Social and Mobile Talent Acquisition Predictions for 2013

…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob.com – CEO

There are plenty of predictions for the future of the Talent Acquisition Recruiting space and I have a few for 2013.

Go Mobile Now: Just as businesses needed to follow their consumers as they moved from traditional marketing and onto the Internet, Talent Acquisition Pros must keep up with Candidates moving from laptop to mobile. In fact, did you know that 10-20% of your Candidates are increasingly using their cell phones and tablets to access career information and view jobs? Plus, this will only continue to scale with the steady sales growth of these devices that enable Candidates to connect on the go. As potential Candidates (especially Passive ones) check out your jobs from the car pool lane or their favorite Starbucks on their 4G networks and Wi-Fi, a mobile-optimized website and efficient browser-based Candidate app can make or break your recruiting opportunity.

  1. Segmentation Rules:  There’s a new kid in town and his name is segmentation, a.k.a  job category and localization options for Candidates. This way a Candidate can filter the jobs they want and permission only what is of interest to them. This enables a private way for you to reach Passive Candidates on their social media sites.  Segmentation has always been the mainstay for traditional marketers. Your Candidates, both active and passive, consume information across a wide spectrum of sources and channels, so you should be engaging them wherever possible. So, letting your Candidates customize their info and channels is essential in 2013.
  2. Your Blog Is Your Candidates’ Friend: Good blog content is, and will continue to be, super important to your Candidate hiring effectiveness. While most everyone agrees that a blog is valuable to his or her social recruiting efforts, The top content marketing companies reported challenges: creating enough blog content, creating engaging content, and creating a variety of content. With blogs securing their hold as a vital part of a solid social recruiting marketing plan, expect that these problems need to be addressed head-on in 2013. Top blogging Recruiting Teams are already resourcing this content development internally or outsourcing it.
  3. The Take Over Of Inbound Marketing: One thing that shows no sign of slowing down: the success of Inbound Marketing (IM) in recruitment. Over the past few years the growth of inbound marketing has been strong and consistent. Impact is noticeable with solid ROI results coming from more efficient recruiting methods and processes. Candidates using Inbound Marketing techniques now get to IM, Chat, Direct Inbound Calling or Click-to-Call, building relationships directly with recruiters.  In fact, placing IM opportunities around your Career Website, including your ATS apply page, has proven to increase Candidate conversation and conversion to hire.

At SourceMob, we have also recently published a study that determined most midcap to Fortune 1000 companies we speak with fall into the following four buckets regarding Social and Mobile Recruiting. They are:

  • Just thinking about Social Recruiting
  • Have started to update their legacy systems to include social recruiting
  • Have a robust social recruiting program
  • Know they need to jump into Mobile now.

So which bucket does your Talent Acquisition Team fall into?

It is a great question for you to ask around your next meeting. Why? Because we see in our client metrics that your Candidates want to speak to you in social and mobile.  If you are not engaging them where they are in 2013, then you are most likely losing your best candidates to your competitors who are. Can you continue to simply stand on the sidelines?

To learn more how SourceMob, using second generational social and mobile recruiting tools, can increase the quality of your candidates, find Candidates in niche job categories while lowering your Cost Per Hire, simply give me a call at 612-349-2740 or email me at jeff@sourcemob.com

Best

Jeffery