The ‘Relevant’ Recruiter: Enhance, Adopt, Survive in the Digital Age
To be a “relevant” recruiter, one needs to be a marketer and brand custodian, an experience enhancer, an analytics buff, a quality adopter, and a constant innovator. A recruiter in the digital age must learn to live and stay alive, a survivor in the digital desert and social media minefields.
You must be able to uphold your corporate image and reputation. Moreover, you must be able to interact and cultivate relationships with your followers on social media.
You must learn to crunch numbers and analyze data, metrics and indicators for your potential job candidates. You must learn about engaging new tools such as chatbots and other tools for sourcing and recruiting.
In our daily lives, most people are consumers interacting with social media – not thinking about the return of investment for each post, whether on Facebook or LinkedIn, even Instagram or Twitter.
Most of the time, people posting to keep their social networks updated – for vanity, for career progression, for chronicling their daily lives, and for a myriad of other reasons.
The same applies to a recruiter. It would seem, then, that every recruiter should have no problem when it comes to social recruiting. After all, if recruiters are using social media daily in their personal lives, they should be adept enough to use it in their professional lives, too.
This line of thinking seems sound, but if one is to be a serious talent marketer, it’d be a different story. Social recruiting isn’t that simple. There’s a big difference between how we use social media in our personal lives and how we use it to attract talent and build employer brands.
A social media-savvy recruiter has to be a master of his or her own employer brand. The recruiter must be able to express his or her employer branding via social network language.
Relevant Content
As a marketer representing the company, the recruiter has to work hard in creating social media content that feels natural — marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing. A marketer has to create a convenient and easy user interface to help applicants apply to available job position quickly and effortlessly.
Why? Because these disruptions can be tricky. Most of the time, social media may not work well for the employer or company.
First, social recruiting and the networking tools that go with it are designed to be D-I-Y. It can become very confusing if a recruiter does not understand the purpose of digital recruiting, what needs to be measured, and what you are looking for when generating loads of data.
One has to understand that in platforms like Facebook, to ensure that users continue to come back to these platforms, friends and connections’ posts are prioritized over businesses’ posts.
Some of these platforms have even set up their systems or algorithms so that people are far more likely to see posts from their friends than they are to see posts from employers trying to build their brands. Not only does prioritizing friends’ posts keep users happy. It also leads to increased profit for social media platforms.
Silos, Stovepipes and Synergies
A “relevant” recruiter must know about convenience, mobile technology, AI, and gamification. They are not the future. They are here.
For mobile users, 62 percent visit a company’s career page on their phone. Meanwhile, 36 percent research for job opportunities while commuting, 51% research job opportunities during coffee breaks, and 80% research job opportunities at home – using their phone.
A company recruiter should know that disruptive trends such as digitally networked workplaces themselves work hand in hand with other new technologies and AI are expected to define the future of businesses globally. Companies need to find the best strategic partner to guide them through the chaos of such disruptions.
But these disruptive technologies don’t have to work like large silos or small stovepipes. In fact, they can all work synergistically and seamlessly. And with efficiency, synergy and seamlessness, one of WeRK.ph’s clients ramping up their operations was able to work these all out:
1. An employer career microsite;
2. Content development;
3. Social media campaign management, monitoring and report generation;
4. Push mobile technology with assessments or gamified challenges;
5. An automated interview scheduler.
The synergy resulted in more than 4 million social media impressions and almost 100,000 clicks. There were also more than 4,500 applications. About 66 percent converted to mobile tech users, while 96 percent were assessed as proficient.
In this digital day and age, disruptors can work wonders for the company if its top-level executives, especially from talent acquisition and recruitment services, know what must be done. Most importantly, if they are done with a partner that can help these companies reach their goals, like some mobile technology solutions equipped with gamified assessments.