In last article I introduced "The Paradox: Recruitment Through Social Media" by stating the situation that Google China's recruitment team is currently frustrating for using social recruiting initiatives (e.g. twitter, linkedin) currently in progress in Google US. I also evidenced lots of organizations fail or still struggle during the transition from the traditional sourcing channels to social recruitment initiatives. The reason is quite simple: it's just because they relied solely on the limited resources of the recruiting function to establish visibility online, engage the potential candidates as much as they can, and provide continuous follow-up services to their connections throughout a multi-stage conversion cycle. When they do these mind-set and behavior changes over time, too many reasons may explain why they feel suffered in face of the pressure since in-house recruiters feel difficult to manage the volume, have less dedicated time, limited job -specific knowledge & headhunting capabilities, less motivation in terms of incentives as well as less competitive intelligence for supporting their targeted approaching, etc.
Because the social recruitment is a kind of novelty and future direction, every person is groping with how to make better use of these channels. From the above reasons, we can make a conclusion that recruiters cannot or shouldn't do it all. Simply an increase in the number of connections and spending more time for random approaching do not guarantee that you could get the results you want. First, you need to understand that your in-house recruitment team has essential difference from external searching firm, and then, you need to know where your strengths rather than simply think that I can copy someone else's advantage intactly. In short, you need to consider from the system rather than putting all the responsibilities on the shoulders of the individual recruiters. In general, we always overlook the advantages of our own - thousands of employees. Here, I would like to propose a concept by leveraging employee engagement to generate best ROI of social recruitment in a systematic manner, in which your employees fully engaged to help the firm in identifying potential candidates, in building relationships, and in strengthening the company’s employer brand image online. Meanwhile, it’s not just standing alone strategy or process by your recruitment team, but should be truly embedded into your corporate social media strategy.
The following is a chart I made to highlight key ideas I addressed above. To wrap up, engaging your employees in a systematic manner will greatly improve your chances of success.
