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When you hear statistics such as 59 percent of recruiters said that job seekers found on social media were rated “highest quality”, it is easy to assume that using social media automatically improves the quality and efficiency of the recruiting process. In order to see the expected results with social media, the secret lies in how you actually use the tools not the act of simply using the platforms to find candidates. Many recruiters actually introduce more issues and slowdowns into the recruiting process by incorrectly using social media. Here are three common social media mistakes recruiters make that decrease productivity:
- Spending Excessive Time Analyzing and Learning Social Media Channels. When recruiters think of social media, most automatically turn to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. But there are actually over 15,000 different social media channels available ranging from niche sites like GitHub for IT professionals and Proformative for accountants to platforms popular with the younger generation of job seekers, such as university sites and Instagram. Even on LinkedIn recruiters must sift through over 1.2 million interest groups to determine which are most relevant to the target group for each position. To make things more complicated, social media is evolving daily with new platforms being launched and the demographics shifting of current platforms requiring recruiters must continually monitor platforms and sites.
By automating this process using technology that carefully analyzes the available channels against the candidate profile to determine the best social media sites to target, recruiters can overcome this challenge and decrease the time spent on social media “discovery.” Automating this task reduces hours spent researching as well increases results because it is almost impossible for a single person to be knowledgeable about all platforms available in this ever changing climate.
- Targeting the Wrong Potential Applicants Within the Channels. Recruiters often simply look on Facebook or LinkedIn without targeting the various groups within these channels. According to the 2013 Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey, over 94 percent of all recruiters use social media which has made these channels a prime target for job hunters, thus contributing a high volume of applicants when recruiters unknowingly cast a wider net. Without a targeting strategy, recruiters might end up with a higher number of unqualified applications, which increase the time and cost to process and screen (e.g. counterproductive). And since you are sorting through applicants who may not have neither the skills nor experience, it is very likely that you might overlook qualified applicants, or worse, you might not find who you are looking for at all, even after spending a lot of time.
The solution is to use targeted recruitment marketing to focus your efforts. This technique is sometimes referred to as narrowcasting. It may be a specific LinkedIn group, a niche social media channel or the college social media channel that has a specific area of interest that meets the job requirements. Since targeting and narrowcasting can be a time consuming and challenging, many turn to social media distribution technology to decrease time spent on targeting and posting.
- Manually Posting and Monitoring Social Media Sites. In the old days, recruiters might have posted jobs ads in their local newspapers and then had to check their email, snail mail and fax machine for applications of interested candidates. But today recruiters must post each job to multiple places and then monitor each channel for responses, including content and group posts, and direct mails. Additionally, it is essential that recruiters carefully track and analyze their efforts to continually make changes to the process as not everything might be effective. Performing all of these tasks manually, and often several time per day, requires countless and a lot of patience as the tasks tend to be highly repetitive and not very strategic.
To help eliminate these inefficiency, making more time for people to focus on more strategic activities, many companies are now using technology to automate posts as well as monitoring the responses. This allows recruiters to reappropriate their time towards higher value activities like developing campaigns and go to market strategy.
What challenges has using social media introduced into your recruiting process?
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