The internet has, and will continue to, change the way we do things.
‘Business web sites’ such as LinkedIn and other social media web sites such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being used to meet people and sustain friendships and business relationships online.
More and more organisations are also using social media to help them with recruitment, either to source people for hiring purposes or, more controversially, to discover more about prospective and actual employees.
1. Recruiting to your organisation
Many organisations now employ social media to raise their profile for recruitment purposes and to source the best candidates/applicants for a given job. Having a ‘vacancies’ page on your web site is no longer enough if your competitors are undertaking fully-fledged online campaigns.
Social media can be used either for rolling recruitment purposes or, provided you take a planned approach, to support a one-off campaign if attempting to hire for a particular role.
If going down the latter route, there are four simple steps HR directors need to take:
- Target groups: Decide on whom your target group is – for example, are you looking for young engineering graduates or experienced managers?
- Employee profile: Determine your prospective employee profile and required values.
- Brand: Create a recruitment brand – clear messaging will help you target the top talent.
- Channels: Establish the most appropriate venue/channel to achieve your goals. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are obvious examples, but think about where else members of the group you are targeting may be found. Undertake some simple research to ensure that you are not missing emerging channels and repeat such activity regularly – web sites emerge and grow very quickly.
The above process enables you to set up feeds, disseminate information and open up and nurture networks of contacts. Some services are free beyond the time investment required, while others may charge a small fee.
But running a planned social media campaign in this way makes it easier to draw attention to your organisation and highlight what jobs you have on offer.
2. Candidate’s backgrounds – getting to know them
Although a good CV will help you get to know a prospective employee, realistically such documents only provide a snapshot of things that candidates wish to showcase.
Interviews enable us to get to know the person a little better and references can provide further enlightenment. But even after a lengthy interview, you are often left wanting to know more.
As a result, a lot of HR professionals and recruiters are now taking a peek into the personal lives of prospective and actual employees using social media – although interestingly, many profess themselves reluctant to do so.
But others are wondering where to start and so here are some basic suggestions to help:
1. Business web sites
Business web sites such as LinkedIn are useful for networking purposes, not least because many of them have forums that encourage interaction with others. Within these forums, ‘hothouse’ relationships tend to form, which enable you to gain a clearer view of individual personalities.
The dynamic appears to be that a lack of direct face-to-face contact creates a false sense of security, which means that individuals often become more intimate more quickly than would normally be the case.
So, after only a couple of weeks of chatting in a forum, you may end up having conversations and getting involved in expressions of opinion that normally would only take place with trusted, long-standing colleagues.
2. Twitter and Facebook
Both Twitter and Facebook are useful tools for people to manage their social lives. It follows, therefore, that taking a look at candidates’ activity on both sites will help you learn a lot about them.
Aside from the obvious hobbies and interests, you can start to build up a more rounded picture of what each individual is really like. Such information would be virtually impossible to glean from a CV, interview or reference.
3. Google
If you simply type a prospect’s name into Google, you can start to find a lot of information about them. Refine the search with other criteria and you will often be inundated.
Some people will argue that such activity is not unethical because you are looking at publicly available information. If the individual concerned did not want others to see/read such information they would not have published it.
But others believe that using social media in this way is like looking at someone else’s diary, a point of view that HR directors should consider. They should also evaluate whether such activity contravenes the organisation’s discrimination, recruitment and any other policies.
At the end of the day, however, it comes down to personal and professional ethics and each HR director has to make their own judgment call.
Chris Slay is chief executive of recruitment consultancy, Skills Provision.
