Introduction

As part of Social Media Week London, BraveNewTalent.com brought together experts and practitioners in the digital and social recruitment sectors to discuss the concept, capabilities and concerns surrounding this fast-emerging recruitment channel.

A Conversation on Social Recruitment, hosted by BraveNewTalent, explored how social recruiting can not only be cost effective, but incredibly powerful method of creating an international network. Speakers included Lucian Tarnowski, CEO of BraveNewTalent; Alex Hoye, BraveNewTalent Chairman and CEO of Latitude Group, a leading digital marketing services company; and Matt Alder, digital recruitment expert and founder of Metashift.

BraveNewTalent presented information about how it used the power of social media to recruit delegates for One Young World, the world’s first global youth leadership summit held in London in February 2010.

The Premise

As Lucian Tarnowski, CEO of BraveNewTalent commented; “Recruitment is all about relationships and social media is the most impactful channel outside of real world communication. Used correctly, it can lower costs, improve results and have a positive impact on employer brands.”

A central topic during the debate was defining social recruitment. Matt Alder’s statement that “social recruitment is NOT advertising on social media” set the focus on the more obvious question of what didn’t fit under the umbrella term. Alex Hoye added the point that giving mandate to another person to be your social ‘voice’ should not be within the definition as it is vital for your brand and business personality to shine through.  The simplest sum-up was provided by Matt Alder: “Social recruiting is simply using social channels to find the best people for an organisation.”

Rear View Mirror

As with any evolutionary developments, looking at what has gone before can provide some interesting insight. Alex Hoye suggested that just 6 months ago, the big question was whether to get involved in social media conversations as opposed to simply tracking mentions of a business or brand, whereas today the focus is on what to proactively talk about. This shows just how quickly the concept of social media communications has been adopted by the business community in general.

Matt Alder commented; “As with internet recruitment in the late 90’s, there are few standard bearers for social recruitment currently, and a lot of effort is still required to achieve any ROI.” He went on to say that the big technology companies are yet again leading by example, with companies such as Cisco and Microsoft putting social recruitment at the heart of their efforts both in the US and Europe.

Bill Boorman, organiser of the popular Recruitment Unconference event series, gave a further example of Deloitte’s in New Zealand, which has risen to third position in the list of companies graduates want to work for due to their engagement with Facebook as a communications channel. Closer to home, there have been little pockets of activity from brands such as New Look and Sky, which are working hard and achieving good results from recruiting within Twitter and Facebook respectively.

Looking Ahead

2010 is the time when social recruitment converts from ‘buzz’ to ‘action’. The expert panel agreed that this year there will be a growing number of case studies and examples of social media in action that will incentivise and inform others about their own opportunities in this area. Of course, the recent economic climate has not been conducive to new ideas and formats, but there is a growing belief in the potential of social recruitment and a number of employer brands will gain significant ROI and profile due to their efforts in this area.

Further into the future, the full adoption of social technology as a business channel will only come about when companies have brought it into the heart of their business, understanding it from the inside out.  “It may take a generation to get there, but when the top tier management are those who grew up and built their careers utilising the social media tools and techniques we’re talking about today, there will be no question about social media’s validity and capability to find and recruit people for a business” proposed Alex Hoye.

Monologue… Dialogue… ‘Multilogue’

One of the biggest changes social media has brought about is the ability to have conversations en masse with a wide-spread audience. This is what BraveNewTalent calls ‘multilogue’ and it is the cornerstone of social recruitment.

Lucian Tarnowski explains; “The early days of the web were pure monologue, where information was presented with no options for response or discussion. ‘Web 2.0’, which started to come to life in 2004, then brought content generation and interaction capabilities that allowed people to engage in dialogue by adding their voice and commenting via text, voice and video. Today’s social media world has evolved this much further. Social network technology has enabled both social media sites, and any others that utilise elements of social media, to offer a range of conversation tools that allow people to have open conversations with anyone and everyone on any topic imaginable.”

