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.

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