Calling BS on Social Recruiting

On November 9, 2010, in HRExaminer, by John Sumser

Calling BS on Social Recruiting

Jason Blais is an industry veteran with deep experience in the job board and Recruitment Events business. His blog, which is one of the more substantive sources in the Recruitosphere, provides an ongoing stream of info and insight into Recruiting technology. Jason says,

I started this blog with the idea of sharing the volumes of qualitative data I was collecting. Data that didn’t fit nicely into any report. Data that when viewed as a whole, provided an amazing perspective for the issues facing both employers and job seekers with respect to the job hunting and recruiting paradigm. Over the past couple years, however, my focus has turned more toward developing new technologies and partnerships to provide employers and job seekers with better tools to be effective in their search for candidates and jobs respectively.

Jason does a good job of identifying and summarizing key issues in the space.

Calling BS on Social Recruiting

"...most efforts to deliver social recruiting really amount to spamming the social media sites with job postings."


Recently, he published a piece called Primer on Social Media for Recruiting. In the piece, which I’d consider a solid tutorial on the way things are, you’ll be able to gather the essence of Social Recruiting as currently practiced.

Jason segments the universe of social media possibilities into two general areas: push and pull. In the push segment, you promote job openings by shipping out information to social media sites. In the pull arena, you develop content that will attract the kinds of candidates you want.

The problem with Jason’s view (and most of the contemporary thinking about social recruiting) is that it grossly understates the cost, time and complexity involved in making things work. At the same time, it dramatically overstates the likelihood of success.

While social recruiting operates as Jason describes it, the problem is really different if you are a 10 person shop, a 500 person company or a 100,000 person enterprise. For a lucky few (say the top 1500 companies), the existing brand is good enough to drive employment branding activities. For the other 97% of us, employment branding is a challenging battle rife with opportunities to throw good money after bad.

The trick is that ‘defining your target audience’ isn’t so easy. There are no good templates and no proven methods for adequately identifying, sizing and attracting the people you want to reach. Whenever you hear someone tell you about the ‘viral power of the internets’, hold on to your wallet. For the vast majority of us, the internet is anything but viral.

If a large audience on the web was the flu, we’d be well immunized. If figuring out how to make something ‘go viral’ is the holy grail, most crusaders are returning from battle empty handed. It’s really, really hard to make something grow.

That’s why most efforts to deliver social recruiting really amount to spamming the social media sites with job posting. There is little evidence that social recruiting, as currently practiced, actually yields meaningful results. It’s simply not even cheaper to distribute jobs through social media. The job boards are vastly more cost effective.

So, take a look a Jason’s post and see if there’s a conversation to be started. Do you know anyone who is actually getting results with social recruiting? Are they doing anything more than spamming job postings? Is there anything particularly social about their approach?

About the author

John Sumser

John Sumser is the founder, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer Online Magazine. John explores the people, technology, ideas and careers of senior leaders in Human Resources and Human Capital. John is the also principal of Two Color Hat where he routinely advises Human Resources, Recruiting Departments and Talent Management teams with product analysis, market segmentation, positioning, strategy and branding guidance.

Visit Authors Website

If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!

 
  • http://jasonblais.com/2008/12/rfl-the-relationsip-of-social-media-recruiting/ JasonCBlais

    John, first thank you for the kind words, they were truly received with appreciation and humility.

    Second… I couldn’t agree with you more. It takes a significant amount of time and skill to deftly promote your organization’s employment brand and/or jobs across social networks and new media.

    The fact of the matter, however, is that companies see the sheer number of people actively engaged in these resources, and continue to seek ways to utilize them efficiently and effectively. And this desire is driving new and developing technologies, though the jury is still out on the overall ROI potential.

    The following is an excerpt from a post I wrote almost 2 years ago now (The Relationship of Social Media and Recruiting), and I think applies as much as ever:

    “…The truth is that while there may be some very good candidates found through social media, most organizations don’t currently have the resources to wade through the enormous volumes of those disinterested in job opportunities and those who have created completely bogus profiles. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of return on investment…. If an employer can find 20 candidates with 85% of the profile they’re looking for within a week of posting a job online (which only takes a small amount of time), is that activity more or less valuable than spending dozens if not more than a hundred hours filtering through social media and finding 2 candidates that have 95% of the profile you’re looking for?”

    Thanks again John… great insight as always!

  • http://twitter.com/garelaos Gareth Jones

    nteresting post John and I think we need to clearly understand the impact of social resourcing and most definitely a discussion to be had – count me in!

    BUT, I would take issue with your comment “The job boards are vastly more cost effective.” Whilst the evidence for social resourcing effectiveness is perhaps thin on the ground for the moment, the same goes for job boards, despite them being around for over 10 years. This statement is simply not true.

