Deselection isn’t new, even in social recruiting

{ 03/13/2012 @ 9:04 pm } · { Candidate Experience, Effectiveness, Employer Branding, Recruitment, Social recruiting }
{ Tags: Effectiveness, Employer Branding, Recruitment, Social Recruiting }

Besides attraction and engagement using social media, how about deselection? There seems to be a movement at the moment that this is something radical. Something new. It’s not. It really isn’t. Most good recruitment communications have always (or should have) attracted the right candidate, while ensuring those ‘not quite right’ thought twice, or at all, about applying. Whether that was a press ad, a poster or website. It’s a principle we’ve always believed in. And always practised. After all, what makes an employer seem attractive to one candidate, can make others turn away.

Recruitment marketing, done properly in any media, has never just been purely about attraction. And now with social media, that ‘deselection’ process is an even stronger option. Questions can be asked before an application. Answers can be given to sway either way. Never mind the option to talk to someone in the company/role. Or actually getting to know what the job entails. The normal job listing ad ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach has been ‘left and gone’. So thankfully has the ‘first opportunity for most candidates can ask a question about the role/employer is the first interview’ approach.

This means candidates who ultimately apply for jobs are more engaged. More keen. More interested. More suitable. That is how social recruiting can help you attract the right ones.

How can you add more to their candidate experience? This all has an impact on the perception of you as a brand and as an employer.  It’s much more than ‘being where the fish are’. It’s about being there when the fish are feeding. There’s nothing worse than sending an email and waiting for a reply. Or leaving a voicemail and wondering if it was picked up. At certain levels of job hunting, there’s an expectation of immediate response. Which goes back to where we started about deselecting. The image of your employer brand isn’t just the design of your Facebook page, the size of logo in an avatar or even that video showing what a ‘wacky’ place you are to work for. It is your approach to response. Otherwise, you may find the right candidates deselecting you from their list of companies they’d like to work for.