By Lisa Jones
I ran a webinar for the lovely folks at Bullhorn Reach recently (thanks Vinda!) – topic: Social Recruiting; Debunking 7 Myths and Misconceptions (watch it here… but not yet, read this first!)
I promised to follow up with some blogs, so here’s the first myth “debunker:”
Everyone is a candidate
So, you’re out at a club. You’ve had a few drinks, you’re feeling sassy! There’s a girl/guy on the dance floor busting some moves. You’re feeling confident…up you stroll and mosey on in. A bit of eye contact and a lot of nerve!
This so equates to the average recruiter activity on LinkedIn. Sassy, confident (overly?) assumptive, winging it?
Now I know that LinkedIn is a recruitment system, but believe it or not that’s (currently) its best kept secret. Most people on it only spend 17 minutes per month on it (how do they cope?). 26% of them are surfing using their mobile (how the hell do they read your oh-so-mega-detailed-“our-client-is”-job-adverts? Yawn!)
Just Because I’m Dancing doesn’t Mean I Want to Dance with You!
What’s so special about you? Your jobs!? Hell no! I don’t care about them. I care about me. It’s REALLY unlikely that I have logged in specifically to see a job. Have you actually looked online recently? The amount of doomy gloomy blogs about talent shortages make me want to go and open a cattery…Passive candidates are the new black! In fact, they have been for a couple of years. Oh my God! What are we going to do? I know lots of recruiters whose strategy is just to shout louder (it works like a treat in a foreign land!)
LinkedIn even published some interesting “not everyone is a candidate” stats:
• 21% are active (stand back – I’m likely to tango with you!)
• 15% are ”tip-toers” (I’m thinking of looking you in the eye, perhaps flicking my hair about a bit and fluttering my lashes)
• 44% explorers (not exploring too literally on the dance floor, but I am likely to dance if you seem like my type and my husband’s not looking!)
• 20% are super passive (I want to dance on my own – back off!)
Moonwalking
So before you dump the LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook logins in favour of a cattery deed, think about stopping the assumption that everyone’s a candidate and do 2 things:
1. Start actively looking for people who may actually be interested (go to where people want to dance with you!)
Look out for users with the lovely Job Seeker Premium accounts on LinkedIn.
Search for people with “seeking” or “looking” or “searching” in their profiles (see the fab blog about this from the superb @BooleanBlackBelt on this.
Use Bullhorn Reach and its gorgeous Radar feature to spot movers and shakers.
Think about something a little different with jobs – don’t post a job, ask your community for help finding someone… see if that works!
2. Attract the passives
Get on the dance floor, dump the Funky Chicken and Office Robot dance in favour of some carefully selected moves designed to attract (I’ll let you decide how far to take this!)
Optimise your profile to not just bore me to death with your fab recruitment skills and multitude of jobs but to let me know what you know about me (my world, sector, job, contacts etc…)
Demonstrate, don’t irritate! Share content which I like (if you don’t know what this is you’ve been dancing with yourself for too long! Stop talking at me and listen to me).
I think that we all know that not everyone is a candidate – so can we stop acting like they are?
About the Author:
Lisa Jones is a Director at Barclay Jones, a Consultancy working with agency recruiters, corporate recruiters and B2Bs advising them on the most effective use of technology, web and social media to improve their business processes, recruitment and bottom line. Follow Lisa on Twitter, her business Facebook page, read her blog, check out her Pinterest page and connect via LinkedIn.
By Vinda Rao
Today we released the 2013 North American Social Recruiting Activity Report. The findings were quite surprising. Among the highlights:
Early adopters of social recruiting use a wider variety of social media than later adopters. While the percentage of recruiters using Facebook and Twitter has gone down from 2011 to 2012, the percentage of early adopters from 2011 using these networks has gone up.
Recruiters are relying heavily on LinkedIn, because its value is clear. 64% of recruiters used only LinkedIn for social recruiting in 2012, compared to 48% in 2011, and with good reason. Jobs posted on LinkedIn received more views than jobs posted on Twitter and Facebook put together.
Recruiters are under-utilizing Twitter and Facebook. Only 12% of recruiters were connected to all three social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter – in 2012. Half of North American recruiters using Twitter for recruiting have fewer than 50 followers.
Facebook isn’t a highly-utilized social recruiting tool because it isn’t popular among recruiters – not because it doesn’t work. Facebook is the largest social network on the planet, but only 22% of recruiters used Facebook for recruiting in 2012, versus 27% who used Twitter. However, 16.7% of recruiters successfully used Facebook to place candidates versus just 12.7% with Twitter.
For more information on North American recruiters’ social media activity, download the full report for free: http://sites.bullhorn.com/SocRecReport_2013?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Blog+post&utm_campaign=SRA+blog+post
By Adam Stober
As the battle for talented candidates rages, recruiters are always on the lookout for an edge. Anything that can help bring in quality candidates or save a recruiter some time can be the difference between making a placement or wondering what you could have done faster.
Our vision at Bullhorn Reach has always been to help recruiters leverage social media and search engines to bring in great candidates, particularly those that are hard-to-find. While some job seekers are actively submitting applications to postings on job boards, many more are simply searching social media. People spend more time than ever on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and are most open to hearing about new opportunities from people in their network.
Since social media provides access to candidates through connections who want to help their friends, you might think it’s a no-brainer for recruiters to build up an engaged following on social media and post jobs on a regular basis. However, recruiters are way too busy as is, and it can be tough to make time for social media when faced with a ringing phone, an overflowing inbox, and the constant barrage of distractions that manage to come up every single day.
Wouldn’t it be great if recruiters could post to social media without spending the time needed to effectively circulate job postings and build a following? Even the free edition of Bullhorn Reach helps to automate postings to social media, and today we’re proud to announce the introduction of Teamcast, exclusively in Bullhorn Reach Team.
With Teamcast, a company can help recruiters get more candidates through social media while having them invest less time in their outreach. From a company perspective, Teamcast can be an incredibly powerful tool to increase reach, as even a modest recruiting agency can promote consistent messaging and access tens of thousands of connections through the social networks of its recruiters. This is the future of collaborative social recruiting, and it could be your secret weapon in the battle for candidates. If you’d like to learn more about how your organization could use Bullhorn Reach Team to get more high-quality candidates, please reach out.
Adam Stober is a product marketing manager at Bullhorn, focusing on Bullhorn Reach Team.