Social media recruiting

Synonyms: recruiting 2.0, recruiting in the web 2.0, online recruitment

Definition of social media recruiting

Social media is an umbrella term for media to exchange statements, impressions, experiences, or information among internet users and to collect knowledge (User Generated Content, UGC). These media include forums, web logs, and micro blogs such as twitter, social networks (e.g. XING, facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, StudiVZ, etc.), social bookmark portals (e.g. Mister Wong, oneview, delicious, Digg or LinkARENA), wikis such as Wikipedia, information portals (e.g. wer-weiss-was or gutefrage.net), photo, music, video or document sharing portals (e.g. Picasa, flickr, YouTube, sevenload, slideshare, MyVideo, Scribd or last.fm) as well as rating portals (e.g. QYPE, Idealo, or ciao!).

Social media recruiting is a type of recruiting that uses social media offers on the internet to hire staff. Social media recruiting can also be used to maintain a brand image and increase the brand awareness.

Why social media recruiting?

Characteristically, private and professional interests mix in social media. Companies focus on the classic communication goals – image, brand recognition, customer acquisition, and customer retention. However, the search for personnel and the recruitment have become more important goals of the social media activities. The increased use of social media channels (also referred to as web 2.0) for personnel search and the resulting active candidate approach basically have two associated reasons: the increasing war for talents and the demographic change in society. The companies can only reach their economic goals when they have the right employees – at the same time, the war for qualified workers is becoming more intense. Many companies have recognized the signs of the times and follow innovative recruiting paths in future (also referred to as recruiting 2.0 or social media recruiting).

Challenges for social media recruiting

According to Wolfgang Brickwedde, Head of the Institute for Competitive Recruiting (ICR), the following main topics for social media recruiting result from the reasons mentioned above:

Professionalization of the recruitment

HR managers must prove that their company attracts talents (employer branding), and has, retains, and hires the better employees compared to the competitors. In this competition, recruiting must be able to measure and confirm its value contribution (controlling in recruiting).

Individual and proactive approach of potential candidates

The candidates, who are becoming fewer and therefore more important, must be addressed more individually and proactively. This applies on the one hand to a larger differentiation of employer branding messages and personnel marketing means based on the requirements of the different target groups, and on the other hand to early identification of potential candidates for current and future vacancies.

Simplification of the commitment and recruiting process

The increasing importance of social media recruiting forces companies to rethink, starting with the use of social media for all employees (only then they may act as ambassadors for their company), continuing with social media guidelines to the willingness of the recruiters and employees to receive personal messages via their social media profiles from potential candidates. Only then, interested job seekers (not applicants yet) will get the opportunity to learn more about a company and its employees and to form preferences for the companies.

Social media recruiting with heroes e-recruiting

By means of the application management software heroes e-recruiting, all applications are administered and organized in one system. This does not only ensure transparency and increase the comparability between the individual applicants, but also reduces time – the time recruiters need for their most important task: Find the best employees for their companies, communicate with them, and finally hire them for their companies. These are exactly the challenges mentioned above assigned to social media recruiting. The heroes e-recruiting application management software allows to post jobs in the corporate design of the company with just a few clicks on the website, online jobs markets, and in social media channels such as facebook, twitter, and others. By this, the communication with the desired target group can be controlled and a professional image along a successful employer branding process can be achieved. Automatic correspondences (e.g. acknowledgements of receipt) and individual correspondences (e.g. invitation for an interview) ensure timely and simplified communication with the applicants. By means of the matching function, a suitable applicant can be selected for an open position and a permanently growing pool of interesting candidates is built. The intensified form of communication ensured by the heroes e-recruiting software as an innovative means for social media recruiting allows to maintain connections to the top applicants of the different sectors and achieve decisive competitive advantages in the war for talent. The efficiency of the recruiting measures in the different media (online job markets, print media, website, social media channels) can be quickly and easily recognized by extensive standard evaluations and individual evaluations without requiring time-consuming manual data input.