Social Media and Talent Acquisition

No rant this week. Instead I would like to focus on my experiences with using social media as a vehicle to drive recruitment. I feel like the intersection between social media and recruiting is an evolving one. When social was new, I think recruiters instantly tried to turn into something they already knew; a job board. Tools like Bullhorn Reach became available to automate the process and ATS (applicant tracking systems) integrated with social media, making it easy to push jobs out to a variety of social networks. The result is the constant bombardment of bland postings with the tag line, “Are you a fit for this job?”.

To me, if you are just using social media as a job board, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Social media is a place to have conversations and distribute content. My feeling is that 90% of what you put out on social media should try to tell your company’s story, and 10% should be about open jobs/hiring inanities.

Each social media platform is different and requires a different approach. Take LinkedIn for example. While LinkedIn is technically social media, it makes millions of dollars selling its recruitment platform to people like me. That platform takes LinkedIn, and turns it into worldwide searchable database, making it an excellent way to seek out and connect with passive candidates. LinkedIn should be used by recruiters as a job board because it is basically built to be one, while still calling itself a professional networking site.

Facebook is very different. I have colleagues that have successfully used Facebook to find potential candidates. I have not had the same success but I know it can be done. Today, NetBrain has ads running on Facebook promoting our growth in both our sales and R&D teams. It is hard to track the conversion rate of those advertisements to resumes. I know that in February we got 1,100 clicks on our advertisements but I cannot tell you how many resumes came from those clicks. The advertisements are better for building “brand awareness” around our aggressive growth plans.

Twitter is unique as well. While I have not personally connected with a great number of candidates via Twitter, I know other recruiters who swear by it and it acts as an intricate part of their sourcing strategy. As I mentioned previously, I feel that 90% of what you put out on social media should be content about your company or the arena in which your company operates, and this is where Twitter shines in 140 character snippits.

I have not personally used Instagram or Pinterest, but I recently heard about companies starting to integrate both into their recruitment strategy. I cannot talk about strategy with Pinterest or Instagram but perhaps more importantly, I think it is more significant to keep trying new things. I will not be shocked if I am downloading a whitepaper on recruiting best practices from Snapchat sometime in the next 18 months. NetBrain recently created a showcase page on LinkedIn called #NetBrainiacs. The goals is to show off our growth as a company and the fun we have working on the next generation of networking management tools. This is an unconventional use of a LinkedIn showcase page but so far, the early returns are positive.

I am not sure exactly what the “next big thing” in recruitment is but I would bet that the intersection between social media and recruiting will continue to grow.