How to assess Social Media Vendors

Here's a challenge and a question that I thought would be worthy of RecruitingBlogs. Just try googling "social media" and see how many results you get. Everyone and their Social- Media-Dog has an opinion on what it is, how is works, and what type of results it should bring.

So my query is this: given that Social Media is redefining how Recruitment gets done - how should large recruiting organizations choose vendors in this space. What kind of criteria or baseline functionality should be expected? What's the most important criteria?

A few that come to mind are integration, aggregation, privacy (opt-in, opt-out functionality) and CRM capabilities. Just scratching the surface here so far...

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Amitai Givertz on October 8, 2009 at 8:20am

Warning: Not for the easily offended!

Hat tip: Michael Marlatt

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Harold Ensley on October 8, 2009 at 11:06pm

Hilarious video. To tell you the truth, I think many people in this space would put a used car salesman to shame. In assessing these products, you have to remember, a lot of this stuff is built with venture capital, and they are desperate -- like an pyromaniac at a match factory -- to find a revenue stream.

For instance, I'm gravely disappointed with one large social media vendor, which openly lies about exclusivity to corporate clients. Not naming names on this one, google it yourself. Hint: it's very large.

In a perfect world, recruiters would all be web savvy, and figure this stuff out for themselves. Yet, in the not so perfect world, many fret about how it should be used (missing the point that it's about being "social" - naturally so). Also, the unsettling reality of being a corporate recruiter with 30 - 50 job orders, is that these social media processes have to be streamlined or simplified to be effective.

So is it too much to ask for a product that streamlines referrals from social media products, and/or leverages new ways of searching, such as conceptual or semantic search? I'm not sure there's a silver bullet answer at this time, although I'm certain some of us have explored this space and can point us forward in this new direction.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Duarte on October 9, 2009 at 4:06pm

Amitai,
Awesome Find!
Unfortunately, its sooo true.

The difficulty in social media and recruiting with social media is the learning curve and setting measurable expectations.
Those expectations should be measurable, such as 1,000 members in our LinkedIn Group, with 15 applications, and 2 hires, or something like this.
Just going into social media with no plan and expectations is like hiring the guy in the video.

Jonathan

Amitai Givertz said:

Warning: Not for the easily offended!

Hat tip: Michael Marlatt

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Duarte on October 9, 2009 at 4:41pm

Harold,
Great post and topic for discussion.

The first step in any Social Media Campaign should be to understand the desired deliverable.

This in itself will take some time, but once achieved, finding vendors who can fulfill the desired outcome is much easier.

Some of the tatics for a recruiting campaign might be any of the following:
* Brand Reputation Management, to track and understand what is being said about your brand first.
* Recruiting Outreach, to engage the communities of your prospective candidates.
* Gathering of the herds... building your own communities to engage and build relationships with the members, in a place where you control the content and relationship.
* Simple or more advance presence on multiple social platforms, FaceBook Fan Pages, connected to a FaceBook Company page, Twitter job broadcasting with or without twitter human integration (which is always better than just sending out a bunch more jobs to deaf ears), LinkedIn Company Profiles, LinkedIn Group building and maintenance, etc.
* Then the actual social marketing to build and maintain the profiles and groups.
* Integration between social profile platforms and job feeds, rss news feeds for company and industry information, etc.

Once the strategy is flushed out, its easy to find companies, vendors, or even employees, who can implement and maintain the tatics.

The harder part is finding someone who understands social media, recruiting, the corporate strategy, the technology, and the individual platforms (ie. LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.). If you can find someone who has proven experience in the strategy side, chances are they aren't the right person for the implementation anyways, because they are too leading edge. They either need to have a team behind them, or they must be willing to train your internal team or another vendor to do the actual implementation and maintenance.

And, just finding some local "social media" vendor who has done one part of the above IS NOT going to get you the results you want. They might be able to get you started in the education process, but you really need someone who knows the industry, how recruiting works, and how social media works, so that you can create a pilot project to get buy-off from senior management.

I hope this helps.
Jonathan Duarte
Http://jonathanduarte.com
Jonathan@gojobs.com