When we last off, UPS said that the candidates who were coming its way via Facebook and Twitter were more likely to convert to actual hires than were any old candidates. But the sample was small: in other words, social media recruiting seemed to pay off in terms of ROI, but not in any large volume.

Things are different now. 

As 2010 progressed, TMP’s Mike Vangel says that UPS wanted to know: “What was the ability to scale? Would we be able to continue at the same rate of growth? Would it plateau, or would it accelerate?” 

So far: no plateau. UPS attributes 955 hires in 2010 to the social media efforts, breaking down like this: 45 from Twitter (out of 681 people who arrived via Twitter and created applications); 226 from Facebook (out of 3,926 people who created applications); 84 from text-messaging (out of 1,004 who created applications); and 600 from people (out of 7,919 creating applications) going to UPS’s mobile-friendly careers page from a mobile device. That mobile-friendly site had about 510,000 page views in the last 4-5 months of 2010, with people averaging about a minute and a half each on the site. 

More from Matt at – http://recruitingfuture.com/2011/01/21/by-grads-for-grads-social-recruiting-from-unilever/

While Facebook may come to mind as the most likely social media tool for this purpose, it isn’t! This is because Facebook is primarily a social, not a professional network like LinkedIn or BioCrowd. Further, despite Facebook’s gargantuan size, the lack of real time interaction coupled with the sheer volume of updates, ads, activities and games at the site render it largely ineffective as a job advertising or recruiting tool.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an ideal medium to advertise jobs and attract new talent. This is because information that is broadcasted on Twitter has the potential to reaches large numbers of persons very rapidly. Moreover, regular Twitter users pay attention to activity on their feeds and like to “retweet” information that they find useful or helpful to their followers. Finally, many Twitter users regularly cull their follower lists to more accurately reflect their interests which suggest that the quality/focus of most follower lists on Twitter far surpasses that of friend networks on Facebook. For example, I manage the @BioCrowd Twitter feed. To that end, I decide who BioCrowd follows and wants to follow. And, not surprisingly, I only follow or allow individuals to follow BioCrowd  who are interested or work in the life sciences. Currently, BioCrowd has over 1,300 followers, all of whom work or are involved in some aspect of the life sciences industry. Because, I have intentionally created a highly specialized network of life sciences professionals, the likelihood of a prospective employer finding a “right fit” candidate by tweeting a job ad to the BioCrowd network greatly increases. Further, the ability of Twitter users to direct the job tweet to specific followers or retweet it preserves the longevity of the ad and improves its effectiveness. And, perhaps the best thing about using Twitter as a job announcement platform is that it is free!

The use of social media as a recruiting and retention tool by Fortune 500 companies like American Express, Best Buy and others is not new. However, its use as a recruitment platform by life sciences companies is very new to the life sciences companies. As many you may know, the life sciences industry has been slow to adopt the use of social media. Nevertheless, several companies like Merck (@merckcareers1) and AstraZeneca (@JoinAstraZeneca and @AstraZeneca Jobs) have decided to boldly go where no other pharmaceutical companies have gone before and are beginning to experiment with Twitter as a recruiting tool.  

About a year ago, I wrote a post that suggested that social media would be an ideal recruitment and retention tool for most life sciences companies. The fact that a couple of companies are testing this idea suggests that my idea may be a good one! 

If you know of other companies using Twitter to recruit new employees, please leave a comment or contact me.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting (@BioCrowd)

We’ve learned a lot from the process, and with the benefit of retrospect, I have distilled our ideas and lessons learned into 10 rules that should help any organization confidently launch a social recruiting effort. These 10 elements are crucial to consider when developing your social media recruiting strategy. And they’re applicable across organizations of any size, in any country.

1. It’s Not Just About You and Your Open Positions

Just dumping a list of your open positions into Twitter or Facebook won’t work. At Unisys, we provide information not only about Unisys and our open positions, but also share helpful job hunting information in general. Whether it’s interviewing techniques, job-seeking techniques, or resume writing, we’re sharing our careers expertise with the people we want to connect with. It’s not just the Unisys story. It’s a career-focused information resource that incorporates Unisys principles.

