This post is
part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a
successful social recruiting strategy and started with You
do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!
The
engagement gap today
Today, the
"social" aspect of the candidate experience is virtually nonexistent!
You have invested time and money to source candidates across various social
media channels. You’ve started to come across as an engaging brand. However,
the minute a candidate is impressed enough to want to work for you, your social
capital plunges: You ask them to fill forms and go through the hoops and loops
of your career site or your job application forms. You go from a friendly approach and a compelling message to a
cumbersome and robotic interface that yields terrible results:
- Up to 90% of the people you have attracted to your career site may drop off and lose the opportunity to increase your talent pools.
- Most of the people who have filled a form or left you an email will never hear back from you, which will destroy any brand capital you have built and damage your company's reputation.
Your social recruiting efforts will be
disappointing because you break the first and most compelling rule of social
networking: the ability to connect and make people feel connected.
The traditional candidate experience today is
mediocre at best. The experience of socially sourced candidates is just the
same, and may even come across as worse because of the canyon between how
candidates see you on social networks and how they’re treated once they try to
apply for a job.
Experiential Continuity: Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting
Continuity is the absolute first requirement to
leverage your social sourcing efforts into a powerful social recruiting
strategy. You must offer candidates a smooth transition between public social
networks and your corporate precincts.
Social login
Make it easy for candidates to respond to your call. Joining your talent network must be easy – it should leverage the identity candidates feel comfortable disclosing. For social candidates, their ID is typically a social login. Instead of asking candidates to fill a lengthy form, let them import their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+. Candidates must be able to join from anywhere via a link or a button.
Make it easy for candidates to respond to your call. Joining your talent network must be easy – it should leverage the identity candidates feel comfortable disclosing. For social candidates, their ID is typically a social login. Instead of asking candidates to fill a lengthy form, let them import their professional information from LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google+. Candidates must be able to join from anywhere via a link or a button.
Live
social profile
Being social is more than enabling candidates
to connect via a social login. Your private talent network is a live engagement
platform designed to enable interactions between the candidates and your
company — not a passive repository where you store candidates whose data will
be stale after just a few months.
When candidates join your network using their
social login, their profile is auto-populated with their professional
information from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Plus. Even more importantly, candidates have the ability to access their
profiles and add supplemental information, such as a video resume, which gives you an immediate insight into their personality. In the social
world, we hire for attitude just as much as for aptitude[1].
Again, social recruiting is not just about
scouting public networks for talent (that’s only sourcing through social
networks). The power of your public social channels is the fact that people opt
into these networks and voluntarily provide the information they deem
relevant to share.
The strength of your candidate network must be
predicated on exactly the same principle: By opting into your network,
candidates indicate that they are interested in being and staying connected
with you. In other words, your talent pipelines include real followers, instead
of just names you’ve scraped from the web.
[1] In his book Hire for Attitude, Mark Murphy explains, "Our research
tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more
surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the
time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of
skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack
of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and
temperament."
