I’ve seen a number of posts speculating about the importance of social recruiting and to be honest, I don’t think the critics have managed to convince themselves, let alone their readers.
They have said social recruiting doesn’t matter or that “it’s a waste of time”, despite the fact there are many others saying otherwise and many benefits your company stands to take advantage of. Having read around the subject, I’m now tempted to agree and thought I’d write my own post for why there’s absolutely no reason you should use social recruiting.
If it works, use it forever.
If there’s one thing you learn in the recruiting industry, it’s that once you find a method that works, you should stick with it forever, because trends don’t change. What worked once, will always work, right? It’s why scientists never try to repeat the results of experiments and it’s why you should stick to the recruiting methods of 20 years ago. Ignore the decline of newspapers’ classified ads in favor of Ebay. Keep posting all of your jobs for your big company in newspapers. And whilst you are at it, make sure you’re constantly cold-calling people about jobs, too.
Why would you need something new like social recruiting, when you have the good old newspapers to keep your hiring efforts bringing elite talent to your door from now until the end of time?
No one else is using it.
Let’s face it. “Social recruiting” is a marketing term cooked up by “recruiting departments” in order to sell “recruiters” on “products.” No one really uses it. Especially not 92% of businesses.
It’s just another keyword that won’t sell because it offers no advantage over other recruiting methods. And if no one’s using it, then clearly it’s not any good, right? We can safely ignore its rise in usage over the last several years and continue our current method of recruiting: yelling at people on the street (or in the pub!), asking if they’re looking for a job and have a degree in the field you’re looking for. That’s what we all do.
There are no benefits to social media.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume a few things. First, let’s assume walking into people’s places of work and asking them if they wouldn’t be better off working somewhere else isn’t the only viable recruitment strategy. Second, let’s assume this whole “social media” thing actually existed. Even if those two things were true, there’s no way social recruiting could improve any of the following aspects of recruiting by the respective amounts:
- Quality of candidates – 44%
- Quantity of candidates – 44%
- Time-to-hire – 34%
- Employee referrals – 30%
So as you can see, social recruiting doesn’t matter at all. We should continue to use the same recruiting methods we have been for years, social recruiting will never help you because no one’s on it when they check their phones all day, and it doesn’t have any noticeable benefits.
Okay, let’s drop the charade. Clearly, social recruiting is one of the best ways for recruiting to fill jobs for the exact opposite reasons as the one’s I’ve outlined here. It totally does matter and anyone who thinks otherwise is really missing out.
