Social Media in Recruitment by Shally Steckerl, EVP Arbita

2. The New Communication Paradigm…
• Is a dialog not a broadcast
• A “message” is not a conversation
• Those who seek to control the conversation
will be defeated by those who enable,
inspire and influence
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3. Benefits of Social Media Engagement: Branding
• Increased presence in social media elevates your brand so
its important to participate and engage with prospects on
others’ Facebook pages, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter accounts
and Blogs

4. Benefits of Social Media Engagement
• Social Media communities tend to allow members access to
their total membership so your recruiters may use member
email and other contact information to make direct contact
with specific individuals of interest via “direct approach” on
social networks

5. Benefits of Social Media Engagement: SEO
• Your organization’s activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
and Blogs results in favorable organic ranking by search
engines, driving traffic to your careers page and allowing
you to dramatically reduce your advertising budget

6. Benefits of Social Media Engagement: Viral Networking
• Members of LinkedIn, friends on Facebook, “followers” on
Twitter (etc.) are generally able to see the complete list of
“friends of a friend” so your recruiters will find that each
single social media contact becomes a gateway to a broader
community – this is known as the viral networking effect

7. Benefits of Social Media Engagement: Comp Intel
• Social Media communities are replete with “word on the
street” – actionable intelligence that gives you a heads-up
regarding industry buzz, competitive intelligence, where the
talent pool is headed, and other key indicators that don’t
come through job boards.

8. Key Social Media Initiatives: Go Where They Are
1. Go where your prospects are not where you think they
should be - identify key talent channels within varied social
media platforms: online Social Networking reflects our real-
world social proclivities, we hang out with others who share
our interests and affiliations

9. Key Social Media Initiatives: Global Vision
2. Compose a Vision Statement describing a robust approach
to social media recruitment to include acquisition,
validation, analysis and application of actionable
knowledge about key stakeholders for goal-setting, strategy
formulation and support HR & recruitment missions

10. Key Social Media Initiatives: Roadmap
3. Based on identification of channels above, craft a roadmap
on how the entire organization should engage, connect and
participate with skill-set relevant niche sites and online
subject matter influencers to heighten identification of
organizational employment brand

11. Key Social Media Initiatives: Assigned Channels
4. Assign social media activities in each channel to key
recruitment personnel with an emphasis on outreach,
engagement and organic attraction of dedicated talent
audiences

12. Key Social Media Initiatives: Communication Strategy
5. Implement a communications strategy that fosters genuine
candidate relationships utilizing Web 2.0 or “social media”
channels of communication

13. Are social networks a useful source of candidates?
• No. Social Recruiting works only when you empower and deputize your
entire organization to be recruiting evangelists.
• The way we’re doing it there is little reward in comparison to amount of
work. Most companies lack an effective strategy for sourcing, they
depend on web-savvy recruiters “figuring it out” as they go
• Blogs, among the largest and most active social networking
destinations, are almost completely ignored by recruiters
• Most companies mistakenly push nothing but job ads to social
networks, and in such frequency that it becomes noise nobody listens
to, with little to no value-add
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14. Interesting Genome Report Findings
• 70% have no strategy for sourcing from niche and regional
networks and 83% have no strategy for sourcing on blogs: both
massive, yet remain widely overlooked
• Not all the tried-and-true methods have been supplanted: 90%
say Employee Referral programs are much or somewhat better
than social networks. The challenge going forward is how to
make social networks and employee referral programs
synergistic
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15. Recent Survey on “hard to fill jobs”
What recruitment marketing initiatives Which recruitment marketing channels
have you used for hard-to-fill jobs? yielded most qualified?
• 85% Job Boards • 24% Social Networks
• 78% Social Networks • 16% Recruiting Services
• 49% Recruiting Services • 11% Job Boards and Sourcing
• 41% Sourcing Services Services (tie)
• 24% SEO • 3% SEO
• 16% SEM • 1% SEM
• 28% “other” • 34% “other” (from “no idea” to word of
mouth, referrals, internal sourcing team, etc.)
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16. What are the Main Social Networks?
MySpace Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Ning
300MM+ members, skews younger 500MM+ members, skews older 90MM+ people, skews older 120MM+ members 30MM+ members?
Monthly usage: 4.97 billion min.* Monthly usage: 13.87 billion min.* Monthly usage: 202 million min.* Monthly usage: 299 million min Monthly usage:
Mostly social Social & professional Mostly professional Social & professional Mostly professional
Not many useful Apps Many useful business Apps 2 awesome jobseeker Apps Many apps 90 apps
Easy search, hard to connect Difficult to find new contacts Easy to find and connect Easy to search Difficult to search
Fewer employers Few jobseeker ads Many jobseeker ads Many job postings Many jobseeker ads
No groups Join unlimited groups Join only 50 groups No official groups 1.3MM Groups
High participation, shallow Must be group member in order to
Moderate participation High participation Low participation
conversations participate
• In comparison, there are 4 billion mobile users worldwide
• In the US, there are 116 MM people reading blogs and 23 MM writing them
• There are 8 million people each on Xing and Viadeo (European focus)

17. Branding
Get noticed among millions of profiles:
• Have a 100% complete profile – fill out summary and specialties with
words/phrases describing your expertise
• Vanity URL (your name): makes sure your profile is “public”
linkedin.com/in/shally or facebook.com/shally.steckerl
• Your past experience should go back 10 years. Concisely explain what you
did at each company.
• Write/get recommendations, ask/answer questions
• Link to your websites (your jobs RSS, team blog, etc.)
• Remember, its not who you know it’s who knows YOU
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18. Social Media Marketing Tips
• Don’t be a social media schitzo. Be the same person on all your social networks!
• You are your brand - skip the canned branding rhetoric and just express your passion for your industry,
your job, your role, and the branding will come naturally.
• Don’t sell, share. If you treat it as advertising you will turn people off. Share something useful,
something about you or your company or your product, but you will gain more if you don’t sell. You
don’t have to give the whole recipe but revealing a little taste of your secret sauce once in a while will
get you better results.
• Be real. People want to relate with other people, not with “constructs” so be yourself, be honest about
who you are and what you care about, and what you are doing, even an occasional tip about your
favorite burger joint. You have multiple interests, so express that.
• Write well. Bad spelling, grammar or punctuation, and hasty abbreviations should be avoided. You
can’t always get it right but confident prose and concise eloquence go a long way to establish your
brand.
• One you get it, stay committed. If you are going to do it then don’t just
stick your feet in, jump all the way in and stick to it. This doesn’t mean
you have to write constantly every day but stay involved at some level
of frequently at least once every other week or even weekly.

19. Top Three Social Media Mistakes
• Participation in to many tools – You don’t want “naked profiles”
• Self Promotion Overload – Using SM platforms as a promotion platform
doesn't provide anything to the community
• Setting & Forgetting – Time investment involved, continual process –
Listen & Participate

20. Recruitment Genome Project
Arbita’s Recruitment Genome Project is the single most wide-reaching and
thorough market research project ever conducted in the recruitment
community.
– Focus group interviews Shally Steckerl
– Multiple survey instruments EVP, Arbita, Inc.
612-278-0042
– Exhaustive secondary research shally@arbita.net
http://aces.arbita.net/shally
– Analysis from industry thought leaders like:
Kevin Wheeler, Peter Weddle, etc.
– Practical wisdom from over 4000 staffing leaders
– Ranked list of key sourcing initiatives for 2010
– Participate and get the 1st and 2nd reports for free