Reaching Your Team’s Network: Realizing the ROI of Social Recruiting

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cOPyRigHT © 2012 BULLHORN, iNc. aLL RigHTS ReSeRved.

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Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have yielded

highly qualified referred candidates for a handful of pioneering recruiters.

But “social recruitment” remains more of an art than a science, and

most staffers and managers at recruitment firms remain in the dark with

regard to what practices work and why. The social mediasphere can

be overwhelming to navigate, to say nothing of mining it for qualified

job candidates. With a centrally managed framework, agency executives can realize social recruiting’s ROI potential.

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Put simply, social media is a channel

for socializing, whereas social

recruiting is the practice of cultivating

that channel to achieve a specific

goal: finding and placing qualified

candidates. More importantly, that

goal should be to cultivate a network

of professionals willing to actively refer

open positions to job candidates on their

respective networks.

As any recruiter knows, referred

candidates tend to be far more qualified

for a position than candidates responding

to a job ad. These referrals not only

distinguish social recruiting from social

media, they are what make social

recruiting such a powerful, competitive,

and profitable, tool for placing candidates.

Social media makes it easy to pass

along information to one’s followers.

But social recruiting requires more than

simply posting jobs on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Although that may land a few applicants,

it isn’t far removed from posting openings

on yet another job board. Social recruiting

requires recruiters to actively engage their

networks to build relationships and, more

importantly, trust. They must be helpful,

educational, interesting and responsive to

the people in their network.

More to the point, it requires an

investment of time on the part of

recruiters — time to regularly check in,

or to create, post, and share interesting

content, or to personally respond to

developments in your contacts’ lives.

The question becomes how to intelligently

manage that time investment so that

“value in” equates with “value out.”

And therein lays the challenge, both for

recruiters and those who manage them.

Social media is a channel for socializing.

Social recruiting is the practice of cultivating your recruiters’ social media networks to find and place qualified candidates.

How Does Social Recruiting Differ from Social Media?

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In many respects, recruiting activities

online are not so different than for

traditional recruiting:

• network with the industry

• maintain a pipeline of candidates

• post jobs

• match candidates to fill orders

But, unlike conventional practices,

online recruitment is largely invisible to

managers. This can be disconcerting, even

for managers at firms that are reaping the

benefits of social recruiting. Managers

can’t always track the productivity of

individual recruiter networks, or measure

which online practices yield better results

than others. Are the agency’s collective

networks growing? Is staff building

targeted connections? Staying engaged?

Representing a unified agency brand?

Today, managers are gaining a vague

understanding of the potential business

value of social recruiting. But they’re

crystal clear on the importance of

monitoring and measuring their firms’

online recruitment activities. The best

way to manage an unfamiliar practice is

to implement it before your staff does.

The challenge is finding time to develop

a coherent, actionable social recruiting

strategy from the ground up, and

implementing that strategy in an

intelligent framework.

A well-run social recruiting program has three elements — centralization, measurement and optimization.

Centralize

In today’s social recruiting landscape,

each recruiter has a network of contacts

to which they reach out whenever they

have an opening to fill. However, before

managers can measure, compare and

manage performance of these networks,

they must first gain visibility into them all.

In addition, individual recruiters can neither

see nor share each other’s networks,

and therefore lack the opportunity to

collaborate and pool their efforts.

Providing this insight to staff should

be as important a goal for managers

as gaining it themselves. One recruiter,

working alone, can tap his or her own

connections. A team of recruiters, working

together, can reach a larger network.

This becomes much easier if recruiters

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have a single portal on which to network.

Then they can learn from each other,

experiment, and make adjustments based

on which channels and networks are most

responsive. Plus, this ensures that their

individual networks point to the same lists

of jobs.

More importantly, combining networks

increases the potential for generating

referred candidates exponentially.

Compared to job board applicants,

referrals not only tend to be more qualified,

they are generally more likely to accept a

client’s job offer.

If colleagues cannot refer candidates, then

often someone in their network can. And

even if they or their contacts have fewer

connections, or only a fraction share a

posted article or job opening, individual

recruiters can still reach more active job

seekers, passive candidates and hiring

managers than by their network alone.

Sharing job openings on an enterprise-

level social recruitment platform should

be a very simple, beneficial and hopefully

obvious goal.

Uniting your firm’s individual social

recruiting efforts under one centralized

platform can make those collective efforts

more time efficient. Online tools already

exist to post job openings to share and

track content and to proactively spot

passive job seekers. To consolidate these

tools makes it easier for management to

track and measure team’s individual and

collective effectiveness.

Measure

You cannot manage what you cannot

measure. Today, managers see the end

results of individual social recruiting

efforts, but they lack any way to gauge

what works, or why.

Once all recruiters are on a centralized

social recruiting framework, management

can begin to apply measurement and

tracking tools that are characteristic of

traditional, offline recruiting programs.

Managers need to see what jobs have

recently been broadcast to the enterprise’s

collective network of contacts. Then

managers can track, in aggregate or

job by job, the number of shares, visitors,

and inquiries each job is receiving.

In addition to tracking how job postings

fare on the network, managers can gain

insights into the network itself. They need

to see which recruiters have connections

online, whether or not the firm’s network

is growing, and how many visitors social

media efforts are attracting.

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With the right tools, managers can dig

down and see how their firm’s networks

and social recruitment practices

compare — both between individuals,

and collectively over time. Managers

can stop reacting to the end results of

individual social recruitment efforts —

however positive — and start proactively

managing them.

Optimize

Once all social recruitment activities

share a unified platform, managers move

from measuring to optimizing. In other

words, managers can exercise some

leadership over their agency’s social

recruiting efforts.

