Why use Social Media in recruiting?

Social media provides recruiters with a large audience of ideal prospects - any effective sourcing tool requires a global audience that includes a large number of qualified prospects, and social networks are both large and growing. In addition, the proper composition of the audience is also important. The majority of sourcing tools focus on the active job seeker, which generally makes up less than 25% of the people trained in any field. In contrast, the social media audience is quite broad and in fact is dominated by users who are currently employed and that are not actively looking for a new position. The ability to reach those that are “not actively looking” (in addition to actives) makes this a powerful recruiting tool.

A WetFeet.com survey of more than 3,000 experienced professionals conducted in August 2000 showed that more than a third of respondents who were currently employed were open to accepting a new position in the next six months.

 

How the Total Experienced Professional Population Breaks Down Currently "between jobs" (unemployed), seeking employment 2% Currently employed, seeking new employment 9% Currently employed, open to accepting a new position in the next six months 36% Happily employed, not open to accepting a new position in the next six months 53% Base: experienced professionals (n=3371)</< td>

Source: Recruitment Marketing Strategies: Building Employer Brands That Attract Talent © 2000 WetFeet.com

A recent survey sponsored by Yahoo! reached over 3,700 people aged 18-64. It found that just 17% of the population-fewer that one-out-of-five people-was actively seeking a job.

This finding correlates well with an earlier study attributed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It found that just 16% of the population was active job seekers.

The key benefits of using social media as a recruiting tool are:

1. Broad capability - social-media-empowered recruiting has the broadest array of capabilities of any existing recruiting tool, by a large margin. In addition to the obvious direct sourcing capability, social media has the capacity for multimedia messaging, brand communication, conducting market research and for building sustainable longer-term recruiting relationships. Social media sites allow you to go beyond the traditional resume and gather information that can be beneficial in accurate candidate assessment.
2. Creating Brand Image - Ability to brand and market a business organization on popular social networking sites is a strategically sound recruitment method that will provide business organizations the capability to accommodate the incoming professional workers wants and needs (Jacobs 2008). Branding the business organization creates a compelling and unique perception in the minds of target candidates to describe what it feels like to work for the organization (Jacobs 2008). Branding a business organization should include: highlighting opportunities available, emphasizing career growth, flexible work schedules, telecommuting, and other employment perks can be included and will set apart the organization from its competition to inform and attract viable candidates.
3. Ability to mine & reach out to prospective candidates - The key success to using social networking lies in the ability of the business organization to embrace a new way of interacting. Use of social networking is critical to connect with current and future job seekers. Expanding an existing recruiting network permits a business organization’s to target and reach candidates they would not otherwise. The use of social networks allows for professional connections to be made, and using professional connections to reach candidates through alternative methods is known as knowledge mapping. Knowledge mapping represents who knows whom, who knows what, who knows how, and who knows why. As illustrated in Figure 1, when using social networking through knowledge mapping connections, business organizations can rapidly expand by reaching candidates through other avenues.

                   

4.       Relationship building — most sourcing tools are really just “job posting tools,” and as a result, they do not support you building relationships. Social media provides numerous opportunities to build trust relationships based on common interests with individuals who simply wouldn’t respond to anything related to a new job opportunity. Building a relationship over time almost guarantees that you will have a high offer acceptance rate.

1. Low cost - in most cases, social media allows for no-cost messaging, job posting, and relationship building. There are some fees for some features that you may decide to pay, but overall, it is an extremely low-cost platform.

6.       Leveraging employees -there is never enough “surplus time” for recruiters to do all of the sourcing and branding that needs to be done. As a result, an important power factor for rating any recruiting tool is the extent to which the recruiting workload can be shifted to others, especially employees. Advanced social media leaders use their recruiters primarily as coaches and educators, so that your firm’s employees can carry the bulk of the social media prospect identification and relationship building.

1. Prioritized applications - many sourcing tools fail to produce superior results because the last step is formally applying for a position using the firm’s corporate website. A long tedious application is fine for active candidates, but it is not user friendly enough for non-jobseekers who have recently been convinced to consider a new position. Fortunately, well-designed social media strategies automatically route employee-generated contacts from social networks through the more “candidate friendly” employee referral program.

 

1. Better Performance in Recruiting/hiring candidates -

The four performance objectives include:

(a)   hire the best possible candidate,

(b)   establish a candidate pool pipeline,

(c)    improve the existing recruiting process, and

(d)   Cost-to-hire.

The first performance objective is to hire the best possible candidate for the position. Social networking increases candidate pools of qualified and desirable applicants enabling HR and staffing professionals to hire a viable candidate. The second performance objective is having a candidate pipeline that helps fill in the “just-in-time” job opening. A candidate pipeline is an established pool of candidates that can be easily contacted in time of need. The third performance objective for hiring efficiency is improving the recruitment and hiring process. Implementing a social networking system will help aid the recruiting efficiency allowing business organizations to search by key words and/or qualifications. The final performance objective for hiring and recruiting efficiency is to limit the cost-to-hire. The cost of using social networking platforms pales in comparison to advertising and social networking enables the business organization to find and attract candidates while decreasing the man hours to fill open positions.