be seen. Be Known (Didn’t Monster use that recently as a product name?). Candidate driven jobs market is happening to the recruiters that simply do not follow the candidates. Not all candidates change their behaviour all at once. A recruiter should look at the trends. It might be more worth recruiting from the source (media) where there are less candidates if there is relatively far smaller number of recruiters.
 
 
The initial success in sourcing candidates via the social media that the early adopters have recorded is a classic sample. It is not easy to recruit on Facebook or twitter. But guess what? No one is recruiting there! Whoever you find is very unlikely to have ever spoken (gen y) to a recruiter ever!

If you have been monitoring your source of hire in the last couple of years, you have most likely noticed the trend. There is more and more hires  and placements made from the candidates sourced from the social media. If you didn’t notice this trend jet you might want to look into the way you are measuring your source of hire, or you are simply non-existent on the social media sites.

The social media enables you to attract candidates that would never ever apply for your job advertisements. Those are the Passive Candidates that you can reach only by sourcing. Social media help greatly in that task. It enables you to ‘speak’ to them directly. It gives you an unique chance to ‘sell’ them your vacancy.

The way you go about selling your vacancy can be direct and indirect. The less direct you are, the harder to reach candidates you attract. Here is how recruiters approach the social media:

Level 1. Publish our jobs in recruiters tweets, LinkedIn status updates and Facebook profile.
- This is the closest to the job advertising model so recruiters are comfortable with that straight away. The problem is that it gives nothing for candidate that he cannot see on the job boards. In fact most of the candidates will feel their ‘space’ in the social media is invaded. Hence the results are similar to the job board advertising, just a new set of candidates have been reached.

Level 2. Mixed amount of the original content and jobs data is published in recruiters tweets, LinkedIn status updates and Facebook profile.
- The original content created by the recruiter gives reason for following, connecting, and responding to the recruiters content. Engagement level grows from the candidates as the amount and the quality of the recruiters content. Recruiters who publish interesting industry data get ‘listened to’. Those that include their personal views get interacted with. Talking to the passive candidates, what else could you have asked for?

Level 3. Time to own the conversations – your own blog!
- Social media is great. The more relevant quality content you publish the more Passive Candidates you are attracting. More often than not the other recruiters will join in. And poach from your candidate pools. Remember on social media you don’t really own anything. When you build your talent community, by simple providing them with the content they are looking for, it is time to bring them all to the environment you control. On your own blog you control what content gets published and what not. You have the full control of everything! Publishing in the social media and bringing the conversation to your own controlled platform puts you in power. Here you can control that your talent community is not just ‘stolen’ by your competitors.

Level 4. Your talent community becomes Alive!
- At some stage your talent community will have its own voice. Your role is more on the moderation and support side. The content contribution of the community you have attracted in the social media and brought to your own platform outgrows your own and takes the life of its own. The recruiter needs to step back and provide a platform for the candidates to communicate freely. It can be online in the shape of the Forum, or a blog network or offline in Open Evenings, Breakfast Briefings or any offline networking event. A barbecue or flashmob would do as well!

The higher level (on the scale above) of the recruiters social media evolvement enables talking to a larger group of possible candidates. Not all of the people engaged will ever become a candidate. Some people are just happy where they are. The longer it takes you to get to them, the less other recruiters they are talking to. If you talent community grows your main job actually becomes keeping them aware that you actually exist and are actually hiring. Your activity actually gets far less demanding and gets back to where a recruiter starts – just publishing your jobs, in your own pool of candidates on a platform you control.

It does take a lot of effort, and it doesn’t happen overnight though…

Social Recruitment – where are we today?

Most recruiters cannot even envisage the scenario where their jobs would be posted to their Facebook and Twitter, and especially on LinkedIn. Their Facebook profiles are in most cases private. They network with their friends and family there. Twitter is actually a social media tool that recruiter try to avoid if at all possible. It is just a bit too simple. 140 characters to say something meaningful? Not likely. Saying it in public, to both my candidates, clients and competitors? Definitely NOT! That is actually the main reason that sourcing on twitter works best out of all social networks. Recruiters simply don’t use it. So a few that do – have plenty of candidates to choose from. You would like to be the only recruiter with the full access to the Monster CV database, would you?

When recruiters push themselves (or get pushed by their manager) to start posting their jobs to the social media, it usually have no impact on their work. Why? Simply because they do it wrong. How wrong? Well completely wrong. What they do is just what they got set so it is done for them automatically. Like the link to every new job gets tweeted by their Twitter account. Of course no one but a plethora of SPAM-ers and robots follow them. There is absolutely no reason to follow someone’s Twitter account that just publishes jobs. Perhaps the only ones who would find any use of it are the competitors. They can check on you – what are you up to, by subscribing to your Twitter account. The same is with Facebook. The same is with LinkedIn.

