Menu

facebook

HOW TO: Use Social Media for Recruiting


This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Finding the right candidate for a job is like finding a new apartment: timing, finances and quality all have to align just right. And somehow, the pool of options always seems to feel both prohibitively large and prohibitively limited at the same time.

So, in both types of searches, online tools have become invaluable. But while tweeting out a call for a good real estate agent is fairly straightforward, using social media for recruiting has nuances that, if overlooked, can render the process far less useful. Here are a few key pointers from experts in the field to remember when getting started.

1. Start Early

Simply tweeting out a link to a job posting might get you some viable candidates, but to really make sure you’re reaching your target audience, it’s important to cultivate your personality as an employer early on. “Social recruiting is about getting engaged and having conversations with people before they’re even thinking about you as an employer,” says Bruce Morton, CMO of Allegis Group Services, a company that provides human resources consulting. Morton also suggests that recruiters could “learn a lot from the consumer industry” in terms of marketing. In that analogy, your company is your brand, and the available job is just one of many products you have to offer. Keep that in mind when cultivating a social media presence for your brand that will eventually allow you to incorporate job announcements.

2. Know Your Audience

These days, it’s the rare holdout who has avoided creating a Facebook profile. But just because potential candidates have a presence on a given social network doesn’t mean that it’s the right site to use when targeting them. Debbie Fischer, human resources manager for advertising agency Campbell Mithun, found resounding success by using Twitter as a recruiting tool for summer interns. But, she cautioned that “you have to think about the types of roles you’re recruiting for,” because while college students can be open about their job hunt, more seasoned professionals may not feel comfortable publicly sharing that they are considering a career move. For those types of roles, Morton says that LinkedIn can be a good place to start, because, as he puts it, “what LinkedIn has done is given people the permission to put their resume online,” without fear of repercussions from current employers.

3. Get Creative

When you make the foray into social recruiting, you are entering a space in which both passive and active job seekers are already receiving a massive amount of information on a daily basis. So, to get the best results, your message has to stand out enough to make people take note. Additionally, presenting your job openings in a creative way allows companies to show more about their personalities as organizations, which in turn helps potential candidates get a feel for whether or not the culture is likely to be a good fit.

This year, Campbell Mithun hired for their “Lucky 13” internship program through a process that required those interested to apply by submitting 13 tweets over 13 days. Due to its novel use of social media, the campaign garnered press from national outlets like AdAge.com, as well as Mashable. Even a straightforward job description can spread like wildfire on social networks if it’s written in a way that sparks discussion, like this announcement from a Florida newspaper that readers found refreshing for its candid and witty tone. And if you have more resources, you might consider creating a short video, as corporations like Facebook have done, to present your material in a more engaging manner. Morton says that when seeking Generation Y talent, recruiters can’t assume that candidates will read a page of text, “but they’ll watch a video.”

4. Be Open in Return

Finding candidates through social channels means you’ll be asking them to share information with you via possibly public means. For the process to work, employers need to be willing to share information as well (while, of course, carefully and closely guarding any personal information they might have about their applicants). Morton says some employers express staunch resistance to putting jobs on Twitter, when in fact, the listings in question are all on Twitter through unofficial channels anyway. For Campbell Mithun, the finishing touch of a successful social media-driven hiring process was getting to showcase the talented, web-savvy young people they had selected. Kristine Olson, the agency’s Director of Corporate Communications, had a communications strategy in place that was designed, fittingly, to use social media channels to share the results of the campaign, noting that the HR team “had to be really open to allow us to publicize who we were hiring.”

Do you have any success stories about finding great candidates through social recruiting? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, SchulteProductions

More About: career, facebook, human resources, job recruiting, linkedin, social media, trending, twitter

For more Business & Marketing coverage:Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business & Marketing channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad


In a data driven world, marketing and IT must come together

Like oil and vinegar, marketing and IT just don’t mix well. Never have. Since the two industries first met way back in 1994–when a digital magazine called HotWire (an offshoot of Wired) played host to the world’s first display ad–these bedfellows soon set up shop in different corners of the internet.

