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!

Recruiters often distinguish two groups of candidates called Active Candidates and Passive Candidates.

Who are Active Candidates?
Active candidates are the ones who are actively looking for a job. They search the job postings, apply on job boards and agency web sites. They leave their CVs in the CV databases like Monster.

Who are Passive Candidates?
Passive candidates are not looking for a job. They are working for their current employer or lately can also be unemployed. What makes them the potential candidate is that they if approached with the right opportunity, they will consider their options. A good recruiter will find a perfect timing like when times are tough for their current employer, to convert those passive (from the recruitment perspective) people, to candidates.

Who are the Best Candidates?
There are times when the active candidates are more sought for. In what is called a ‘Full Employment’ in a country, when the unemployment rate is below 5% (for most countries), there is shortage of any candidates for majority of roles. What recruiters value to most is finding a person that would actually accept a job offer. On the other side in the recession times like today, there is plenty of candidates, majority of them unemployed who are forced to actively look for a job. Recruiters will still find hard to fill roles in this scenario for several reasons:
1. Hiring managers are aware of a huge number of unemployed people and are driving the salaries low and requirements high.
2. Passive candidates are hard to convince to change their job. Higher salary doesn’t play the major role any more. Job security becomes important.
3. The volume of applications from non-applicable (unskilled) candidates needs to be managed.

The Best Candidates are the one you manage to hire. Their behaviour changes in different economic situations and even stages of life. Depending on what type of role you have to fill, what is the economy like and what is happening with the industry will have a drastic impact on what types of candidates you will be able to get.

In the recession times like today, Passive Candidates are your best bet!

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.

We are proud to be shortlisted as one of the 7 finalists of the Inspire Ireland competition by Irish Executives. Irish executives is organised as a LinkedIn group that has 9,393 members today. Being the largest network of Irish Executives on any Social Media platform, it represents the true voice of the executives in Ireland.

The Inspire Ireland competition is:
"...is to encourage Irish Executive members to develop an inspiring business idea that will result in wealth creation and jobs in Ireland.".

Congratulations to all Inspire Ireland finalists:
George Howlett - Safefood 360
Govind Basnet - e-MissionManagement
Mark Sugrue - Kinesense Ltd
Lochlann Scott - Helplink Support Services Ltd
Ivan Stojanovic - JobsBoard
Denis Sheehy - Inspire Renewable Technologies


Seven finalists selected from all entries will compete in an online event on December 12th 2011 between 12-1pm GMT. The competition will be held live on Irish Executives TV.

Let the best man win!

 

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