By engaging candidates in this way, we can provide a better sense of who Unisys is and what we do. Prospective candidates are more likely to share what we talk about through social media outlets with their friends through e-mail and other networks. And that ends up promoting and cross-promoting our brand and employment opportunities, as well as generating employee referrals.

2. Conversations Are the Key to Success

You never know where conversations are going to start from or where they’re going to lead. By listening to your Twitter stream, for example, and by being engaging, and posting information you might think is meaningless, your conversation could turn into something important that ends up delivering a valuable contact. For instance, a conversation that starts out as a plug for a new product could lead you to your next hire.

3. Align Your Career Brand with Your Corporate Brand

Search engines love social media. It’s important to realize that everything you say and do on these forums will contribute to your organization’s online brand, just as much (if not more!) as the official company website.

This is one of the reasons our social recruiting efforts have been so successful. We began working very early on, and very closely, with the Unisys corporate communications department in (1) establishing an overall social media strategy for the entire company, and (2) developing a social media recruiting strategy that aligned with the corporate social media strategy.

We spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that everything we did with social media was branded and worded correctly. The goal was to establish a workable cadence between our corporate brand and our careers brand that represented Unisys well. It continues to be extremely important to us to align what we’re posting with our overall corporate strategy.

For example, if our corporate efforts are focused on cloud computing, then it’s important for the career side to also reinforce that by talking about different cloud opportunities. Actions speak louder than words. Social media amplifies our actions related to hiring and recruiting, and allows them to play a meaningful role in reinforcing our overall corporate branding.

Don’t try to do social recruiting in a vacuum. Join forces with others in your organization to ensure everyone is well-aligned with the corporate brand and that all external messaging is in sync.

4. Go Where Your Audience Is

It might sound simplistic to say that you should focus your social media efforts where your targeted talent is. Yet I continue to see many recruiters focus on the technology rather than the people side of social media.

It’s much easier to attract a large following on a site that already has a large following or user base. But you also have to remember that you want to reach the right people. Constantly evaluate new sites for their recruiting potential. Go to the sites that cater to and attract the sorts of people you want to connect with. Look for quality, not quantity.

For Unisys, services such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter were important, as we wanted to reach several different demographics. It might not be the same for your company, especially if you are not in the U.S. Each of our geographies has sites that are unique and relevant to their region of the world.

5. Remember that Social Recruiting Is Still Evolving

Social media is still a relatively new world for the vast majority of organizations. And it’s also new for most job seekers. There’s a lot of buzz about the use of social media in a job search, but that doesn’t mean everybody is doing it, is comfortable using it, or is effectively using it.

You might not be able to reach your ideal candidate using social networks. And even if they are on a social site, they might not be open to being contacted by a recruiter. Don’t lose faith. That doesn’t mean social media in general isn’t an effective recruiting channel for you. It simply means you need to keep searching and leveraging social media outlets to find the right mix of services and engagement to start networking with your intended audience. The additional effort on the front end might provide you with new effective methods for future searches.

6. Educate Your Team on Best Practices

It is important to educate your team on best practices for using social media, especially in a corporate sense. Authenticity, interactivity, value, and just plain respect can put a human face on your corporate social media efforts. Being too aggressive or insincere in your interactions can doom your efforts. Have your most effective social media users coach your other recruiters and keep track of usage to ensure that you have consistency in your messaging and tone.

7. Involve Management

Social recruiting is not just for the recruiting team. Management can play an important role here. Unisys has a new regional recruiting leader in the Asia Pacific region based in Sydney. One of the first things she did was set up meetings with the local management groups trying to hire for some unique positions. She laid out how these hiring managers could use LinkedIn to their advantage. She worked with them to tune their profiles. She encouraged them to regularly add status updates that announced Unisys was seeking talent for a particular role. Publishing that information out to their network of contacts, it helped make the outreach viral.

Educate management on the benefits of LinkedIn for recruiting. Train management on how to tune their LinkedIn profile for recruiting, and build and manage their professional networks. Use their network updates to keep their contacts aware of job opportunities and business activities. Do the same for each of the social networks that your organization is using (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

8. Recognize the Risks

Using social media is a double-edged sword, especially with regard to LinkedIn. If you’re having managers tune their profiles to attract job candidates, they could just as easily attract recruiters who will try to woo them away, especially if they have a unique skill set.

