If you have a great culture and work environment, employees will naturally spread corporate karma to their networks
By Harpaul Sambhi
It doesn’t matter if your organization is a haven for social media or if it outright bans it from the workplace, HR needs to consider using social media when it comes to recruitment.
And why wouldn’t it? LinkedIn is the new Monster, averaging three new users per second. The professional social networking site is growing its revenue exponentially via hiring solutions offered to organizations looking to tap into this vast database of professionals.
Facebook is approaching one billion users, a threshold it is expecting to cross by March 2013, if not sooner.
Twitter is maturing into a media platform where users are now checking tweets, instead of tuning in to CBC or CNN. But we can’t have presence in all these places, plus YouTube, Google Plus, blogs and forums. After all, some companies are still feeling the repercussions of the economy with a “trimmed” HR budget. In a social world that rapidly changes, the employee remains the key to success.
Employees can help guide organizations to the best online mediums for recruitment. As Dale Carnegie said, “Grade-A people know other grade-A people.”
If this is true, your employees will know other likeminded colleagues who might be the perfect candidates. Employees can help define what online tools they and their colleagues use. Make this a part of your social recruitment strategy when choosing which networks to invest your time, and resources, in.
Employees can also recruit for you in the social world. If you have a great culture and work environment, employees will naturally spread the corporate karma to their networks, creating awareness of their fabulous employer. New employees, naturally more engaged during the onboarding process, often have networks that contain untapped candidates. However, these employees are often not actively aware of current or upcoming vacancies. If employee referrals are known to be a top source of hire, it certainly makes sense to marry social media to employee referrals.
It may be a fine balancing act to ensure you respect employee privacy, but if you engage employees to broadcast a hard-to-fill vacancy to Facebook or LinkedIn, what impact could it have?
Exposing your brand via employees to their networks is the holy grail of recruitment. Similar to what TripAdvisor or Yelp is to the travel and restaurant world, the employee would act as a vehicle and give honest reviews to their network. At Careerify, we’ve looked closely at more than 200,000 employee users that have on average 316 social connections. Assuming these same statistics, imagine what your first impression social reach is?
Most referrals are activated when a candidate reaches out to the employee, but it is seldom the employee who triggers the referral process through her own networks. If we can revert the typical referral process and fuse social media, we will have an army of employees acting as mini-recruiters.
Interested in learning more? Take a look at this new eBook focusing on 15 ways to optimize the employee referral program and infusing social media. It’s free to download.
Harpaul Sambhi is the CEO of Careerify, a company that develops social recruiting tools focused on employee referral programs with offices in Toronto and San Francisco. He is the author of Social HR, published by Carswell, which sheds insights in how social media is impacting human resources. He can be reached at hsambhi@careerify.net, (416) 840-6216 or visit www.careerify.net for more information.