Sajjad Masud is co-founder & CEO of Simplicant, a cloud-based social recruiting platform transforming talent acquisition and making enterprise-level recruiting technology accessible to companies of all sizes. Connect with Sajjad and the Simplicant team on Twitter and Facebook.
The way we communicate with each other has evolved rapidly over the last decade. Social media has further intensified the departure from traditional communication methods to redefine how people and businesses interact with each other.
In fact, more than half of companies on social media fail to have a social media strategy and in doing so, risk ignoring an increasingly dynamic and expanding audience. Recent social media stats show that more than 60% of adults are connected to one or more social networks, while 23% of online time is spent entirely on social networking activities.
While social media has seen rapid growth at the consumer level, the gap between consumer and corporate adoption is widening. Businesses are continuing to figure out optimal ways to harness the reach of social media and translate its usefulness into results.
One area where the benefits are already beginning to outshine older methods is talent acquisition and recruiting. The sheer number of active users on sites such as Facebook have made social recruiting extremely advantageous. With so many people using social media, especially for employment opportunities, companies are expected to use social media to recruit for more than 80% of job openings in 2012.
So just how does social media benefit the environment of talent acquisition? Here are five shifts that are taking place now.
1. It's Personal
Hiring has always been concerned with people, and the relationships formed through social media between candidates and employers are even more imperative.
While candidates can reach out to key recruiters, companies form entire networks or talent communities to connect and engage with candidates. Social media is a tool that caters to sharing interests and engaging in conversation, making it easier to find a suitable candidate early on. After all, we do it so much everyday that it becomes a natural process.
2. It's Transparent
Social media users tend to be self-aware of their brand because of how visible their activity and interests can be. Because of this, we must always anticipate some sort of reaction or feedback. No longer are your strategies and tactics a secret from those outside the company — they are fair game for criticism, even by the candidates themselves.
Though your recruiting activities can open a Pandora's box of negative comments, it's still a good way to find new perspective on what you may be doing wrong and how it can be better.
3. It's No Longer Just For HR
Social media talent acquisition allows for entrepreneurs and CEOs alike to find candidates directly, quickly and with a reduced cost-per-hire — especially for startups that lack traditional HR personnel or funds for a recruiter. However, social recruiting is not to be taken lightly; just because you can find candidates on Facebook doesn't mean you should throw away the rule book.
4. It's Marketing
A solid plan, a target audience, metrics and data are all required for effective social recruiting. With the introduction of Brand Pages on Facebook, your organization isn't any different from those selling a product — instead, you're advertising a place of work.
Through brand management, content creation and engagement, candidates and employers alike see the value of social interaction for talent acquisition. It's instantly measurable and targeted to something that older processes simply can't match.
5. It's Being Shared
Employees on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are contributing to the efforts of recruiting through their own posts and tweets. Not only are open positions getting distributed as pieces of content to vast networks of people, but it's also facilitating the use of social referrals — one of the best sources of quality candidates. Job seekers are finding ways to take advantage of social referrals by keeping in contact and engaging with key members of companies.
Conclusion
Social media doesn't need to be the absolute center of your recruitment strategy, but it would be ill-advised to ignore the trend completely. These five factors are changing and advancing the ways we approach finding the best talent and taking it to a more personal, open and collaborative experience.
What do you think? Does using social media mean less work for recruiting, or just more effective implementation of traditional ideas?
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we've selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
- Senior Manager, Social Media Communications at Deep Focus in New York City
- Online Product Manager at Cars.com in Chicago
- Front-End Engineer at Yelp in San Francisco
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, chris_lemmens, alengo
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