You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy! (Part 1)

 This will be a series of 10 posts focuses on social recruiting.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In May 2013, the Aberdeen Group reported that "social networking sites have jumped up to the second most effective source of hire," after employee referral. According to a study published by CareerArc, two out of three companies will implement social recruiting in 2014. Their June 2013 study surveyed 350 hiring employers and 2,117 job seekers and showed that:

• 72% of companies use social media to advertise their jobs;
• 59% of companies find they get more referrals and 50% get more applications by using social recruiting;
• 1 in 3 job seekers use social media as their primary tool for job searching;
• 50% of job seekers spend more than 6 hours per week using social media for their job search.

Today, social sourcing is a fact: 92 percent of U.S. companies are using social media networks to recruit talent. Are you able to make the most of it? Probably not: your "social" efforts likely hit a wall - because you drive "social" candidates to your career site and ask them to fill the same convoluted forms just as you did five years ago. So, despite significant investments in social sourcing, your company probably comes across just as antisocial as it did five years ago.

Can you stop relapsing into the old days? Yes, you can, and it's easy. You need to go beyond social sourcing and have a social recruiting strategy. You need:

• A destination within your corporate site that allows you to transform a follower or a connection into a contact and a link into a relationship. In short, you need to continue to engage.
• A network to scale engagement capabilities. You already know, based on your experience with social networks, that engagement can only happen if parties share a common space where they can interact. Follow-through must also happen on a network. It's not enough to store candidate information in a database.

TalentCircles is the talent engagement network that enables you to:

• Expand on your social sourcing efforts.
• Transform these efforts into a coherent and rewarding social recruiting strategy to offer an optimal social candidate experience. 

Social recruiting is the ability to better engage with candidates, engage with more of them, know them better, nurture a vibrant community and build up relevant talent pipelines for immediate or future positions in order to save time and money.

This series of posts will describe the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and leverage our Talent Engagement Index™ and our Candidate Engagement Index™ models to assess your progress and performance.

• C#1 Continuity — Articulating social sourcing and social recruiting
• C#2 Consistency  — Follow-through your branding strategy
• C#3 Culture — Your core values and your credibility
• C#4 Courtesy — Social recruiting means candidate centricity
• C#5 Conversation — Live video screening and discussions
• C#6 Curation — Pre-recorded interviews/questionnaires
• C#7 Content Marketing — Addressing real people
• C#8 Conversion — Social sourcing, social sharing and socializing past applicants
• C#9 Compute — Mastering Talent and Candidate Engagement Indexes

The Move Towards HR Metrics and Analytics for HR

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Since 1990 HR metrics have been evolving. Since the introduction of benchmarking in the HR space professionals have been working to prove their value in the business support systems. For nearly a decade benchmarking reigned as the top measurement in the HR world. It wasn’t until the 21^st century when metrics and analytics took over as the number one source of reporting. Human Resources have struggled to prove their value beyond the mundane tasks of paperwork in the hire to retire scenario.

Workforce and Business Analytics 

Workforce and business analytics have been used to establish baselines, help structure, and maintain operational and company efficiencies. We’ll provide insights into this move and what it means for the future of HR and how companies can use their current data and metrics to elevate their workplace. As our world becomes more about how to measure activity it’s important for any HR professional to have a good understanding of proving their value to the company.

As HR becomes more metric driven it will be important to communicate with senior members of your organization to find out which metrics they are interested in and how you can deliver the information. Your CEO, CFO, and COO are all looking at different aspects of the business and it’s vital to tailor reports to fit their specific needs. In a recent case study from Koenig& Associates studied the attitude of CEOs as it pertains to the HR department and hiring.

People within a company account for half or more of a company’s expenses, but 57% of companies don’t track the impact. Understanding how effective a company is spending their money is an important aspect for any business. One of the most important reasons HR should care about metrics is because CEOs and Senior Executives care about how HR impacts business performance. No longer do companies consider HR a soft unavoidable cost, but as a department that has significant influence on how a business is run.

The Importance of HR Metrics 

Metrics in HR are more then reporting number of vacancies, turnover amounts, and absentee dates. We use big data to help companies understand, anticipate, and develop strategies facilitated by HR.  In order to provide value you must not only compare the results from previous time periods, but also ask important questions such as the importance of job roles filled, how long it took to fill the jobs, and how satisfied were direct supervisors with those hires. Diving into the data beyond the surface level statistics is what makes any good HR department, great. As metrics continue to evolve it’s important to understand which metrics have which benefits or negative impacts on the business. Only then will your HR department be able to show it’s true worth.

What metrics do you find most important in Human Resources? 

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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