Forming Relationships with Candidates Through Talent Communities
Social Media
as a source of candidates is increasingly popular but regular, consistent
results remain elusive for many employers. There’s some anecdotal evidence
about social media successes in recruiting, but these are hard to
replicate. Also, what many employers call social media recruiting is
nothing more than broadcasting jobs on social networks. Posting jobs on
Facebook does not make the process social, and most recruiters use Linkedin like
a job board – they simply search for candidates and then try and reach them.
But that should be no surprise – trying to connect with prospective candidates
socially is difficult and time consuming.
Mission (Maybe) Impossible
The
goal is to form relationships with prospective candidates. The people you are
trying to connect with through social media generally have expressed no
interest in your jobs. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to
engage them in a conversation, which may result in a relationship over time,
which may allow you to convince them to consider a job you have open. In case
it wasn’t obvious just remember that a conversation is a two-way street. This
is what it makes it social. If you don’t have anything to share then it’s near
impossible to form a relationship.
There
are no shortcuts here. If you’re not interested in or don’t have the time to
form relationships then just send them an email asking them to apply for the
jobs you have open and see how well that works… But if you do want to use
social media to recruit, then one approach that we’ve found successful is the
Irrigation Drip approach to building talent
communities.
The basic concept is simple – it’s information
gathering, one piece at a time. Relationships are formed one drip at a time.
Think about any social relationship you have – it didn’t form in minutes or hours.
It formed as you got to know the other party, and vice-versa. The goal is to
slowly collect information on candidates through a series of social
interactions.
This approach starts with a talent community
that attracts candidates of the type you would like to hire. The Irrigation
Drip is the process that feeds a database of prospective candidates. As you get
more and more information on candidates, a profile emerges. Let’s illustrate
this with an example of a situation where this was implemented for a client
that provides high-level financial planning services. They wanted to recruit
people that had 10+ years of experience in insurance sales, dealing with
high-level clients, and capable of establishing long-term relationships. Here’s
how information was collected through conversations in a talent community.
The conversations resulted
from a series of blog posts around the topics mentioned. The idea is to convert
(interview)
questions into opportunities for sharing, or provoking participants
into sharing the information you seek. In this example, we developed a matrix
with a row for each “trait” and offered a number of ways to stimulate a
response.
Stimulating or provoking responses can be as simple as writing or
commenting on a blog posts.
It worked well – the company made 8 hires,
at an average cost of $618. The effort took about 4 months, but the given the
profile of candidates they were targeting it was worth it. Most of the
candidates were people who would never have applied for the job.
One
Drip at a Time
Making social connections is a very labor and
time-intensive activity. This is why LinkedIn
is not much of a social network – the vast majority of connections people have
are with individuals they know nothing about beyond what’s on the profile,
mainly because there’s rarely been a conversation between the two. One of my
best connections on Linkedin is an officer in the Israeli army. I have no idea
why he reached out to me but I’ve got to know him pretty well as a result of
email conversations that we’ve had where I helped him with his resume. I know
of his family, his interests, his aspirations, and his goals and I was able to
help direct him to a job with the UN since he was bored with what he was doing.
That’s more than I can say about 90% of my other connections on Linkedin.
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