Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/207525
TekTober Making Sure It's Effective Have a social recruiting strategy in place but don't know how to measure it? Ray Schreyer, manager of global talent acquisition at IBM revealed some best practices during a recent webinar (How to Create a Killer Social Recruiting Strategy from Blogging4Jobs). "If you don't have measurement you can't tell if you are going forward, backward, or standing still," he noted. Schreyer pointed out that at IBM, the company measures four distinct areas: reach, engagement, amplification, and conversion. • Reach. Get a good gauge on the amount of people you are reaching. Track this through audience members who have opted into your communications, the number of connections in LinkedIn, and Twitter followers. • Engagement. Track how your audience interacts with content published by noting the number of likes and comments received, and if it's producing interaction and engagement. • Amplification. See what type of reach your efforts are having through audience sharing with others, retweets, and videos going viral. • Conversion. Measure how many hires have resulted from your actions. Technological tools also have the ability to show the power of social recruiting programs. ADP's Marzulli reports that social analytics can deliver transparency of source of hire and time to hire. Recruiters also have the opportunity to track the interactions between candidates. Entelo's Bischke says hiring managers can do a deep dive to see what is working—like subject lines of email outreach— and what's not in terms of response rates. Plus hiring managers leading the effort want to glean on which sites are linked to success. iCISM's Vitale says recruiters can see which social media channels perform best for specific job profiles. [10] HRO TODAY MAGAZINE | OCTOBER 2013 candidate quality increase saving, the recruiting team time and money. NPR has saved more than $100,000 by moving the majority of their recruiting efforts on social media." So What's Out There? ADP's report Recruiting Trends 2013 found that 32 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees have seen a year-over-year improvement in the impact of social and mobile recruiting tools. Technology impacts the speed of the hiring process as well as the productivity of candidate. A recent study by CareerArc found that 50 percent get more applications by using social recruiting and 59 percent of companies find they get more referrals. In fact, Aberdeen Group reports that social networking sites have jumped up to the second most effective source of hire. Such marked improvements in metrics can be directly related to some of the offerings in the marketplace. iCIMS's recruiting tool Social Distribution removes the onerous task of job posting from the equation. It has the ability to automate job postings throughout social media networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter as well as more than 300 other emerging sites. "Recruiters and employees no longer need to spend copious amounts of time manually posting each job to specific social media sites," says Susan Vitale, chief strategy officer for iCIMS. But it also leverages the power of referrals. Social job posting isn't inclusive to the HR department—employees throughout the organization can set up automatic newsfeeds to communicate job openings to their professional network. "Best-in-class organizations typically boast 40 percent or more of their hires from referrals so iCIMS is putting a concerted effort around optimizing this channel," notes Vitale. Pete Kazanjy, co-founder of TalentBin, couldn't agree more. "Employee referrals have always been the most powerful recruiting method, and with social media, employee professional networks have grown exponentially compared to a decade ago, no less a generation ago." TalentBin's technology demonstrates how employees within an organization are linked and connected to the profiles in its database. Recruiters, as well as anyone else in the company who has access to the platform, can make notes about candidates and express their interactions. It's a way to crowdsource feedback for a more effective, transparent streamlined process. Integration is key. Some hiring managers would argue there is too much information out there.