The Social Network

…ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob – CEO

Most of us know the social story (we all saw the film “The Social Network®,” right?). Facebook started as a website for Harvard University students and it is now a global phenomenon. Now anyone can tell the world what they are eating for breakfast.  However, the real revolution that sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have created is how Talent Acquisition Professionals are now using them to net passive candidates. Recruiters can reach the 2.5+ billion users worldwide who collectively spend billions of minutes on their social and mobile pages. On the flip side, career analytics prove that the brightest, most educated and motivated job candidates are also using these platforms to search for jobs.

In 2014 (and well beyond), social and mobile sites will become the most important recruiting channels in the world. You should know that recruiting budgets are already being used less on archaic job boards and “old school” business development sites and more on social HR marketing and mobile talent communications.

It’s not just social sites that are affecting recruiting. Candidate-facing blogs, forums, podcasts, Slideshare and YouTube recruiting videos already have a profound impact how candidates are interacting with your recruiting brand.

Right now, a social and mobile recruitment strategy should be pulled from your organization’s HR drawing board and integrated into your Talent Acquisition focus. Social and mobile recruiting currently impacts all of an HR brand’s Talent Acquisition campaigns. These include free viral “job sharing,” engagement and conversation.
So what will the social and mobile HR marketing landscape look like in 2014?

Consider these three factors and then perfect your Talent Acquisition approach ASAP!

• Social Recruiting Will Kill The Job Board (…and soon!) – OK, “kill” might be an exaggeration, but is your job board advertising netting more candidates today than it did in 2005? I suspect your answer is NO. So ask yourself – where are these candidates coming from to fill the gap?

If you have looked at your HR analytics recently, you will probably see that more candidates are coming from social and mobile networks. Since social brings together candidates and recruiters through communication, it is no surprise that an online conversation in real-time enables more hires.

• Mobile Is Social : Social is Mobile – According to Facebook, more than 900 million of its users access the site through their mobile devices. These mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile users. With the emergence of location-based services (GPS), the integration of social and mobile is scaling even faster.

Does your ideal candidate profile focus on the key age demographic of 25-to 34-year-olds? These Millennials are relentless users of social and mobile.  If you want to reach them before the competition, make your career pages mobile responsive and allow candidates to have real-time conversations with your recruiters.

Not only do candidates search for jobs themselves online, their friends discover job content and job ads and share them through smartphones. Because of this, the best mobile HR Marketing job communications are those that can be shared and placed where your candidates hang out online.

• Social Sharing Is The New Search — While Google will continue to prosper in 2014, the role of “social sharing” and how people discover job information is changing, Now your candidates expect you to deliver your job content to them through social and mobile.