Today, they remain mostly segregated within the corporate offices and advertising budgets of the world’s biggest brands. Even as folks embrace data for everything from customer relationship management to testing the best news headlines,the traditional advertising industry is still happiest storyboarding sexy high-concept campaigns featuring supermodels racing German cars against jungle cats in exotic locals (shot on location in Bora Bora, of course).

Creativity, expression and artistic license drive the industry. Data and analytics …. not so much.

But as social media flourishes and marketers try to use it to their advantage, it’s really time to bridge the gap and get these departments speaking the same language, said Peter Kim, Chief Strategy officer at Dachis Group, an enterprise-focused social-media consultant firm. During an interview Wednesday, Kim said the relationship between the creative and the IT side is the “same as it ever was,” but that needs to change, especially as consumers live more digital lives.

Big data, cheap processing, and social media, are changing the advertising and marketing landscape. IT has been quietly hammering away on advanced analytics systems and platforms to aggregate and filter data, while sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can provide exactly the detailed demographic data that marketers say they need. Put it all together and you have technology that can spit out almost personalized advertising on one side and deliver quantitative measurements to gauge the effect every little marketing decision has on the bottom line.

Kim says there are three major issues keeping IT and marketers apart.

  1. Budget cycles. While IT budgets follow a three or five-year cycle, marketing budgets are allocated on a quarterly basis. But getting processing power or software to process big data or manage business intelligence isn’t a cheap quarterly expense (unless you use the cloud). The two need to get more in sync if the departments are to work together to create campaigns and projects.
  2. And to justify what might be larger spending plans for more gear or technology, marketing has to have a means of showing executives how that will pay off. But to do that, the industry needs accepted metrics to determine the impact of social media. While we can measure display ads and click-throughs, there is no clear way to measure return on investment in the social sphere, something Kim believes is a big opportunity. Without metrics, brands can’t understand the actual value of social media and the best ways to implement social strategies.
  3. Finally, among some of the creative types, there is an aversion to big data. Getting marketers to understand the world of big data is a challenge, Kim said. And while platforms like Facebook and Twitter are giant storehouses of consumer information, information overload is a huge problem. Plus, “it’s boring, and on the back end,” Kim said.

Alas, identifying the barriers standing in the way is the easy part. Breaking them down is tricky. Can companies bridge the gap between marketing and IT? Should they?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

Governments Are Still Trying to Kill, Replace or Undo the Internet

For all the optimism — much of it well-placed — about the Internet and social tools like Twitter and Facebook helping to create revolutions in the Middle East, there is a corresponding tide of repression, censorship and surveillance by governments aimed at the Internet and the freedoms it allows. A new UNESCO report looks at the scope of these efforts and the emerging effort to create a form of “digital rights” that can counter-balance the attempts of repressive governments to shut down free speech on the Internet. Meanwhile, both Iran and Syria have upped the ante in their attempts to blockade the web.

Iran wants to create a “national Internet”

Iran, which shut down almost 70 percent of its Internet during the demonstrations in that country in 2009, has stepped up its efforts to wall off dissent: according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal , Iranian authorities are said to be considering a “national Internet” plan that could disconnect that country from the Internet and confine users to an authorized and government-controlled version. The government is also said to be working on its own computer operating system that would replace Windows and presumably make it easier to build censorship into the computers that citizens use.

In Syria, meanwhile, the government actually loosened earlier restrictions on the Internet and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — but as Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, these moves appear to have been designed in part to make it easier to monitor and apprehend dissidents. For example, there have been a number of reports of Syrian citizens being detained and forced to reveal their Facebook passwords. And there has also been a rise in hacking attempts aimed at dissident websites (as documented by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab) which appear to be government directed.

