Posts Tagged ‘Social Recruiting’

It’s been 15 years

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Wow. We are 15 years old this month. It’s certainly been a decade and half. From and advertising to andsome. Growing from a small Recruitment Marketing start-up doing print and press ads (remember those two) to a… erm… compact Digital Social Agency doing recruitment comms to employee branding (and everything in between). You see, we’ve never wanted to do a Google (who also launched in 1998).

Who’d have thought all those years ago, that we’d be even closer to the candidates that we’re trying to recruit for our clients? ‘Representing’ them on social media, as their community leaders, in constant dialogue with candidates 24/7. Probably creating more ‘comms material’ than ever before – except now it’s called content, updates and tweets. It’s hard work. But the buzz when it’s working is so much more personal, gratifying and involving – even emotional – than those days of old, creating ads/posters/brochures, distant from the audience you were trying to connect with.

We have changed. But in some ways we’ve stayed the same.

Our standards, for one thing. We still won’t regurgitate a strategy, approach or creative concept. Even if someone else didn’t want or like it. And, in this gobble ideas faster than a MaccyD world, we never repeat the same approach because no-one will remember it if you did. (We will though.) Our integrity is unchanged. In this ever-changing world of recruitment, we stand by our founding principle that ‘We’re not right for everyone’. Even if it occasionally costs us the opportunity to work with someone new. After all, wouldn’t you rather work with people who are as passionate about your business/brand/products as you are?

Teenagers, what are they like?

Why we prefer to do

On the Job experience. That’s often the starting point for many a successful career. It’s an ethos that has come back into vogue over recent years with Work Inspiration (for 14-17 year olds), Internships/Placements for Students and Apprenticeships instead of Uni. It’s all about the learning. In the working environment. Especially the apprenticeships route, learn while you earn is the phrase. Where you’re working for real, not just attending lectures with the odd practical thrown in for good measure.

Social media is exactly the same. You learn far more in the doing. It’s great to hear the case studies but at the end of the day they’re just overviews. No matter how detailed they might be. If you’re looking to community manage, or get involved in, social platforms and talent communities, the only way is to get your hands dirty.

You’ll soon see that the ‘rules’ that float around aren’t always the good advice that they seem. You know the ones. About timings. Scheduling (or not). Tweet 100 characters or less. Where to position a link in your update. Not flooding your account with job posts. Who you should or shouldn’t follow. What gets Likes. Update an average 4 times a day. More than 2 #Hashtags affects engagement.

Honestly, with all the accounts we’ve managed and been involved with over the years, every one of the ‘rules’ above (and more) have been blown away on different accounts and different audiences. That’s the key – the audience ‘tells’ you what they want. And as every business is unique, even in the same sector, what applies to one doesn’t mean it will work for another. One approach that’s successful for one facebook page, will fail on another. That’s what experience will tell you. That’s what your audiences will show you. You never hear failure admitted very often, if at all, in a conference case study. You wouldn’t expect to. (Although a #FAILconf, is an interesting idea…hmm.) It’s always success stories. That’s what everyone wants to hear. But the odd fail (or disappointment/surprise) is often much more enlightening. And the spur to keep looking at things differently.

Facebook’s news feeds social recruiting impact

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What’s new for the social recruiting arena? Bigger images for one thing. Now your content does need to get noticed. More area. More impact. Higher resolution. Higher interest. Hopefully, this means much more thought about using own, rather than generic, content. And the disappearance of those non-visual page updates which looked rather invisible, even now, in the current feed.

But there’s more to the big picture of this latest Facebook update than that.

There are the Feeds themselves. That means more choice. On top of the current stream, there’s All Friends, Photos, Music and Following. The first three are obvious. The last one, Following, contains all the Pages you like and People you, well..follow. Which means your content is going have to work even harder. Relevance will no longer be an optional extra.

And to top all of this, finally, the Facebook experience will be identical across desktop, tablet and mobile. It was about time. And it’s yet another interesting installment since the introduction of Timeline for Pages just 12 months ago.

Social recruiting can be really personal

Social media for recruitment. There’s much talk about engagement. Finding the right job hunter. Searching for the passive candidates. Spreading effective content. Generating the correct ROI. Creating an Employer Brand. Ultimately, it always comes down to the hiring.

But there can be another side. When social media transcends the worry about the application process into something more personal. Rather than platitudes that this would be a dream job, it turns to talk of experiences from real life. And in our role as social media community managers, we’ve seen this touching side of recruitment, time after time.

Take someone who suffers from an extreme form of epilepsy. They contacted the Twitter account, after asking for a follow, and then enquired about how to gain a foothold in the industry for a career. We took up the conversation. For them it took the extreme effort of a chain of Direct Messages over a 45 minute period to fully explain their situation. For us, it was an extremely emotional conversation, as you saw the passion and frustration coming through. We pointed them in a useful direction.

Then, late one night, there was a girl trying to apply for a role but there were issues with the online application form. We were on hand to help. She then cam back to say she couldn’t apply because of family pressures due to her mum suffering from MS. We talked with her about the situation. (She even RT’d some of our replies.) She never applied. But hopefully, we helped her that night.

Another occasion, a gay man talked to an account about how he’s been victimised in a previous job because of his sexuality. We offered some advice. Other followers joined in the conversation. He appreciated all of the support.

You would never, necessarily, be exposed to these kind of ‘recruitment’ issues, if it wasn’t for the openness of social media. And only if your social media accounts show that they have a human side. Providing a platform for real conversations, not just jobs. The next time the question is raised of  ‘Is this Social Media effective for recruitment?’ remember that it’s effects can more worthwhile, far more wider reaching, than you could have imagined.

The future of recruitment is… now

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Direct resourcing has always been around – it just wasn’t as fashionable and some HR/recruitment weren’t so accountable.

Employer Branding was driven by employees way before it became popular to blog about it.

Technology is here – how it’s used is what matters, rather than just what it does.

Social media has had an effect on recruitment for the past 4 years – there’s no need to keep talking about what it could do, it’s what it does that matters.

Talent communities existed before social media or the latest social-enabled ATS technological advance.

Looking for quality candidates, rather than quantity has always been the holy grail.

Candidate Engagement wasn’t just ‘invented’ when organisations started using social media for recruitment.

Word of Mouth about opportunities happened way before you could tweet a link.

Spreading the word of jobs on Social Media is not a problem, it’s how you ‘post’ them that counts.

Website User experience isn’t Candidate Experience – it’s wider than that.

Recruitment marketing has been around for years – it’s quite worrying when recruiters think it’s a relatively new approach.

It’s time to keep it real. Too many conferences that offer the same topics/opinions/case studies will make it stale.

The time for talk is done, the time to do is here.

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