Recently I attended the ERE Social Recruiting Summit at Google’s HQ in Mountain View. I was amazed that hundreds of major employers had converged on arguably the largest search engine’s campus to discuss their social recruiting strategies. It had me wondering why the event wasn’t held at LinkedIn or Facebook.
Being at Google, I kept asking people the simple question: “Do you have your search strategy online so that candidates can Google your jobs and find them?” And the answer was consistent: “Nope.”
This was amazing to me. There are over 220 million “job” related searches on Google each month alone (per their Adwords statistics), which is higher than any of the major job boards by a long shot. There seems to be a huge oversight on the part of talent acquisition leaders who have already jumped over several other key interactive strategies and into social media.
The unspoken theme of the conference was clearly that the social networks are the next frontier of recruiting and will solve every employer’s recruiting problems. One employer even went so far as to suggest that they weren’t even going to continue their corporate career site, but instead only build out their career site on Facebook.
While I agree that social media plays a key role in any employer’s long term strategy for attracting and maintaining relationships with key candidate segments, it’s only one part of a multi-channel interactive strategy that needs to be created.
In order for companies to bring online a true Web 2.0 strategy that can help decrease their addiction to the job boards as their only source for talent, taking a multi-channel approach will produce the desired results.
Key elements have to include search engine optimization and marketing, job aggregators and classifieds sponsorships, employee referral marketing, talent community development, and recruiter optimization (sourcing and marketing, and most importantly multi-channel source tracking, or visitor through cost-per-hire).
The other amazing thing about the conference was that only 1-2 companies were truly pursuing an interactive recruiting strategy. Most weren’t doing anything more than putting up a Facebook careers page, signing up with LinkedIn, and calling these tactics their social network recruiting strategy. Apparently the fear around brand and reputation management is paralyzing them from moving forward in their legal and PR departments of their companies.
The recruiting ad agencies are also licking their revenue chops and selling the social strategies. The problem is, as they put packages together to help employers build their social brochures as an extension of their career sites, they don’t go far enough to bring online the functionality and depth of strategy in building social recruiting channels.
True micro-communities create true talent pipelines that have integrated, actionable content (basic job search/feeds) and measurability into any ATS system which are automated and require little recruiter involvement.
Don’t get me wrong: the excitement around social media is justified. It’s a powerful future frontier for the recruiting world, but it’s a complicated and ever changing landscape that is proving to be a mystery for even the smartest consumer marketing minds.
But when there is “low hanging fruit” in much easier and proven approaches (SEO, SEM, Pay-Per-Click, Talent Community Development, etc.) that can be easily deployed and will produce short/long term results (and best of all are measurable end to end), it seems logical that employers should consider these strategies first versus the complexity and long term politics of trying to launch a comprehensive social recruiting strategy.
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June 29th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Hi Doug,
When I developed the initial concept and program for the Summit, the idea that Social Media “will solve every employer’s recruiting problems” never crossed my mind, and it was certainly not a theme for the event. No tool works in every situation, and only a fool would claim that it does.
The idea behind the Summit was to explore how Social Media tools are being used, show real world examples from companies using them, and stimulate new ideas and conversations within the profession.
Did the Summit focus on this niche to the exclusion of all else? Of course. This was not a generalist event, and it did exactly what it said it would do.
Search is effective, and it’s an important tool that should be in every recruiter’s arsenal, but there is nothing social about it.
June 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
David, I couldn’t agree more.
Perhaps Doug just appreciates the popularity of your event and he found a way to indirectly push his own product(s)? :)
June 29th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Anytime someone uses the “low hanging fruit” metaphor they should have to put a dollar in the jar. It simply doesn’t exist. SEO, SEM, talent community management all require an investment of time, talent and money. As I pointed out in the session on community building, research by Sun Microsystems indicates that talent communities require one FTE for every 10,000 visitors. SEO/SEM demand constant vigilance and having a well-thought out strategy to guide the rapid-fire decisions those techniques require. Are these techniques less expensive than advertising? As with everything in life, “that depends.” (Disclosure: I work for a recruitment marketing firm… and I’m proud of it.)
