Social Talent Acquisition is the product of employer branding and social recruiting. Smart companies recognize the power of their employees to extend the employer brand, while enabling them to convert social media into referrals, candidates and hires.
2. Talent Communities
Mobile recruitingLinkedIn Recruiter
Twitter recruiting
Facebook Career Pages
Lots of time.
Lots of effort.
Lots of money.
But…
A p p l i c a n t
Tracking
S y s t e m
Candidate
Relationship
Management
3. 79%
jobseekers use
social media.
89%
think mobile is
important for job
searches
90%
of F500 career sites do
not support mobile. 45%
use mobile to
search
86%
use social if
in first 10
years of
career
7. 70%
hear about companies
through friends and job
boards
trust friends and family
opinions above any form of
marketing
92%
look for people and
culture fit with
employers
80%
important to work for a
company that embraces
transparency
96%
11. …to reach, engage and convert the
highest quality candidates within their
networks.
Putting the employer brand in
the hands of recruiters…
SOCIAL TALENT ACQUISITIO
18. • Reached 298,272 connections, 36,633 new
• 32,046 content shares / 42,142 content click through
• 8,478,903 impressions
• $.70 CPC
• 370 referrals
• 364 candidates
• 150 hires
• Earned Media Value = $191,445
19. Keys to Success
Be very clear about your objective
Align with business goals
Teach best practices
Focus on conversion
Feed sharable content
Measure, adjust and experiment
There has been a ton of time, energy and money spent on figuring out how to harness social media for recruiting.
And with good reason.
79% of job seekers use social media for their job search
86% of people in their first 10 years of their career use social media
They need to be able to hire millenials, and they knew they had to harness social media if they were going to reach, let alone attract and hire them
They also know that mobile is an increasingly important channel to enable people to find them, and more people add to the momentum every day:
45% of job seekers use mobile specifically to search jobs
But the real question isn’t whether you are using these channels and technologies. The real question is whether you harness them for talent acquisition. Because is you don’t, then you won’t be able to reach quality talent. If you can’t reach them, you can’t attract them, and if you cant attract them, you can’t hire them. And that goes to to the heart of social talent acquisition. Because the people you need to hire use social media to vet and find jobs. If you can’t harness social to hire them, that’s not a recruiting problem. That’s a fundamental business problem.
Perhaps it’s time for us to step back and elavuate what we are doing, and reframe the question. Instead of focusing on the how – the tools and technologies – and refocus on the how.
We’ve done a lot with talent communtiies and facebook pages, but what’s really going to help us reach, attract and ultimately hire quality folks through social channels?
The answer is a lot close than you probably think…
Because it’s your recruiters who are in social every day. They are the ones who use LI, Tw even FB. And in doing so, they ar enot only looking for the right canddiates, but they have become the face and voice of your brand.
Within any given organization, outside of marketing it’s the individual recruiters who have taken up the mantel of social media as an every day work tool.
This is important because social is Relationship centric
Allows organizations to Taps into new talent pools
Brings employer brand to life
The reason your recruiters have such power is precisely because they are the ones in social every day. They are the individuals talking, They and your other talent ambassadors – “what a great place it is to work here. All of the great things the company does”. Etc.
The ambassadors’ part is really important, because it’s your employees who are connected to the people you want to reach. It’s the birds of a feather analogy. Software engineers are connected to other engineers, etc.
The power of Word of mouth has long been a central theme in marketing, and is gaining steam in recruitment marketing, as people increasingly turn to their friends and trusted sources for guidance, and employees for their transparency into the company experience.
92% of people say friends, family and trusted resources shape their perceptions and decisions more than company marketing
70% of Millenials say they hear about companies through friends and job boards
80% of Millenials look for people and culture fit with employers
65% of millenials are more skeptical of claims made by a company than 4 years ago
And yet, staggeringly, only 47% of companies fold WOM into their outreach efforts. Why wouldn’t you actuvate your most powerful, persuasive and authentic voices to tell the employer story?
Not only are recruiter the face and voice, they and their peers are your best advocates. Not only do they provide the valubale authenticity you need, but they also extend your reach far beyond your current social properties. With an average of 1000 connections, if you activated 200 talent ambassadors, you would extend your reach to 200,000 new connections, people that are connected to your employees. New passive candidates that are probably not in your CRM or ATS already.
People want to work for a cool company, and so the corporate brand impacts the desirability of a company to work at. On the flip side, the corporate brand is impacted by the employee experience, and by extension the employer brand. Google, Zappos, Southwest and Amazon are all thought to be great places to work, which has helped bolster their corporate reputation. You can probably think of some companies whose not so great employer reputation has tarnished or been a drag on the corporate brand – examples?