That said, remember that strong candidates with unique skills are likely targets for recruiters anyway, regardless of the quality of their LinkedIn profile. Candidates make their own career choices. You can’t control whether someone will be found by a recruiter, but you can control whether your own organization capitalizes on the power of social recruiting.

Another risk of social recruiting is the permanence of information on the Internet, and the ability for anything to go viral, for good or bad reasons. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Unlike love, the Internet is forever.”

Anything you do online is likely to be captured and archived somewhere, free for anyone with access to a search engine to find, even years later. It’s difficult to predict what will make something go viral, but training your people on the best practices for using social media responsibly will minimize the chances that something negative about your company will make the rounds.

9. Use Video, but Don’t Force It

There is great interest in the use of video for social recruiting. Search engines love video, so it can be a great way to gain visibility. Our experience has shown that not everyone is comfortable with video, no matter how enthusiastic they might be about a project. Some people do well on video, and some people don’t.

Don’t force anybody to appear in a video. While it can be a powerful tool, there are other avenues that can deliver similar results. There are also questions about what sort of video is best. Should it be informal and shot from a Flipcam? Should it be done professionally? How much production is too much?

There are implications for choosing one production approach over another, and what that might imply about the style or professionalism of a business. We’ve found a wide difference of opinion throughout the world on what style of video is most appropriate. Align your efforts to these regional preferences.

Video can work well as an element of a social recruiting program, but it needs to be approached judiciously. Try several styles and see what works best in each circumstance. Note the successes, and establish them as your model for future use.

10. Start Small and Grow

Don’t try to do everything at once. Start small, think big, and build on your successes. LinkedIn is a great place to start because it’s accepted as a professional business networking tool, even if someone is not in an active job search. And it’s very easy for recruiters and job seekers to use their LinkedIn account as a first point of contact.

Once you build up to a level of comfort using LinkedIn, begin to expand into other areas of social media. The key is to build trust, add value, and start authentic conversations. It takes time to build trust — about as long as it takes to build a large and active community. The more people who are engaged and interacting on a page, the greater their sense of trust. Scale creates an environment where candidates will seek you out.

The corporate blog has a tremendous ability to build the value and trust essential to social recruiting. Unisys has had great success tying its blogs to its recruiting practice. But blogging is not for everyone, so think carefully before you take it on for your company and have a plan around frequency of posts and line up some back-up posts to fill in any gaps that occur once you begin

If you decide it’s the right move, identify the folks who are open to contributing, because it’s an ongoing and regular commitment. Also, is it right from a strategy perspective to have your own careers blog, or is it better to integrate it along with a corporate strategy? Again, start small with any corporate blogging plan, and expand it as your needs and experience grow.

The End of the Beginning

These are the lessons we learned as we embarked on our social recruiting initiative. The effort continues to deliver results for us and we continue to review and expand our usage of this growing medium. I hope these best practices help you build your social media recruiting strategy. Feel free to comment here or write to me if you have any questions, opinions, ideas, or need more information.

If anyone can track something, one would hope UPS could. With that in mind, the company set out to recruit using social media and track the heck out of it.

It built jobs communities on Facebook and Twitter, and used those to better explain to employees and recruits what it’s like to work for UPS. Then, it measured how engaged those community users were, and whether they became employees.

All this was spelled out by Mike Vangel, who’s the VP of client strategy at TMP, UPS’s agency. Vangel’s talk came at today’s #socialrecruiting summit at the sprawling Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Though tracking is in UPS’s DNA, that doesn’t mean social media was a natural for the company, which has traditionally banned the use of Facebook at work. But, things are changing.

The company launched a Facebook page for careers in early October of 2009. By the end of 2009, there were 1,885 fans of the page, without, Vangel notes, spending money on paid media.

Of course, a fan is not an applicant, or a hire. But to start with, UPS was able to get demographic information, such as that 78% of its audience was 18-44. And the data told UPS where people lived (93% from the U.S.). Basically, the early data, without hires, determined that at least this movement into Facebook as a recruiting tool was generally on the right track.

