7 Habits of the Highly Effective Social Recruiter

As more and more companies begin to utilize Social Recruiting to achieve their broader strategic recruiting objectives. An important consideration is, what makes an effective social recruiter?

1. Be Present–This means establishing a presence on sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & niche) that are important to your target audience. The key is to strike the right balance between heavily trafficked and niche sites. For each site that you join, you are going to have to spend lots of time establishing your presence. If you do your homework, you should be able to identify 3-5 sites that are most relevant to your target audience. Once your target audience begins to recognize who you are and what you are about, this makes it easier to connect with prospective candidates for opportunities of interest.

2. Be Knowledgeable–Recruiting is largely driven by the exchange of relevant information. Both employers and candidates are looking to learn more information about each other to establish fit. Based on your target audience, you should be prepared to highlight the major benefits of your industry, organization, and specific openings as well as respond to likely areas of candidate concern. If you don’t have the answer, you should be able to direct candidates to another source (company website or independent) or connect them with someone within your organization that can answer their question. The better you are able to connect candidates to the information they need, the more successful you will be in Social Recruiting.

3. Be Helpful–As more and more people are connecting with each other on the social web, it is important to establish yourself as someone who can be helpful. If candidates have a question, do you quickly respond to it or do you ignore it? If a colleague is struggling with the implementation of new technology that you have mastered, do you reach out and offer assistance or do you let them struggle for the solution on their own? With all the talk around interaction and engagement, one of the major ways to establish a great reputation is to help others without expectation of reciprocity. This creates a magnet effect wherein not only will candidates be drawn to you but colleagues (internal & external) will find ways to help you achieve your specific goals.

4. Be Social–When you see an interesting blog post, tweet, or status update; dive in. Don’t let fear of what others might think about your thoughts inhibit you from socially engaging with others. And don’t limit your social interactions to just those within your core group (Human Resources or Recruiting). Expand your social network, reach out to people with peripheral but related interests. In no time, you will start to see just how interconnected different ideas and concepts are. And, you will find that you are able to implement these new ideas far more effectively because you can begin to include best practices from a wide variety of industries.

5. Be Aware–There are a variety of written and unwritten rules to social engagement. WRITING IN ALL CAPS, only tweeting about job openings, or discussing your personal relationships status on Facebook are typically frowned upon. However, there are also things that are not yet well-established that may be detrimental to your social recruiting efforts. Are you always negative? Do you only discuss or share content consistent with your point of view on a subject? Before you engage with others using social media or social networks, take a moment to think about how your target audience will receive it. If you have any doubts, its best to err on the side of caution. Digital permanence is real and even when content is taken down, there are typically enough people who have seen it that the misguided decisions will not soon be forgotten. This is definitely not how you want you or your employer represented.

6. Be Yourself–Even though, there might be a temptation to create an idealized image of yourself on the web (complete with amazing profile picture and embellished accomplishments), it isn’t going to work. In fact, the more you try to become someone you aren’t, the more people you are looking to build relationships with will shy away. Despite being hidden behind our computer screens, it is incredibly difficult to keep up consistent appearances. In fact, many times the underlying facts about a topic of interest are pretty similar. However, what others are interested in is your interpretation of these facts. By letting people know who you really are, you can start to truly build some real relationships.

7. Be Authentic–No one wants to engage with someone that constantly argues point of views that they don’t agree with. If you truly don’t agree with something, then by all means jump into the conversation and express your disagreement. But, don’t pretend to be against technology based recruiting while constantly tweeting job openings at your company. If you do, you will quickly lose all credibility. The main reason is that lots of users have a variety of interests, and they will begin to track people of interest to see what they have to say on a variety of forums. If you become known as the person who argues for the sake of argument, then that is your authentic brand. If this is inconsistent with how you would like you or your company to be perceived, then stop.

The list above is just a starting point for discussion on the different habits that I think highly effective Social Recruiters should practice in order to be successful. What do you think about the list? Are there some that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

–Omowale Casselle (@mysensay)

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About the Author: Omowale Casselle is the co-founder and CEO of mySenSay, a social recruiting community focused on connecting talented college students with amazing entry-level employment opportunities. Our solution integrates social media, real-time web-based communication, and intelligent analytics to enable employers and students to discover, interact, and connect with each other.

