Recruitment agencies had become inhuman, Social Media Recruitment isn’t.

Social Recruiting: Behind the recruitment brochure

When I graduated, unsure what career to take, I chose recruitment because I “liked people and stuff” (I barely paraphrase). I imagined riveting, brilliant, leisurely interviews, in my nice suit and best corporate-humanistic self. Revealing talent. Delving into psyches. Dignified, caring and quite brilliant to be honest if I said so myself.

I had no idea recruitment was one of the most savagely salesy careers you could find.

Reality quickly set into my job search, facing awkward interview questions:

• “Do you like money?”
• “So, errr, how many cold calls can you make in a day?”
• “Can you sell me this pen?”

In the end, I started by getting a job in advertising phone sales. Our “leads” were the directory. Pitch and close. ABC. AIDA. A great training to become a solid recruiter in the old paradigm. And despite never enjoying the salesmanship, I went on to spend 15 years in the industry.

But that just doesn’t work anymore.

Social media for recruitment agencies is aggressively growing as a marketing channel. And it has a lot to do with the end of classic sales talk, client information asymmetry, and changing customer habits.

Hiring through social media – Easier and more ethical than you may think

The recruitment industry has been further hollowed out of its human element over the last 20 years. Growing pressure from offshore suppliers and low entry barriers have made recruitment fantastically competitive.

Agents have reacted, by and large by doing “more of the same” just more calls, more InMails, more spec CV’s, more templated phone conversations. It is a normal reflex obviously. Stick to what you know, and do it better, or more of it.

Too rarely, having the time to really listen to the human looking for work on the other end of the phone. Rather, trying to systematically rinse each of them for leads as to who may be recruiting in the market, as I had been trained.

Unfortunately, this is keeping agents in an under-performing undertow: You need to lose sight of the shore to discover new lands. Social Media Marketing and Social Recruiting work because they are more adapted to consumer habits that evolved enormously recently.

• Technology has enabled enormous change: A good blog will convey your voice and branding to thousands of stakeholders in your niche. It’ll get you dozens and dozens of leads or registrations per month, for years on end. A good post going viral hits an exponential reach. Ubiquitously. In your ecosystem. Around the world. Even while you sleep. We can summarise that as a “1 to many” approach as opposed to “1 to 1” approach (picking up the phone 1 by 1, sending emails 1 by 1, having a templated conversation, 1 by 1, etc.)
• Consumer habits themselves have enormously changed, and not for the best as far as traditional recruitment agents work: Simply put, people are growing sick and tired of brochure speak. Sick and tired of cold-calls and unrequested spec emails. The average consumer wants to learn more about you before engaging or buying. The average consumer does not want you to send him 3 “spec CV’s” he/she never asked for per week. If it feels like “sales is getting harder” it might simply be the efficacy of the tools you are using, that is decreasing.

Benefits of using social media for recruiting

Social recruiting will yield these general benefits to any recruitment agency:

- More candidates:                       Social recruiting will open up large segments of untapped candidate pools you simply could not see, let alone reach. Your 1st-degree connections on LI or existing database really only go so far.

- Better candidates:                      As any recruiter knows, the passive candidates you source and engage with are usually of a higher caliber than those found on a job board. Social Media in recruitment is dreadfully efficient at generating passive candidates. Being seen, in a smart and valuable light, by as many relevant potential future candidates as possible.

- Higher candidate engagement:              The passive candidates you “pull” through to you, by being active on social media and producing valuable content for their niche concerns, will have

- Insights:                                          More, deeper insights into the current market for your recruitment niche. Information asymmetry is being stripped bare by technology, making genuine thought-leadership essential to recruiters. Influencer marketing (a core subset of social media marketing) also relies on acquiring genuinely cutting-edge insights.

- Higher branding:                          Speaking of which, brand equity and branding building are a core component of social media. Being seen by more, in a smarter / more beneficial light will not just yield better, more, more engaged candidates. It will also generate in time a “funnel” of client inquiries. Easier negotiations, when it comes to exclusivity and executive search retainers.

As far as innovative recruitment methods go social media marketing is high up there. And it cuts across the entire industry: day rate/contractors recruitment, permanent contingent recruitment, and executive search. The only thing that will change in that spectrum is where you will balance out virality and visibility building (more for contract) and branding building (more for search).

It works better both thanks to its creative and innovative ability as well as for its ubiquitous, exponential e-mileage. Social media for recruitment agencies will gradually crush traditional marketing channels used. Cold calling, spec email CV's and even InMails, all of these transactional actions build no branding, leverage no innate synergies and must all be done one by one. Their yields are dropping against adversely changing customer habits.

Inbound Marketing vs. Cold-calling

Wouldn’t it be great if you could drive quality candidates and clients to you? If you could choose whom to work with, and enjoy getting involved with clients whose culture, values, and projects you really rate? With candidates who are really deserving of a break, who get back to you, and who sound sincerely authentic on the phone?

How are you going to get there with cold calls and spec emails?

You say what you want about Millennials, I for one like their style. We (I’m a Gen X myself) talk a pretty chat about their social media as if it were just click-bait. Millennial marketing at large is actually much more human than traditional marketing.

No one is forcing you to click on the click-bait. You are free to follow anyone you like. And enjoy their free content. And with the growing amounts of content being produced (aka “Content Shock”) it takes more and more to stand out. Simply put, it takes more and more valuable content, expertly produced and authentically voiced, to stand out on social media these days.

The future of recruitment industry is inbound marketing. Social Media Recruitment (aka “Social Recruiting”) is here to stay, and agents better take notice. Not just because social media marketing at large yields better RoI than traditional marketing. Not just because it espouses deep societal changes (the growing rejection of cold-calls, direct mail, spec/spam emails, etc.)

In the specific arena of recruitment, it comes with another gigantic, overdue benefit. It actually puts sincere agent – candidate relationships back in the centre of agency success. It makes recruitment agencies human again and allows the ones that really care and know their niche, to showcase that. It strips down the “brochure speak” of the swankier agencies built on arrogant and self-proclaimed branding. Social media for recruitment agencies therefore also boasts a great if intangible benefit. You get to work with clients who are natively more attuned to your style and values. Win-win-win.

As part of your digital recruitment strategy building that authenticity and informative brand voice will be key.

Digital recruitment is authentic, creative recruitment

Ultimately people do business with you as professional and an individual. As a company, a group of people organised rationally, but also as a group of people who live out a culture. One that they may like or not. But you will find more and more that having no discernible culture is just not the way to go. That even if you only appeal to a specific 10% of your potential market, that will far outperform trying to be everything to everyone.

That you can’t hide behind the brochure anymore. Social media for recruitment agencies is largely about stepping in full light, from behind the brochure.

And in time you will probably find that you are happy to let your external stakeholders into the authentic culture and backstage of your agency. And that you actually do not want to do brochure speak anymore. That you breathe more easily in the morning, bill more easily, closer to target, working with better clients and candidates.

Social recruiting is simply the future of recruitment and in many ways, and actually harkens back to the original idea of recruitment. Something human and sincere. And the trend also largely applies to social media recruitment for HR and employer branding.

It is no gimmick and it is not click-bait if you do not make it so.

But even if you believe it is click-bait, accept that it is here to stay and gradually crushing traditional sales and marketing tools.