When everybody professes to be an expert on a topic there is a high probability that nobody is really an expert. Finding hard data to support a social recruiting program is a never ending quest. It is like looking for proof of extraterrestrial life by scanning the heavens with a radio telescope and getting excited when a blip on the scope shows signs of promise. Often space noise is just a million-year old star fart and sometimes social recruiting stats are the result of twisted and tainted data when interpreted by mere Earthlings. We keep looking because our commitment to making this happen depends on real world realities of time, money, and a committed workforce. It cannot be overlooked that the bottom line is really that social media is still not the panacea for all recruiting woes and wishful thinking won’t change that fact. Today the best recruiting program is one that consists of a whole toolbox of methodologies and sometimes social media will prove to be the best tool for a particular application. Even when it evolves into the sharpest tool in the box, it is highly doubtful that it will replace all the other tools.
Survey data to assist in justification of social recruiting programs are a hot topic that can also throw up barriers. One such report conducted by SHRM and published in April 2013 is Social Networking Websites and Recruiting/Selection. Showing that 77% of companies are now reporting that they use social media to recruit candidates (an increase of 21% just since 2011) the report also introduces an apples/oranges discussion about screening candidates with social media. Even though sourcing and screening candidates are entirely different discussions, a takeaway by Chicken Little antagonists is the claim that there is a substantial legal liability associated with social media. Social recruiting missionaries promoting this as a sourcing and recruiting tool will almost surely be met with opposition from those who don’t understand that it is not screening or are afraid of any exposure to legal action. The truth of the matter is that there is a risk of disparate treatment by all means of recruitment and social media just makes it more obvious. A positive aspect of social media use is that it levels the playing field for most candidates and can highlight problems that can be isolated and corrected before discrimination becomes a reality.
The CareerXroads 2013 Source of Hire Report by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler reports that only 2.9% of external hires were attributed to social media. This would seem to be a disconnect from the results of the SHRM study, but most reporting systems can only give data from a single source of hire. The fact that reliance on job boards is declining as a major source confirms the SHRM findings that companies are using social media to reduce their job board budgets. The reality of hiring today is that most candidates are exposed to multiple pathways into a company. A job announcement on Twitter under the hashtag #jobs (the number one career hashtag) could lead a job seeker to a posting on a company career site, followed by a search of LinkedIn to find a network contact at that company, and ultimately entering the system as an employee referral. Referrals are the number one source of external hires in this survey, but how many of them share three other sources in reality?
Accepting the fact that other tools in this recruiting toolbox continue to provide viable candidates for hire, looking at sources from both a company and candidate perspective gives an interesting look at how to piece together a comprehensive and scalable recruiting policy. Two interesting surveys were released in April 2013 by Jeff Dickey-Chasins (@JobBoardDoctor on Twitter) that helps to pin down this approach. The 2013 HR/Recruiting Survey and 2013 Job Seeker Survey tells us that 64.2% of job seekers surveyed said that they typically use social media in their job search. Of these candidates, 89.3% stated that they used LinkedIn. When asked which tools were most useful in a “pick only one†question, only 9.7% picked social media. Is this a significant disconnect? The HR/Recruiting results reported that referrals, niche job boards, and LinkedIn produced the highest quality candidates. Almost 60% of those surveyed indicated that they will increase their commitment to social recruiting in the coming year. Perhaps this will close the gap with job seeker expectations while not closing the door on other meaningful recruiting tools.
So what is a social recruiting missionary to do? The data from surveys appears to reinforce the fact that there is a trend toward increasing social media presence and balancing that with budgetary cutbacks in other areas. One problem with surveys having open ended questions is that some aspects of social media are still very misunderstood. When asked “Do you use social media in recruiting?†the reply does not always indicate how it is used. Most surveys cite LinkedIn as the number one social media platform, but how are they really using it? If there is a dialog with job seekers that takes place in this exchange, then it is truly social. If it is only used to post jobs that are also on the company career site, then LinkedIn is no more than a job board to them. The same could be said of Twitter and Facebook.
All recruiting is social and must ultimately be a two-way conversation. Social media is the most expeditious way to generate a dialog in real time and maintain a mutual relationship. Job seeker complaints that they never get any feedback indicate a need to do something more social-like to satisfy their needs. Companies struggle to find qualified candidates and casting a wider net to passive job seekers rather than those who just happen to apply would be a direct benefit of getting and staying social.
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