    Job boards measure their success on applications only, and not even relevance, simply apps. I have managed to measure our job board effectiveness in terms of relevance, whether or not they make interview and – the ultimate success measure – placements. Despite combing the internet and publishing my numbers – which are shocking in terms of ROI for job boards – on my blog, linkedin and twitter, i have not found anyone else who has measured job board effectiveness to this level. Maybe you have. If so we should compare numbers!

    Having listened to a lot of resourcing teams lately, i suspect people like Oracle and EA would say they have clear evidence of the success of social resoucing.

    Bottom line, no bagfull of supporting evidence for social resourcing agreed. but none for job boards either so lets perhaps not knock social media and imply job boards represent or indeed can demonstrate ROI, because they cant.

  • http://twitter.com/DailyCareerTips Susan D. Strayer

    Such an interesting debate and conversation. I have to start by asking why is push versus pull. I don’t want to push content at people anymore than I want to lure them in. I want them to find content in places where they already are and engage in the content because they see a reason to engage or a relationship to pursue. Push vs pull makes it seem like we’re pulling at candidates with marionette strings.

    Yes, it’s not to ignore the marketer’s nature to control consumer behavior, but candidates are consumers of a different kind. So I’d advocate for thinking about the consumer as a consumer of an experience, but still a consumer nonetheless. Which is where my marketer’s hat gets put on.

    Social recruiting results aren’t about volume of jobs tweeted and clicked on or candidates hired from Twitter or Facebook more cheaply than from Monster. For me, it is thinking like a marketer–measuring unaided brand awareness or any number of metrics marketers use to measure brand influence and engagement with the brand NOT the channel. It’s downstream measurement.

    And while plenty of successful consumer brands measure this well, I don’t know of any company who has measured employer brand and recruiting via social media in this way.

    - Susan Strayer
    @dailycareertips
    @susandstrayer
    http://www.susanstrayer.com

  • http://www.work4labs.com Stéphane (Work4 Labs)

    Thanks for the article John. It points out real issues faced by companies hiring on social networks today.

    However, posting jobs on Facebook and other social media sites isn’t always complex or expensive. Indeed, the social nature of the sites make this process relatively inexpensive and easy if done correctly. We have found that our app, Work for Us (http://bit.ly/WorkforUs), allows you to recruit effectively on Facebook without wasting time/money.

    By using social features to distribute jobs through your network for free (Share, Like, etc), it harnesses the power of referrals within the company, as well as users interested in the company.

    Most of our clients also use our advanced advertising engine to promote their job postings through the Facebook Ads system, only targeting candidates most likely to apply. These ads operate on a cost-per-click basis, so you pay only when one of these qualified candidates views your job description. And candidates don’t have to leave Facebook to apply, which is key if you want to avoid losing applicants.

    By making the process as simple as possible to find, share, and apply to jobs, and allowing companies only to pay for results, we are strong believers that Facebook is creating an unparaleled opportunity for recruiters across the board.

  • Dave Nerz

    Like all things, social recruiting is not for everyone. I do know that recruiters are finding value in the connections that can be made through social media tools like Linked In and Twitter. In every case social media and social recruiting is just another tool and not a panacea. Once located, contacts still need to be warmed to the idea of job change, relocation, a new company, different industries, and all the other issues associated with real changes in employment.

    If you hire people to fill roles (hourly jobs, non-skilled positions, entry level) social recruiting is a great and perhaps affordable means to find people. If as an employer you seek talent (experience, track-record, specialized) it might be best to let an in-house or independent recruiter work that position.

  • Pingback: StrictlyRelevant » Blog Archive » BS, John Sumser on Social Recruiting

  • Rob K

    John- This is a very interesting post. I think you miss the mark regarding the use of social media in recruiting. I don’t feel one needs a big brand or viral content to be effective. Certainly social media is not a nirvana, but using social media should be part of a recruiter’s tools. I blogged a much longer response here. http://bit.ly/gN7fSU

  • http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

    Thanks, Rob.

    It’s hard to overestimate the impact that a big brand has on recruiting. No
    one, as yet, has really quantified the costs of doing social recruiting. I
    don’t mean using social network data as a proxy for a resume database. When
    I say Social Recruiting, I’m referring to building relationships in advance
    of the requirement in order to have a high quality pipeline available when
    it’s time to hire.

  • Pingback: Relationships in Social Recruiting – #SRConf « Recruitmedia – Social Recruitment Guide

  • Rob K

    John- Thanks for the response. I totally agree with you, using “social” media as a resume database isn’t social recruiting. It’s just an inexpensive resume database. With regard to brand, I guess we will agree to disagree. We have seen very small (3 person) staffing agencies with no brand and limited following have success using social media with only minutes spent a day. I don’t think social media replaces other tools just yet, but i do believe it should be in every recruiter’s tool kit.

Page 1 of 11
More in HRExaminer (642 of 798 articles)