Recruitment Marketing – Starting with Social Recruiting

What is Recruitment Marketing?

According to good old ERE:

Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing.

For now, let’s skip to the last part…Social Media, or in HR terms: Social Recruiting. Do you currently have a social recruiting program? If you don’t, maybe you should… In a recent CNN video, these social media sites are said to be “taking the teeth out of job search websites”. Essentially, more money is being pumped into these social media sites, while many of these job search websites are suffering losses. If this is any indication of the way the recruitment industry is going, I’d say social recruiting is here to stay (at least for the next decade).

However, the major problem with social recruiting is the comprehensive nature of these sites. Navigating through Linkedin or Facebook for recruiting purposes can quickly consume a recruiter’s time. So while this recruitment marketing piece is very desirable, it is not easily attainable (manually speaking).

So, the big question is how do you make social recruiting not only desirable but also attainable. Take a step back and ask yourself:

What tasks do you need to complete in order to get top talent to submit an application via social recruiting efforts?
- Choose social media sites to leverage.
- Post jobs to all social media sites, career sites, etc.
- Build branded email campaigns to connect with your social media contacts.
- Reach out to candidates proactively via email/phone.
- Analyze source effectiveness of each social media site.
- What else?
Which of those do you feasibly have time for without working outside of the 8-6 work day? – Keep in mind social recruiting is only one aspect of recruitment marketing.
Which tasks can you automate?
- Send mass emails using a communication tool – don’t waste time emailing one person at a time.
- Post jobs to all social media and career sites at the same time – don’t waste time going to each site to post jobs.
- Copy job templates – don’t waste time reinventing the wheel.
- Store data electronically with an ATS – don’t waste time manually accumulating data to report on. Use an ATS or similar-type database, so you can visualize source effectiveness in a matter of seconds.
- What else?

Choosing Automation

While automation through technology solutions is not meant to replace HR professionals it can facilitate the process and automate essential tasks that recruiters just don’t have time for. For example, there are plenty of recruitment marketing systems that would be the most targeted solution since they help automate social recruiting so people don’t have to spend hours navigating their Linkedin accounts. Now, social recruiting is much more attainable.

P.S. Did you know that Linkedin recently announced their 100 million member mark? Crazy right? And that’s only one piece of social recruiting and recruitment marketing…

What about you? Do you have any other tips to share on improving a social recruiting program?

Comment by Karen Bucks on March 24, 2011 at 1:41pm: Very true! Thanks for your comment!

Comment by Chris Short on March 25, 2011 at 11:51am: Karen, Great post. How do you feel about automating postings on the major social media platforms. Meaning connecting LinkedIn to twitter and twitter to Facebook so that one post on LinkedIn automatically feeds the other two. There is an obvious value to the efficiency of automating this process, but does that offset the value you lose by being repetitive across the platforms?

Comment by Karen Bucks on March 25, 2011 at 3:58pm: Thanks for the comment Chris! And that's a good point. Forgive me if I jump around a little bit...I think my brain is ready for the weekend! :)

To answer your question, I think I'd still be a proponent for job posting automation, only because there are a lot of configurable options out there right now that weren't there years ago. Some of these tools, like the recruitment marketing one I mentioned, allow you to automate a bit more than just sending job post to all sites. You can choose specific sites, times, view sent, etc., so with that, you can monitor the whole picture rather than typing in one-off posts here and there.

Also, there is always a risk of repetition. But, there is a risk of being repetitive if you are doing it manually too. The good thing about automating it would be so the person can spend less time on those administrative tasks and more time looking at the overall social recruiting picture, e.g. brand, responses, research etc. Lastly, I think there is a danger of missing out on highly-qualified prospective candidates if you don't post to all sites. A perfect candidate might be browsing your facebook, but has never even seen your Linkedin account. And at the same time, it could go the other way and the repetition may be unfavorable to candidates viewing both sites.

Either way, you mentioned a good point! Definitely something to keep in mind if a person decides to automate some of their tasks.

Comment by Suresh on March 25, 2011 at 5:23pm: Karen, good list.

Also, niche career sites are continuing to morph, some are beginning to incorporate niche social networks too. Doing good research in each niche would be a worthwhile effort .