xScion Solutions, LLC

For the past few months we have been on a mission to develop our talent community, primarily through social media outreach. We have sent e-mails out to people in our Applicant Tracking System with requests to join our group on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, ‘Like’ us on Facebook. This is downright exhausting for people to visit us on three websites; so we narrowed the field. We targeted LinkedIn as our medium to post articles, update our group with interesting discussions, and reach out to past employees and friends for referrals. When this approach brought us a whopping two new people to our group, I decided it was time to get personal. I tabled the mass e-mail and started reaching out to my connections on LinkedIn who had some relevance to xScion, past/current/prospective employees, friends etc. I sent each connection a personalized note along with the invitation to join my company’s LinkedIn group. My personalized efforts doubled the number of members I recruited to the group, but when that number is only four new members, it hardly seems worth it.

All this time spent on attempting to build a following with little success left me questioning whether it was my efforts that were failing or was it possible that social media was slowly becoming obsolete? I stumbled upon this article, which is what inspired me to write this post. Mr. Reimgold focuses on Google+ and the fact that the website is a ghost town, completely dead; it just came too late in the game. No one wants to log onto another website, build another profile, add people to circles. I took his ideas and applied them to my experience with recruiting member to my company’s LinkedIn group. It might be that people have little interest in following another group and connecting with more people. We are on social media overload, which is perhaps causing a slowdown in the use of these websites. Of course social media will always serve a purpose in some industries, but the creation of new networking websites needs to come to a halt because if Google can’t make it work it doesn’t bode well for other companies.

Yesterday I had the privilege of tuning into a webinar hosted by JobFox, a career website that connects job seekers to potential employers mainly through social media websites. The webinar was called “The Art of Social Recruiting” – quite a broad topic, but it caught my interest to see how they were going to tackle a subject that could be discussed endlessly. The speaker on the webinar was Peter Weddle, an author and columnist for CNN.com and The Wall Street Journal. He is well-versed on the subject and has written many articles on recruiting and social media.

Weddle said the common fiber across generations of job seekers is that they are all “career activists” i.e. everyone wants to do something they enjoy where they feel they can grow and be appreciated. Once you have realized this about people you are ready to pick out the top-talent. To do this effectively he said, “Remember the Golden Rule of social recruiting: What you do to recruit the best talent, will also recruit mediocre talent, but the inverse is not true.”

Peter then broke social recruiting down into different types of relationships that the recruiter needs to form through social websites. There is the ‘Blink Relationship,’ the type that is formed quickly and the ‘Red Shirt Relationship,’ one that takes time to develop and then is maintained through sporadic communication. The common goal in these relationships is to build trust between the recruiter and the job seeker. Once the trust is built, the recruiter can begin to build their network and ask for referrals from the job seeker, thus creating a pipelined network from which to drawn upon when needed.

Each relationship had a ‘Golden Rule’ to abide by, following the theme of the ‘Golden Rule’ of social recruiting. The Golden Rule of the Blink Relationship: “Flattery first, facts second.” Because the relationship is being formed quickly and most likely with little introduction, the recruiter needs to flatter the job seeker so the job seeker is more enticed to connect with them. The Golden Rule for Red Shirt Relationships: “Career first, jobs second.” These job seekers want to know that they are going to be able to advance in their career and that this is not simply a job to make money, but that there will be opportunities for upward mobility.

To put his ideas into action, he says the most important thing is to assign someone in your organization who has the time to dedicate to forming and maintaining these relationships. The only way social recruiting will work is to nurse the relationships once they have been formed and keep up with connections.