Facebook has close to one billion users, Twitter around 500 million, and LinkedIn 180 million. And growing! The sheer amount of people using the three pre-eminent social media platforms is quite startling - and very attractive to recruiters.
The key word in the previous sentence is “using”. According to one set of statistics, the average Facebook user spent 405 minutes on the site in January 2012; LinkedIn (17 minutes); and Twitter (21 minutes, but this figure does not count mobile usage or Twitter clients like Hootsuite). [1]
Something that goes wrong can go viral quickly and ultimately impact on the brand.
Raymond Myburgh is head of IndigoCube's HR Solutions business unit.
Dedicated job portals simply can't match this reach, and of course, they only cover active jobseekers. They are also inflexible, and the move to social media should be seen as an indication that many companies want greater control of their recruitment processes.
But first, a few words of warning. I have linked social media to e-recruitment, and that's because social media can generate significant volumes of responses, many of them duplicates, as people obviously use multiple platforms. Administering and reviewing these will only be practical with an electronic, automated e-recruitment platform.
A second caveat. I advise clients to consider recruitment generally as a branding exercise, and this is particularly true in the context of social media. As this is a real-time exercise, something that goes wrong can go viral quickly and ultimately impact on the brand. Get buy-in from the marketing team for the material used on social media.
Getting the process right
Having decided to use social media, the recruiter should follow a logical sequence of steps to maximise effectiveness. The first thing is to decide which social platform, and thus audience, would best suit the job. For the purposes of this discussion, let's restrict ourselves to the three main social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
digital marketing coordinator, however, might work better on Facebook.
Having made that basic decision, the recruiter then needs to consider whether he or she is going to target active or passive jobseekers. The former is in some way the least desirable category, because the bulk of good people are already employed (although a minority of them might be looking), and is also likely to be using conventional job portals.
However, one might decide to use social media to get even wider reach across the active-jobseeker audience. The main medium here would be the company's own pages on the social media platforms chosen.
LinkedIn also offers a job advert option, but it's expensive, at around $100 (R820) for 30 days - however, it's an option depending on one's strategy.
The passive jobseekers category is perhaps the more interesting, as it constitutes an audience that is not likely to be on the job portals. A more delicate approach is called for here. It will rely on approaching the company's and the recruiter's own networks on the chosen social media platform, and asking them to share the job specifications with their networks.
This can be highly effective, because it's targeted, but the way the approach and the job specification itself is crafted, is vital. Here, in particular, the help of marketing colleagues in communicating the right messages about the company are vital - the company is essentially being positioned as a desirable place to work.
An example of how not to do things was recently offered by a major retailer, which used clumsily worded advertisements relating to its employment equity policies. Although the adverts weren't placed on social media, they were taken up vigorously on these platforms - and the fallout could have been much worse if they had been placed there in the first place. [2]
Remember, too, that much social media activity occurs on mobile devices, so be sure to have a .mobi site that people can link to.
It goes both ways
I think it's worth mentioning that recruiters are also beginning to use social media to investigate candidates whom they are considering short-listing. Clearly, what types of thing a person posts on his or her Facebook page, or tweets, can reveal a great deal. Candidates should therefore take note of the fact that pictures and comments posted on digital channels are, as some have found to their cost, forever!
Facebook's recent changes to its settings were, I believe, designed in response to the need for the page-owner to adjust who sees what pieces of information.
In conclusion, then, social media can be an extremely valuable part of the e-recruitment mix, but one needs to think through the whole process very carefully.
[1] “Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest - How much time do we spend on social media sites?”, available at http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-minutes_b19034. The article is based on figures from The Wall Street Journal.
2 See some examples of media coverage at http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71656?oid=324051&sn=Detail&pid=71656 and http://www.facebook.com/Moneyweb/posts/10151020618770168
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