Meanwhile, Vangel says, UPS measured its cost: $7,500 to develop its Twitter page, and $7,500 for its Facebook page. Vangel breaks those numbers down by followers ($5.71 per Twitter follower) and leads and tweets and so on.

Then, as time goes on, it is measuring the payoff. UPS and TMP captured (using both Google Analytics, as well as UPS’s talent acquisition system) data on social media visitors who applied for UPS jobs, as well as, of course, hires. They measured how many people clicked from social media to an “apply now” landing page, how many created an application, how many completed one, how many were interviewed, and were hired. The upshot is that there is twice as high of a conversion ratio of created applications to hires from Facebook and Twitter compared to all other online media. The interview/hire ratio is 2:1.

“Obviously what I want to work on (now) is scale,” Vangel says.

What he means here is that social media is paying off greatly in ROI, but that doesn’t mean it’s generated a huge volume of hires yet.

UPS won a number of awards for social media and got attention in the Wall Street Journal and in places like job-hunt.org, which listed the top 50 employers using Twitter to recruit. It also ranks high on Twittergrader and Twinfluence. Twittergrader has a formula showing your influence using a long list of factors, while Twinfluence measures the number of followers the people who follow you have.

So, in a sense, Twinfluence is a measure of who you’re reaching, sort of like People magazine measuring not just how many people subscribe to it, but how many people, on average, each passes it along to. UPS’s jobs page on Twitter now has almost 3,000 Twitter followers, and UPS and TMP use the page not just to blast out jobs but to provide interesting business information, sometimes on UPS philanthropic work or other topics.

Vangel notes that Twitter “tends to have a lot of people talking, but necessarily a lot of people listening.” In other words, if you’re looking to have a “conversation” with a candidate, maybe Facebook is your place for that kind of engagement. As for Facebook, the UPS job-application landing page originating from Facebook had 18,485 page views from October 1, 2009 to August 27, 2010. The average time viewed was 3 minutes, 28 seconds.

Beyond Twitter and Facebook, TMP and UPS continue to expand these social media recruiting efforts. A mobile platform, www.UPSjobs.mobi, launched in August, which, Vangel says, is averaging 5,400 visits weekly. It generated four hires in a couple of weeks and 10 so far overall. Also, Vangel says he did a TweetMyJOBS trial during the month of August, though Vangel says the “jury’s still out” on whether it’s something UPS will stick with in the long run.

Awareness, Influence, Action

TMP’s Louis Vong suggests three things for companies to consider when measuring the success of their social media recruiting:

• Awareness (who is talking about you?). This you can find out by measuring impressions/traffic on blogs and video, as well as tweets, posts, and social bookmarks.
• Influence (what are they saying about you?). You’d measure this by counting positive/negative opinions, perceptions, and attitudes.
• Action (what does it mean to your business?). Here, you’d track site visits, applications, hires, referrals, leads, and fans.

Most direct sourcing and candidate development activities seem predicated around the adage: “Go where the talent is.” That’s why it’s not surprising that talent acquisition has been an early adopter of social networks. As noted search expert Glen Cathey recently wrote: “Recruiting has always been social — interactions have primarily taken place in person and over the phone. Social media simply enables a third way to communicate: online.”

It’s a wonder, then, that Facebook remains somewhat underutilized in social recruiting. According to a recent industry survey, only 6% of recruiters active in social media found Facebook to be an effective recruiting tool.

Perhaps this is because Facebook makes it more difficult than many other platforms to source and engage with passive candidates and communities. In HR parlance, Facebook seems widely perceived as the “life” in “work-life balance,” a place to share with friends, not network with connections.

The Facebook Paradox

So far, employers have largely stayed on sidelines on Facebook, consigned to career-oriented “Fan Pages” that offer much in the way of extending employment brands and advertising new positions, but little in terms of the kind of meaningful interactions required to develop and engage top talent. 

Of course, with 45% of employers performing social media background checks as part of the hiring process, many candidates don’t exactly want to be found, either. In fact, in recent source of hire data, the amount of hires attributable to Facebook seems dwarfed by candidates whose profile information revealed incriminating information that prevented an offer extension. 

