Having been in several discussions recently about the use of social media, particularly within recruitment, I thought I’d share some findings and look at how we can leverage it to improve our presence and influence within our target networks and online communities to reach clients and candidates.
Firstly, it’s worth looking at how effective each social media has been so far. It is without a doubt that Linkedin proves its worth time and time again as the leading source of information on clients and candidates and serves well as both a professional social network and a candidate/ client database. In addition, Linkedin appears to be taking inspiration from Facebook with added new functionality including ‘newsfeeds’, ‘comments’ and ‘like’ options and has also borrowed the ‘follow’ function from Twitter, making it an all round awesome tool for sales and recruitment professionals. With most Consultants making placements through the use of Linkedin and utilising it as a business intelligence tool, it is slighty easier to prove it’s worth in ROI terms.
However, when it comes to other social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and localised networks, it would appear that there is more skepticism around whether they are useful tools for recruitment or not?
One of the issues I have faced is working out how to centralise social media and find the time to keep everything interesting and up to date. In addition, I wanted to include my wordpress blog in the mix and I was interested to find out how I could track stats and measure ROI.
To me, ROI meant, “how many placements did I make using social media?”. However, my former colleague in Digital at Harvey Nash, Derek Kelly made the point that it may not be as useful to measure “return on investment” as “return on influence”, a very interesting point and definitely food for thought! To me ”Return on Influence” represents a change in understanding the importance social media is beginning to play across all business sectors. The youth of today are spending phenomenal amounts of time on social (not professional) networks indicating that this is already a massive space for all businesses to be promoting and operating within. Basically, if you are not building or have an intention to build your brand and general presence within social media, at some point in the near future, you will find yourself seriously behind the curve.
To prove my point that the Recruitment industry should not be ignoring the implications and benefits of engaging in social media, there are a number of recent developments that are paving the way for other job search engines, agencies and hiring companies. Take SimplyHired, a well known job search engine, they recently announced that they have released new features allowing integration with user Facebook friends to enable job seekers to connect with hiring companies and recruitment agencies through facebook friends and thus uncover the hidden job market. This marks the first time Facebook has entered mainstream job search http://recareered.blogspot.com/2010/06/facebook-becomes-job-search-engine.html
Basically, the framework is in place for businesses to incorporate social media as a key tool for recruitment and the future rewards could be massive.
Having left Harvey Nash and crossing over to In-House recruitment at a Web Design and Ecommerce company, RSTO, I have implemented an integrated digital recruitment strategy that is already showing signs of success and I will blog on this at a later date. To see the RSTO website, please go to http://jobs.rsto.co.uk
