More and more headhunters and companies are tapping social media channels to recruit jobseekers. Especially in a recession, companies know their ultimate success depends on the quality of human capital they can reel into their organization. Leveraging social media plays an increasingly key role in making sure your company finds its widest array of candidate choices.1. Start with the usual suspects.
Candidates have been given the secrets to pass the social media recruitment test. Since recruiters tend to check an applicant’s personal blog, Facebook profile, Twitter feed, LinkedIn recommendations, Flickr portfolio, SlideShare presentations or even YouTube resume, establish the same transparency for your company with these tools. Creating your firm’s online character attracts the best pool of applicants and indicates to potentials how they stack up to your ideals, culture and caliber.
To keep costs down, companies should start by posting their own creative job description on a company site or blog and then use email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to pass around the URL. Nine times out of 10, the best candidates are already in your employees’ networks.
2. Avoid CraigsList, Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and other major database sites for one of two reasons.
If you’re looking to fill a professional position these sites do not filter resumes enough to make the search worth the time. “Employers” on these sites are often temp or placement agencies or even spammers — not actual employers — and good applicants know this. As a real employer, know that talent is available in excess, but your ideal applicants generally try to target their job search by looking at sites catered to their specific industry and skill set. They’re not spending much time on the large database sites.
Second, the cost of posting jobs on these sites can grow very quickly based on the number of people you’re looking to hire. If you’re a small firm, there’s no reason to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to recruit a few people. If you’re a large organization, your own infrastructure is more suitable for recruiting internally on your own site. Google does this especially well.
3. Recognize that paying for recruitment services is almost always a poor decision.
In recruitment, your fixed costs of recruiter salary is a given, so your end goal should be to eliminate all other variable costs like job posting fees. Again, big sites are not the way to go.
CareerBuilder starts at $419 to post for one month for one job position. A bevy of emails and socially networked messages might not get you as many responses in volume, but rest assured candidates who do respond will on average be more qualified, know more about your specific company and industry, and will possess more genuine interest in being an asset to your firm. In this game Quality: 1, Quantity: 0.
The exception to this rule is niche recruitment. From healthcare to tech, smaller job sites are generally cheaper and viewed by a more industry-savvy audience, so bets are if you’re going open the purse strings, smaller sites are a smarter move in your recruitment strategy. Mashable, for instance, offers a gamut of social media positions. For recruiters using Mashable, the $50 price tag is justified by the hours your HR manager won’t have to spend combing through unqualified candidates who‘ve been spamming their resumes around.
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Thank you for stepping up and saying, "Avoid CraigsList, Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs!" Two companies I've worked with over the past year were burned by the national job boards, plus they're expensive.
ReplyDeleteI must say, I HAVE had great success posting jobs locally on the site Jobing.com. They're local to San Diego and have great prices and useful tools. As a job seeker, I never noticed any fake "work from home" or MLM jobs there either. The jobing site is an A+ in my book!
-Cyndi