Social Media Recruiting…Candidate Search Versus Attraction
There’s no doubt that the role of social media in recruitment is here to stay. Every day, more and more recruiters and businesses get into the social sourcing game. With a myriad of choices, recruiters have to determine which tools are best for candidate search and which tools are best for attraction.
But before we begin, let’s take a step back. What’s the difference between search and attraction? In this case search is the purposeful use of social media platforms to look for possible job candidates as if one was using a resume database search. Attraction is the opposite. It’s the use of social media tools as a portal to attract jobseekers to an organization or opportunity.
Candidate Search
Alright, let’s talk search. For years, the only tools a recruiter had for search were their own personal network, industry Blue Books or resume databases offered by job boards. Now, there is no shortage of options from mailing lists, to licensure lists, industry organization memberships, etc. Oh yeah and about 100 different social media platforms. But not all social media sites are beneficial for search. It’s not likely that a recruiter would have much luck looking through a list of tweets if they are searching for CPAs.
In lieu of using Twitter for search, I recommend a handful of other sites. Hands down the best social media platform for talent search is LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the most extensive number of professional profiles on the net (barring major job board resume databases). Along with its large scale, it offers many of the web 2.0 tools that encourage trust and authenticity. LinkedIn does have some short falls though. Recruiters looking for hourly workers or more blue collar type workers will not find many qualified prospects on the site.
There are a couple of other sites that similar, but smaller versions of LinkedIn where recruiters might have some luck. Due to the size differences, the talent pool on these sites may be less picked over giving employers more of the candidate’s attention. These site include BrightFuse.com, Xing.com, and for the less experienced white collar jobseeker Koda.us.
Facebook and MySpace are also good tools to turn to for search. Maybe not search like you would use LinkedIn for…more like candidate screening. Today almost half of America’s recruiters use Facebook and MySpace to prescreen candidates they get from other, more traditional recruiting means. If you have 25 strong candidates for one vacancy, checking out a potential employees Facebook profile can tell you a lot about the person’s interests and maybe even work ethic.
Candidate Attraction
The other side of the coin is candidate attraction. Before the popularity of social media, an organization had to depend solely on their own career site and presence on various job boards to get their recruitment brand out to the job seeking masses. Today, several social media platforms offer a recruitment portal experience almost equal to that of a careers page. I saw almost equal because a company can do essentially what they want with their careers page, but have to work within the confines of a social site’s terms & conditions and design parameters.
The best social media tool to use in attraction has got to be Facebook. Facebook has three things that set it apart from other platforms when dealing with candidate attraction. Facebook is very trusted, it allows two-way conversations, and it gives employers a great medium to extend their recruitment brand. Some of the best examples of Facebook recruitment portals are the Ernst & Young, City Year, the US Department of State and Select Staffing.
To a lessor extent, MySpace can be used for candidate attraction. There are far fewer organizations using the site for attraction portals. Several branches of the U.S. Armed Forces successfully exploit the tool to reach out to future soldiers. Other organizations cite the less professional tone of the site as reasons to not source from within its membership.
LinkedIn is another platform that works well for candidate attraction. This site gives companies the chance to set up a corporate profile page where the companies to use an RSS feed to list all the current openings. You can also post openings for free in any number of user group pages.
Next, Twitter is a great source to find both passive and active candidates. Using any number of hash tags and lists, a recruiter can get a job opening out to a large audience very quickly. Twitter also has several third party vendors that offer Twitter posting (both for free and for fee) services that go out to a larger pool of Twitter followers who have opted in to get tweets about jobs in a certain geography, industry or keyword.
Lastly, there’s YouTube. I put YouTube at the end of the list because I feel like it is the hardest platform to use for candidate attraction if you want to do it right. Having said that, when it is done right YouTube is a fantastic medium upon which to build or extend a recruitment brand. With the right amount of time and budget, an organization can use YouTube as both an attraction space and as an onboarding tool. Take the U.S. Coast Guard’s YouTube channel. This channel has 50 videos aimed at attracting possible recruits, sharing job details this group and giving them a real-life view of what joining the service really entails.
These eight or so tools should offer plenty of options to use. As new social media tools hit the web, this question of searching versus attracting will come up again. Until that happens, this primer on using the sites for both should come in handy. When you are able to reach a broad audience in your recruitment activities, you have to look at quality as quantity refined. Using these tools should help you refine your talent pools to find that gem of a candidate you are looking for.
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