Is Your Social Recruiting Strategy Manual Or Automatic?

Doug Berg, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Jobs2Web, Inc.

What You Need To Know About Automating Your Social Recruiting Strategy

My hunch is that most companies have started to use social networks for their recruiting, but it is most likely happening more by accident than strategy. Recruiters are setting up their own personal profiles – rather than corporate accounts – and manually building their contact networks using the social sites to source candidates and market their jobs by tweeting, wall posting, or sending group updates with each job requisition.

While many companies allow their recruiters to take this approach, there are some problems that should be addressed before letting it go too far. Most importantly, you have to ask yourself, is this is a scalable approach to social network recruiting?

Social network recruiting can be a time consuming activity for recruiters when done manually, but it can be automated if configured correctly. There are two primary activities that recruiters are involved with when doing social network recruiting:

Relationship/Network Building Mode
This is the initiative of finding people of interest and trying to add them to your network (linking, following, etc.) In this mode, recruiters are actively trying to build the network of people they have access to and are connected with in order to communicate with them when/if any matching jobs come up.

Job Marketing Campaign Mode
This is when recruiters have a particular job to fill and are trying to identify and reach the people in their social networks by sending messages and inquiring if they are interested (or if any of their friends are interested) in the specific positions.

The relationship/network building mode will require some level of ongoing involvement from recruiters, but can be augmented by creating social network pages, groups or accounts which will self-attract people to join them.

Moving From People-Oriented To Company-Oriented Social Recruiting

One thing anyone who is building a social recruiting strategy should know is that nearly all of the major social networks have the ability for companies to establish company owned assets/channels on the social network. This would move them away from individual recruiter accounts as the primary method to conduct recruiting on social networks. For example, in Facebook a company can build their own corporate pages, which allows them to attract "fans" of their company. These could be pages like "ABC Company Accounting Careers" or "ABC Technology Jobs," etc. Groups in LinkedIn can be set up in a similar way, and when creating Twitter accounts, different accounts can be set up as owned by the company versus owned by the individual recruiters.

In other words, instead of "Jane Recruiter" having a personal account and hoping people want to find her and link to her, people can instead search for, find or join a more targeted group such as "Game Developers" on LinkedIn or "Game Designers" on Facebook. On some networks candidates will even be suggested to join these groups based on keywords in their profiles that match up with the groups. This puts the social networks into recruiting mode and helps to automate the growth of these networks online. Most importantly, by creating logical company-owned groups/accounts, employers now have a company owned asset that helps them to organize social contacts within the organization versus a personal account that can walk out the door when any recruiter leaves the company.

Automating Your Social Recruiting

The campaign mode is automated when employers feed jobs and other content that is readily available into social channels by using an RSS feed as the delivery tool into the social channels. Most of the social networks allow you to link an RSS feed into them so that employers can automate the flow of targeted jobs into their social channels, eliminating the need for recruiters to spend all day posting and tweeting jobs. Unfortunately, most of the major ATS systems don’t provide a configurable RSS feed of company jobs, so employers seek to work with companies like Jobs2Web that can provide organizations with an RSS feed of the company’s jobs.

Once in place, these automated channels help employers reach people in the network automatically and direct interested candidates directly back to the company career site and ATS system when they are interested in applying for jobs. This is not unlike what a recruiter would do when/if they followed this process with any candidate via their personal network. However, by automating this process, organizations not only improve recruiter efficiency, but they also protect their social assets online. By using the right platform, employers can then measure all of these social channels through their hiring process to determine what channels are most productive online.

Without this automation, most companies will be adding these social recruiting responsibilities to their recruiters, which will pull down their productivity, or they will have to look at hiring "twinterns" to tweet jobs, and/or add other recruiting administrative headcounts, which can get very expensive over time. By automating social recruiting, organizations can answer a resounding "yes" to the question: "is your social recruiting strategy scalable, effective and able to translate to a positive return on investment?"

Posted by Doug Berg on January 19, 2010. Filed under Human Resources, Recruiting, Sourcing, Thought Leadership, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry