When you’re a corporate business, and you take the big decision to move part of your recruiting, talent attraction and sourcing efforts to social. Most of my work involves working with businesses at this stage.
Integrating social takes 4 key stages to make things effective, and I’ve picked up a few learning points at each that I want to share with you. The 4 stages are:
- Technology
- Social places
- People
- Launch
For the next 4 weeks I’m going to be covering the key considerations in each of these stages, concluding with a webinar (date to be announced), where I will be using case studies from companies who are at different stages of the journey. In this post I will be covering stage 1: Technology.
It took me a while to learn this, but you need to have your technology and social/mobile application process in place before you start. There’s no point being social until you get that right or you will be leading candidates in to a dead end. The number of candidates reaching you by mobile via social recruiting is going to be much higher than other forms, so you need to ensure that any content is easily visible with all the features functional on a mobile device. You also need the application process to be light touch, requiring limited data input, ideally something like apply with LinkedIn, and not question after question, page after page.
There are 4 key considerations with technology:
Collaboration
Does all the technology work together, feeding in to one source? The last thing you want is multiple apps that each holds independent data. Get all the data in one place so that it is searchable and retrievable. Does everything work with mobile?
Analytics
I want to be able to measure everything. Every click and time spent on what application. I need to know how effective all my processes are being. What is working and what needs attention, so that I can react accordingly. Social recruiting is a process of test practice rather than best practice, and this only works when you can see the full candidate journey rather than just where they apply from.
Simple user interface
Technology should be simple to use for everyone, recruiters, candidates and visitors. That means that the next process needed should be logical and easy to follow. Recruiters need a single dashboard to monitor and control their activity. All users need very simple sign up, sign in, with an emphasis on simple navigation with any device. The easier the use, the easier to integrate in to the recruiting process and get user adoption. I’m looking for technology that is intuitive and learns from all the user actions, recruiters and job seekers, so that information is only ever asked for once and remembered forever, and matching and suggestions becomes ever more accurate.
Flexibility
Because we work to test practice, it’s important that we retain the flexibility to change the parts according to results, and developments in technology. There are launches of new apps and technology on a daily basis. What is good today may need replacing tomorrow, and what is already installed may need upgrading or changing. This is why I favour integration through middleware like Tribepad, rather than being fixed in to one system that will age quickly.
These are my thoughts on the technology aspects of social recruiting integration. Next week I will talk more about social places. If you have any questions on this or any of the other stages, leave them in comments and I will be glad to answer you.
Bill Boorman
