Categorizing Social Recruiting

Originally posted on the SmashFly Intern Blog.

Last week RecruitingBlogs.com author Jeff Dickey-Chasins posted a thought provoking article called Is Social Recruiting a symptom – or a solution. In it, he defines two ways of understanding social recruiting in a broader, systemic context: as a symptom of or reaction to insufficient communication between employers and candidates – or as a comprehensive solution indicating a fundamental shift in recruitment marketing strategy.

In my mind the two categories aren’t necessarily separable or may not even be functionally relevant. The recruiting and talent acquisition industry has always been defined in part by problem solving or responding to new challenges presented. In this sense, almost all recruiting efforts can semantically be considered a symptom of a problem. However, a symptom suggests impermanence or inadequacy, which portrays social recruiting as more of a Band-Aid that doesn’t address larger ubiquitous problems in recruiting. When viewing social recruiting in this manner, it seems to me that it represents a complex interplay of different variables including the technological advancements that enabled its practice and the demand for more interactive communication. I cannot think of any recruiting solutions that weren’t at least initially response or symptom of a greater conceptual problem. Although this may all be a battle of wording, one thing is clear: social recruiting has come to be a permanent aspect of recruiting that both responds to problems and prevents problems from occurring.

In the end, I can’t really place social recruiting into any discrete category because it inherently traverses theoretical boundaries and frameworks. I really enjoyed Jeff’s post, I hope that you all take a chance to read it. It serves as an interesting way of looking at why we implement social recruiting and what we accomplish through it. Let me know what you think of my response, and also let Jeff know what you think of his article.

About the Author: Tim is a Online Marketing Intern for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies and staffing firms to easily distribute and more importantly measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.

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Comment by Paul Alfred on November 23, 2010 at 7:30pm: TIm I understand you've got a product and service to push ...But after reading your Blog I had to go back Jeff Dickey-Chasins post to see if I could make sense of your observation - Why do we really implement Social Recruiting and what do you think Companies accomplish - Qualified candidates? No! You still have to have to pre-qualify that candidate with perhaps a 2 in 10 chance he/she will be a fit for your requirement, so a company of any major size has to allocate a major cost on that task.

What do you mean by "social recruiting has come to be a permanent aspect of recruiting that both responds to problems and prevents problems from occurring...?" You have not yet identified the problem - have you ran the cycle of sourcing a candidate from Linkedin to Hire, I have, and I have found that the candidate you end up with usually comes from a a line of referrals tracked back to the first profile one would initially contact...

Social Media allows a Company/Professional to better position itself/oneself in the market where it can have a different kind of communication with its Customers/Vendors/Potential Employers and in our case potential employees- It does not solve the qualifying issue which we still have to do either as a Third Party Recruiter or Corporate Recruiter...

Social Media provides another medium like Job Boards to access Candidates ....

Access to "Qualified Candidates" however, is still missing variable in the equation... There is a significant cost that SM Solution providers are still not addressing ...

I Love Social Media too but let's be clear on the definition on what it really is and the problem it really solves or more powerfully, creates in our industry....

Comment by Jerry Albright on November 24, 2010 at 10:05am: "Social Recruiting" creates problems more than solves them.

Recruiters think they are doing something important (getting the word out, branding, creating awareness, blah blah blah) with their social strategy - when in fact all they're doing in most cases is neglecting the real work of our profession. And what is that real work?

Making presentations as often as possible to people who may be in a position to buy what you are selling.