Taking social recruiting to the next level
Social recruiting has certainly been all the buzz for several years now. Though the use of social recruiting platforms like LinkedIn has risen dramatically, they have been treated more like social sourcing platforms (just another place to find candidates, another candidate pool). But is that really social recruiting — finding a candidate, getting his/ her résumé, and moving the person through the time-tested, ATS-based recruiting and interviewing process, and archiving the candidate résumés into the depths of the ATS résumé database? Not really.
Real social recruiting (and its full potential) lies more in engaging and establishing relationships (with talent), one that you own and maintain as a vital asset of your staffing business (not just over the brief find-hire cycle, but over a long period of time — possibly many years — in your own talent community). That means establishing a social brand and long-term engagement. Doing it requires more than just sourcing candidates from a social network or allowing a third party’s recruiting platform solution to appropriate the vital assets (relationships, talent community) your firm should be building up and owning in order to be more than just a transaction processor of hiring events.
Two very new and extremely interesting solution providers are at the forefront of making social recruiting real for staffing firms: QueSocial and TalentCircles.
QueSocial was developed, says co-founder, Mike Dwyer, “one, to operationalize social media across the organization to drive measurable business outcomes; and two, to make it easy and compelling for employees to use social media effectively by providing training, delivering sharable content, driving business outcomes and tracking actual business impact.” The QueSocial gamification platform encourages learning and adoption of effective social recruiting behaviors in a way that is interesting and stimulating. It also provides relevant, easy-to-reuse content (a critical and often hard to achieve practice in successful social recruiting).
If QueSocial supports the accomplishment of your organization’s and people’s social recruiting development tasks, Talent Circles, in a complementary way, goes a step further and provides more of the tool set and platform for further enacting and maintaining your own talent community or network over the longer run. As noted by TalentCircles’ founder Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, today “candidates and recruiters have no space in common. Recruiters … have no way to manage and own relationships controlled by other entities (LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, etc.).” While finding/sourcing candidates in social space is starting to happen, keeping and developing those valuable relationships as your own is a much more difficult thing to achieve, given the architectures of today’s employment websites, applicant tracking systems and third-party social sites. TalentCircles inserts a unifying solution that enables staffing organizations and recruiters to develop and maintain longer-term talent relationships (actually build sustainable talent networks) that they own and control. TalentCircles accomplishes this in a number of ways, through a broad set of tools, including a remarkably integrated and easy-to-use video/communications set of capabilities that make it easy to develop and maintain unique, vital relationships with candidates and talent network members.
The buzz used to be about the idea of social recruiting. Now the real buzz is about a group of new innovative start-ups that are enabling staffing organizations and recruiters to make that idea a reality.
