How Social Recruiting is Changing the Value of Source of Hire

 

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

As more and more people move towards social media and employment branding as a method in driving candidates to your open requisitions, it’s becoming harder and harder to track concrete recruiting metrics like source of hire. Companies will have to find different methods to capture candidates through talent networks or touch points to help define the value of recruiting points and sources.

According to a new study put out by CareerXRoads, social recruiting has evolved into a more interdependent role where job applicants are influenced and pruned from a long list of social networks. The study only attributed 2.9% of hires directly to social media, but that doesn’t mean social media didn’t push job applicants to company career sites, job boards, college fairs, or any other source of hire.

It’s important to understand the value and role of social recruiting when it comes to source of hire. With everything going social it’s been difficult for marketing companies, public relations agencies, and now recruiting teams to figure out if going social contains a big enough ROI to continue. The jury has been out for a long time with no companies stepping up to the plate to prove overall ROI effectiveness. Facebook introduced their own analytics, companies have form to track link clicks (bit.ly, etc.) and Pinterest finally got their act together and started (well attempted) to track pins, repins, etc.

For recruiters all of this tracking, analytics, and mounds of big data means the world to them when attempting to prove the value of being online. Besides saying, If we’re not on social media we’re missing out, companies are looking for more concrete correlation between source of hire and social media. While there are ways to prove the value of being online, aside from pure numbers, it’s a recruiter’s job to find solid reasons to keep their social recruiting efforts alive. Here are a couple things that you can present to your manager at your next meeting:

The Social Recruitment Monitor: While this isn’t the most reliable way to present statistics on your social recruiting efforts, a company called Maximum has developed a beta product that will help you keep track of your efforts through what they called the SRM Index. This index takes a look at subscribe content, frequency of content, and social engagement. It’s something you could measure elsewhere through CRMs that provide that type of analytics (Sprout Social, Hootsuite (to some degree, etc.). It might take a little longer to pull these numbers manually and compare them to other types of information, but if you want to keep your social recruiting program alive, it’s worth the effort.

Invest in Simple HR Metrics: If you’re looking at social recruiting from a numbers standpoint, the biggest way that it’s changing the industry is reducing candidate acquisition costs. Since social recruiting is shaking up how candidates funnel through the talent pipeline, it’s important to look numbers associated with the source of hire. Being able to prove that social recruiting is working is one thing, but going one step further in proving it costs less will keep your program alive.

There are currently multiple ways that you are able to tell that social recruiting is changing how many recruiters find and calculate source of hire. How does your company prove a correlation between social recruiting and sources of hiring coming from those networks?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 


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