What Is Social Recruiting?

On April 8, 2009, in All, Employment Branding, Futures, Industry Analysis, JohnSumser.com, Online Community, Recruiting Strategy, Social Recruiting, Social Software, Sourcing, by John Sumser

What Is Social Recruiting

(April 08, 2009) I’ve started a conversation about the nature of Social Recruiting on an Australian Wiki. It’s my contention that using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn et all to recruit is not necessarily social recruiting. It’s a desktop variant of Recruitment advertising. It’s an advanced form of sourcing.

That’s not to say that using the amazing new social software communities as your own personal talent fishing pond is wrong. It’s just that there’s little new or interesting about the idea of researching a list and sending opportunities out to it. Calling it ‘social recruiting’ makes it seem like something different is happening.

Of course, the evolution to social recruiting is going to take time and make slow progress. Each wave of technology hits the Recruiting beach-head in much the same way. Once the dust settles, we essentially deliver incremental improvements to the old way of doing things.

Here is the essence of the argument :

The potential to build community as a way of recruiting is not something new. I’ve been writing about it for fifteen years and only wish that the idea was mine. As technology changes the face of recruiting, what happens most often is that recruiters do exactly what they used to do. They just use new tools to do it.

This phenomenon is not unique to the Recruiting world. Our culture is littered with software stuffed with features and capabilities that no one uses.

In Web 0.0, we learned that no one comes just because you build it. What that means in this case is that just because you can build community using social software doesn’t even vaguely mean that that’s what will happen. And, the techniques and values required to build a community have little to do with the technology.

I don’t mean to be cynical here.

Community based Recruiting is a necessary strategy for organizational survival in the 21st Century. But, it requires a whole new way of thinking about the people we have objectified as ‘candidates’, ‘applicants’ and ‘job hunters’. We have to treat them as if they are actually community members. That’s a big commitment.

For a community strategy to work, members need to receive a constant flow of value and be held as a part of the team in some way. Most organizations will view that as a discretionary expense rather than as a necessary investment. Every time you stop investing, you have to start over.

Social recruiting is not cheaper, it’s more effective.

While it might be possible to envisage a world in which the cost of social recruiting is covered by the interactions between community members, that day is a ways off. For now, the rationale for community based recruiting will have to be higher quality and speed. If you are going to call it a community, the members have to get real value from communicating with each other.

If the communication flow is only one way (recruiter to people) or two-way (back and forth between recruiter and people), it’s not community in any real world sense of the world. When the communication happens between community members then it’s a community. Community means conversation amongst the members.

If you use the word community to describe one-way or two-way conversation, you are setting an expectation that will not be met.

That’s really bad branding.

You can see all comments on this post here. I’d love it if you would join me in that conversation. Do you think that community is an inherent an necessary part of ‘social recruiting’?

This discussion echoes a conversation between Raghav Singh and a couple of well known contributors over at ERE. Singh maintains a perspective similar to mine. The other side of the argument is something along the lines of “a face book recruiting page already is a community. Employers are running communities and don’t even know it.

There are 7 Million employers in the United States. Trying to capture them in broad generalizations doesn’t work very well. Nonetheless, it’s disengenuous to suggest that employers are already engaged in social recruiting. We don’t even have a good definition yet.

I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.

I’m leading an Intensive workshop called Recruiting Strategy in a Down Economy: Identifying What’s to Come in the Upturn at the Kennedy Recruiting Conference in Las Vegas on May 19.

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John Sumser

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http://www.ere.net/ David Manaster

I’ve been thinking about the conversation that we had on the social recruiting summit site, and I don’t know if there is a real choice to be made between one-on-one conversations and “community”.

Community (to me) is a group of interacting people who share commonalities. Like all grassroots interactions, it starts modestly, by forming individual connections.

The one-on-one interactions are a necessary, but not sufficient, step in forming community.

When you look up close at a tree, its just a tree, but when there are enough of them in one place, you have a forest.
http://www.johnsumser.com John Sumser

There’s a lot to what you’re saying, David. I really appreciate the time you took to leave a comment.

We’ve both seen enough ‘revolutions’ to spend the rest of our lives talking about them in some cafe. My take is that without a clear focus on the end state, you just get more of the same. The community part of social recruiting has to be repeatedly emphasized or you’ll have a bunch of lawns with one or two trees in them and no forests.