June 29th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Doug, you forgot about the best part of the presentation you did with Entice labs. You know the part when John Sullivan started demanding numbers and there were none so he said I want numbers, you guys sound like you have never spoken to a cfo before ( I know you have but it was funny) I was sure a fight was gonna break out. Made me think of the movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
First of all thanks for the informative article about the Social Recruiting Summit. For those of us who weren’t there this helps us get a slight grasp of what the overall feeling was. I agree that it’s probably not best to go totally dependant with web 2.0
You mentioned a paralyzing fear around brand and reputation is stopping progression in organizations moving forward with 2.0 recruiting. I think Susan Burns just posted a great article to get over that on her Talent Synch blog.
It’s interesting that google had such a response. Have you heard of google wave? Do you think that could help? Jeff Shwartzman’s blog on ERE had article about that not too long ago.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Social media is a vital tool that should be utilized by firms. However, is facebook really a place that is conducive to recruiting? Linkedin is perhaps, but not facebook. Students are on facebook to see what their friends are up to, not to connect with employers.
This article actually makes me want to jump out of my chair, becuause I believe my company’s platform ((www.groupereye.com/launchprogram) will be every firm’s interactive recruiting strategy.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Nicely put. Many need to realize that social media is merely a set of tools to help in the recruitment process. It is not an answer. There are simply to many variables with social media because the landscape is everchanging.
SEO is a more stable tool to focus on because it offers long term(reasonably) success…if done properly.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Had to chime in here. True Search is not Social Media per se in most people’s definition of social media. However, it is social. If you go with a broader definition of social as being the set of behaviors that characterize how people do things. To me that’s what social media gets after, making it easy for people to be people, and do what people do, on line. Along the way it tries to learn from actions and behaviors to make products better, to make tasks easier and more efficient. Given that description is there anything more social than search?
Arguments can be had on both sides, personally my social approach to recruiting involves an expanded view of what social media is, for me it includes search. Yes, I’m a jobs2web customer. Yes, I’m a friend of Doug Berg’s. I’d have the same perspective regardless.
July 2nd, 2009 at 10:10 pm
I love ya Josh, but I am going to have to respectfully disagree here.
Let’s keep things simple. For something to be social, there needs to be an actual interaction between two or more people. SEO and SEM simply is a different beast, and the logic linking this kind of marketing to social interactions seems a bit tortured to me.
Interestingly, it does not appear that Google themselves believe that search in its present state is social. Check out this interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience at http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/31/googles-marissa-mayer-social-search-is-the-future/
There’s a lot of great stuff there, but here’s a part of it:
“VentureBeat: How would you describe social search?
Marissa Mayer: We believe social search is any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection… Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you’d come up with on your own.
We know that because of the volume of searches like this that happen everyday, that the social component of search is actually very important, and it hasn’t translated well yet to the internet medium.
Social search is hard because the intuitive thing you would do online to mirror normal social networks and other social interactions just aren’t that effective, compelling or even reasonable. So, for example, from the Facebook News Feed analogy, you could just get a social network and broadcast all of everyone’s searches to everyone on their social network, but most people view search as a far more private activity than that. They’re not comfortable letting everyone in their social network know what they searched for, so such a product is clearly not reasonable.”
Social search is clearly on the way (Marissa’s quote was from before the Twitter breakout), but I do not believe that this is at all what Doug was referring to in this post.
July 4th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Sorry David but you lost me. SEO has everything to do with social interaction. The logic linking the two is inexorably tight and not tortured.
When I took my kids to see Transformers (loud clanging metal – ugh!) this weekend, I searched for “what movie should i see” and began an online interaction (ended up seeing The Proposal). Later on I might write a blog post about the movie and how to recruit in Alaska. If such interactions are not social, what are they? If they lead to increased hits to my website, why isn’t that SEO?
Those who confine SEO to a narrow set of technical skills like keyword analysis and link-building are missing out on all the fun.