The Truth About Social Recruiting

Hey you guys, LinkedIn is DEAD. All the cool kids are recruiting on Facebook and you better have yourself some Pinterest sourcing sessions. I’m serious. So serious, in fact, I Binged “Social Recruiting” (well what did you expect) and got over 42 million results, most of which were a horrifying mix of conferences and poorly written blogs by people who couldn’t make a placement if their mortgage payment depended on it. Yes, I Googled it too – 159M results of the same tired crap.

Sigh.

I guess I’m still under the impression that social still means what the good old dictionary defines it as –

  • relating to society: relating to human society and how it is organized
  • relating to interaction of people: relating to the way in which people in groups behave and interact
  • living in a community: living or preferring to live as part of a community or colony rather than alone

What's that you say? Interaction of people? But I TWEET! I BLOG! I LEAVE PITHY STATUS UPDATES ON FACEBOOK!

Eh, so what? When I think about recruiting as a social activity, I think of it as the act of talking with people for the purpose of filling roles for my clients. I don’t do this by spouting off statistics about the number of candidates who aren’t on LinkedIn (73% of people will tell you 92% of statistics are made up anyway). I don’t do this by posting white papers on Pinterest. Most of my Facebook content is food and kid pictures alongside a whole lotta football trash talk. No dears – social recruiting is talking to people who might be a fit for the jobs I’m paid to fill.

But what about the next generation of workers you ask? College students aren’t on LinkedIn! They’re on Facebook! Well, they were, until they started leaving it in droves for Snapchat or something. How are we to reach this next wave of candidates? I’ll tell you what’s worked for me. I talk to them. I find their email addresses and phone numbers and I get in touch. I offer to speak to their computer science clubs, sororities, wherever groups of them congregate. There are two main questions that come up EVERY SINGLE TIME -

  1. How can I build relationships with Recruiters?
  2. Can you help me with my LinkedIn profile?

Wait - recruiters AND LinkedIn? And this just isn't coming from the college set. In fact, I get the first question from all kinds of people from every age group and level of experience. What this tells me is that potential candidates understand the value of recruiters. They wouldn’t be interested in talking to us if they didn’t know there was something in it for them. If LinkedIn is dead, why am I speaking so often to groups of 50 or more college students about how to optimize their profiles and build their networks? Why am I getting new connection requests EVERY DAY from very talented people?

Now I am not anti-social media. I’m not anti-anything, really, except excessive amounts of BS. (I can tolerate it in small doses not to exceed the amount I personally dish out.) I even use job boards. One of my best hires EVER came from a last minute desperate Monster search of resumes posted 18-24 months ago. The tools are only as useful as the person wielding them. Although it’s perfectly fine with me if my competition wants to continue debating amongst themselves the importance of their Klout scores. I’ll just be over here wooing your people away. By being, you know, social.

***image shamelessly stolen from Mike Chuidian AKA The Rad Recruiter

 

Views: 1566

Comment by Becki Banning on December 27, 2013 at 4:02pm

Amy, I loved this. Thanks for sharing.

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on December 27, 2013 at 5:34pm

thank YOU!

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on December 27, 2013 at 6:46pm

Thanks Amy.

I ask any social network recruiting advocate to do as follows:

1) You have 25 reqs: high, medium, and low-level positions.

2) Starting in one month, you're expected to fill one req on average/week.

3) You can only use FB.

4) Your clock starts NOW...

-----------------------------------------------------------

How can I build relationships with Recruiters?

It's funny how an envelope filled with large denomination bills can help improve your relationships at times....

..........................................................................

Can you help me with my LinkedIn profile?

LinkedIn - YouTube

www.youtube.com/user/LinkedIn‎
LinkedIn's official YouTube channel. Connecting ... LinkedIn is the perfect place to start your professional story. ... LinkedIn for Students: Top Five Profile To-Do's.

start your professional story. ... LinkedIn for Students: Top Five Profile To-Do's.

and if you need more help:

It's funny how an envelope filled with large denomination bills can help improve your relationships at times....

YOWZA!

Cheers,

Keith

Comment by Will Thomson on December 28, 2013 at 5:07pm

Amy- I absolutely love this post.  Saying Linkedin is dead like you said is absurd.  I think the news feed has gotten a bit out of hand, but when it comes to recruiting and finding candidates- it is still the #1 tool.  I don't think it will be the medium to share blogs and things, but it is clearly the white pages of candidates.  Most candidates can be "found" there.  How you contact them is what will change.  Sending inmails won't work, as it is cluttered.  To NOT have a linkedin profile is a bit of a shot in the foot in my opinion if you are ANYONE- passive or active.  It is a resume database.  Thanks for writing.  I have had similar thoughts lately.  Will

Comment by Derdiver on December 29, 2013 at 9:51pm

Wait so what is this LinkedIn you are talking about....LOL

Comment by Matt Charney on December 30, 2013 at 9:59am

Amy: Sorry to be late to the party here (even us 'social media professionals' need a break from social once in a while) but I think that this is an awesome post and you make some really great points in here. I think that the real problem is that people tend to equate LinkedIn with 'social recruiting' - it's not, because it's more or less a job board with good marketing - and think that due to its efficacy, people tend to focus on 'social recruiting' when what they're really doing is the same old recruitment marketing, but on a very different board. The truth is, LinkedIn works, but so too does Monster (to your point), CareerBuilder, Dice and just plain old networking.  The success or failure of a search - that is, the EVP and relationships that develop - remain fundamentally unchanged. But you probably already knew that since you're actually making hires instead of regurgitating theories or aphorisms like so many in this space wasting their time debating how to recruit instead of actually recruiting. Amazing post, and thanks as always for bringing the feisty :-)

Matt

Comment by Keith D. Halperin on December 30, 2013 at 1:56pm

@ Matt: well said.

Instead of arguing "this works" or "this doesn't work"  I think we need to say that some tools work better for some people/positions/companies than others do- one size does NOT fit all. I also think "It's a poor crafts(wo)man who blames their tools."  Finally,the more you popularize a competitively-advantaging tool, the less competitively- advantaging it will become as more and more people use it.

HNY,

KH

Comment by Amy Ala Miller on December 30, 2013 at 1:58pm

thanks y'all! Exactly - I would never say "don't recruit on FB!" because I'm sure it works for someone. No big deal, fish where they're biting and for the love of Pete use decent bait and you'll be just fine... but the "73% of your candidates aren't on LinkedIn" crowd.... um no. Not buying it.

Comment by Mike Chuidian on December 30, 2013 at 3:20pm

Another excellent post, Amy! Your writing steelo is the best! 

Comment by Sarah Calverley on December 30, 2013 at 5:12pm

Love your post. 

We can find people on more mediums these days than ever before in recruitment history, and as a result people are losing the art of a personalised approach.  We have so much information on each person we email / inmail (just ask Google) and we spend more time making templates than crafting an individual message that will carry influence.  It's appalling that the Linkedin educators have taught us that a 30% inmail response is average.  I'd say that's a pretty good waste of time if less than half the people I thought were great chose to respond to me!

Let's redefine social recruitment and stop spamming - back to basics with the added efficiencies and tools we have at our vast disposal :)

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