Social Media for Recruitment

These results should make it clear that incorporating social networking into your recruitment strategy for 2010 and years to come is the way to go... something I would definitely encourage you to do. Companies like Deloitte, and Motorola are creating internal social networks where they are able to communicate with thousands of customers, and using them for internal collaboration. Recruiting on external social media, such as using corporate blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Careerify, and Twitter allows you to target particular demographics, which would be vital with the impending labour shortage. Expect the talent shortage to only increase as we rebound for this recession.

Now I will be highlighting how specific companies use social media to recruit the tech savvy generations of today. When talking to clients, one of the more frequent questions I get asked is how to recruit on these networks? With Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, HR must think outside the box to create a viral campaign. Users on these social mediums visit these sites mostly on a social basis. Creating a fan page on Facebook and posting job opportunities will not work effectively. Your employees will not invite their peers to join, nor would the common user land on your corporate page. Let's focus on Ernst & Young, a company who has used these social media effectively. They have been able to utilize social mediums to cultivate over 40,000 users who frequently communicate with a few recruiters with questions. Since Ernst & Young have corporate recruiters creating an interactive environment with two-way communication, a user's experience is much more pleasurable compared to the common FAQ sections most corporations provide.

In order to create a viral campaign, it must involve not only your marketing department, but also your employees. Employees are the most effective recruiting tool when incorporating social media. An average user has 120 friends on Facebook, and adding other social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace, a user has an average over 160 people. Multiply this by the number of employees that use any of these networks within your corporation, and you have the average potential of how many people you can reach out immediately. Taking Careerify as an example, amongst the three co-founders we have 2,284 people on LinkedIn and Facebook alone, which is one of the main reasons Careerify is growing, how we recruit employees, and brand ourselves. So how can you get your employees actively involved in a recruitment strategy? One way to spur employee involvement would be incentives through a contest. For example, having employees create a video that combines their personal and company life. Deloitte is the best example of this, where they created a Deloitte Film Fest, much like a film festival for their employees. Employees were asked to create a short-film that expressed Deloitte's culture and values. They had over 370 submissions and had employees vote on the best films. Once these were uploaded, they had several thousands of views simply because employees pushed traffic to these videos. Viral marketing, if done properly, can create hundreds of applications without spending the head-hunting money.

Next Topic: How specific companies are recruiting on Facebook