A firm’s administration should convert

best practices into institutional

knowledge to train less connected

or new recruiters. Managers can also

ensure their teams stay engaged with

their networks and continue to add

contacts, so the firm can maintain

sustainable value from social recruiting.

Even veteran social recruiters can take

advantage of management support,

such as interesting content generated to

share with their networks.

Plus, everyone benefits when the firm

benefits. Recruiting from a centralized

online platform allows management

to capture interested applicants if and

when the recruiter decides to leave

the firm.

But most importantly, management

can get the jump on the competition

by turning social media into an entirely

new channel for finding highly qualified

candidates more quickly. In the end,

social recruiting’s value must be

measured by the same metrics that

talent agencies already use to measure

their business. This gets back to the

“value in” versus “value out” issue.

Can social media improve your firm’s

bottom line?

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Social recruiting has an impact on your

bottom line. More connections in a

recruiter’s network lead to more views

for new job posts — and subsequently,

more applicants, qualified applicants and

placements. More placements translate into

more revenue.

Adding more qualified, relevant candidates

to your pipeline will accelerate the cycle

time between opening a new job order

and placing a candidate. It also reduces

sourcing costs by minimizing your reliance

on using job boards to find people, and

cutting the phone time necessary to

screen out unqualified candidates. The

more qualified candidates you add to your

pipeline, the more your firm will quickly fill

orders and make money.

Social Recruiting’s Return on Investment

One out of every ten jobs you fill will be sourced from social media.

33 views for 10 jobs

15 applicants

4-5 qualifiedcandidates

1 placement

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The question is, how does social media

compare to conventional channels

for filling the pipeline with qualified

candidates? Does it help produce better

candidates? Or fill orders more quickly?

Some real-life numbers, derived from

observing more than 100,000 recruiters

who have used the Bullhorn Reach online

platform, can help.

The data shows that the average job

posted by an active Bullhorn Reach user

gets just over 33 views. That number

represents people who clicked on a

short link that directs them to a Bullhorn

Reach job portal with a job description.

Just under half of these postings on

the Bullhorn Reach portal elicit an

application — in fact, they average three

applications each. These are visitors who

send an inquiry to the recruiter about the

opportunity, submit a resume, or apply via

their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.

Crunching these numbers, it turns out

that about 4.4% of all Bullhorn Reach

job views result in an application. This

is where the comparative value of social

recruiting begins to appear.

A recruiter trying to fill 10 job openings would attract about 330 views and convert an average of 15 applicants from

these views.

But how many of those applicants will

be qualified candidates? That number

could be anywhere from about one to

two percent, which is the return that

many recruiters expect from job board

applicants, or as high as 40%, which

studies have cited as the rate of qualified

candidates from referrals. Depending on

how motivated a recruiter’s network is

in recommending the post to their

network, those 15 applicants should

generate between 4 and 5 qualified

referrals candidates.

That leads to another question: How

many of those well-qualified candidates

need to be submitted to the client to

win a placement? Like all numbers here,

this may vary by industry and vertical.

However, the industry average is about

four, which finally translates to one

placement secured through social media.

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To recap: One recruiter actively using social

media can expect to fill one out of every 10

job orders completely through their social

recruiting efforts. This ratio was recently

corroborated by one recruitment firm, which

cited similar numbers one month after

implementing Bullhorn Reach.

It could be argued that a recruiter might have

placed that candidate using conventional

means. But this misses two key points. First,

only social media allows a recruiter to reach

beyond his own network and tap into his

team’s network. Second, highly qualified

referred candidates are more likely to find

recruiters on social media, which is the exact

opposite of how things work when an opening

is posted to a job board.

Conventional recruitment practices do not

allow a team of recruiters to easily combine

their networks. Social recruiting means more

connections scanning each job posting and

sharing postings with their own networks.

It means more referrals, either to active or

passive job seekers, and more qualified

candidates applying for an open position.

Faster placements means more revenue within

a given time.

The biggest variable is how much your

company earns for each permanent

placement. But in terms of “value in” versus

“value out,” the time and money required to

implement a social recruiting platform can

begin to provide returns after only

one placement.

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CONCLUSION

Social recruiting delivers more qualified candidates more quickly

through the power of referrals. But, to date, adoption of the practice

has been scattered and non-strategic. This creates an opportunity

for firms that get on board early by first implementing a centralized

platform for their recruiters to build and pool their social media

networks. Once firms take this first step, they can begin to intelligently

advance along social recruiting’s learning curve to measure and

optimize the impact of social recruiting on their bottom line. Staying

competitive amidst these trends isn’t impossible, or even difficult. But

it requires firms to take quick and intelligent action, as the history of

social media demonstrates how rapidly an effective business practice

can go viral.

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ABOUT BULLHORN REACHBullhorn Reach is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) social recruiting

solution, designed to help recruiters leverage social media to source

candidates and identify potential movers more efficiently. Launched

in February 2011, the Bullhorn Reach social sourcing suite offers

robust recruiting solutions that empower recruiters to engage as

thought leaders, enhance their personal brands, and increase their

visibility online.

With more than 100,000 registered users worldwide, Bullhorn Reach

delivers advanced technology that brings recruiters and job seekers

together more efficiently than ever before. Bullhorn Reach is a division of

Bullhorn, Inc., the global leader in software-as-a-service for recruitment.

Headquartered in Boston, with offices in London and Sydney, Bullhorn’s

recruiting ATS/CRM and social recruiting products serve more than

130,000 users across 126 countries.

33-41 FaRNSWORTH STReeT5TH FLOORBOSTON, Ma 02210

WWW.BULLHORNReacH.cOM1.617.478.9110@BULLHORNReacH

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