…HR Ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob..com
Is everyone telling you that your social recruiting pages should have more “friends” online? Of course you already know that your candidates have virtual friends as part of their social networks and they can “friend” someone on Facebook, on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest or Instagram. They can also become a “fan” of an individual or organization as well. For all of these terms, “friend” is the one that most recruiting departments single-mindedly latch on to when thinking about a goal to focus on while using social recruiting. Being successful in social recruiting has come to be equated with having more friends for your brand online.
The problem with this logic is that people don’t naturally become friends with brands or recruiting departments.
Relationships with organizations are tough to describe as “friendship.” People do, however, become friends with other people – and often those people work for brands. The relationship with your brand, however, is more accurately described with the other two terms popular in social recruiting … followers and fans. So when it comes to thinking about how you can get more candidates engaged with your brand through social recruiting – forget about friendship and focus on increasing your fans and followers.
But another challenge when aggregating Fans or Followers is unfortunately you don’t own this data – the social channel does. So another word of caution here. Don’t spend your entire time building your social recruiting on the back of the social channel. Instead use the social recruiting channel to migrate candidates to your talent pipelines, Talent Community(s) and Career email and text alerts.
Most students of any business course are taught constantly about the importance of having a good Return on Investment (ROI). Whether that “investment” is measure in dollars or in time that you or your employees spend trying to do something, we are taught that the benefit must be tangible when it comes back to your business. The problem that many businesses have when it comes to social recruiting is that the ROI is not as simple to measure as putting a discount code into a print ad and then counting the redemptions.
During a presentation at the World Business Forum last year, Charlene Li, bestselling author of “Groundswell” as well as the brilliant new business book “Open Leadership” and a leading mind in how social technologies can be used for business, talked about this in her short presentation to a global audience of business people. At one point she asked all the members of the audience to shake hands with the person next to them. Then she asked them to describe the ROI of that handshake. It was a nice example of where the measurement problem lies – because most of us are not used to quantifying the value of social relationships and conversations
The irony is that most business people know this inherently – and the process of trying to emulate big businesses is what drives them to forget. You KNOW that if your candidate is also the President of the local PTA that they will help drive word of mouth about your recruiting business to other parents. You KNOW that having a positive review or endorsement of your business in the local paper will add to your credibility and increase candidate consideration. In some cases, you may already be tracking the value of these instances in hard terms. But most of these sorts of activities don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
In fact, this situation is what creates the most skepticism about the value of social recruiting for business is whether or not to engage in using it. The solution is surprisingly simple. Stop comparing what you might do in social recruiting and how you might measure it to something as tangible as a radio advertisement or sponsoring an event with a booth.
Instead, start thinking about the value of social recruiting and how you think about whether or not to attend a networking event. Or in the realm of customer service or loyalty for how you encourage your current customers to talk about you or come back to you over and over again. The ROI of focusing on these activities is huge – but it may not fit neatly into your spreadsheet.
Does that mean you stop attending events or stop pushing your job into your own social career pages? Of course not. The ROI of a conversation may not appear for years, or it may happen tomorrow, or it may never happen. That is the way that relationships go. But the more of them you can create, the more you can increase your chances for positive outcomes. You KNOW this already – just trust your instinct and start doing more of it. When you do your recruiting will go into the Zoom Loop™
Would you like to find out how SourceMob can help you improve your recruiting excellence, lead capture, candidate engagement, nurture candidates using over 35 integrated recruiting solutions? Simply send me an email at Jeff@sourcemob.comor call 952-417-6955 to provide you with a virtual presentation to mutually learn.
Helping educate our Industry is why we are growing and many of these Webinars are FREE.
To check out our latest Webinar Education schedule go to SourceMob.com and look for the Events link off the navigational bar http://sourcemob.com/events/
Next Webinar – August 25th – 12 PM CST
Where Are My Candidates? – The Necessity of Talent Acquisition Analytics
Presented by Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob & Jared Law – VP of IT – SourceMob
It’s Free!
Click below
http://sourcemob.com/event/the-necessity-of-talent-acquisition-analytics/?instance_id=244
ABOUT SOURCEMOB: SourceMob links Internet, social, talent community and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob software distributes job content and conversations providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and all of the major search engines. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create efficiencies and lower recruiting costs.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Best,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
jeff@sourcemob.com
952=807-8364
Twitter: @sourcemob
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener
Post by Rohit Bhargavia/ Appended for HCM by Jeffery Giesener