Online recruiting, social media and employment branding

Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of people seeking their next career move who look to the Internet grows exponentially every month. We go online for every type of consumable — why not work?

Joshua Waldman’s Career Enlightenment blog suggests that 89% of companies use social media for recruiting, 65% of companies have hired using social media and 56% of human-resource professionals have used social media to source candidates.

Others suggest that as a consequence, the traditional avenues of career opportunities — for instance, job boards such as Workopolis — now account for less than 15% of the attraction stream, with “contingency” recruiters struggling for a sustainable model in the face of this online onslaught. 

Retained search firms seeking executives and senior managers are holding their own, and are even growing. There is no better way to signal that you are serious about attracting the right person when approaching top talent. 

Social media platforms have reinvented the job search market by providing tools and information not even dreamed about five years ago. LinkedIn allows 120 million people to post their resumes online with a host of networking benefits. Recruiters spend hours each day researching and finding candidates for their clients on LinkedIn.

It’s just not economical to hire top recruiters for every position. Online recruitment campaigns look like a good economic alternative. Besides, aren’t less-established recruiters simply using LinkedIn as their database? Employers are questioning why they cannot do that themselves.

Finding employees using online methods has particular advantages for mining companies needing to ramp-up quickly, and often hiring many people at one time in an industry that has acute skill shortages.

For best results, plan your hiring campaign around the skills you need and the time frame in which you will need them. Attracting the best candidates means not just active job seekers, but passive ones as well — such as people not looking to change jobs. This latter group will take its time to trust your campaign before following your social media posts. With the right strategy, the 10 mining engineers you need to recruit will already be following you on one or more of your social-media platforms.

Creating an online brand or credible web presence lets followers  understand your values, culture,what it’s like to work for your company. The most successful campaigns are permanent and share every aspect of a company’s offering in a format that can be explored by potential candidates in bite-sized pieces at their leisure.

For example, when attracting candidates to a particularly difficult location, you can explore every potential concern from security to schooling that a typical family might have, thereby removing at the outset any barriers for passing on the opportunity to apply.

Through the social media platforms that you use, you will be communicating with followers who will in time join the conversation and repost your posts to their networks, thus expanding your audience. It is important to avoid creating poor or erroneous impressions that will take time to recover from.

With or without a social media campaign, an online presence is essential because people seek new work experiences online. Your online employment brand may support or work in tandem with a traditional recruiter program. 

Any scenario must include a candidate-friendly area of your website or a designated recruitment portal where all career information is stored. This could include a job board but without a supporting social-media program, candidates will not spend time looking for it with so many competing demands for their online attention.

The site will need constant refreshing to encourage potential candidates to return. 

Building a sizeable following will not happen overnight and will require dedicated resources and daily posting. You will need to maintain a presence on numerous social media platforms in addition to the holy trinity of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

Your recruitment strategy will dictate your social media goals. For example, to increase audience numbers in certain communities, geographies or amongst specific skill sets will determine posting and reposting techniques and tactics, and these will change in response to the migration patterns of your audience. The web is fickle.

Content is essential (e.g., text, video and audio) and needs to be interesting, varied and constantly refreshed to attract both returning and new potential candidates. A strategy to attract passive candidates will fail if you only post details of vacant positions. To engage an audience for the long haul, an employer must establish its brand by providing or pointing to informative and useful information about the company, its industry and the skills required to succeed.

Your goal is to persuade potential candidates to chose to follow you by providing information on the role and by making other helpful services available, such as resume writing, career coaching and, for expatriates, location specialists that will help address any reservations.

Keeping on top of emerging online protocol is an important part of online employment branding. Most experts agree that unless the web is your core business, it is very difficult to stay conversant with changing Internet practices.

A company embarking on this route is in effect taking over tens or possibly hundreds of conversations with potential candidates that were previously undertaken with recruiters. That will be time consuming.

Automatic online screening should be considered using an online questionnaire targeting the skills and values that you want to hire. 

These challenges are all easily overcome but are important considerations when formulating your strategy. When anticipated and planned for, outcomes and value creation will improve.

Creating an online employment brand and web recruitment strategy will benefit an organization in a number of ways: no organization with growth aspirations can afford not to have a credible online employment presence and brand that will help to attract new employees. Coupled with a social-media campaign and exponential increase in suitable applicants, a program targeted at passive candidates will improve the calibre of applicants. Followers of your social-media conversations become a talent supply chain that can drastically shorten the recruitment process and reduce downtime costs. A well-constructed online presence coupled with a vibrant social media program can attract more superior candidates at less cost than any other source, and will improve the effectiveness of internal HR specialists. Costs are normally scalable to the number of candidates required and available budget.

— Based in Toronto, the author is the founder of The Human Well, an international human capital consulting practice focused on the mining industry. His background is in executive human resource roles with leading global companies and major consulting firms. With Mark R. Thompson of McKinley Solutions, he founded careersinmining.com, a web-recruitment service tailored to the mining sector. Visit www.thehumanwell.com for more information.