Generating Names Or Making Connections?

// September 23rd, 2009 // Employment Branding, Recruitment Marketing

This morning, I saw an email offering to teach recruiters how to identify talent using Facebook, Twitter and a few other social networks, by doing site x-rays for search terms. It’s not a bad way to identify what people do for a job, assuming they’ve put that in their information. Here’s my problem – those people aren’t candidates. They aren’t looking for you. And in finding (and potentially approaching) them through a technological means, are you putitng your brand at risk?

Internal recruiters are the mouthpiece of a brand, not just an opportunity. When you’re in-house , your job isn’t just to fill a role, but to add to an existing team that’s already a part of your business. There’s a fundamental difference between agency recruiting and in-house recruiting. In house, you see your mistakes every day. Your bad placements are there, being performance managed or managed out, and it sticks to your reputation. No one within the business remembers the names of their agency recruiters with the same tenacity that they remember the guys sitting down the hall.
Which means in-house, you’re recruiting for a culture, not just the job itself. You know the culture better than anyone else, and so it’s a massive part of what you’re looking for. You know the fit you need for the team. You know your value proposition. And you know your brand, and how valuable that is in market, because it’s what gets people to love you, or leave you.

How do you apply culture to sharking for resumes on other people’s websites, or on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Flickr, or Twitter, or anything else? Identifying that there’s talent using a specific platform is one thing, but how do you get them to connect with your brand, not just your individual identity? In order to give them the brand experience, they have to have something they can marinade in. I don’t think you can do that unless you already have that brand portal on the platform that you’re frantically trawling for resumes. You’re running the risk, not just of communicating poorly (and perhaps a little desperately) with potential superstars, but of representing your company in a way that makes potential hires less likely to want to approach you.

If you’re going to recruit on social networks, make it SOCIAL. Don’t barge into an online discussion screaming at people that you might give them a job. Talk to them. Yes, Twitter and Facebook can generate a list of names, but it’s the very least of what they can do when you learn to converse, not just contact.