(Gaurav’s Note: This guest post is written by Karishma Daswani who is a human resource consultant. You can connect with Karishma on Twitter or LinkedIn. The copyright for all guest posts on Gauravonomics is help by the guest author.Write to gauravonomics@gmail.com to write a guest post on Gauravonomics.
I am a big believer in social recruiting myself. At least 4 people in the 12-person 20:20 Social team were recruited online, on social networks and blogs.)
HR professional are beginning to use social media in various ways, ‘Social Recruitment’ being the most prominent of them. Blogs and social networks have turned into fantastic recruiting mechanisms and organizations that are adept to change (management) have been quick to adopt these tools due to ease of use and low cost. Example: Ernst & Young uses Twitter and Facebook to hold public chats with candidates and Deloitte woos potential recruits through YouTube videos.
Social Recruitment is a two-way process which involves an online dialogue between the company and the candidate. Hence, the first and most important step to develop a successful social recruiting strategy for any organization is to analyze, build and monitor its online employer reputation. Several social media analytics tools like Radian6 allow companies to track conversations about them with ease. It is necessary to know the opinion in the market of an organization and also any issues that exist as these are considered more credible than the information found on the corporate career site. Job Vent, Jiibe, Jobvite and Glassdoor are other popular sites for understanding the expectations of people and how the HR practices of the company are fared in the candidate community.
Companies even cultivate a great employer brand that may be different from the corporate brand and reach a targeted audience of younger applicants. This helps attract the best talent as it establishes a transparency and gives candidates a fair idea of the ideals & culture of the organization. An excellent example of the use of social media in this case is ‘Microspotting’ – a blog for Microsoft which encompasses videos, a Twitter profile and a Flickr photostream.
After online reputation management, the next step for an organization’s HR practitioners is to form a team of Employee Brand Ambassadors. This team consists of people who are not just tech savvy but also ‘social savvy’ . They are trained on understanding RSS, content portability and distribution, blog participation, creating and responding to forum threads, encouraging comments, microblogging effectively and understanding user patterns, site analytics and effectiveness .A Candidate Community Manager is responsible for how communication takes place for career opportunities, company culture, promotion of career events & highlighting of awards and news items.
The most basic, low cost and effective way to get to the ideal employee via social media is to have a creative job description on the company’s website and use email and social websites to share it, as nine out of ten times the best candidates are already in the employees’ network. To add a personal touch to this it is apt to implement a Live Chat feature on the careers page so that candidates can contact the hiring manager directly incase of any questions. It’s also possible to do a quick background check before a face-to-face interview, using search engines, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Finally, Social Recruiting also helps promote diversity in hiring practices as a heterogeneous mix of candidates is present online and can be chosen on the basis of their experience, age and other factors.
Clearly, social media has proven to be a boon to HR practitioners making recruitment more convenient, effective and time-saving than ever before.
