Imagine a successful shopping trip: You hit up your favorite clothing store and find the perfect shirt. It’s even on sale! It’s everything you’re looking for…except, days later, when you’re about to wear it to a coffee date with a friend, you realise that the sales associate left the security tag on!
What do you do? Chances are, you don’t change your plans and drive all the way back to the store to have the tag removed. Most people would put the shirt back in the closet, put on a different outfit, and resolve to take care of that security tag “later.”
<! people like having their day interrupted or their plans change based on an unexpected inconvenience. It’s the same thing for your candidates: If you are making the effort to reach them on social media, then you have to respect the means and methods you give them for learning about or applying to your jobs there.>
We throw around the idea of “seamless” social recruiting, but what does that actually mean?
When a social candidate experience is seamless, that means it integrates your technology and the ways you expect to interact with a candidate with the candidate’s expectations of a visit to a social media site.
For example, let’s say you have a Facebook Career Page, and you post a link to a job, which is located in your ATS. A Facebook user who has “liked” your Facebook Career Page in the past logs onto Facebook to check out her friends’ status updates. Your job shows up in her News Feed, and she clicks on it. Unfortunately, the click takes her off ofFacebook to your career site, where she is confronted with a long, dry job description, which she has to scroll through in order to find the “apply” button.
If, by this point, she still wants to apply, she’s then faced with a 10-20 minute application process that involves filling out her entire work and Education history field by field (even though it’s also on the resume she had to upload). There’s a very good chance that she’s not going to bother finishing. After all, she didn’t go online to apply for a job; finding a potential job was just a side benefit of logging onto Facebook to see what her friends were up to.
And if she logs on from a mobile device and encounters a non-mobile friendly application experience, you can forget it!
So, here is your mission, if you choose to accept it: “remove the security tag” before you “sell the shirt!”
You don’t want to make your job harder either—changing your talent management technology makes your recruiters’ jobs harder. So instead, you need to merge your ATS with your social candidate’s application experience.
Ask yourself: Is there information that can be captured from your candidates’ social profiles? Can you sync your ATS with your Facebook Career Page? Will you keep your candidates on their social networks instead of driving them to an external career site?
These are all questions you must answer when you start using social media to recruit. By seamlessly integrating your ATS with your social apply process, you can keep your team and your candidates on the same page…literally AND figuratively!
