All this fuss about Social Recruiting and Recruitment as a Marketing function. Marketing successfully implemented, drives purchase decisions, inspires a call to action, and, if broadcast and amplified on social media as a channel, should drive volume. 

But maybe you should take time to think about your actual objectives. What does effectiveness in recruiting really look like? 

• Is the time you've invested in building a large volume of candidates really worth it in terms of return on effort? 
• Is driving a large volume of applications more likely to yield the golden candidate who will deliver the most to your business? 
• Is vanity [or pride] a factor when you showcase the volume of traffic and applications you received? 

Or are you better off using laser-sharp targeting to engage with a small audience, and tailoring custom content to entertain and inform them? 

Mass Market Broadcast? 

or 

Niche Audience Engagement? 

Consider making a smarter move by narrowing the funnel. It surely follows that your candidate care will improve in leaps and bounds if you have fewer candidates to care for. 

Candidates who are cared for, make better future advocates - more likely to help you in the future and have positive brand recall. 

I read a lot about how employers can use guerilla and social recruiting techniques to drive mass audiences and high volumes of applications but I can't help but think that high application volumes are just vanity, and create work needlessly.  

Placements are the real value. That's what you recruit for. It is surely a better result to  connect with just 5 qualified and engaged contacts in your talent pool to yield a placement, rather than drive [and sort] 50 or 500 by broadcasting your message to a broad audience via a social platform of unqualified people. 

We all know that the % of relevant resumes is below 10% on average for most companies who advertise jobs. Why are we using social media to stretch that number out?

It's the failing of most ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) that they don't allow for better communication beyond basic templates and message tracking. They should put CRM, Employee Referrals and Candidate Care at the core, not just social broadcasting of a message. It's the failing of many recruiters to not tag, label and segment and work their talent pool in a way that allows for low-effort, high-yield recruiting. 

Sometimes the quality of responses [to advertising] is so low, and the volume is so high, especially when pumped by social media, that I often wonder if there is really any point advertising jobs online in the traditional way anymore? When compared to using a message or piece of content to engage with a small, qualified pool, ready to network with and refer each other, it's easy to see which method has the most efficacy.  

My next ATS will be a true CRM product with the Community I've built as Customer.  

I think there are too many people out there trying to convince recruiters to broadcast our message to the biggest audience, to get the maximum return in terms of volume. But shouldn't we only be focussed only on relevance and quality? Why do we even care about volume? 

At the end of the day it's the ROI / Quality of hire that trumps everything else. But If I can get to that ROI without having to work through 1000's of resumes because of the success of an ad campaign, surely that's a better way? 

I think it's high time we recruiters took a look in the mirror and thought hard about why we are pumping the social media networks with recruitment advertising to drive and amplify application volumes. Why aren't we spending more time focused on marketing to the most relevant channel - our talent pool.