Standout Jobs

Anna Farmery has a straightforward, practical post on social media tactics for recruiting. For someone just digging into the realm of social media recruiting, it might take a bit more elaboration and explanation (although none of this stuff is overly complicated) … but the most important thing Anna writes is this:

You don’t need a large budget for recruitment, you need a passion for reaching the right people…

She’s absolutely correct.

One of the things that makes social media so interesting (and important) is that anyone can create success with little money. And this isn’t just about recruiting. I built up an audience of almost 3,000 RSS subscribers at my startup blog, Instigator Blog and I barely spent a thing. It was all done by leveraging social media and learning how to tell an effective story in the Web/blogosphere-medium.

And it’s not necessarily about doing something insanely viral that gets huge amounts of traffic and skyrockets you to fame and fortune (although that would be nice.) Leveraging social media is an ongoing, deliberate process. There is certainly a viral component to it, but the goals you set can be quite modest.

In the near future I don’t think we’ll be arguing whether or not social media (and by extension social networking) will be an important part of a businesses’ operations - it just will be. That doesn’t mean every company will have a blog, every person will be using Twitter, etc. — but it does mean that companies will recognize the obvious value, get past their fears of “something new” and start asking themselves, “How can I best leverage social media for my company’s success?”

Social Media Recruiting

One of the challenges in the world of social media, blogging and social networking is the growing array of tools at one’s disposal. It can be overwhelming, especially when those tools are brought into an industry, like HR, which isn’t used to such massive, quick change. The key to social media recruiting is this:

1. Build a targeted audience of candidates.
2. Turn that audience of candidates into a community.

Use any and all tools at your disposal. But don’t fret about which ones you’re using (or not.) Start with something simple, experiment, test results and go from there. I think our product, Reception is simple because it combines many of the tools in a social media toolkit (blogging, video, photos, commenting, etc.) in an easy-to-use package.

Don’t worry about looking foolish - people are incredibly forgiving when they see the effort being put in to reach them in an authentic, conversational way. Social media marketing isn’t about ramming perfectly crafted messages down people’s throats. It’s about opening the doors to your world just a little bit more and saying, “Come on in and check us out.” People want that. Candidates want that, and they won’t mind if everything isn’t perfect (it never is anyway.)