Sourcing in Social Media?

You might as well speak French. Or Boolean. Or Klingon. The majority of recruiters would not be able to tell the difference between Boolean and Klingon. And why is Boolean different in Google, Bing, LinkedIn, and your own CV database search? Why can’t there be just one Boolean? Why is there a Boolean at all if it’s different in every single place I use it? It is like Klingon that has a very strong accent? Like a Dub talking to a someone from West Cork.

Recruitment and sourcing specialists and trainers train recruiters on how to use advanced tools on top of the social media products, where the average recruiter doesn’t really understand the underlying products at all. How to generate twitter lists does very little to a person who doesn’t really feel the urge to tweet and build his followership. Again the vast majority of recruiters simply do not want to tweet, full stop. Will they ‘Engage’ and build a ‘Talent Community’? Absolutely not! They hate the whole idea of ‘exposing’ themselves online. Recruiters are more comfortable with the word ‘Confidential’ than ‘Share’. Recruiters do not really ‘Share’ anything. Recruiters do not ‘Like’.

That is why a few recruiters who do the opposite are so successful! The way we communicate is changing. A few years ago I would call a few friends and we would go out. Today I ‘Publish’ where I am, and others follow. Note the difference – today there is less planned – it is real time. I checked in here. I am here doing this and that. Others follow, or I follow them. Today we live and work where the information is freely available in real time. Not using it for the recruitment is like deciding not to use fax, email, job boards, or whatever revolutionised the recruitment.

Real time, local and hence mobile. Those are the attributes of the future recruitment process.

While a lot of noise is about the importance of the social media in recruitment the hard fact is that there is about the same number of recruiters using the social media and the ones that simply ignore it. There is very little written on the web about how social media is useless for a recruiter. People who do not use the social media do not publish online. In fact the most of them simply do not publish at all. Recruiters who do use social media in most cases just listen to what others are publishing. More courageous ‘like’ or ‘Share’, and the very small percentage of less than 5% actually create the original content. So here is a path of a recruiter in the adoption of the social media.

1. No social media presence

A lot of recruiters simply do not have a LinkedIn profile. Or they have a 100% empty profile, with just their name, a handful of connections, no picture, not bio. No twitter, or the one with no tweets. Facebook – closed for the friends and family / or none. They are doing their job as they did it 5 or 10 or more years ago. They do it good. They do not need the social media, have no time or interest for it. Most work in narrow industry niches, and are specialised in a location where there is not much competition between recruiters.

2. Listen

After reading in newspapers about LinkedIn, and listening about the success of Facebook on TV recruiters open their LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter accounts. Some fill their data guided by the wizards, and complete their profiles. Then they just listen. They invite a few colleagues in their networks, and when have time, they read groups discussions, and watch pictures on Facebook. They are never really tagged in pictures, and they watch closely their (minimalistic) social media footprint. They are the ones you will hear talking next to the water cooler about what someone wrote on Facebook. They take the social media content – offline.

3. Share

At some stage when you read a discussion that is about the topic you are passionate about, you will get an urge to get involved. The first steps usually are the little buttons that enable you to ‘Like’ a page, or ‘Thumb Up / Down’ the point someone made in a discussion online. You can ‘Score’ and answer, and do similar one click actions – that lure you in the world of the social media. You feel like you are a part of it. I have had my say! By clicking the Like button on some comment on Facebook. Great.

4. Create

The last stage of evolution of a recruiter in the social media adoption is the creation of your own content. Your first tweets, your first Facebook simple sentences, your LinkedIn answers and latter questions. Your LinkedIn Group contributions and later starting your own discussions. The next creating your own blog, and later on syndication parts of your content on the related industry blog networks. The number of people who actually create the continent is really small. It is really hard to justify the time, and hard to measure the ROI.

One cannot really say that it is necessary to ever get to the latest stage of the creation of your own content. Although all the social media platforms are built with exactly that in mind, the reality is that the vast majority of people simply just do not do it. Some try it a bit and stop, but most really never publish anything. Should one be a good or bad recruiter based on the level on the adoption of the social media? Absolutely not. Recruiter’s quality is measured by the quality, (speed, cost, etc) of a hire. The tools used to make it happen are irrelevant.

To answer that question, Jobvite commissioned a study of 2,049 adults aged over 18 across the US, asking them for their opinions on using social media when finding a job.

Jobs Board enables recruiters to reach to job seekers that simply do not go to the job sites any more, while still making sure the others who still use job boards are reached to as well. It enables a recruiter to post to the main social media sites and all the Irish job sites