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Comment by Julian on May 20, 2010 at 1:09pm: In the context of social recruiting, I understand yoru points better. It is not an area I can afford to spend time on. Thank you - this is my final post. Take Care All

Comment by pam claughton on May 20, 2010 at 1:19pm: Omowale,
This is good advice in general for how to engage with social media, but I think it misses the mark a little as it pertains to recruiting. I agree with Jerry and Julian, recruiters need to spend their time recruiting, on the phone or in person interviewing candidates and filling jobs. Engaging in social media can be a slippery slope when it cuts into recruiting time. I think social media can support what you are already doing, but it's not going to take the place of actual recruiting. Social media is mostly about branding and I agree it's a good idea to be 'out there', but in all honestly, I spend as little time as possible on social media. I have a twitter feed, and post jobs and the occasional link to an interesting article, but that's it. I don't have time to engage in conversation on Twitter, I haven't found it to be productive. I am on Facebook and check in regularly for a minute or two and it's mostly personal but I have jobs copied there too and more people are contacting me via Facebook which has been increasing and interesting. LinkedIn of course is a must. I generally do social media activities outside of work hours, or at lunch breaks....it can be far too distracting otherwise! When I need immediate results, I just pick up the phone.

Comment by Omowale Casselle on May 21, 2010 at 6:19pm: Pam,

Thanks for the comment. I'm definitely not suggesting social media be used as a replacement to current best practices in recruiting. I could be wrong, but I view the habits highlighted above as being integrated into what many recruiters are already doing offline. However, it seems as though you have already taken the time to trial these tools to achieve your goals and found it unproductive. So, I would definitely agree; it doesn't make sense to continue using tools that don't work.

Omowale Casselle

Comment by Sandra McCartt on December 6, 2010 at 6:05pm: I think what we may be seeing emerge is something that is not new. There has always been a large divide between "marketing" and "sales". Sales people do some marketing of a product or service in their sales cycle but marketing does not do sales. Marketing develops brochures, writes articles for trade journals etc. etc. Fast forward to social media. Sales people (recruiters) may do some "marketing" as in create a profile, tweet a job, post one on a site but sales people (recruiters) do not have the time to waste chatting with folks on the net anymore than they have time to spend an hour on the phone with a candidate who will never be a fit for anything they will ever have ,anymore than a territory rep who sells widgets will spend their time calling on people who don't use widgets and never will.

I think perhaps the risk recruiters take when they spend sales time engaging with multitudes of people on social networks can be detrimental to targeted efforts. Consider a widget sales rep building a relationship over time only to find out that his contact never had any interest in widgets just thought he was great guy and wanted to get to know him. Then what ,drop him off the radar, don't answer his posts or tweets. Social media poses the risk that it can be become anti social pretty fast. If i took the time to be helpful to everybody i encounter on a social network when they want to ask a recruiter how to help their job search or interview everybody who called my office wanting to come in and "talk" to me about a career change they might want to make i wouldn't have time to do what my clients pay me for and my qualified candidates expect from me. Don't go ballestic, yes i talk to a lot of folks that i can't help ,both clients and candidates, make a few suggestions or referrals because i want their contact to be positive. But i have to limit that interaction as much as possible.

Would that all recruiters and sales people could afford to hire a marketing person to market, a sourcer to source, a screener to do initial interviews then pass on the top three for a recruiter to interview in depth, qualify, present and sell while working with multiple candidates for multiple positions giving fair representation to all, follow up , give feedback, salary negotiations not to mention working with clients who pay our fees.

Marketing and marketers are wonderful, handy gadgets. I wish i had five and they left me alone to do what i do, source, qualify and sell. Marketing for the most part may be able to determine a target demographic, do what they do best , promote, but they don't sell.

I am continually wondering why marketing folks feel that they have the expertise to tell recruiters how to do their job. Not beating on you Omowale, i have read many of your blogs and find you a proficient and interesting writer. I see this happening over and over in recruiting spaces. I don't see it in other industries. Any of them. I just wonder why recruiting marketers can't just do their job, do it well without having to insist that sales become marketing to survive. If we did we wouldn't. That's why we react so violently when marketing folks try to tell us what we have to do and must incorporate social media to be able to do what we already know how to do. If that makes any sense.

Social media is no different than what we have been doing forever ,interacting with clients/candidates in many venues. It's almost like how the hell many chamber of commerce meetings does marketing think i have to go to. Marketing stands on the corner of social media handing out brochures, waving at folks and passing out business cards to get attention on 25 sites. Recruiting goes out and calls on a targeted audience to present the real product, sell it and close the deal. It takes both marketing and sales i don't tell marketing they have to sell to be able to market so cool it already,

If i hear something from a producing recruiter about how he/she made more money, much money, it helped with retention or any of the other stuff marketing is promoting with social media i'll be very interested in how they did it. I do not have time to be "social". I have to go sell somebody nobody pays for how wonderful my brand is and don't seem to care unless i don't deliver. Then they will brand me as somebody who should be in marketing instead of sales.

Damn!! :)