How to create and implement a rewarding and innovative social strategy #RecHangout with Andy...

The monthly LIVE discussion show for recruiters

How to Create and Implement a Rewarding and Innovative Social Recruiting Strategy

27th May 2015

#RecHangout is supported by:

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Hangout ParticipantsMark StephensMDThe Recruitment Alliance

Alan WhitfordRecruitment StrategistAbtech + RCEURO

Louise TrianceCommunity OwnerUK Recruiter

Steve WardCloudNine Social Media Recruitment and Digital Talent

Louis WelcommeCRM Comms ManagerColleague Software

Andy HeadworthFounderSirona Consulting Ltd

John HeffernanDigital Sales DirectorHillcroft Digital



“Social is the primary source of all our candidates, clients and business inputs but it’s merely an extension of the way that we’ve always done it. Now it’s 2015 we’ve got new tools to play with.”




“For candidates it’s become mainstream but for many recruiters it’s not. It’s not just to post jobs but a fantastic extension to further engage and have a conversation in a place where candidates want to have a conversation.”




“Social sits across anything. Look at the media, social is embedded in it, embedded in our lives every day so why shouldn’t it be the case in normal recruitment strategy, it’s what we do.”




“It’s not a question of having one social channel like LinkedIn to find candidates: there’s a good chance they’ll be on four or five other networks. It becomes a matter of course to explore all of them when you want to recruit.”




“We owe it to our clients to be effective in social and digital channels because they’re paying us a fee to find the best people for their roles. If we’re limiting the sources, we’re not fulfilling our client’s requests properly.”




“Clients don’t know why they want to do a social recruiting strategy, they’re doing it because their competitors are doing it or their CEO says they should.”




“You’ve got to build candidate personas, map candidates, where they are, what they look like and then you can select the social channels where those candidates can be found: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.”




“What are we going to share on our social networks, what content? How are you going to keep people engaged and interested? You need ongoing monitoring to ensure that you’re not missing out if someone’s talking about you whether positively or negatively.”




“I serve a lot of media and digital industry, and that industry is still struggling to work out best routes of action for taking a brand to social media and getting genuine Indicators of Interest from it.”




“Organisations need to allow time for branding to take effect, Recruitment agencies aren’t very good at allowing things like branding to take effect because they want short-term results.”




“It stems from lack of knowledge and needs more people to understand how it’s done to implement a successful strategy. Usually they try it for a few weeks and it has no obvious impact and it’s ditched.”




“Defining the audience can be as simple as asking your own audience. A good example would be Maersk. They had a huge challenge three years ago: to recruit 2.5 thousand new employees in the oil and gas sector at a time when traditional methods weren’t working.”




“They reached out to their marketing team – not their HR and Recruiting team – and decided to try social. They did their homework to try to understand who and where their audience was.”




“First thing was to ask their existing employees where they go socially. A high percent, 85-86% were on Facebook, they were engaging on the rigs with family and colleagues. So they started to share content that their existing employees liked to talk about, so things like rigs, boats. ”




“This was shared between employees, they shared it out and it increased exponentially in terms of likes and engagement: on the Maersk page there’s a picture of a ship with 65 people commenting on it and 5-6 will be people asking for jobs right there!”




“That works on a global scale but on the other end think of things like Snapchat. There’s a pub in Ireland last summer, needed to recruit people for a new bar with something different so they did Snapchat applications!”




“The applicants had to get their attention in a short time, three or four seconds to say why they could make a difference and this pub recruited all their employees via Snapchat.”




“Why not work around the social pattern, identify people’s specialisms and profiles and work out where their bigger footprint is. People love it if you follow their Instagram and Pintrest and blogs: reception is higher there.”




“Raising your visibility in comfort areas should be the priority. This is the big challenge: how can we be social in business and still count it as business?”




“Every person has on average 4 or 5 profiles across social networks and yet every time recruiters go to the same place their competitors and colleagues are going and then banging their head against the table wondering why they can’t get the candidates.”




“If I think everyone’s going on LinkedIn that’s what I’ll use. Training needs to show that it’s not about passively posting and waiting for people to come. This is a fantastic time for going out and finding people because we can find them everywhere!”




