The Bandage Of Social Media Won’t Stop You Bleeding Talent
// May 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // Recruitment Marketing
It’s been said before that we have moved into an age where adopting the new has overtaken mastering the old. We embrace platforms and technologies as they surface, usually in relation to how submerged we are in the innovation pool. The more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to know something new is coming, and the more likely you are to try and integrate it into your people strategy. It’s why HR and recruitment people get involved in social media. We like to see the trends coming, and to experience the information, analysis and viewpoints of our own community.
The problem with this is that we become addicted to novelty. We get addicted to trying to get the new thing up and running. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Tumblr – the list of possible ways to engage talent , particularly passive talent, grows as we spend more time in this world. We have conferences on how social platforms can build brand engagement, on how LinkedIn can find us the names of possible talent, on how metrics and online interaction can create loyalty. It’s a shiny new world, and it gives us all something to talk about. And I have no doubt that there are plenty of strategies that allow companies to use social media to bring passive talent to a greater understanding of what they offer. No doubt at all.
However, this addiction to novelty comes at a price. We have ignored mastery for diversity. We’ve become handymen instead of craftsmen, explorers instead of refiners. Most of all, we’ve become people who go out and buy bandages instead of going to a doctor. We have diverse and complex systems to manage our active candidates that contain communications templates, can tie in to existing communities and give us a multitude of ways to parse talent. And I believe that, in the majority of cases, our teams of recruiters know enough about this software to get by, and nothing more.
(I’m going to use PageUp as an example here, just because it’s easier to name a system. PageUp isn’t the problem; in fact, it’s an excellent system that almost no one is using to full capacity.)
If you have PageUp, your recruiters most likely get trained in how to do the day to day work in the system, and very little about the advanced areas. They won’t be unilaterally educated about updates or new features. They’ll be technicians, good at using one functional workflow to answer a need – the need to fill a role. They won’t be masters, or gurus, or (insert your term for the PageUp wizard in your business here) – they’ll have a fit-for-purpose understanding. This has been the case everywhere I’ve worked, and from discussions with other people in the game, it is common enough. Common enough, in fact, that organisations with strong social recruiting efforts spend more time refining their social campaigns to attract passive candidates than they do talking to existing, active ones.
If we compare the relationship between candidates and your brand to human relationships, then we are investing in looking good on RSVP instead of learning to be a better spouse. In short, we go speed dating online and never use the phone numbers we collect. We are ignoring those who are already attracted to us in favour of converting the unallied masses to our brand. We are making conversions from brand ambivalence to brand alliance through marketing and online engagement, and then rewarding that conversion with silence and ambivalence of our own. “Treat them mean, keep them keen” doesn’t apply to what we do. We foster discontent with every missed opportunity for better interaction with our existing, active candidates, and often we do it because we’re time-poor. It’s like saying “When sales pick up, we’ll do some marketing. “ Bad advice. This is the area in which most companies can grow the most, can return the best ROI, and can make the most significant gains in reduced time to fill, cost per hire and recruiter workload in. It’s so simple that’s it’s overlooked by default.
Advanced skills (mastery, if you will) in all the ways you can pipeline talent and use PageUp (or whatever system you’re using) is a less public, less expensive, less marketing intensive way of making gains in the war for talent. It requires harnessing the knowledge of your experts and sharing it so that everyone in your team becomes highly proficient in all the aspects of the system. It provides, in return, more channels and opportunities for measuring ROI, better deployment of resources, faster results, lower time to get new staff up to speed and, above all, thicker and deeper communications channels to the people in your talent pools who really want you.
Social media has pulled our focus, because it’s public and shiny and democratic. It’s visible and engaging and fun. People like using it. And it absolutely has its place in engaging passive talent, in building brand perception, in being a brand authority and in joining the conversation about your employment offering. It’s important, however, to make it a balanced part of a strategy that mixes passive contact with nurturing existing candidates, a strategy that encourages loyalty by rewarding the most loyal, active candidates with the most attention.
And if yours is an organisation that sacrifices good candidate care and dismisses active, motivated jobseekers for trying to hook the passive ones, you run an additional risk. If you sow dissent in those who love you, your social media presences may become the field on which you reap the annoyance, vitriol and disappointment of those hearts you’ve broken or spurned.
