I’m all about myth dispelling. I love it. There is so much nonsense spoken in the social recruiting world by inexperienced social recruiters or by failed recruiters taking a new path. By failed I mean people that have hopped around from company to company without ever having made money. While we’re here, let’s dispel another myth – contingency recruitment IS a sales industry. You are selling jobs to candidates (on behalf of the client – they pay recruiters to do it and they want them to do it) and selling CVs to clients (on behalf of the candidate). If any tree hugging beard-faced pinko Guardian-reading leftie wants to think otherwise, more fool them. God this is cathartic.
Right, back to the point. LinkedIn is not social. It’s business business business. It’s an online, open access information store. Ok ok, there are some comments in the group sections where people have a bit of an inane natter about stuff, but I’m not going on there to tell them about how I went to Auntie Mavis’s funeral on Saturday. It’s all about the business.
So if you’re a recruiter that needs to pay to hear someone to tell you to use LinkedIn – you’re an idiot. If you are surprised that people are recruiting successfully using LinkedIn, you’re an idiot. If you tell me your candidates aren’t there, I tell you to look for your clients, because they are. If you tell me your clients aren’t there, I tell you to look at the events and find some. Oh, and join some relevant groups. That way you’ll be able to contact people directly. That’ll be a grand, thanks.
The point is, I want to know and learn about social recruiting. Let’s exclude LinkedIn from this. Let’s hear about proper social network recruiting. I’m of the generation that had to learn about these things, rather than grow up with them. I want to hear about @irishrecruiter hiring 27 people through twitter. I want to hear about @billboorman arranging hundreds of interview in just one month for Hard Rock Cafe. I want to hear @radicalrecruit bang on about using Facebook to recruit. What about Branch Out? Why haven’t I heard more? Is it going to be crap? Maybe there’s a gap in the market for a @MrBranchOut. And we can do this until @wepassout.
Time to cut the apron strings folks. LinkedIn is old news. Let’s press the eject button and focus on Social Recruiting.
Including LinkedIn stats when talking social recruiting metrics is something Alastair Campbell would be proud of. They hide a myriad of untruths.
Let’s keep those waters clear. Recruiters will spend more on this (and therefore push its progress) if they see that the bullshit has been taken away. They’re not as stupid as you think….
Yup spot on Jack re LinkedIn – there isn’t anything `social` about it. It’s a place where people where Mr Perfect business masks and say what you like without looking in anyone’s eyes. (ahem… http://recruitmentmisfit.com/there-are-no-bad-recruiters-on-linkedin )
That said, it is a good online community portal, and that word now gets banded in with social media, so that is why it gets instilled in the `social recruiting` mix. I advise (not for money) recruiters to start their social recruiting journey with LinkedIn – because it’s the one tangible collection of contacts they already have – and if 20% of your contacts have entered their Twitter handle on LinkedIn, then by automatically following them through the LinkedIn-Twitter connection, then you have the beginnings of a Twitter network.
Ref sales. Hmm. Do you `sell` a job to candidate, or do you `consult` with them? There’s a difference. Maybe I’ll blog about that rather than east up comment space here…
I would have to agree to some extent. But it depends on how you regard the term ‘social’. By definition, in its most basic form, I believe social can be the interaction of one organism with another, implying that any form of communication could be regarded as social.
Bottom line, the recruitment process is not generally a social experience, so how can you replicate that process on social platforms online? Granted there are unique exceptions, but not on mass scale there’s just too much volume.
Facebook allows social activity like sharing photos and discussions of hobbies and events, but recruitment isn’t really social, hence why recruiters and organisations alike are faffing around trying to work out how to plague networks such as Facebook.
Facebook users generally store personal information, and accounts are usually private, so using Facebook for anything other than its advertising platform and business pages is going to be a waste of time for most recruiters (again there will be a couple of unique stories I’m sure). There’s no reason why Business pages accounts can’t be used for value added purposes, but this is more of a marketing communications activity. I don’t see many recruiters talking about the potential of generating direct feedback with your audiences through platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn for research, which is what we have been using it for
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As you say LinkedIn is different. In essence it can be used as a recruitment tool with publically viewable and regularly updated CV’s (not quite CV’s but a good overview of a candidates skills to justify engagement), and there’s also the client side. Great business networking tool really.
I have to agree with the points made by Jack, the reason why LinkedIn is still seen as the weapon of choice for most recruiters is that its the only platform (with exceptions of course) that is currently making them cash.
Whether it is social not…is an interesting debate, but in my experience the reason they aren’t utilising other social networking platforms such Facebook and Twitter is two-fold.
1) They don’t no how – it just pisses me of how many recruiters that you see on Twitter who just tweet job after job after job. How are they adding value to online conversations or forging online communities?!
2) Secondly because Facebook as platform for example, just doesn’t work for senior level appointments (or not in the short term anyway). I can see how Bill Boorman utilised the platform so effectively with the Hardrock Cafe for high volume, low level roles yes (fantastic case study by the way) and for graduate type roles because of the demographics! But lets face it most recruiters don’t make there money from placing waiters and waitresses. I feel the most effective way is to use Facebook as part of an employer branding strategy, rather than a direct social media recruitment tool for most organisations at the moment. However you never know Facebook are trying desperately to capture some of the “professional” market so things may change.