Top 10 in ’10: Trends in Social Media
By: Matt Charney, Monster Social Media Engagement Manager
While January traditionally is one of the busiest hiring months of the year, 2010 is likely not going to be business as usual. While few are likely to miss the recessionary ravages, record unemployment and stagnant job market of 2009, the impact of last year’s events on the hiring function continues.
Most prominent among these is the rise of social networks. In 2009, social media became as indispensible to many employment professionals’ tool kits as reviewing resumes or interviewing.
When creating long-term recruitment strategies, incorporating social media can prove difficult. One year ago, few could predict Twitter would achieve its current omnipresence, or would have thought to incorporate a Facebook fan page into a posting strategy.
2010 offers similar challenges. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of top trends in social recruiting to watch in the year to come. While some may prove less than prescient, one thing appears certain: how well employers leverage and engage social media in the coming year will largely define the efficacy of their hiring efforts.
Here are our top trends in social recruiting in 2010:
1. Search firms’ social pipeline increases pressure on employers
The predicted increase in hiring activity for the second half of 2010 should result in a significant uptick in business for agencies and search firms. Third-party recruiters’ have been quick to adopt and integrate social recruiting into their strategies and many have capitalized on the slowdown in hiring activity for pipeline building.
Employers just now adopting social recruiting strategies are likely to be beaten to the punch by their agency partners, particularly for top candidates, many of whom may already be represented. In response to this trend, social recruiting should become the most in demand HR specialty within companies by year end.
2. Online brand management shifts to hiring function
As social media evolves, we may see priorities of internal human resource and recruitment functions shift towards brand management and public relations. Just as employers embrace social media as a tool to discover damaging information about candidates during the pre-offer due diligence process, it’s important to remember candidates are often returning the favor.
Now that companies are investing significant resources in online employment branding and outreach, employers should find themselves tasked with protecting that investment through proactive engagement, outreach and careful messaging.
3. Information visibility leads to compliance nightmares
As powerful as social networks are for sourcing candidates, they also create a litany of potential compliance nightmares, particularly for OFCCP-regulated organizations. Such sites allow employers visibility to much more than standard profile pictures, including information about date of birth, religious affiliation and sexual preference. This information remains protected, by law, during the hiring process.
The rise in social recruiting opens the door to potential discriminatory hiring practices and/or lawsuits. With the OFCCP previously announcing more frequent and detailed audits in 2010, compliance issues could potentially impact many companies, particularly as many company websites currently have limited tracking capabilities as mandated by Federal hiring regulations.
4. Social priority migrates from pre-hire to post-hire
The ease of communications and scalability provided by Web 2.0 platforms offers unprecedented opportunities for employers to proactively engage employee populations and increase visibility within their organizations.
By properly leveraging social networks to create a dialogue, HR will have increased exposure to employees’ ongoing work-related concerns and feedback.This additional exposure into professional backgrounds, experience and career objectives of employee populations outside the formal planning process should trigger a rise in internal promotions and lateral moves between function and department.
5. Boomerangs finally come back
While hesitant to embrace emerging social networks, many corporations have been building online alumni networks over the past decade. Features like searchable directories, messaging capabilities and event planning allow online alumni groups to essentially serve as proprietary social networks that are ideally suited to employer outreach. With limited resources and cutbacks still a factor, 2010 should continue the increasing prevalence of alumni boomerang hires.
These candidates offer many potential advantages, including familiarity with company policies, culture, systems and hierarchy, enabling them to hit the ground running and add immediate value. Their performance histories and internal references are also easily accessible, allowing more informed decisions and increasing the quality of hire.
6. Shift in employer usage from prospective to current employees
Social recruiting should disappear from being primarily a sourcing tool and transform into an employee engagement/development tool, with HR utilizing it to keep track of employees’ complaints, issues and work-related content via social media. This will give visibility into people in the organization whose talents and skills align with open roles or potential internal possibilities as a way to target internal promotion.
7. Market fragmentation leads a return to the boards
A plethora of “next generation” (read: alternative revenue model) job posting sites popped up in 2009. Few of these sites, however, have screening processes for either employers or candidates, and lack demonstrative ROI, original content, enhanced services and capabilities that go beyond job posting and resume submission.
When hiring does pick up, many industry watchers predict candidates and recruiters will abandon these upstart boards in favor of more proven, heavily resourced sites, which themselves have evolved to meet the changing recruitment landscape, such as the recent launch of Monster Communities.
These social networks are designed around professional specialties, such as Information Technology and HealthCare.These user-driven, career-focused sites may spell trouble for more traditional, fee-based niche boards, which have already suffered a steep drop in revenues and posting activity.
8. The slow demise of the employee referral
Social recruiting will lead to an increase in volume for internal referrals, particularly for employers with referral fees. This easy access to candidates will diffuse recruitment from an HR activity to active employee solicitation. But the lack of training for line management and employees will lead to a diminished percentage of quality referrals with emphasis on volume. Consequently, referrals should drop out from their reign as the top source of hiring for many companies who will respond by severely limiting or deemphasizing referral programs.
9. Recruitment’s social network of choice: applicant tracking systems
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are increasingly going to become integrated with social networks, allowing candidate profiles to include not only resumes, but also consolidated social networking information. This will essentially remake ATS capabilities as integrated background check, sourcing and resume disposition solutions.
10. Niche job boards begin slide to obsolescence
Niche job boards will significantly diminish in scope and effectiveness as social recruiting allows for much easier engagement with targeted candidate pools through professional communities, lowering costs while decreasing time to fill.This will also help with employment branding and awareness as specialty recruiters will become increasingly active.
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