Of course, employer branding is made up of a lot of components, of which social is only one. But it’s an important one, and it’s impact is growing and becoming outsized.
But employer branding is only half the story. A truly effective social talent acquisiton brings EB together with social recruitiing to convert all of those people you’ve attracted with your brillinat EB into real, tangible and quality referrals, candidates and hires.
One without the other is akin to a fantastic brand ad campaign without a way to capture or qualify the impact. The social recruiting side of the equation is focused on conversion – nurturing social networks, feeding their networks with a steady stream of good, releavnt content. Qualifying referals and canddiates to find the right ones for a position.
So, let’s start thinkign about socila talent acquisition much more broadly than we have, with employer branding and social recrutiing as two equally important parts of the whole. By putting the EB into the hands of your most trusted, authentic and recognizable voices. Whiel giving them to tools and skills to convert social into real outcomes.
Let’s face it, at this point there aren’t that many STA rock stars. Within any organization, there are maybe a handful of recruiters who know how to use social as an effective recruiting channel. By most people don’t know or are too timid, afraid of doing something wrong after so many hand slaps. Given the importance of social as a TA channel, recruiters need to be given the skills and best practices to grow, nurture and convert social networks into referrals, candidates and hires. And given the ever evolving nature of social, this is an ongoing reality, to teach drive activities that lead to real results.
So, training is one compotent, because it impacts how your recrtiters behave – and since they are the face of the org – both corp and employer brand – they are shaping the perceptions and decisions of their networks.
Teachign best practices
Upskilling them with actionable knowledge
Driving performance with real and measurablel business milestones
Part of it is their personal brand. How are they perceived? What are they knowne for. Any does that align with your mission? Do they even know how to shape their personal brand? Training can help with that, which is good for both the company and the employee.
One of the biggst hurdles many companies have is with content. it’s the currency of social media. It’s what drives social media, and it’s what establishes interest, credibility and trust as a resource. Or not.
Great content buys mindshare. It buys attention. It buys thought leadership. Once you have that is something Bryan will talk about in a few minutes. But to get there, if it’s going rise about the droning blah, blah, blah of the other 9 hours and 59 minutes of content we take in every day, it has to be
Relevant, interesting, useful and sharable, and actionable. Give the reader something to do, someplace to go to drive the connection deeper.
It can come from your marketing, your nesroom on your website. 3rd party content is very important – credibility for recruiters. There is a lot more content at your fingertips than you may think, if you think about it creatively.
It’s so important that I am going to reiterate my point from a few slides ago. If you want to reach someone, you’ve got to speak to him or her. Give them content that means something to them.
After all, most software developers can’t cook, so why share content about a fabulous butter cream frosting with them?
One of the big reasons our client was so successful is that their content wasn’t all about them. In fact, they told their story through 3rd party content, using content that aligned with their core values, their work experiences, and their culture, and then sprinkled in a good smattering of their employer brand content – employees talking about how great their company is, all the great things they are doing, the awesome culture, etc. And only then a very few job postings.
If all you’re doing is sending out job postings, and if that’s what you are providing your recruiters to share, their networks will just tune out.
We recommend a 60 / 30/ 10 ratio –
60% third party
30% brand
10% jobs
We’re not talking content for the sake of content. We have a purpose, and we want specific things from this content we are sharing. Tie it into a call to action – either to Join your talent community, apply for a job or simply to follow your social channels.
We call this FJA – Follow / Join / Apply. Whatever you call it, or wherever you send them, when you are sharing company news, or the employee generated video, add a link to encourage readers to go to deeper.
There are tools, like bitly and Google analytics, that enable you to track each piece of content, and where it goes. It takes some planning, but once it it set up, you will have visibility into the impact of each piece of content, which will ten give you a clear picture of how your content strategy is working, and adjust as needed.
so, what does this look like?
I want to share with you a story about one of our clients, who you’d certainly recognize and have likely been a customer of. They hire a HUGE volume of people every year, and need to constantly refresh their talent pool.
We recently had a quarterly business review with them, and their results were interesting.
By doing so, they were able to increase their reach by 70,000 people. In Q2 alone, they grew that number 20% organically. They shared 325 pieces of content 15,783 times, and generated 20,973 clicks on that content.
From a marketing perspective, they generated 8,478,903 impressions, had a .25% click through rate, and had an earned media value of $76,301. In one quarter.
More important, they had 123 Talent Acquisition ‘wins’ – including referrals, candidates and hires.
So, where to start? Be very clear about what you are doing, and what you want to accomplish. Be explicit about aligning with business objectives. And articulate your sharable story – what do you want employees, candidates to say about working at your company?
Measure:
Like / Favorite
Follow / Fan
Comment / Reply
Share / Repost
.