4 Social Recruiting Missteps (and How to Avoid Them)

January 21, 2011

For years, recruiters and hiring managers have relied on job boards and staffing agencies to fill open positions. Those tactics worked for a while, but last year proved that they’re quickly becoming outdated.

Social media is the hot new recruiting tool. According to Jobvite’s 2010 social recruiting survey, 83 percent of companies surveyed currently use or plan to use social recruiting as a hiring tool in the coming year. Those same companies surveyed plan to spend 46 percent more on social recruiting, while spending 36 percent less on job boards and third party staffing agencies.

Needless to say, now is the time to start considering how you can take advantage of social media to help with your staffing needs.

In November, Unisys released a report on its website that discussed its own experience — and significant success — with social recruiting initiatives. The company revealed that the use of social media has helped widen its candidate pool, prospectively target the exact candidates it prefers to hire, and improve recruiting productivity and cost-efficiency. What company wouldn’t want to reap those same rewards?

You don’t have to be a mammoth corporation to experience the same social recruiting benefits. In fact, in a lot of ways, social recruiting can be even more effective for startup and expansion stage businesses. Most of those companies have much smaller budgets and more restricted resources. Social media can provide them a cost-effective means to still find and hire the top talent in their industry.

Social recruiting isn’t always successful.

Like any initiative, there are right and wrong ways to do it, and plenty of companies’ social recruiting efforts have failed for a variety of reasons. Highlighting some of those hiccups, Smashfly’s Chris Brablc wrote a great blog post with the tongue-in-cheek title: “Why Social Recruiting Fails!” Brablc outlines a handful of common causes for social recruiting failure. Some are obvious, while others are less glaring. So, thanks to Smashfly, here are the four reasons social recruiting fails, along with my own assessment of each one:

Lack of an Overall Strategy

Just like anything you do in recruiting, you must have an overarching strategy that backs up social recruiting. Some things to consider include: who will be in charge of managing your social profiles and what type of recruitment-focused content you plan to share with your network and followers. You should experiment with various social networking platforms and how each one can be used by your company. But an overarching strategy will help you stay focused on your objectives.

Lack of Measurement

In order to measure the success of your social recruiting initiatives, you need to track metrics like the hits to your Careers site (understanding which social networks led those visitors there), number of Mentions and ReTweets on Twitter, and source data for candidates to enter in your ATS (Applicant Tracking System).

Not Enough Time

If you aren’t willing to take the time to learn and develop your social profiles and connections, you probably aren’t ready to start a social recruiting strategy. As much as some people view social media as a fun tool, it’s not child’s play. Your social recruiting strategy should involve your company’s management teams and if they aren’t prioritizing it, there’s far less chance for success.

Just Another Job Board

If the only way you utilize your company’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook page is to post jobs, your recruiting efforts are likely to fall on deaf ears. Those platforms should be portals for conversation first and job posting second. Share articles that are pertinent to your company and industry — and be personable. Social networks are a great way to communicate the culture of your company, which is something a potential candidate will consider if they’re deciding whether or not to apply for a job.

Social networks, quite simply, are a new — and increasingly powerful — tool that recruiters can leverage to bolster their recruiting efforts.

It’s pretty obvious that the tides are shifting in the recruiting world. Companies will likely continue to use job boards, staffing agencies, and more traditional means of finding and hiring talent. But social recruitment is certainly reaching a point of significant maturity and I don’t think it will be long before it becomes a significant part of every company’s recruitment strategy.

Take advantage of it, but do it the right way. Take the time to strategize and research the best social media tools for your company. There is no blanket approach. Find what works best for your company, encourage senior management to commit to it, and you’ll begin to notice the benefits that much larger corporations like Unisys already have by utilizing social networking.

VP, Human Capital

<strong>Diana Martz</strong> is Vice President, Human Capital at<a href="http://www.ta.com/">TA Associates</a>. She was previously the Director of Talent at OpenView.