By Carisa Miklusak

Time-to-hire. Cost-effective. Turnover. We associate these words with the traditional recruitment model. From the (often urgent) job requisition through sourcing, interviewing, onboarding & training, the traditional model ends when someone leaves the organization.

Today, open dialogue in the social sphere between past, current and potential employees stretches this cycle on both sides. The process starts long before the requisition, with a consistent need for a social employment brand; as for the other end, well, there is no end. Once someone enters your recruitment process they never leave, even if they are not hired. When they interact with your employment brand, they become a permanent part of your New Media Recruitment Cycle. Although words like time-to-hire, cost effective and turnover remain critical, in the emerging recruiting environment we also incorporate words like branding, influence and alumni communication.

The Reallocation of Authority
What has driven the shift in the recruitment model? Social media has reallocated employment brand authority from companies (who used to control their employment brand) to their workforce audience. Today, social media users can, and do, say whatever they want about their employment, interview and applicant experiences. Moreover, because of the high degree of trust that exists between social users, their comments mean more to a potential candidate than what your company can message as a brand. Social media has empowered job seekers to demand a degree of humanism in their job search. Hence, statements from individuals are more important than emails or Facebook posts from a company.

Additionally, the fusion of recruitment and social media is changing standard job seeker behaviour and consequently, employment branding and recruitment advertising strategies. Today, job seekers source company information and look for references and recommendations in much the same way recruiters search for candidates. Savvy job seekers maintain and leverage robust online social profiles to quickly engage multiple employers. They find and target employers and current opportunities via both traditional and social search; then they narrow the results with user-generated social feedback and/or by directly seeking network recommendations.

Benefiting Seekers and Succession Alike
In this light, emerging media has again empowered job seekers, providing greater knowledge of organizations. Today’s seekers visit both a company’s website and social profiles to see what employees and customers are saying about the organization. Social employees want to work for organizations with happy customers and are therefore interested in reviewing comments and sentiments on recruitment and consumer-facing social platforms. As job seekers turn to social networks and digital referrals, it is increasingly important that employers are visible, in order to influence candidate decision-making factors. This illustrates how the New Media Recruitment Cycle has been extended on the front end with a demand for a presence long before a requisition exists.

Many benefits exist for employers in this shift. For example, savvy social job seekers often come highly prepared with a good understanding of the organization. When candidates gain a deeper, accurate understanding of an organization via traditional and social recruitment information, a natural, positive self-screening process occurs, resulting in better long-term candidate fit. Also, an intrinsic benefit exists for succession management in that future leaders tend to naturally emerge in the social sphere, their shared best practices becoming an influence for peers and leadership alike. Social media can be used as an effective breeding and nurturing tool in the succession management realm.

The Power of Influence
Without the ability to control conversations, we must seek new ways to interact with our workforce audience and influence the tone and topic of dialogue. In the New Recruitment Cycle, employers should expect their audience to discuss their experiences at the organization – the ups and the downs.

With this expectation, it’s recommended that employers involve all employees and leverage social media’s power of segmentation to encourage a productive New Media Recruitment Cycle. Encourage employees to share specific news updates, post open jobs and distribute referral messages. Train employees on proper social media usage and suggest discussion topics that align conversations with your desired employment brand image. Team outings, company and industry developments, and personal achievements are good places to start. This empowering of employees, versus prohibiting dialogue, is critical.

Segment for Social Business Success
Leverage social media segmentation further by creating LinkedIn groups and/or Facebook pages for different sub-audiences in your social workforce audience. For example, create a LinkedIn group for current employees, a closed group for those in leadership programs, an “Alumni” LinkedIn group for ex-employees, and a recruitment-focused Facebook or Twitter page for candidates.

Segmenting allows you to build deeper relationships with your audience as well as serve more relevant, tailored information to each group. Ask individuals to participate in appropriate groups and incorporate social media best practices into critical touch points during onboarding, company events, training and even exit interviews.

The old recruitment model has been transformed, and recruitment is no longer a secluded organizational function. Rather, it’s a front-and-center branding driver, impacting all areas of the organization. As the fusion of recruitment and social media continues, the New Recruitment Cycle will force recruiting efforts away from a campaign mentality toward a segmented and relevant ongoing workforce audience dialogue.

Carisa Miklusak is speaker, digital journalist and CEO of tMedia, a transmedia strategy and training firm. Carisa has worked in the Human Capital and Emerging Media industries for 13 years. She holds an MBA (Queens University), A Masters of Global Management (Thunderbird) and a Masters of Integrated Online Marketing (USF). www.CarisaMiklusak.com

PeopleTalk Summer 2012