Social Media in Recruitment, Social Recruitment, Social Recruiting, Online Recruitment, Digital Recruitment – all of these “skills” are a necessary part of every recruiter’s daily lives. They are skills which mean that they start their day when they wake and check their phones, and are likely to still be “working” when they are in bed surfing in their PJs. But many recruitment firms have done almost nothing to strategise this area, let alone reduce risk or capitalise upon it.
So many things have happened to the recruitment space in the last 13 years:
- Digital cameras (hence we now have online personalities).
- Smart phones (is that a computer in my pocket are you just glad to tweet me?)
- Social media (recruitment revolution or evolution?)
- An assumption that we are able to use social media to find the best staff.
- An assumption that because we have a LinkedIn account that we should drop our rates as recruitment is now just so easy.
- (The recession – in brackets for a reason… shhhh!)
All of the above had have a major impact on the market, not to say the fact that clients (and candidates) also have had this environment thrust on to them.
And as much as I work with many recruiters who seem to starting to grasp the need for this change to be capitalised upon, many more are still:
- Offering very little training to help recruiters integrate social media into an already busy business process.
- Drafting a social media “policy” which is more about “don’t do that” rather than “it can help you do this” – and worse tucking it away in HR to get dusty assuming that this is classed as what lawyers will argue is “reasonable response” and the business is covered.
- Seeing social media as “free and easy” – hence they are not taking it seriously enough.
- And this is resulting in lack of control and perceived ROI – and some recruiters are ok with that(???)
I see so many silly behaviours demonstrated every day by recruiters who need to be better at what they do if they (agency recruiters) are to get anything out of this “recruitment revolution” (and work better with clients, in-house HR and candidates). Typical behaviours include:
- Badly made up profiles expecting to be chatted up (score)
- Very little “how to” policy – more of a “don’t you dare”
- Primary social media activity is #job #hiring #jobs #me #MyCompany (yawn)
- Lots of candidate sourcing on LinkedIn, lots of job posting EVERYWHERE – very little other meaningful activity
- You do great job of making recruitment look easy (you’re training clients to do their own recruitment) – stop advertising so much!
- Very little lead gen, very little client sourcing/maintaining, very little competitor analysis
- Facebook is the devil and must be avoided at all costs
- Assumption that everyone is a job seeker
- Your website is where you invest your cash and time (see previous blogs about your LinkedIn company page being more important than your website)
- You are a LION and have a LinkedIn group therefore you are God!
Behaviours are trained, or are as a result of a lack of training – and the recruiter fills the void with what they believe is common sense. Recruitment leaders need to seriously consider this new environment (new to them, perhaps not new to their staff?) and think about some of the following:
- What are your objectives for being on social media?
- What is your strategy?
- What does success look like?
- What are you measuring?
- Who is the subject matter expert in your business?
- How are you going to integrate social media into your business as well as your business process?
- How are you going to reduce the risk to your business?
It really is time for recruiters to stop-box-ticking-job-posting-time-wasting-everyone-is-a-candidate-assuming and start having a real and positive reason to be on social media, and get giddy about some tangible and £$€ results.
