Recruitment agencies, beware. You may be losing your custom to social media sites. Michelle Flynn, recruitment manager at technology consultancy EMC Consulting was tasked with moving the company’s recruitment away from agencies and take the process in-house in 2006.
She now recruits all EMC employees through social media sites. In doing so, she saved the company £2.7m in agency fees, not to mention the time saved by consultants in toiling through mountains of CVs.
The basic theme running through the company’s recruitment policy is applicants become part of its online community long before they actually join, significantly enhancing the chances of a new joiner fitting in well with the existing workforce and corporate culture.
Specialising in technology services, EMC Consulting’s applicants are naturally more attuned to social media, but Flynn insists that using these sites to recruit staff is something any company can do.
Here’s her advice on how to do it:
- Hire a dedicated recruiter. Hiring directors and HR staff have other things to concentrate on and this needs someone’s undivided attention. They will eventually become ambassadors for the company brand.
- Get the buy-in from the rest of the team. Building awareness of vacancies needs everyone’s participation, as you will see later on.
- Use job boards, but sparingly. Amongst the job sites she uses are jobserve and Totaljobs to advertise vacancies. Flynn advises to be selective about which job boards to use, depending on the role. She has experimented with others and discarded some that didn’t suit her purpose.
- Announce your vacancy on the company Twitter account. Then retweet it on any other Twitter accounts you own. Get the rest of the company to retweet it on their accounts — this is where the buy-in from the rest of the team comes in.
- Write a blog post about the vacancy. Then get all your staff to vote for it and blog about it on their blogs. Flynn usually waits until there are a few vacancies and puts them all in one blog. For her, blogging is not just about vacancies but also about general company news, so she uses this channel sparingly.
- Announce the vacancy on LinkedIn. Flynn has a high-level agreement with LinkedIn, which she pays for, to use all of the tools on the site. She can email likely candidates direct with appropriate vacancies. Flynn doesn’t contact applicants through Facebook though, which she sees as a social tool.
- Search around for good candidates through their blogs and tweets. It’s an added bonus if you can hire an applicant with a high digital profile, who may already be known and respected by your customers.
- Where appropriate, give applicants access to your user groups. This gives each side a chance to get to know each other. The applicant can get a much more accurate impression of what your company is like than asking a few questions at an interview and lets them know how committed you are to your customer and employee communities. Hopefully, the successful candidate will be committed to accepting the offer and will already know some work colleagues before they join. They can hit the ground running.
- Combine everything. Blog about your tweet, tweet about your user group, direct LinkedIn users to your blog. The more referencing you do, the greater chance of alerting the right candidate to the vacancy.
- Keep up-to-date. Social media is continually evolving, Be on the look out for new channels and periodically review the ones you already use.
www.warren-knight.com thanks bnet