Until the benefits of visibility on Facebook outweigh the potential repercussions in the employment process, there’s little incentive for top talent to engage with employment professionals or brands.

In January 2010, users spent an average of 431 minutes on Facebook, or upwards of 14 minutes a day. With over 400 million users worldwide, it isn’t hard to see that there’s a potential goldmine of widely untapped, largely passive talent that makes Facebook too powerful a recruitment tool to ignore. 

Yet effective best practices utilized on relationship building platforms such as blogs, Twitter and streaming video seem to fall flat on Facebook. To increase efficacy, employers need to stop making “fans,” and start making “friends” (and, ultimately, new hires).  

Knowing the difference between fan and friend is essential. 

Volume Versus Quality of Connection

While many businesses already have a fan site on Facebook, many approach these pages as a simple extension of an employment brand or career site. Maintaining a branded presence on Facebook generally suffices to attract “fans.” While many companies adjudicate quantity within the context of metrics analysis, attracting fans falls flat without dedicated content and a platform-specific engagement strategy.

According to Facebook’s own internal statistics, business related sites constitute just over half of the approximately 3 million fan pages within Facebook, generating an astounding 20 million fans per day; the site estimates pages have created 5.3 billion fans with users joining three fan pages a month. 

The sheer volume of these statistics reinforces the notion that there’s little inherent meaning in having “fans” to the recruiting process, essentially undeveloped candidates unlikely to match just-in-time hiring requirements for open positions that constitute the majority of most career-related fan site postings. 

Fans do, however, have significant value as active seekers; like all applicants, it’s incumbent on employers to qualify and develop those applicants into a slate of potential candidates worth additional due diligence. In Facebook parlance, these constitute “friends.”

Remember: “fishing where the fish are” only works if the “fish” are the loyal audience necessary to spread the word you want about your employment brand, corporate culture and job openings.

After all, that’s what friends are for.

These are all real messages, posted on Twitter by real hiring managers. You’re probably thinking, “Hmm, it’s about time we had a no-social-media policy.”

Don’t do that! You need your managers online to help you build your recruitment brand. And your managers need guidance, not duct tape over their mouths. As bad as oversharing might be, these three social media recruiting mistakes are much more common – and in the long run, a lot worse for your online brand.

Mistake #1: Spelling out everything you can’t do.

Recruiters sometimes panic when it comes to social media, so they try to compensate with strict communication control: The only acceptable posting topics are new jobs and sandwich specials. Don’t talk about actual people. All tweets must be approved by corporate. This will kill your social media recruiting fast.

What to do instead:  Define solid social media principles.

The word “principles” is important, says Amanda Hite, CEO of Talent Revolution. “Principles are things we live by,” she says. Not the things we can’t do.  

Here are a few examples from Hite of principles to share with your hiring managers:

• Use good judgment. Just as your behavior offline can positively or negatively impact your career, the same applies online. It’s just easier to find, and it’s permanent.  
• Be authentic.  Social media is only a tool to use to build relationships. It’s important to come across as authentic, to humanize your brand and to be yourself.  
• Sharing proprietary and confidential information will get you in trouble.  

Mistake #2: Making your managers use social media as an advertising channel.

Sell, sell, sell! And both your customers and your potential applicants will drop you like a lint-covered lollipop. ”Broadcasting messages or promotions is viewed as spam in the social web and will get you voted off the island,” Hite says.

What to do instead:  Build relationships.

The most leverage your managers will get from using social media for recruiting is by getting referrals and maintaining relationships with potential prospects. It’s about relationships, not advertising. We won’t lie. This takes time. But it works.

Look at it from your future hires’ point of view. They don’t want the hard sell – they want to peek inside your company. They want to get to know your hiring managers and discover that they’re cool people who are excited about their jobs. Plus, remember that superstars know superstars. The more your managers build their professional networks, the more effective they’ll be at communicating openings and getting good referrals.

Mistake #3: Wait – and wait – for your audience to come to you.

You know the D-list celebrities who hang around any patch of red carpet they can find, hoping someone will ask for their autograph? Don’t be them. If you’re just launching your social media recruiting efforts, fans won’t be knocking at your door. You have to knock at theirs.

