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HROTG_Summer_2013

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HRO Today Forum Preview No Silver Bullet Recruiting via social media requires patience and planning. By Matt Charney There's no doubt that when it comes to recruiting and hiring, social media long ago moved from the margins to the mainstream. The exponential increase in employer adoption has become a big business in its own right, with a rapidly growing ecosystem of new tools and emerging technologies dedicated to helping companies find, attract, and engage better talent faster through social networks. According to a recent survey, 55 per cent of employers currently plan to increase their social recruiting spend. That represents a growing share of the estimated $140 billion that organisations budget for recruiting products and services annually, giving birth to a cottage industry of consultants, contractors, and content marketers. The competition has become cutthroat, with essentially every purported "expert" not only positioning social media from a strategic recruiting and hiring process perspective, but also suggesting that it offers some sort of talent management panacea. The fundamental truth of the matter, however, is that when it comes to social recruiting, there are actually no experts, nor established benchmarks for success—only experimentation and emerging best practices. And, as every seasoned talent manager knows, there's no silver bullet when it comes to recruiting and retaining top talent. Intertwined, Comprehensive That's why it's imperative for recruiters, and the employers they represent, to stop looking at social media as a siloed, selfcontained strategy and rather as an integral, fully intertwined component of a comprehensive talent acquisition strategy. Social media can be great for broadcasting your reqs or building your brand, but at the end of the day, it, like every other recruitment advertising tool or technology, is simply a medium. And, to apply McLuhan's aphorism, it's the message that really matters in defining social recruiting success—or failure. Developing, refining, and testing that message to ensure that it resonates with your target audience—in this case, current and potential candidates—is a critical first step in developing a social recruiting strategy. Yet it is often overlooked. With SUMMER 2013 | www.hroglobal.com [11]

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