To answer this question, we’ll first need to look at what Social Recruiting actually is: the term, often seen as Social Hiring or Social Media Recruitment, refers to the use of various social media platforms as main means of reaching and attracting candidates. Though it’s taken on a life of its own, it’s more of an addition to the ‘classic’ recruitment strategies, a way of adapting to changing technologies and lifestyles, than it is a new recruitment process altogether. While it provides a new set of options and tools for HR professionals, and a more dynamic means for employees to advocate their potential, social recruiting carries almost as many challenges as it does advantages.
Let’s go back in time and remember what recruitment meant about 10 years ago.
As a professional looking for a job, you had your personal computer, which would now feel impossibly slow to work with, to assist you with typing and printing a clean, neat, straight-to-the-point, plain-text CV. You’d pass that printed CV on to the interviewer, and that would be pretty much the highlight of your interview.
Obviously, those days are long gone, and recruiter and employee alike can firmly see social recruiting gaining more and more ground. Today, your resume is more than just educational background and a list of former employers and held positons, it’s your entire virtual presence, via social media accounts. You have the opportunity to let your social account speak for you in ways the old printed resume never could, by sharing some of your relevant work, your presentations, and other visually-rich content, including trust-inspiring photos of yourself in your best professional mindset. (Of course, all this has been known to backfire – but that is a discussion for another article.) This offers you a chance to stand out, to make your unique skills known. And it offers recruiters a chance to get to know you a bit better, before approaching you with an offer. Easy internet access to all the extra information is clearly a good thing, but it’s also somewhat overwhelming for everyone involved. Recruiters have to come-up with new, efficient strategies for attracting candidates, while increasing the reach of their social networks. Recruiting has evolved from a passive, publish-job-announcement-and-wait way of attracting employees to a proactive, networking-and-connecting approach.
Of course, recruiting as a whole involves several procedures. As a recruiter, before you dive into it, you need to have your employee profile and objectives clearly defined, as well as have an attractive job description ready. When you do, you can move on to the search phase. Where do I begin? Social networks, like LinkedIn and Facebook, are usually my fist option, and of course various recruiting platforms, depending on my employee profile. In order for this phase to be successful, you should be very active on your social accounts by posting jobs, joining all kind of groups and interacting with potential candidates. It sounds easy, in theory. But the reality of it is much more complex and time consuming than meets the eye. Building a network of potential employees takes time, patience and coherent involvement, and it may at times take years for a recruiter to gain sufficient experience and exposure, and be able to accurately match candidates with the many jobs usually demanded by technical projects.
What’s your take on today’s recruitment process? Do you think the rising standards brought-on by technology advancements in the field of talent acquisition offer sufficient benefits to reward the extra time you invest in the process, both as recruiter and as candidate? I’m interested to look at things from your angle, HRs and employees alike, so leave me a comment or contact us by email, and stay in touch through our RSS feed for more discussions on talent acquisition in the IT-Software field.