What to do instead:  Go where the community is and tune into their conversations.  

Are you recruiting passionate bartenders? Go to forums and groups where bartenders hang out online. Join the conversation. Share your mango martini recipe. That’s the only way you’re going to build your own fan base and attract great people to your company.

We never stop talking with our members and employers – not only about employment, but also fun stuff (like weird coworkers and office chair soccer). Become our friend on Facebook and Twitter!

This week at ERE’s #SocialRecruiting Summit in Minneapolis, Facebook.com’s recruiting lead, Richard Cho, lead a break-out session about using social media tools for demand generation (DemandGen) versus for demand fulfillment (DemandFul).  His session was intriguing and sparked quite a bit of interest in the audience.  I caught up with Richard this week to drill down a little deeper into the subject.

Many recruiters interested in social recruitment want the practice to become the sole source of making hires for their organizations.  There is a big group of recruiters who want to make the whole recruitment process free too.  They profess that social media could become the means to their end.  But can it really happen?  I don’t think so, neither does Richard Cho.  Cho takes a very pragmatic and realistic view of how companies can use social media tools (like his own Facebook) as a recruitment demand generation tool.  However, his is just as practical about getting job seekers over the hump from seekers to applicants.  Here are his thoughts:

Social media is great for recruitment demand generation

To explain what he means Cho uses the example of consumer brand demand generation for Adidas with the decision funnel.  The decision funnel is a well known B-school tool to show how people make decisions; whether it is a purchase decision or career decision. 

Brand Discovery – Brands like Adidas use all sorts of advertising and marketing mediums to expose consumers to the Adidas brand.  When a consumer sees the Adidas brand, they immediately form an opinion or have some idea of what that brand represents based on previous exposure.  When Richard mentioned the Adidas brand, I immediately thought of Glee’s Cheerios coach Sue Sylvester’s unending parade of Adidas track suits (honest). 

Brand Affinity – After repeated exposure to the Adidas brand, consumers start thinking of it as a viable option for their sporting goods needs.  When a consumer finally has a need, brand affinity makes that consumer ask the question, “Where is that brand sold?”

Brand Decision – Later in the process, the buyer knows about the brand, knows where to get it and finally has made the decision to make a purchase.  At this point, the funnel takes its turn from DemandGen to DemandFul and that’s where social media won’t best serve recruiters.

So what does this all mean?  Let’s put the decision funnel into social recruitment terms.  A company’s presence and exposure in any variety of social platforms helps (or hurts) in the brand discovery process.  This may take the form of a Corporate Careers page of Facebook, a recruiting Twitter handle, or a company page on LinkedIn.  From these culture brand outposts, many job seekers get their first exposure to the career opportunities available to them. 

A job seeker may also know someone who works for your organization and form decisions about the company that way.  Cho points out that, “How you affiliate yourself with a job often happens to be through a person you know and respect.”  In other words, my group of Facebook friends may have had their entire opinion of the company I work for shaped by what I do and say about it in my status updates, tweets, and blog posts.  This is brand affinity. 

In the Adidas example Cho says that one of his friends might see that he bought a pair on Adidas golf shoes on Facebook.  That friend knows that Richard is a good golfer and may respect his opinion of footwear.  So out of the hundreds of options in golf shoes, Richard’s friend now has at least one (positive or negative) data point to make a buying decision on in the future.

Finally we come to brand decision.  At some time or another in any passive or active job seeker’s job search a do-or-die moment is reached.  The job seeker determines whether or not to apply for a job with company X.  This is the decision.  Has your organization’s presence in social media positively affected that job seekers opinion of your company or have you left them lacking?

At this point we go from the generation part of the funnel to fulfillment.  How can social media help in demand fulfillment?  Well it really can’t.  Much to the chagrin of many pro-social media recruiters, social tools cannot take the place of your ATS, the application process or the vacancy announcement.  These tools are requisite in the employment process.  As much as some would desire, social tools can’t take the place of job announcements.  Even a 1200 employee company like Facebook who has a good cadre of recruiters (at 75) for its size cannot hope to replace the traditional tools for DemandFul.  Facebook has some 40 opening in sales and marketing alone today.  The company can’t expect its team of recruiters to have so many solid prospect relationships that they can just reach out to individual job seekers when a job comes available.  They need their careers site to help facilitate the move from interest to action.