“Aren’t there two separate strategies? Targeting individuals as a sourcing strategy: we might find their digital footprint and use those means to engage and influence. But there’s also the opportunity to market ourselves to a mass audience.”

Mark StephensMDThe Recruitment Alliance



“Are we underusing our databases? Wouldn’t it be easy to take our candidate emails, drop them into a remarketing programme and have something that we push out to them on a regular basis on Facebook for example?”




“If you’re going to invest money in targeted advertising take that email database – you can upload email addresses to twitter and facebook to target people on those platforms – and run specific targeted campaigns at people on that platform.”




“To take it a stage further you can do lookalikes: people who meet the profiles of those you’ve just sent to will be matched to provide an extra audience.”




“People underestimate the power of social. When we start talking about targeted personalised advertising on pages they visit every day.”




“I would export candidate details on our database that were relevant and run content marketing, incentives or offers to pull them into talent pools and strengthen relationships with these people for the next relevant opportunity or get exclusivity and market them out!”




“We’ve got all this segmented data and target content accordingly. We can have a shout to an occasional job, but I think we look inside niches for targeted marketing because it’s much more effective sending content to 100 people than 2000 people if it fits them more exactly.”




“How do you instruct people on educating their employees? When I look at LinkedIn it frustrates me to see people reading articles for an hour at a time and they fudge it and say it’s part of their work and research!”




“I think recruiters are all marketers anyway. You’ve got an office of 10-15 recruiters and each recruiter should have a different vertical, understanding their precise market and reading blogs, news keeping up with events.”




“They can get a tool like feedly to fetch blogs, websites and pull them all into feedly to collate information in your particular vertical. You don’t have to keep going back to those sites, knowledge comes to you.”




“Start sharing that on your platforms, knowing where people are and scheduling posts to those arenas for times when people are ready to use it: when commuting, at lunch, at tea-breaks.”




“The kind of recruiter we want has changed and the way we make business has changed. Because someone can make calls doesn’t make them useful in this sector. You might have different skillsets across a team, but the modern day recruiter has a different look.”




“I don’t want a sales person hosting my content, all they’re doing is chucking it out. I want someone who looks at content, understands the market they’re creating content for and commentates as part of opening their discussion with their audience.”




“There’s a recruiter friend of mine who worked for Spotify and came up with a playlist for candidates that he sent out with a link. In the playlist was a message aimed at developers, software and technical people.”




“For me this is being clever, a recruiter who knows his audience and he has a whole raft of these that he’s specialised for headhunting. How long does this take? Five, ten minutes. It shows someone who’s using social cleverly!”




“Do we need to have different KPIs including articles shared and engagement level or, as I suggested, retain our recruitment KPIs but including our social in our measurements?”




“Integrate those metrics, sources of hire & engagement, like how many referrals have you had through Twitter, Facebook etc. They’ve got analytics built in to assess the level of engagement, conversations, who’s sharing content through retweets, conversations.”




“If your site is not showing what people want to see, you won’t be driving people back to your domains where you’re controlling content, stories, blogs, conversations.”




“If we capture people at our chosen destination do we want all of these engagements going on elsewhere where we don’t control the final message?”




“We don’t put KPIs on content sharing: I decide that it should be a given, rather than something we measure success by. We measure them when we’re bringing people towards the placement.”




“We need to be experts and make content to inform the industry: we need to measure people by new metrics.”




“We’ve talked a lot about the candidate side, but what about the marketing side, how can we use social for business depth and go out to generate business and leads?”




“There’s no difference to the sell, from my point of view candidates also mean clients. Really it’s a people thing, it’s not a regimented situation there are as many bosses, CEO’s, directors, on social as candidates.”




“I’ve had conversations and developed business by finding the people you want to find and start a conversation in social media. It’s about communicating and engaging and it doesn’t always have to be about work.”




“One is an influence, the other is an influencer. They’re both your market, your designated audience. Word of mouth is what you’re aiming for, the biggest purpose is that I want it to be an inbound marketing tool.”




“All the things you’ve been talking about are things I come across in every industry every day of the week. Across the board a lot of people don’t integrate social into their overall marketing strategies.”