The notion that there is a community (or at least a crowd sourcing) component to recruiting is non-intuitive. Recruiters know how to have lots of one on one communications. So far, that doesn’t usually build a community.

The question becomes ‘what’s the difference between a bunch of one to one conversations and a community? The answer is that the people who aren’t the recruiters get to talk with each other and find value.

The Raghav Singh article hints at the notion that recruiting on Facebook, where you can co-opt an existing community, could be a start. As he says, it usually isn’t.

I’m following a Microsoft Canada sponsored initiative called ‘Ignite Your Career’. It doesn’t have community as an end game. Instead, it’s all about up leveling the skills of all of the people in a talent pool whether or not they are MSFT users or advocates. They just deliver career advancement value in live / web settings.

Community can spawn in that sort of environment because the emphasis is on delivering value not extracting it.

So, to reuse your analogy, you can’t make a forest by accident.
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Raghav Singh

I was recently talking to a recruiter at a social media event when she said that recruiting from talent communities would be so much easier if they came with good candidates already in them, since it’s so much work to attract the right kind of candidates. (Isn’t this called a job board?) And getting a gold at the Olympics would be so much easier if one were already a champion athlete. The point made above that recruiters do exactly what they used to do, despite any advances in technology, is spot on. In general, we’re most comfortable doing things that we’re most familiar with.

John is exactly right, and borne out by experience, that social recruiting as currently practiced by many (if not most), is just an advanced form of sourcing. The expression “social recruiting” is almost a contradiction in terms – social activities typically do not include professional tasks, and recruiting is a professional task. That doesn’t mean that the two are mutually exclusive but this is what makes recruiting on social networks challenging.

John’s point is well taken – an employer’s FB page does not qualify as a community. How many of the people on it even know any of the others, other than reading an occasional post. The experience is not unlike that of attending a conference or meeting with lots of people in a room – everyone has a name badge and you may get to talk with the people sitting next to you. You’ll hear some people ask a question or make a comment but all that does not make this a community. Trying to recruit from this group will be just as difficult as trying to do the same on the FB page.

There’s nothing wrong with broadcasting jobs to people in a social network – that’s the easiest thing to do, but there’s nothing social about it.
Raghav Singh

I was recently talking to a recruiter at a social media event when she said that recruiting from talent communities would be so much easier if they came with good candidates already in them, since it’s so much work to attract the right kind of candidates. (Isn’t this called a job board?) And getting a gold at the Olympics would be so much easier if one were already a champion athlete. The point made above that recruiters do exactly what they used to do, despite any advances in technology, is spot on. In general, we’re most comfortable doing things that we’re most familiar with.

John is exactly right, and borne out by experience, that social recruiting as currently practiced by many (if not most), is just an advanced form of sourcing. The expression “social recruiting” is almost a contradiction in terms – social activities typically do not include professional tasks, and recruiting is a professional task. That doesn’t mean that the two are mutually exclusive but this is what makes recruiting on social networks challenging.

John’s point is well taken – an employer’s FB page does not qualify as a community. How many of the people on it even know any of the others, other than reading an occasional post. The experience is not unlike that of attending a conference or meeting with lots of people in a room – everyone has a name badge and you may get to talk with the people sitting next to you. You’ll hear some people ask a question or make a comment but all that does not make this a community. Trying to recruit from this group will be just as difficult as trying to do the same on the FB page.

There’s nothing wrong with broadcasting jobs to people in a social network – that’s the easiest thing to do, but there’s nothing social about it.
http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

You have it exactly, Raghav.

A community is a flesh and blood thing. You can tell you have one if the
people in it are interacting with each other.
http://www.hrexaminer.com John Sumser

You have it exactly, Raghav.

A community is a flesh and blood thing. You can tell you have one if the
people in it are interacting with each other.
JP Winker

Recruiters generally don’t have community development skills, and seek to treat community members as if they were a resume database. Community requires interaction to form relationships. This is contrary to the transactional hire sought by recruiters and will continue to confound them.

Given this simple conflict, recruiters need to learn to develop communities, or find someone to develop communities for them. My money is on the latter, if its to happen at all.