The London 2012 Olympics marked a big celebration for social media: it was the ‘First Truly Social Olympics’. The online realm of communications has changed a lot in recent years and it’s not just huge televised events like the Games that it’s affecting – the world of recruitment is also starting to feel its influence and nowhere is this more obvious than in the changes brought to the internal recruitment function.
Kicking us off is an article from Tony Restell at social-hire. Tony recently published a series of blogs giving advice to candidates on how better to succeed at getting hired in a vastly changed jobs market but his advice is equally applicable to the recruitment functions themselves.
For example, Tony warns candidates that ‘if your last career move was more than 18 months ago, the chances are you have much to learn need to completely rethink your strategy to help ensure you succeed in your next career move.’
One can then turn this advice to recruitment functions and ask them ‘what have you done in the last 18 months to keep your IR process up to date?’
Now IR has access to all the same tools as external recruiters the distinguishing gap in resources has closed and no longer are in-house functions restricted to ‘fishing in the relatively small pool of candidates who had already shown an interest in joining’. Perhaps the best example of this technological field levelling is recruiters’ favourite website LinkedIn which grants all recruiters access to a ‘vast numbers of less engaged candidates’ The end result?
Now most ‘major employers have now hired sizeable recruitment teams to deliver on requirements in-house’ with external agencies then acting to take on those last, difficult to fill vacancies.
This greater degree of independence has undoubtedly encouraged in-house recruiters and it is not just the conventional social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter that tech savvy brands are flocking to – video is now fast set to become the next big thing in recruitment. Both Mashable and the Undercover Recruiter have published articles stating that the key to finding the new top talent may very well lie with this content saturated, sensory rich and portable medium. Mashable suggests taking advantage of video to ‘brand your company’, ‘enhance a job description’ and ‘interview top talent,’ citing ‘time saved’ as one of the most attractive features of this strategy.
Presenting us with an informative video from TalentMinded, TUR suggests that ‘Recruitment 3.0’ is an advance that will ‘helps companies reach, engage and recruit passive as well as active candidates’ as well as ‘build community through new technology’.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that YouTube looks set to become the latest recruitment sensation. According to HireRabbit ‘job postings with a video icon are viewed 12% more than postings without video and receive a 34% greater application rate’ as their extensive infographic demonstrates. Perhaps you might want to try experimenting with video to try and reach top talent in new and interactive ways.
Or else you might try uploading a few videos of your office to help ‘brand your company as a fun, innovative place to work’. Mashable notes that ‘interested job seekers want to know more about the company culture and what life would be like as an employee’ and TUR adds that ‘employee videos help humanize a business’. With this in mind it may well be worth investing in the ‘world’s third most trafficked website’ to see if it could add a little extra efficiency and creativity to your recruitment process whilst simultaneously strengthening your company brand.
We’ll be continuing this exploration of social media and its effect on the internal recruitment function in our next blog post where we’ll be looking at more infographics, Pinterest and some ‘Crazy Social Recruitment Techniques’. In the mean time let us know your thoughts in the comments. Have you considered video a viable recruitment medium? Maybe you’re already hosting monthly webinars or building Pinboards. Or perhaps you feel developments in technology are only serving to complicate effective recruitment. Fill us in!
Recent Comments