…HR Ideas from Jeffery Giesener – SourceMob – CEO
Engagement requires a soft touch, not a hard sell. Companies that are succeeding in recruiting through social networks have developed a sourcing strategy that appears more like a customer service procedure than a typical recruiting model. The focus should be on executing a “conversational approach” to attract top talent (especially passive candidates).
Keys to a Successful Passive Sourcing Strategy
- Establish Social Career Pages (not marketing pages) on the key social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The goal is to drive a recruitment positioning statement to lure potential candidates.
- Brand all of your Career Pages and make them interesting and collaborative. Publish relevant content frequently enough to stimulate ongoing conversations with your potential candidates.
- Grow your talent pipeline. Why start a recruiting process from scratch each time a new requisition opens? Be more efficient by mining your current candidate database via employee segmentation that’s not based on your ATS job number.
- Get mobile-savvy. Like it or not, everything is going mobile. A rapidly increasing number of candidates browse through jobs on mobile. Your candidate experience needs to be optimized for mobile and it should be intuitive and enjoyable.
What is important to realize is that a conversation is not an application. It is just what it sounds like… a conversation. Passive candidates increasingly want to “test the waters” by getting to know your company, the recruiter and your company culture before stepping into the formal application process. They want to stay off the recruiter’s radar until they are ready to make the first move. This is why it is important to have a conversation mechanism in place so your recruiters can engage with these candidates.
How do you start? Simply start by creating or selecting a conversational topic on your Social Career Centers and-or via mobile that’s relevant to your audience. It doesn’t have to be job-related but it should be interesting enough to elicit comments from your target candidate audience(s). Then make sure you respond to their comments including finding others (inside and outside the company) that can contribute to the conversation.
Do not make it obvious that you are selling your job(s). Anyone interested in a job either has applied or has considered applying. What you’re looking to do is hook those passive candidates into having relevant conversations and get them to identify themselves. This is an ideal strategy to build Talent Communities around your specific job categories (especially hard-to-fill positions). Remember: generating conversation and engagement with passive candidates comes first. It takes time and there needs to be a level of excitement and energy from your Talent Acquisition team to come across as being credible.
Luring passive candidates to a more substantial conversation is the key goal. These conversations need to be nurtured and fit within the candidate’s timeline, not yours. If things feel “right” for them, they will apply in their own time.
In a recent survey from The A List of some 1,800 candidates, about half the respondents claimed they found their last job through friendly and professional connections via social and mobile networks. The majority of those who found jobs in this manner also reported higher levels of satisfaction with their jobs.
For an employer wanting to tap social and mobile networks, they must drive engagement and draw people into conversations.
Capturing Passive Candidates
Social and mobile candidate ↔ employer networking is one of the most effective ways of finding today’s passive candidates. Here’s why:
- Despite LinkedIn’s apparent popularity among recruiters, job hunters actually find more jobs through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, mobile platforms, and search engines.
- Social and Mobile hires have a higher job satisfaction, feel more informed about the company prior to accepting the job and show longer retention cycles.
- Mobile not only about finding jobs. Candidates apply on the move as well. A disjointed process and having to apply from a desktop makes for a terrible candidate experience. There is no excuse for not offering fully responsive career sites and application forms. It is what mobile candidates want (so deliver it).
SourceMob can quickly help you broaden your Talent Acquisition strategy. We will build your Social and Mobile Career Center and help you execute your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Mobile and search engine recruiting strategy. In addition, all of these pages will be mobile-responsive (including the application forms). Another key is that your HRIS team doesn’t need to implement our solutions.
SourceMob provides your organization with passive communication solutions that are proven to capture candidates at a Cost of Apply (CPA) that is up to 50 percent less than your current rate.
Click here for a virtual presentation, call me at 612-249-2740 or email me at jeff@sourcemob.com.
Looking forward to hearing from you, Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder