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 People who do not use the social media do not publish online. In fact the most of them simply do not publish at all.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.