Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/169755
HRO Today Forum Preview low associated costs and few barriers to entry, recruiters can be tempted to jump into social media feet first. Without a defined strategy and sustainable, measurable processes in place, however, this feet-first approach inevitably leads to employers getting in over their heads. Creating this strategy involves answering three critical, yet crucial questions that every employer or talent organisation must address directly and comprehensively. The bad news for recruiters (and even worse news for consultants) is that for social media, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to answering these essential questions. Like social networks themselves, user experiences—and meaningful engagements—are highly subjective, highly personalised experiences. The good news is that if you know how to recruit, you already know how, more or less, to use social media to recruit. You also know the answers necessary to build a strategic, measurable framework for social recruiting success. Testing, Testing Before rolling out any strategy, however, make sure your message matters with market testing. Hiring managers, HR business partners, recruiting colleagues, and current employees (particularly recent hires) represent crucial stakeholders in the talent acquisition and retention process. They can also serve as ideal focus groups to test and refine your social media messaging and positioning. Because, as every HR pro knows, performance-based feedback matters—like whether or not top talent accepts your offer. There are three questions to turn connections into candidates, and candidates into hires: What's your biggest challenge when it comes to finding and retaining top talent? There's always that one req or passive candidate profile that's the most pressing, the most critical, and, by general rule, the most difficult for which to source. It's the one with an empty talent pipeline where "just-in-time" was yesterday. And, of course, market demand is creating a revolving door for the "A players" whom you've already managed to bring on board. No matter what the title or department, if it's the role or function that is the most imperative to your company's business objectives, it's the one you need to concentrate your social recruiting efforts on. It's likely the one that's taking up most of your time, anyway. And the social channels, content, and messaging that will resonate with, say, a Ruby-on-Rails developer is going to differ significantly from retail general managers. Like job boards, these candidates not only have completely [12] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SUMMER 2013 different niche sites (e.g. GitHub, StackOverflow vs. the National Retail Federation Community) but also different segments, like groups and fan pages, within general sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well. Fortunately, Facebook's Open Graph search makes it easy to find, follow, and engage with groups or specific pages simply by typing in the target title or industry; similarly, hashtags on Twitter (try Twubs hashtag directory) are great at getting in front of the right candidates and standing out from the noise whilst staying on top of industry news, trends, and other relevant information. That's why it's important to not only know which candidates you're targeting, but to tailor your social efforts specifically to them by not only targeting for specific job openings, but adding expertise, insight, and value to industry- and function-specific conversations. Engage to make a professional connection, not to make a hire. Bottom line: Social media saves time and should enhance, not replace, your current talent acquisition strategies. But it won't fix what's fundamentally broken. So if it comes down to elements such as negative market perception or low recruitment ad response rate, you're best served spending your time addressing the underlying issues, instead of exacerbating them through social amplification. What are you doing to overcome this challenge for recruitment and retention? To build an effective social recruiting strategy, you have to know your objectives. And if you're in the business of people, there's only one objective: to find the best talent possible as efficiently, and effectively, as possible. This means being able not only to demonstrate tangible results, but to measure, analyse, and report on those results. That's why, as great as social media is at generating the unstructured part of the big data puzzle, you can't build a business case, or quantify the value of social recruiting, without first building the benchmarks and dashboards incorporating historical, structured data. In other words, meaningful metrics matter. And getting an accurate picture of source-of-hire data might be the most meaningful metric of all in building a social recruiting plan. While these obviously differ by companies, the 2013 Career XRoads Source of Hire Study, arguably the most comprehensive report in the industry, evidences some common and pervasive trends across verticals, functions, and locations. This year's report shows that, for all sourcing and spend dedicated to identifying and recruiting external talent, the top source of hire