Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/169755
HRO Today Forum Preview is actually current employees (42 per cent of hires), followed by employee referrals (24.5 per cent). This means that, statistically speaking, your time spent building and engaging on social media should focus less on engaging prospective employees and more on increasing awareness of open positions and leveraging the connections of your current employees instead. One great way to do this is by starting closed groups on Facebook or LinkedIn, where your employees are likely already spending their time, and populating them with both current jobs and insights/advice on career growth and management specific to your organisation. Another is by adopting or using an existing internal collaboration tool such as Sharepoint or Yammer to push out career-related information and opportunities to your existing employee population. Offering structured referral bonuses or indirect incentives for successful referrals gives employees a reason to stay engaged, informed, and active in these groups, as well as motivation for turning ad hoc referrals into ongoing brand ambassadors—necessary allies in the war for top talent. Bottom line: Engage your employees and hiring managers; they're your most likely candidates, or the most likely to have that next hire in their network. Social media is the easiest way to connect the dots and transform their connections into candidates and hires. Don't look at social media as a sourcing tool, however. Think of it as an engagement and relationship building tool; indeed, the same Career XRoads report showed that whilst 92 per cent of employers use social media for recruiting, those same social networks only accounted for a paltry 2.9 per cent of hires, proving that these channels remain more effective for sustaining long-term relationships than creating short-term, just-in-time hires. Why should top talent want to work for you? Part of social media's value lies in its intrinsic democratisation of information, and with more than 90 per cent of employers using social media for recruiting, this means that, as opposed to a proprietary database such as an applicant tracking system (ATS), social networks have shared databases. This means that if you successfully use these channels to find and engage a qualified, interesting, and available candidate, chances are that your competition has, too. 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. The key to successful competitive differentiation lies in building a coherent employer brand across channels and platforms that appeal not only to the head, like traditional job descriptions, but also the heart. That's why accurately representing your company culture and prominently featuring your organisation's current employees in your social efforts is critical. Culture branding creates an effective screening technique, increasing organisational fit while providing a realistic portrayal of what your company is like, and why it's a great place to build a career. The easiest way to do this, again, is by engaging the company's current employees, providing them with the training and tools to effectively represent your employer brand. It's critical to enable, rather than enforce, social media usage. Bottom line: The conversation is already happening, and (scary for most HR pros) there's no way to control it. But letting candidates and employees know you're listening sends a powerful message that you care about what they have to say and are there to support them. Because that's what managing talent is really all about. Job descriptions, title, compensation, and recruitment advertising look a lot alike, but at the end of the day, top talent makes its decision based on one single competitive differentiation: your company's culture and the people who create it. Matt Charney is director of marketing at Talemetry. He will be presenting at the HRO Today Forum Europe, 12-14 November, in London. SUMMER 2013 | www.hroglobal.com [13]