You grow up most of your life hearing your parents and partners, teachers and TV stars, mentors and managers - remind you that failure is not an option! The fear of failing is scary. It is human nature to be successful.

But atimes, one may have to fail (probably a few times) to get things right. And the same goes with introducing social recruiting into your hiring strategy. One of the reasons that deter some UK companies from social recruiting, is the thought of failure.

It is possible that you have ticked all the right boxes and eventually created a social recruiting strategy, but somehow along the way, the integration into your existing hiring process and the implementation of the so-called social recruiting 'to-do lists' goes awry.

Don't despair. You may not be alone. Many companies will have to redefine their recruitment processes and refine how they manage their social recruiting strategies until they get things right. You'd be surprised to know that several brands with successful social media campaigns and social recruiting strategies could have tried different approaches and formats, before they start getting some ROI of intrinsic value.

A recent article on Techcrunch suggests some reasons on why social media projects fail (an European perspective). For me, quite a lot of these researches and surveys are another set of stats, numbers and percentages that may not be a perfect representation of the situation. However, we can surely relate to some of the reasons they presented. One of which being, just doing 'social' because of the sake of it, will not deliver any meaningful returns.

If you are seriously considering reducing recruitment costs, engaging more with candidates, improving employer branding, then social media may be a strategic sourcing channel for many companies. But before you decide to design a social recruiting strategy, I'd recommend you ask yourself so many hard questions on all aspects of the process you intend to implement, as well as how to manage the feedback and results (either negative or positive). This post on how to create a social recruiting strategy may help.

And to get more insights into how several European based organizations have successfully implemented a company / group-wide social media recruiting strategy, why not come and join us at the Social Recruiting Conference with case studies on 30th November 2010.

The presentations will feature why and how they embarked on their social media recruiting journey and the challenges they have faced. Of course, they will also share the rewards and benefits to their organizations. Interestingly, discounted tickets for the conference ends on 31st August 2010.

Hopefully, we'd see you in London!