UNESCO hopes to spur protection

The UNESCO report, which is entitled “Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet,” (the full PDF version is available here) is an analysis of existing research into how governments around the world are trying to limit use of the Internet by dissidents, and also how they are using the web — including social media such as Facebook — to monitor and crack down on dissent. The organization also said it hopes that the report prompts more protection and support for Internet use and freedom of speech as an essential human right:

Freedom of expression is not an inevitable outcome of technological innovation. It can be diminished or reinforced by the design of technologies, policies and practices – sometimes far removed from freedom of expression. This synthesis points out the need to focus systematic research on this wider ecology shaping the future of expression in the digital age.

The report notes that Internet use has found legal and government protection in a number of jurisdictions, including France — where the French Constitutional Council ruled that the freedom to access “public online communication services” was a basic human right (although that country still went forward with a “three strikes” law to prevent piracy) — and Finland, which last year became the first country to make broadband Internet a fundamental human right (Costa Rica’s highest court has also ruled that the Internet is a fundamental right and mandated the government to provide universal access).

At the same time, however, many governments have also adopted new tools of censorship and surveillance, including “deep-packet inspection” and various methods of filtering, the report says, as well as IP blocking — which countries such as China use to prevent users from accessing certain websites. The UNESCO study even notes that authorities in Western nations, including the United States, have used social networks to monitor and then apprehend citizens, including one case in which a G-20 protester was arrested for being part of a group that posted messages on Twitter:

One arrest made at a Pittsburgh motel by Pennsylvania State Police was of a 41 year old New York social worker, named Elliot Madison, for being part of a group that posted messages on the micro-blogging service Twitter that were designed to help protesters at the G-20 summit “avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.”

But the biggest trend the report describes is the increasing determination by repressive governments in countries like Iran and Syria to both shut down dissent online — in some cases by shutting off Internet access completely — and to monitor and track their own citizens. The Egyptian authorities did both of these things during the revolution in that country earlier this year, although their attempts ultimately failed and President Hosni Mubarak was desposed (the former dictator has since been fined by an Egyptian court for his attempts to shut down the Internet).

The UNESCO report also describes some of the initiatives that both public advocacy groups and governments have been making to fight back against these repressive regimes, including the OpenNet Initiative, which is a joint venture between the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard that tracks and catalogues filtering and censorship by governments around the world.

More than anything, the picture that UNESCO paints is of global arms race — but instead of guns and tanks, the weapons are computers and hackers and Internet-tracking tools, and increasingly social networking sites as well.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Moo

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):



Report: 96% of Americans under 50 are on Facebook

2011-05-31_1442

In a shocking report, a study executed by the Bank of America (BofA) indicates that some 96% of Americans under the age of 50 use Facebook.

A total of 418 participants were included in the polling. Such a limited sample size will surely bolster calls that the survey was statistically unreliable, but the persons questioned were supposed to “roughly resemble” US demographics as a whole.

Of course, Facebook has a rule that no one under the age of 13 can use its service, so it could be assumed that either BofA only interviewed persons over the age of 13, or that the company adapted its data to weed out any youngsters.

On the other side of the coin, there are millions upon millions of underage Facebook users, according to ConsumerReports, opening the door to the possibility that BofA’s data needed no correction.

That aside, what the study reveals is far more important than the hot statistic that it produced: Facebook is racing towards market saturation in the United States. If you were looking for a simple way to show the difference between Facebook and its smaller (albeit quite different) rival Twitter, this is it.

Other interesting elements of the report include the fact that for 82% of those polled, ‘privacy protection’ was their biggest source of concern with using Facebook:

Also, over half of those asked are seeing their Facebook usage rise, years into the life of the product:

Finally, more than half of those in the study check their profile at least once a day:

According to Quantcast, Facebook reaches nearly 140 million people in the United States every month. Even more, according to other sources, more than 40% of US citizens in late 2010 had Facebook accounts. That number could only have risen since then.

With 96% market penetration for the listed demographic, Facebook is now perhaps the single most complete way to reach, and even micro-target, non-seniors in the United States. As corporations pick up on the fact, whether advertising rates on Facebook spike remains to be seen, but it does seem likely.Top Image Credit, BusinessInsider

Load More