“They see it as a stand alone item and get someone who knows a little bit about Twitter. They hand them the keys to the business and say ‘off you go!’.”




“It’s not social media marketing, it’s just marketing. It needs to be built into every element of the marketing that you do, otherwise you’ll fail and your competitors are going to beat you.”




“You need to be able to automatically collect social media profiles against your database, lead scoring and sales pipelines so your consultants can deal with content generated leads effectively instead of hundreds of leads passed on by marketing.”




“Recruitment CRM shouldn’t just be a database of CV’s which recruiters use when LinkedIn fails them. It needs to have every aspect of marketing, social media and sales functionality that CRM outside the industry has!”




“Recruiters just take what software does rather than pushing back. Software companies think they know what they need to do, they’ll give companies what they think they want, not necessarily what they really need.”




“The challenge of sales in Social Media comes back to who does it. A lot comes down to credibility and authority within the subject media.”




“A few years ago we couldn’t demonstrate it unless you published an article in a magazine, nobody knew the field experts. Now people can represent themselves as experts within the organisations and industries in which they operate.”




“To lead the social media process from a business development perspective you need to use the leaders in the business: they should be CEOs, MDs, the consultants, they should be the faces of business development through social rather than the intern!”




“I was asked by Glamour magazine to talk about Youtubers because I hired social media people! I never expected to do that, but it was my specialist area. That’s a good traffic source from a business development as well as candidate point of view. Credibility and branding are key!”




“Think specifically about who you’re going to target, and be creative about how to approach them. Sometimes words aren’t enough. The quality of content and the purpose behind the content you deliver to targeted groups is hugely important.”




“Listen to your audience. When you start using social media make sure it’s interesting and relevant, otherwise your audience will ignore you: there’ll be something else that’s better. Listen to responses and don’t be afraid of engaging.”




“Social is here to stay so let’s just embrace it and turn it to our advantage!”




@RuthWinden

Best of the #RecHangout and Q+A Buzz

Recruiters need to be where candidates are open to engage, i.e. any social media platform, not just #LinkedIn @AndyHeadworth #RecHangout

I agree @AndyHeadworth, @feedly is superb for keeping up to date with your field, collate + curate content. Free/paid versions #RecHangout

Your social recruitment strategy must align w/ the overall business strategy to get support & be successful! @andyheadworth #RecHangout

@AudraKnight

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@EttieHolland

Best of the #RecHangout and Q+A Buzz

“it’s not about passively posting a job and waiting for the candidates to come… you have to go and find them” Yes, #RecHangout

I think the biggest hurdle to recruiters adopting a social strategy is time. Practically how does it fit in to already busy days #RecHangout

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Next #Rechangout The Modern Recruiter: Content Creator, Story Teller And Advert Writer?1st July, 1pm BST

Mervyn Dinnen - Content Strategist. Blogger for Broadbean Technology and Monster UK.

Glenn Southam - Marketing Manager at Staffgroup

Mike Powell - Head of Sales at CV Library Ltd

https://www.colleaguesoftware.com/webinars/the-modern-recruiter-content-creator-story-teller-and-advert-writer-rechangout







The Recruiters Hangout is a monthly, free discussion show, where special guests, business owners and industry experts join our regular panel to share their top tips, insights and advice with a live online audience. Viewers are able to send their questions and comments directly to the panel via our open chat stream and take part on Twitter using our hashtag #RecHangout. Our aim is to ensure that our audience comes away inspired, with new ideas, strategies and resources they can use in their own business.

The #RecHangout is supported by four hosts, including Abtech Partnership and RCEuro founder, Alan Whitford, who makes sure viewers get the most from the show, asking the right questions and ensuring the discussion stays on track; Mark Stephens, founder of The Recruitment Alliance and the F10 Group and director at Smart Recruit Online; Louis Welcomme, Communications Manager at Colleague Software, and Louise Triance from the UK Recruiter community, who looks out for your online comments on our twitter hashtag #RecHangout during the broadcast.

Want to take part? Call Louis on: 01603 735 932 - [email protected]

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How to create and implement a rewarding and innovative social strategy #RecHangout with Andy...

Recruiting & HR

Transcript of How to create and implement a rewarding and innovative social strategy #RecHangout with Andy...