Growing Your Likes and Followers…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob.com
In the last week several prospects have asked, how would I suggest increasing their number of Facebook Likes, Twitter and Google+ Followers?
They indicated they can’t seem to move the needle of their Likes and Followers. It’s certainly a great topic of discussion and as CEO of SourceMob.com we work to assist our clients to doing exactly that.
SourceMob.com Grows Your Likes and Followers
- We build your Career Centers on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Mobile
- We auto-post your jobs into these Career Centers without your IT involvement or HR program management
- We deliver a host of social, mobile, data mining and marketing services that will dramatically help grow your Likes, Followers and Applicant flow.
However at SourceMob.com just focusing on the aggregation of Likes and Followers is not the only answer to success in Social Sourcing. The challenge goes much deeper. Growing Likes and Followers that lead to deeper levels of Candidate conversations, engagement and eventually into hires is the Social Sourcing Holy Grail.
To that point, we were instrumental in helping PBS grow their Likes from 250,000 in 2010 to over 1.7 Million in 2011 and Sportsmansguide.com from 407 in 2010 to 110,000 today. And we will help you too. But the key to success in Social Sourcing is to deliver relevant conversations to wherever your Candidates want them.
For instance, one of our Social Sourcing clients in the Medical Vertical had a Passive candidate who was sourced from Facebook. Unfortunately the timing of the job search vs. the skills of the Candidate just didn’t match. However the professional-level Candidate credentials were so strong that the Recruiter didn’t want to loose him. So over a six-month period the Recruiter continued to engage with the Candidate through a stream of conversations in several Social Media Networks (especially Facebook), eventually creating a new position and filling it with this individual.
Another SourceMob client (a regional Accounting firm) wanted to keep social conversations going with all of their Interns who were also their best potentials for future full-time hiring. The Hiring Manager had the vision to know she could stay in touch using Social and Mobile conversations so when a position was available she had a qualified pool of Candidates to immediately engage with and hire. This Hiring Manager saw social conversations as a perfect way to accomplish her goal and as such she signed up with SourceMob to help her accomplish her objective.
Knowing Your Candidate…
My years of Social experience indicates that when it comes to using Social for sourcing we tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. The basic requirement is to get engagement with a prospective Candidate going, to get to know your Candidate and for your Candidate to know your Company at a much deeper level than the job description.
But the mistake that is often made is thinking that pushing job descriptions at a Candidate(s) like a fire hose is in fact being Social or simply mining Social Networks or job boards for resumes is another form of being Social.
From my seat, I see it so differently The triple play of Social Sourcing is driving valued content, conversations and engagement as the catalyst to a successful hire. That means engaging the Candidate in a stream of relevant conversations that are two-way and respectful. As you well know it could take months to fill a position and keeping connected with your top Candidates works wonders when you use Social to accomplish this goal.
But unfortunately, and with all due respect, what is the common pattern of a Recruiter conversation? Perhaps in more cases than we care to admit, these conversations can better be described as a series of interrogations. And if interrogations happen in Social it is exactly where the Social connection will break down. Even worse they will come to a DEAD STOP.
We would know much more about Candidates if we would have real conversations with them. A conversation that is free of “Big Brother” and one that the Candidate would engage in as if they would feel that they would be already working for the Company. It is within this environment where your best candidates will also help you find other Passive Candidates.
But can your organization enable this level of conversation or strive for this candidate engagement?
Be Who You Are
Social Networks make it easy to get to know Candidates and for them to be themselves. Social Sourcing goes even further when a Recruiter opens a relevant and engaging conversation with their target Candidate over an extended period of time. This is exactly what happened in the two examples above. And you can bet that both these clients are on their way to growing a substantial amount of Likes, Followers, conversations and Social hires.
Best,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob
612-349-2740
Jeff@SourceMob.com