Social media can help with this transition piece.  Food services company Sodexo does a good job with this.  Sodexo has one of industry’s best online talent communities to keep would be job seekers engaged when both actively and passively seeking employment.  But what they do to bridge the gap between applying and not applying is genius.  Richard Cho says, “They get it.”  Job seekers who view one of the company’s job postings on job boards like CareerBuilder.com get two apply options…Apply Now and Not Ready Yet.  As Cho relates, the recruitment process is like getting married.  He says, “Popping the question at the right time is key.”  Sodexo gets this too.  By directing job seekers who are not quite ready to commit from traditional recruitment media to their social talent community, Sodexo is able to maintain that courting relationship.  They don’t pose an ultimatum for the would-be employee. Instead, Sodexo says let’s get to know each other a little better.  According to Cho, that’s what social media should do.

Cho also offers a couple of nuggets as best practices:

1.       Let job seekers test the waters.  

The use of a Company Careers Facebook page may not be the best way to attract passive candidate (or those unhappy in their current employment).  Since many Facebook users are friends with their bosses and colleagues, most will be uncomfortable telling their professional circles that they “Like” your company’s careers.  Instead Cho suggests an alternative.  Give them the option to “Like” your company’s culture brand page.  Cho points out the “Life at Google” Facebook page.  Ostensibly, this page is nothing more than a careers page.  However, the title won’t scare users from liking it.  Google Careers screams “Hey I want to work at Google.”  This culture page merely says you are interested in what this company is all about.

2.       Use Twitter for courtship unless your job seeker base already wants to get married. 

Use your corporate Twitter handle to dispense culture gems to job seekers.  Don’t just ask them to apply, apply, apply.  He notes one big example, again via Google.  Google has done such a good job of espousing the power of their brand, that once job seekers find @GoogleJobs on Twitter, they are ready to take the plunge.

3.       Think Tiger Woods.  

 Before his sex scandal what did consumers think of when they applied a brand image of Nike to Tiger Woods?  Performance, endurance, perfection, style.  Does your social media representation of your employment brand produce good connotations like this?

4.       Empower an army of employees that can act as social advocates for your brand. 

Don’t just rely on the recruitment department to be the social media voice of your employment brand.  Teach your employees the best way to interact online for the benefit of your referral program.  Social connections are probably used to seeing someone complain about their boss online, but how often do they see an employee rave about your company’s mission statement, technical achievements, etc.?

Facebook isn’t the only place you can reach Hispanics though.  There are a handful of spanish-language and Hispanic-centric social media sites like MiGente.com, MySpace Latino, or QuePasa.com (http://www.hispaniconlinemarketing.com/2009/04/reaching-spanish-preferring-hispanics-on-facebook/).

Hispanics Are Really More Social

By: Lee Vann (source – http://www.capturagroup.com/)

As a follow up to my previous post, I wanted share the highlights of my recent presentation, Are Hispanics Really More Social? and also some great insights that I picked up at this week’s Hispanic PR and social media conference in Dallas, Texas.

I chose a rhetorical question for the title of the presentation because most of us know that being social is hardwired into Hispanic culture. Being at the conference with a couple hundred Hispanics really brought this point to life. The atmosphere was friendly, fun and-well-social.

In addition to being highly social, Hispanics consume a ton of media. I came across statistics that indicate that Hispanics teens spend 13 hours per day with media, more than any other ethnic group.

I then took a look at technology usage and showed that Hispanics are leapfrogging to the latest and greatest technologies, including mobile. What’s more, Hispanics have an extremely positive view of the technology and once they get their hands on it, the use it and love it. Here are some key facts:

84% of Hispanics have a broadband connection vs. 79% of Whites
36% of Hispanics view the Internet as tool for building a better life vs. 30% of general market
68% of Hispanics are wireless Internet users vs. 54% of Whites
81% of Hispanics text vs. 62% of Whites

Hispanic social media, the perfect storm

When you combine the highly social Hispanic culture with strong technology usage, you get a perfect storm. I argued that social media is the