Social Media Circus

The possibility that ‘social media’ is merely a fad was also explored, due in part to the hype that has surrounded it for some time now. The wealth of statistical information available and each person’s own experiences with the medium suggests otherwise though. If Facebook were a country, it would have the 4^th largest population globally with 400 million members, while for the UK 11% of all time online is now spent on social networking sites, second only to time on search engines such as Google.

However, as Matt Alder stated “Every single employer won’t use social media for recruitment in years to come. The adoption curve for those who do take it up will be steeper and faster than we saw with online recruitment however, rapidly ramping up over the next 18 to 24 months.”

One of the reasons for the lack of total take-up is the requirement for and perception of ‘quality’. Recruiters and those hiring direct have a simple need, to find the best possible person for the job. If it is felt that social media opens up the role to a wider range of people, including those who are not a good fit, the time taken to sift and sort through applications will reduce the channel’s effectiveness and the usefulness of social recruitment as a whole.

As social media interaction, opportunity and content continues to grow, how to scale up accordingly whilst still having that all-important ‘human touch’ will require a solid, sensible strategy from the start.

Spam Trap?

Many people at the event, and in the wider business community, are concerned about the rise of social media ‘spam’ – a term classically denoting email communications that are either not requested or not wanted by the recipient. For those publicising out job vacancies and finding candidates via broader channels, how those communications are received, rated and used is a valid consideration.

Social media is also very different to email. People have more control over what they see and receive and are more attuned and receptive to sifting through information to find value. Using Twitter as an example, people will follow others for a period of time when the content they post is deemed useful, unfollowing when that usefulness comes to an end. Similarly, many find information on social networks by simply searching within them for contacts or information of value, something which is impossible with the direct and relatively private nature of email communications.

Lucian Tarnowski added the point that ‘job spam’ goes both ways, especially for graduates in the current climate. Recruiters blast out job vacancies many times via multiple channels, and conversely, candidates blast out their CV to multiple employers with the aim of securing a job. Both methodologies are lacking, and both can and should be evolved by bringing social media into the mix.

Broadcasting vs. Engagement

A simple way to delineate social media communications is to view them as either a feed or a conversation. Social recruitment offers both a method for alerting people to job opportunities, as well as a channel for engaging in conversations about the role and the candidate. Placing social media communications within these two distinct groupings both simplifies the theory and makes sense of the practice.

As Alex Hoye commented; “We can interact with social media in very different ways. Why not use a news stream to publicise jobs and find potential candidates, then route them to another profile, perhaps on another social network even, to have an open conversation about the requirements for the role? One person might ask a question in this public forum, but if the vacancy is popular, another 100 may be thinking the same thing. This immediately makes social media a supportive, time-saving channel rather than an extra burden.”

In the offline world, a careers fair is a good comparison. There employers may well be asked the same question ad infinitum, with each person requiring a direct answer. Social media negates the need for this repetition, at the same time as creating a repository of supporting information potential candidates can dip into any time they choose.

Raj Anand, an entrepreneur and social media strategist at the event, raised the point that social media has the potential for much more than a simple ‘job advert’. “It’s not just about the vacancies themselves, social media gives people the chance to view pictures, videos and blogs to get a first-hand perspective and a much better overview of a company which has a lot of value to the individual.”

Matt Alder used the example of Dell’s Twitter strategy to explain the split approach further. Dell built one of the largest current communities on Twitter by engaging in conversations with people who talked about their products as well as those who simply wanted a good deal when purchasing their products. This double-sided strategy has ensured their exclusive Twitter coupon codes have been well received, reportedly generating over $1 million sales for the company.  Focusing back in on recruitment, he spoke about how TwitterJobSearch, an aggregator of vacancies posted onto Twitter, is sending its employers and hirers hundreds of CVs a week, simply by making available jobs easily found amongst all the other content.

