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. 


Photo Credit.

Strategic choice: Create and nurture nimble talent networks

By Kevin W. Grossman

How refreshing it was to hear it. Not that I disparage LinkedIn as a valuable sourcing service; it is used by more recruiters than any other online network. But for the first time of late I heard a recruiter at a decent-sized company lauding the use of Quora to source and network, not LinkedIn. Quora is an expert network where questions are posed and answers are given about a variety of topics from a variety of industries.

That’s one of the biggest wins when it comes to recruiting these days – being flexible, nimble and opportunistic. Finding where your target talent is and going to them. Then creating talent networks and nurturing them, on their own ground as well as yours, whether you hire them or not.

This is a critical key to hiring and retention and one of many valuable takeaways from the recent San Francisco event War For Talent, Winning the War for Startup Talent. And what an appropriate place to have the event, since San Francisco is the center of the startup universe these days (and the past few years).

Blech. War for talent? I know it’s a highly competitive marketplace for the highly specialized skills needed today, especially those needed for technology startups. According to economists quoted in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Job growth since the end of the recession has been clustered in high-skill fields inaccessible to workers without advanced degrees or in low-paying industries.”

As I wrote recently, it’s not really a war; it’s a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds — the leaders, the builders, the doers, all the combined skills that make up the “startup” and of course the money that make it all happen, with barriers to business entry lower than they’ve ever been.

Take the opening keynote speaker at the War For Talent event, Ron Conway, co-founder of SV Angel. Ron talked about how recruiting and hiring should be the number #1 priority for startups, that these firms are the job creation engines.

He emphasized that anyone can be recruited at any time and referenced his time advising Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Early on Zuckerberg spent hours a day recruiting (still does) and was quoted as saying, “If you're not fatigued from recruiting, you're not doing your job. You should always be replacing yourself.”

In fact, a lot of companies are fatiguing their recruiting teams left and right, trying before they buy in today’s market (and trying to find before they buy). For example, developing internship programs and then sourcing whom they should really hire over time. Remember, many highly specialized skills are a rarity in hot markets like the Bay Area.

But even if you've got a great product and your growth trajectory is vertical, those are only table stakes in Silicon Valley and other markets. People want their minds blown to join a company – they want the emotional connection with everyone they’d be working with and for.

Recruiting industry thought leader Kevin Wheeler referenced this week in an ERE.net article that 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession. He goes on to write:

“This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.”

Again, it’s the mobilization of innovation and motivated minds and the companies that are winning are creating and nurturing flexible, nimble and opportunistic talent networks.

Go ahead. Blow their minds.

Seeding Career Clubs in Talent Network Coffee Shops

By Kevin W. Grossman

I don’t even like coffee, but I will drink a chai latte or a fruit smoothie when frequenting a coffee shop for business or pleasure. Don’t judge; I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t like coffee.

But that’s just a means to an end reason to frequent those establishments in the first place. The real reasons we go are to work, read, relax or meet like-minded people to discuss life, love and industry. Intimate, small groups that prefer face time and who might even start a career club of sorts at their favorite coffee shop to mentor one another about the world of work.

Brain freeze from the fruit smoothie I just downed – I read an article the other day titled Our Most Effective Source of Hire, and in it the author had conducted a quality-of-hire analysis in his company based on the following:

Quality of hire is defined as the percent of new hires who pass their one-year anniversary and score at least “meets expectations” on their first review. For example, we grouped together all the new hires from the first quarter of 2010. We then ran a report dating to the last day of the quarter a year later, 2011. We determined what percent of those hires were still employed and were not on performance improvement plans, etc. We did this on a quarterly basis.

What they found were the top 6 quality-of-hire rankings:

1. Former employees
2. Passive candidates
3. Employee referrals
4. Staffing agency hires
5. Contractor conversions
6. Job boards 

What’s interesting is that there was a 10% variance between staffing agencies and former employees, but a 20%-25% variance between contractor conversions and job boards and the top ranking of former employees. Not too surprising for those who’ve been in the hiring game for any length of time.

This also aligns nicely with where the value of talent networks come in – a place where former employees, passive candidates and employee referrals can come together, share a latte or an espresso (or a fruit smoothie) and talk career shop and find employment.

However, these networks just don’t happen. Someone’s got to take the lead and launch something somewhere in order to attract like-minded others for like-minded activities to then nurture this new type of network. Call it manufactured organic; you’ve got to seed it to breed it. Networks have formed since the beginning of time and there’s always someone or some entity forming them, leading them and nurturing them.

Ah, but what’s in a name? Naming and labeling have always changed the perception of what something is and the why of it. If we called it a “career club,” then that could imply a non-threatening collective of people helping people find, land and retain employment, as well as adapting and advancing. If we called it the “working for the man club,” that would change the perception even further — but it would still a self-contained and self-promoted ecosystem of people seeking and giving career advice (or venting about their crappy jobs and bosses).

If we called it a talent community, however, then the “talent” in talent community would actually dilute community, because it would be labeling its participants in a way that most wouldn’t label themselves as. “Community” itself can also be misleading as being to “touchy-feely,” incorporating group hugs, rainbows and unicorns. Plus, talent is for Hollywood, right? Not for us working stiffs. That’s why for those of us who created this career club, I bet we would never call it a talent community.

In fact, I bet most who join an in-person or online “community” primarily want to socialize, but only a few would join talent communities to do the same. Most of those people only want a job, pure and simple. And that’s okay, because that’s why we’ve been seeding and growing talent networks for decades.

But again, there would be a minority who would want to collaborate and commiserate with the like-minded about life, love and industry. A minority that includes former employees, passive candidates and employee referrals, and those are the folks your company wants to source and hire.

I say seed the career clubs inside talent network coffee shops. Just make sure to serve smoothies. Mixed berry with banana preferably.