Twitter, Facebook and Other Social Media Sites Are Not Sources of Hire

By Gerry Crispin

Over and over, the legitimate effort to apply metrics to our profession gets sidetracked when it comes down to the specifics. This is especially true with Social Media and all the noise it generates. Often we seem to be moving down measurement blind alleys that will be unlikely to help our long term cause: hire qualified and fully engaged candidates.

Recently, Mark and I were asked the following question:

“Your Sources of Hire study for 2011 states 88.5% of firms surveyed consider social media part of their Direct Sourcing efforts. But, I’m guessing that the folks who participate in this survey with you would be skewed to be among the most sophisticated portion of the corporate recruiting community. Do you believe that’s the case? So, do you think one can make the leap and extrapolate that 80-something % of US employers across-the-board are using social media to recruit in 2011? Does that sound right to you?”

Part of our answer went something like this:

• 15 years ago it would have been silly to ask recruiters “What percent of your hires involves the use of a phone?” The question is meaningless because the answer is a partial description of the means to an end and not at all crucial to the decision process (unless of course the ubiquitous use of phones was denied to either you or your candidates.)
• 5 years ago it would have been just as silly to ask recruiters “What percent of your hires were made by recruiters using email?”
• And, within another couple years the question “What percent of hires involve mobile social media?” will be as inane as the rest.

The question we should be asking isn’t how many were hired but “How is Social Media used in the decision process?”

• What data is important to influencing a qualified prospect to become more interested in converting to an engaged candidate?
• What access at what cost can social media offer to our firm and our pipeline of prospects that will increase our supply chain conversion rates downstream?
• What sequence of touch-points constitutes a ‘budding’ relationship that is likely to end in a productive employee?
• How does [ultimately] the performance of people we hired who first assessed us through social media before applying compare to those who were found, vetted and wooed but never bothered to do their own due diligence?

Social Media isn’t a ‘Source’ as much as it is an enhancement of the means to communicate interactively – for employers to find job seekers and jobs seekers to penetrate firms for transparency, to dig out relevant content, to analyze options and to execute in real time.

With all the hype to eliminate job boards and other means to attract attention, on any given day a job seeker might look at a digital billboard on the side of the road while contemplating a boss who is standing in the way of progress. And people, for any number of reasons, type the term ‘job’ into a Google search string 45,000,000 times a month. Not a few are delivered to good and bad job description links on job boards, or links from SEO or SEM. It’s what comes next that is key: a phone call, an email, a conversation connection on Facebook, Linkedin Group or your firm’s talent community.

 

Re-published with permission of Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler of CareerXroads, your staffing strategy connection. To reach Gerry or Mark, email mmc@careerxroads.com or visit their web site at http://www.careerxroads.com.