Why does social media matters a lot for any recruitment team?

Courtesy - Google

Today there are only two types of recruitment teams – one who is supportive of social media usage, talks, eats, breaths LinkedIn and Facebook, the other one who rejects it on the face of it, considers social media is a time waste. In both cases one would like to know the fundamental matrix called - what percentage of your total hires come from social media? You won’t find much difference in the statistics of both the parties. Then why so much of cry and debate happening on the same topic. It is because of the reason that both the sides ignore the intrinsic value addition by social media. As a recruitment team you are always prone to measuring value addition through number of hires, the same cannot be the parameter for measuring social media because of the fundamental reason that none of the most popular social media tool is designed specifically for recruitment, and they have not evolved as full pledged recruitment tools yet.

Intrinsic value addition has more worth than the extrinsic like filling open positions. Creating a pool of potential applicants is more valuable than just hiring one candidate. When you have good online social media presence, when you keep your corporate pages updated you will create a circle of people who keep knowing about your company, they won’t stop there – they will further talk to people spread the message – unconsciously they are your brand ambassadors – this will result in reduced effort in selling the company’s brand to candidates. Imagine a recruiter calling a candidate and getting to hear “I’ve not heard of this company” that whole process gets painful, conversion ratios will be bad, attracting the top talent will be even more painful.

Why I think recruitment teams must pay attention to Social media.

We are living in a world where people Google

The year 1998 changed the way internet is used, from then to now we have a close of everyone who consolidates and gives reliable information about any topic across the world in many languages. You cannot hide what you are doing on the internet; if you hide also others won’t reserve their comments about you. It is not a troublesome research project anymore to know more about a particular company - Google gives you accumulated data about every organization. Now it is the job of recruitment team to make that cumulative data look good.

Now imagine if one is trying to search your company on internet and it only throws just a company web site, your company does not exist for the younger generation. They will be interested to see your Facebook page, Wikipedia, Twitter and what not. If you are not on social media you have not arrived or you are not a company for younger generation. No company can afford to land in this kind of unfortunate situation.

What you say on your Website is no more your brand

When a recruiter calls a candidate, after the call candidates used to get on to the website to know more about the company, the trend is changing candidates now get onto mouthshut.com or Glassdoor.com to see what employees have to say about the company. This is the case even you are the biggest brand in the world, people still would want to see what has been written on social media, candidates will be curious to know about a particular aspect- even if you are Microsoft or a Google, they would still want to know about that particular team they are going to Join. Hence what you are claiming about your company on website will become less valuable than what people had written on these sites.it is a natural law of behavior – people believe a third party’s feedback than your own words.  And another important thing is as an organization you might overlook these sites, but people who worked with or left you will not – they will write their comments in most of the cases they will be writing negative comments to avenge out their frustration, hence it is important to companies to neutralize these dynamics with active social media presence. Otherwise over a period of time you will become a bad organization on the internet and you won’t even realize it. As result organization’s ability to attract best talent will diminish.

Your Job site will give you access to candidates in your country – Social media is boundary less

Any jobsite whether Indian, European, American they will focus on the local markets. We will have access to candidate’s database in a particular region but LinkedIn and Facebook or Twitter has no boundaries, reach is bigger. Whenever you are working on a market intelligence project or hiring for leadership roles the help from LinkedIn is priceless. Jobsites might give you information regarding salary ranges and other stuff, but they can’t do the job of social media sites of providing a hawk eye perspective. Let us take an example – if you would like to know the companies who are doing extensive work in HTML 5: LinkedIn will be a great tool for the same because the moment you search with HTML 5 it will give you details around

• ·         Individuals working on HTML 5
• ·         Consulting firms offering services on HTML 5
• ·         Huge network of individuals working on the same technology
• ·         Groups for HTML 5

All of these details at one place and you will have less problem of fake experience – this can’t be done by any jobsite.

Recruitment teams are reluctant to use social media extensively -because

>They always tend to measure social media in terms of number hires made

>Social media recruitment is slow

>Corporate page subscription fee for sites like LinkedIn are higher than the regular Job sites

But when you compare return on investment it makes more sense to get active on Social media, once we reach the break even point in terms of money rest all will be a great bonus

Take an example if you have spent 4 lakh rupees on LinkedIn subscription all you need to look at whether you were able close positions equaling 3 times of the subscription. If you have done it, you are getting the entire branding for free.

Other social media sites are just for free like Facebook,Twitter it makes sense to make most of it and build a consistent content across all sites. Candidates will depend on websites only for factual information rest all like culture, Performance management, and compensation for all these key details they depend on social media and we all know these aspects play a vital role in candidate’s decision making.