Recruiters have a responsibility to their clients to engage with the ‘passive jobseeker’.
As social media sneaks further into the staffing industry, hiring managers are looking to their recruitment partners to drive the unconscious jobseeker to their vacancies.
The growth of social media as a tangible tool for recruitment has coincided with a record number of job applications within almost every industry sector. And no industry has witnessed it more than marketing. Why? Because everyone wants a piece of the social media buzz.
So recruiters working with candidates looking for marketing jobs are faced with an inevitable destiny: either provide them with a place to ‘hang out’ or prepare to trudge the old-fashioned floorboards of recruitment; forced to reduce fees; flogging the same dead horse as last month. It’s the race for survival. And only the fittest will survive.
The reality
Okay, so let’s cut through the sensationalism and get real: the traditional recruitment model is here to stay – whatever anyone thinks. If for no other reason than the tangible accountability of working with a real person doing a real job, contingency recruiters are extremely useful to the staff industry. But – and this is a very large but – they have to adapt. Much has been said about the evolution of recruitment and most agree than the changes must start here. So aside from the need for better customer service (blah, blah), what should recruiters be doing to improve their proposition?
The social conundrum
Most recruiters know they need to be doing something in social media but exactly what remains something of an enigma. So Twitter is the emerging trend right now and more and more recruiters are seeing the benefits of joining this bandwagon. LinkedIn continues to prove its worth as much as a place to find talent as for its original purpose, to make business connections. Facebook, of course, remains that place where it’s cool to be seen…but just not everywhere! And there are many other social media channels. So with so many places to ‘hang out’, where does a social-virgin start?
Here’s a guide to where recruiters absolutely must be:
This micro-blogging site is the bastion of impact messaging and can be used to build both personal and business brands. It can also be used in an entirely altruistic way, where users send messages about what they had on their toast that morning. But whatever the message, the idea to attract followers (your audience) with whom you can build relationships and to whom you can sell. Sell? Yes, social media benevolence only goes so far. (Unless you are the sender of toast-related tweets.)
Non-users of LinkedIn are conspicuous by their absence. How can a recruiter, who’s job it is to connect with the best talent in their market, not be on a platform who’s job it is to connect talented people? It doesn’t make sense. So, if you’re not on LinkedIn, get on it. Now.
But just being on LinkedIn does not mean you’ve cracked social media recruitment. You need to build your profile, get worthwhile connections and join relevant groups. If you’re a marketing recruiter, hand out with marketing folk.
This is the tricky one. More than 20 million people use Facebook in the UK. The majority of these (almost half) are between 20-29 years of age. So this incorporates (generically) most marketing-related titles. So a place to find potential candidates, this social networking site appears to have it all. By joining a corporate Fan Page and getting involved in the action, recruiters can promote themselves as people to be ‘friends’ with as well as find a job through.
Developing a social media strategy
Jumping on the social media bandwagon is great but what do you do when you get there? Where’s the benefit, the quantifiable return on the unquestionable investment of time? Note the absence of ‘investment of money’, here. Because social media is free. That’s the beauty of it. But time can cost money so before engaging in any social media plans, make sure you have a strategy – an end-game to the real-time actions of social interaction. Have you/your agency got time for social media?
Only Marketing Jobs uses all the above channels for a myriad of reasons: attract jobseekers to jobs advertised on the website; provide followers with industry news and views; show recruiters the value-added proposition; and build an integrated brand, beneficial to its community.
Don’t have time for social media?
If you want to send out a press release, direct a message to a specific group of people, enquire about some new technology, find a product manager for a hard-to-fill vacancy or advertise an up-coming event, social media provides the vehicle to do all this. But don’t under-estimate the time it takes to get it right. If time is one commodity you’re short of hire someone else do it for you.
Update your wardrobe
Every recruiter knows that social media is now more than a desirable fashion accessory. It is as essential as a pair of shoes. So whether you do it yourself or partner with a media source already doing it, tweeting, connecting and sharing should be part of not just your social engagement strategy, but your entire recruitment one, too.
Here’s how you can jump on the marketing recruitment buzz:
Simon Lewis | Editor | Only Marketing Jobs
