Why do you need to know about social recruiting? Literally hundreds of millions of people log onto Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn alone daily. One of the reasons is that businesses have taken notice. What have they noticed? They notice where people are and what they are doing. Facebook and Google have become today’s Big Brother and business want to harness the attention we invest in social media. Facebook and Google are business sites and businesses need the best talent. So social recruiting is here to stay because companies want to increase job visibility, hiring quality, build referrals, increase revenue and reduce costs.
One of the fallacies of the social media sites is that they are for social exchange only. From the onsite of people’s participation in “social media” it’s almost always been a business proposition. Even if your activity online seems to be social you probably should note that just about anything you do or say online can be found. Countless news stories over the years prove this to be true based on the endless documentation about people’s rants and words online. To create a positive, powerful personal brand online usually takes a lot of thought. Careers can be enhanced or damaged by content online. We at least know that fact. How can you start the habits to create your online presence in the best way to attract new opportunities for jobs, contracts or to positively create your long-lasting personal brand. It’s not at all easy. For most of us it will take or has taken a lot of individualized thought along with constant adjustments.
In all career phases serious career builders need to prepare for and anticipate work life storms. Social recruiting has been referred to as a tactic or concept related to recruitment on a number of social media channels. Other phrases related to social recruiting could be social hiring and social media recruitment. Some of the sites now credited with helping develop or engineer this man-made career and recruiting storm area LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, BranchOut, Talent.me, XING, and many others that have added fuel to the storm like Indeed and Simply Hired. No matter where you are in your career you must at least have knowledge regarding how talent can be found quickly and through these channels.
Here are some of the questions you may want to note and think about as you consider your career and the intersecting storm of social recruiting:
As an executive what do you need to do to ensure clear notice online but not look like you are desperate for your next opportunity?
How ready are you for this impending storm in terms of setting yourself apart from your peers?
Are you in an industry where you can hide and not be noticed by social recruiters? What if your industry like the financial industry turns and you need to have a presence on social media? In other words are you ready?
Does your use of “social media” make you a more attractive candidate than your peer group of qualified competitors?
Have you studied your competition in social media? What are your peers doing socially and professionally to ensure their brand looks unique, hirable and can be found in the social media channels?
If you are working can you up the ante on social media without crossing the line within your company’s social media policy?
Have you already been affected by social recruiting in your career? How is your company viewing people’s activity online?
After you ask yourself these or other critical questions then think about and know where recruiters can find you. Internet sourcing uses technology and people to find information on you in blogs, online communities, social media profiles, activities, postings and in other ways. Recruiters find “passive” jobseekers based on keywords that they may be looking for in a profile. For technology it could be looking for someone with Lean Six Sigma experience. For a software person a key phrase could be C+ or C-. Now companies are finding ways to distribute jobs to you through hundreds and thousands of social platforms. In other words targeted advertising for possible top applicants will continue to occur within social medial. The combination of sourcing and distribution could be considered the foundation of all social recruiting. According to a number of sources including Wikipedia, social recruitment increasingly sits at an intersection of a number of fast-moving areas including social networking, recruitment and now cloud computing. A number of cloud-based social recruitment services have emerged, such as FireFish, Jobcast, JobPage, Jobvite, Jobbook, SmartRecruiters, The Resumator, TribePad, Zartis, ZipRecruiter, and YeapizSocial media (SM) recruitment, social recruiting, e-recruiting.
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