Quality versus Quantity

The sheer weight of communications flow has made social media management an important consideration within social recruitment. Combined with the requirement to ensure candidates of the highest possible quality are found for every vacancy, those responsible for recruitment are rightly concerned.  Yet technology can again be deployed to support and enhance the results achieved via social recruitment. Matt Alder explained how Microsoft uses technology to segment its pool of potential candidates according to ability. With the wealth of information available within social media communities today, it is possible to assess and categorise a potential candidate before officially requesting their CV. Similarly, BraveNewTalent is exploring ways of supporting its clients in automating some of the initial talent pool analysis so that they can quickly focus attention on the most suitable candidates for any given role.

Once an employer has created its initial social media ‘talent pool’, the benefits are more easily felt. Allen & Overy, a leading legal firm and BraveNewTalent client, has an active community of individuals who all want to work for the business and are profiling their skills, experience and communications directly towards that goal. This appears to be the holy grail for recruitment as a whole and the true benefit of social recruitment – the ability to build a self-propagating community of potential candidates who are in essence pitching themselves for the job via social media.

As one attendee summed up for the room “it doesn’t matter how you describe it or what methodology you use, employers need quality and talent to support their business. If we focus too hard on the way we communicate, the simple fact that there is no substitute for a quality candidate could get overlooked.”

Learning from One Young World

BraveNewTalent’s work with One Young World was then outlined and used as a prime example of the value of social recruitment. Founded by David Jones and Kate Robertson of Euro RSCG Worldwide to find new solutions to global issues, One Young World has brought together hundreds of people under 25, from over 100 countries, to address major global challenges with counsellors including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bob Geldof and Muhammad Yunus.

BraveNewTalent was enlisted to manage the delegate recruitment campaign, incorporating all major social media channels and tactics, to raise awareness and drive delegate registrations from around the world. “This project has taught us a lot about using social media to recruit people;”commented Lucian Tarnowski. “The target audience, loosely termed Gen Y or the Net Generation, are the primary authority on the ways of the web. Growing up with this technology, this group has a natural understanding of how best to utilise the internet and if we approached them incorrectly, we could have been met with a stony wall of indifference. “

Following the creation of a primary website, the BraveNewTalent team built and deployed a Facebook application so that all communications, discussions, voting and registration could be conducted within social media itself, vastly decreasing administration time and budget. Complementary groups, pages and profiles were developed and managed on BraveNewTalent, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and WAYN.

Engagement started within days of the sites and profiles going live and continued throughout the year. All the opportunities provided by social media were incorporated, from microblogging to status updates, videos to viral. Cross posting of content between the various networks allowed people to fully traverse One Young World’s online presence, at the same time as maximising the promotion of support provided by the world leaders involved.

BraveNewTalent’s Facebook application, with over 100,000 monthly active users, quickly became the hub of the conversation. Candidates’ natural understanding of the medium meant they could independently communicate with organisers, supporters and other potential delegates, while BraveNewTalent was able to release news and guidance to all interested parties through a single, fully integrated channel.

The campaign resulted in over 15 million people receiving information about One Young World and 100,000 votes being cast for potential delegates from 140 different countries. This important test-bed campaign showed that spreading the net as far and wide as possible to drive initial engagement, then evolving the communications channel to a single network harnessed and supported both the candidates and One Young World itself.

At the same time, it has brought some of the world’s most proficient graduates and future leaders onto the BraveNewTalent network and proved that when used correctly, social media is the cheapest and most effective method available for finding and engaging with quality candidates.

Final Thoughts

Social recruitment is set to mature much faster than online recruitment. By proving the capabilities of the medium, both during and following a period where employers are keenly focused on reducing costs, social recruitment will evolve into a simple, yet intricate recruitment channel.

Lucian Tarnowski summed up on behalf of the panel; “Social recruitment can and will be very disruptive. Not only can it connect people with companies they want to work for, it also has the ability to build and enhance an employer brand, as well as provide engagement, training and development at very little cost before an employee even starts work.”