As Published in Business 2 Business, March 2010

Social Recruiting - A New Game in Town

By Ira S Wolfe, Success Performance Solutions

As a young kid, maybe 4 years old, I remember standing near the edge of the water in Atlantic City, mesmerized by the ships moving along the horizon.  I don’t know how long I was standing there but when I turned around shouting “Mommy, Daddy, did you see the big ship?,” my parents were gone.

You can only imagine my panic.  It likely paled to what my parents were experiencing.  Since I’m writing this article about 55 years later, I was obviously found safe and sound and lived to tell this tale. But other than a fleeting memory of that day, the story didn’t hold much relevance for me until just a few days ago.

I don’t know what prompted me to recall the events of that hot July day but I found myself using my summer adventure to describe how many business owners and executives are reacting to today’s constantly shifting environment.  As I described the situation, the audience of 15 small business CEOs understood exactly the message I was conveying – while transfixed on a target, don’t ignore that the very ground upon which you’re standing is still moving.

Like wading in the sea, the undertow of change in business is both subtle and insidious. As long as the target is in sight, it offers the perception that you’re safe, just a few steps from security and safety. But when the trance is broken and management turns to address their customers, they may find themselves in a strange place with a new audience. 

While change is happening in nearly aspect of business, it is particularly significant in the area of recruiting.  A slow economy has all but stalled any recruiting efforts in many organizations. And high unemployment has injected a potentially lethal dose of complacency into the hearts of human resources managers and minds of management. When senior managers and business owners finally remember that people are their most important asset, they are in for a rude awakening.

Thankfully, many businesses are hiring employees again.  Based on my very unscientific poll of activity within my own business, pre-employment test volume is up significantly over last year and has reached pre-recession levels over the past few months. But despite the near 10% unemployment rate, many of our clients are struggling to find qualified candidates.  What they have discovered is that sourcing strategies that worked pre-recession are ineffective now.  When they stopped hiring about eighteen months ago, senior management and human resource managers stopped paying attention to the new rules for sourcing.  It’s like they entered the tunnel at halftime of the Super Bowl but returned to the field at the bottom of the seventh inning in the World Series. 

Job seekers – at least the most skilled and qualified ones – aren’t responding to print newspaper ads. In fact, sourcing via print classified ads was dying for years.  The recession just nailed the coffin shut.

Many candidates aren’t even responding to online job boards anymore either.  While still the biggest, the market share for both Monster and Careerbuilder is on a steady decline. For the employers, high unemployment and the ease of applying online has created a blizzard of resumes, a “resu-mess”, for every open position. Lean recruiting staffs and old processes are overwhelmed and unprepared to deal with the new flow and workload. They are trying to apply old tactics in a new game and that strategy isn’t working.

For example, as simple as it sounds, placing the copy of an ad written for print media won’t work on the Internet. Why? In order to be found when a candidate searches, the ad must be search engine optimized, just like a web page for a corporate site. Few recruiters and hiring managers even know what I’m talking about when I mention this. But putting an ad on the Internet is no different than writing marketing campaign for a product or service.  If it doesn’t include the right keywords, no one will find it.

Likewise, savvy job seekers, the kind you want to recruit, recognize that their resume will likely be lost in the digital pile, if it even makes it that far. At best qualified candidates become a diamond lost in the rough.  Most likely, they don’t even apply through the more traditional sourcing paths and you don’t even get a chance to interview them if you haven’t created a more social recruiting strategy.

Because of the inefficiencies of old human resources practices, job seekers are taking matters into their own hands.  They have moved the candidate “meeting place” to the Internet, a place that many small and mid-sized business hiring managers and recruiters find uncomfortable.  Recruiters long ago (at least in digital age terms) recognized that business networking sites like LinkedIn was the place to be. However many business owners and HR professionals are newbies or just plain avoiders. Twitter and Facebook are now becoming hot spots to match job seekers with employers and vice verse, but only a small percentage of businesses are engaging job seekers where they are spending a lot of time.  For many organizations, Craigslist has replaced newspaper ads, especially for low-to-mid-skill hourly jobs in a local business. Even the virtual space Second Life has been the site of several recruiting success stories.

Many business owners are overlooking the jackpot of the Internet when it comes to hiring.  Like Rip Van Winkle awakening from his 20-year sleep, anyone involved in hiring employees who has avoided keeping pace will awake from this recession induced recruiting sleepwalk disoriented and out of touch.

Job boards - which I have found to be over-rated - usually end up with more quantity, not quality. Social recruiting is the new game in town. It utilizes different types of social media to intentionally and strategically capture different demographics, professional backgrounds, and culturally aligned individuals who will fit well into your organization. The premise is simple.  Businesses must now meet candidates where they are spending their time.

Effective sourcing of candidates moving forward will require expansive networks and robust communities enriched with people who know people, who know people, who know people.  Attracting qualified candidates has transformed from the act of placing an ad in Sunday’s classified section to the art of developing relationships. 

Unfortunately far too many businesses and their recruiters and hiring managers are woefully unprepared for this reality.

7 Easy Steps to Getting Started

1. Optimize your job ads.  Do a keyword analysis and re-write the ads.  But don’t use internal buzz words or job titles that jobseekers won’t recognize.  Place the ads in Craigslist and social networking sites, in addition to any online job boards line Careerbuilder and Monster.
2. Try sponsoring an ad on a job aggregator like Indeed.com.  Indeed.com and other like sites function like Google. You place ads by bidding on key words. You only pay when a candidate clicks on your ad. These ads show up on the top and side of the page when a candidate searches, giving you more prominent placement if search engines aren’t finding your ad right away.
3. Evaluate website traffic patterns from different sources to your site.  (This requires some type of online application or career landing page.) An excellent free service is Google Analytics. It will help evaluate what keywords are working, where candidates are coming from, and how long they stay on the site.
4. Evaluate response rate by campaign.  Google Analytics provides this data too. Different campaigns and sourcing venues might need to be used depending upon the audience.  For instance, Craigslist and Twitter might be effective for finding graphic artists, but LinkedIn might be better for salespeople, engineers, and managers.
5. Encourage all your employees to get involved.  Make the job opening announcement information available and ask them to share job openings within their Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn networks too.  Recruiting is no longer just an HR function – just like selling, recruiting should be a duty in every employee’s job description.
6. Be creative.  Get a FLIP camera. Record employee testimonials about what it’s like to work for your business.  Video an employee in action – show jobseekers exactly what the job entails.  But don’t create a full-length film.  Keep the videos to a minute or two. Post them on your career site and to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
7. Feature your jobs on your website (and career site if different.)  On some job aggregator sites like Indeed, you can get them to query your site for job openings. Every time you post a new job, it gets added to Indeed’s  database…for free.

Download a pdf version of "What Jobs Won't Return."

About the author

As president of Success Performance Solutions, Ira S Wolfe helps organizations find and hire the right employees and identify high-potential leaders. He speaks nationwide on hiring, workforce trends, managing the generations in a presentation titled Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization. He is also the author of Perfect Labor Storm 2.0: Trends That Will Change the Way You Do Business.