Social Media for Recruiting

Paul Jacobs describes social recruiting as follows: SR is delivering sound hiring decisions by actively using web-based technologies to build a shared understanding between employers/recruiters and passive and active job seekers. But it is still the question where does the real social recruiting start, what is social in that content and how much are the participants benefiting from this? Is it already social to post a vacancy on a social networking site or to place a creative banner ad on a social networking platform? The author thinks not and gives an example how social recruitment could look like, for instance an online event that includes live-streaming video with micro-blogging. In order to use the new tool social recruitment efficiently, a kind of interactivity between the employers/ recruiters and the jobseekers is necessary. Therefore, the recruiters have to find the niches of the potential employees; they have to know in which social network their clients are active in and how to reach them. He thinks that it is not a question that social recruitment is highly relevant for the future tasks of recruiters.
The knowledge of best-practice-approach still has to be find out by social network analysis, studies, etc. in order to meet this trend timely and adequately. Companies have to develop their social recruitment strategy for being professional and successful in this field. Who’s responsible for the blogs, what should be the content and how much time/ investment is reasonable? These are questions companies have to answer before joining the bandwagon.

That’s the topic of Brent Pearson’s article which describes some critical points concerning social recruiting. He cautions the recruiters against the overheated trend. For him, the hype of SR brings up the question which priority the new tool has in comparison to other recruiting tools like a career site. Having other initiatives perfect first makes it worth to use the tool of SR in addition or as supplement, especially for sourcing. He describes seven points he considers as important when initiating SR in a company:
1. Start using social ,media sites for sourcing immediately
2. Combine different, attractive tools of recruiting
3. Make sure your recruitment house is in order
4. Think carefully about the ongoing investment required
5. Measure your return on investment
6. Be a fast follower
7. Avoid a hype
Furthermore, the recruiters have to pay attention for the pitfalls, social media site provide, for instance the privacy. Jobseekers/ applicants see sites like facebook as “personal space” and a misuse of these data’s could damage an employer’s brand.
From my point of view the above-mentioned articles show how much uncertainty exists concerning social recruiting. On the one hand, there’s the pressure of being a fast follower, not to miss a trend in order to get the best employees in the “war for talents”. On the other hand there are still so many open questions. How to measure the success of social recruiting, how to address the right people in the right way, and altogether: Is it worth to put so much effort to a topic that might be unimportant in two years? While the first article questions and defines the scope of social recruiting, the second one gives a kind of guideline what to consider concerning social recruiting. Both are helpful to evaluate the hype a little bit better and could help recruiters/ employers to a possible strategy.
Since social recruiting is still a quite new topic, it is still in progress of improving. The first companies already collect some experiences. Their success and failure will show how big the potential of the current hype “social recruiting” really is. It is incontestable that the social media networks are growing, especially facebook and Twitter or to have a look at the professional sites LinkedIn. With the help of some special equipment and tools it might be possible to use the huge source of social networks in a more efficient way for recruiting.
Sources:
Human Resources Magazine, December 2009, Brent Pearson, Social media for recruitment, p.6-7
Human Resources Magazine, December 2009, Linda Coles, Using social networking sites, p.4-5
Human Resources Magazine, December 2009, Paul Jacobs, What is social recruiting?, p.2-3
http://www.stepstonesolutions.de/_pdf/News/Whitepaper_Social_Networking-Seiten_als_Recruiting-Werkzeug.pdf
http://www.talential.com/blog/online-recruiting/social-recruiting-2010-soziale-evolution-aber-keine-twitter-revolution/