Does Social Media Work in Recruitment?

Everyone knows that LinkedIn has enjoyed a monopoly for the recruitment world for more than the past decade but as it gradually becomes more personal and less professional in its outlook, I would like to ask a few questions of the recruiters in my audience:

Does social media work for us? What channels do you use? Given the algorithmic challenges on every major platform, are we even reaching our audiences anymore? Are they reaching us?

Let’s say I connect with a Sales professional in an industry I recruit in. I am interested in their activity and I wish to engage with them periodically. Let’s say I have a ‘manageable’ 1000 connections, and I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. That is, until all the ‘trending news’ (etc.) clogs up my feed. You see the strangest industry trends there…. it makes you wonder. I realise that when I do a review of my connections on LinkedIn and do a profile update, I will suddenly start seeing posts and feeds from those people that I had not been seeing in my feed before.

The basic premise of social media should be to connect people, not collect clicks. If this were the sole goal of a channel, interactions would be simpler, noise would be much reduced and the value-add would be astronomically higher. As it is, we must trawl through the attention-seeking masses before we get to anything of interest. That hopeful; ’I’m looking for a job’ update that this Sales professional penned gets utterly lost. It gets no traction and they probably won’t write another one. They may not come on at all for a while, preferring the ‘old fashioned’ techniques of phone and email….

I think that there must be some niche solutions out there that people use for various purposes. Maybe industry specific groups are a way forward – I can see them being a good way of finding people through referrals. Snapchat and Instagram are a great way of getting across your personality, but I’m not sure that it facilitates conversations when they are needed. X/Twitter is noisy, Facebook is an ever-changing challenge, and even LinkedIn is diluting its once awesome value (unless you pay a lot for a recruiter licence).

Social media just doesn’t seem that social anymore. I understand the people who get excited about getting 100 ‘likes’ on an inane update, but just who are liking these updates? Have a look…. Maybe 5% of your potential audience, if you are lucky. And this fame is so fleeting.?

Does social media work in recruitment?

Well, yes, to an extent, but nowhere near as well as it could.

Now that Artificial Intelligence is on the scene, most posts we see are generated by technology logged into a scheduler and churned out at regular intervals. What was supposed to be helpful is now very lazy. The amount of repeat messages I see and even if I do respond to a marketing message how often I do not get a reply!