Social Media Recruitment is a Fallacy

There is no such thing as successful recruiting via social media. This is why so many companies think that they get a poor return on investment (ROI) when their talent acquisition team uses social media to advertise jobs.

There is such a thing as using social media to successfully brand your company and grow your pool of talent organically.

So, how can talent acquisition teams successfully use social media to source and build their pipeline? First, management has to recognize that growing the company's employer brand via social media is a long term game, especially if the company is in a niche market. It's an arena where you get what you give. 

It's also important to recognize that everything you think you know is probably wrong. For example, what do you think the most popular website is for job seekers right now? LinkedIn, right? Wrong. (Sorry, LinkedIn). According to Jobvite's 2014 Job Seeker Survey, it's Facebook.

Some suggestions for growing your talent pool by growing your company's employer brand on social media platforms:

If you are leveraging LinkedIn

• Join groups that your talent will most likely be using. Participate in those groups. Ask questions and see who gives you answers (and then, of course, research those people and go from there). Engage the users. Also, answer the questions of others. 
• Social media networks respond positively to people and companies who reach out, instead of just trying to advertise themselves. Publish long-form posts that will appeal to your pool of talent (how to do that successfully is a topic for a different post). Look at who comments and likes your articles. Connect with them. Now you have expanded your network and can source directly from that group or get referrals from them.
• Don't forget to respond to or to like the comments that people make in response to your posts - remember, social media success is dependent on your level of engagement!
• Make sure that you have an active and complete company page on LinkedIn.

If you are leveraging Twitter

• Research the hashtags that are most frequently used by your talent pool or that have to do with the geographic location where you want to find talent. Now you have two choices: use those hashtags in your tweets, or find the people who use those hashtags and do further research to see if they are the fit that you are looking for (or might know someone who is). 
• Don't just tweet out links to your job openings. No one will follow you. In fact, you might lose followers if that is all you tweet. Tweet interesting articles. Retweet other people's tweets from your industry. 
• Use Bitly to make your long links short so that you can say more within your 140 character limit. Bitly also lets you track clicks on your links and see what source they came from. 
• Lastly, and counter-intuitively, don't follow everyone who follows you. You want to have more people following you than people who you follow - it just makes you look better. It will also reduce the noise in your Twitter feed. Follow those people and companies who might tweet something relevant to you.

If you are leveraging Facebook

• Create a careers page. You can create a separate careers page, or make it a sub-page of the company page. I recommend the latter, so that you can use the main page to engage readers.
• The best applicants come from referrals. Referrals usually come from friends and family. Guess which social network has the highest concentration of friends and family, according to Mashable and every other industry resource out there? Make sure that your whole company participates in sharing company news and jobs. Their friends and family will like the careers page and the company's network of active and passive candidates will expand as this goes on and on.
• Create quizzes, contests, and engaging content to engage your audience.
• Post employee experiences.

If you are leveraging Google+

• Boolean search, baby. You can boolean search the profiles of the 540 million active monthly users, which is something you can't do on Facebook or Twitter.
• Build and keep track of your pipeline with Google+ circles and communities. You can also use this to tailor your communications to different groups of talent.
• eMail prospective talent, even if they haven't listed their email address on their profile!
• Create a Google+ company page.
• Host a Google+ hangout. Connect your company's top influencers with your followers via awesome video conference tools!

Still not generating the talent pool that you were hoping for? Get inspired! Be creative! Create a referral contest and offer an awesome reward, like cold hard cash. For example, challenge the social media community to refer qualified candidates to an opening that you're having a hard time filling. Whoever submits the refers the applicant who gets hired will be awarded $2,000.

Have you had successes or failures recruiting on social media? Is there a trick you wish you'd known from the beginning? I'd love to hear about them in the comments below so that we can learn from each other!

Darth Vader vs. Yoda: Which Type of Mentor Will Boost Your Career to the Next Level?

It's not what you know, it's who you know.

This frequent truth is one reason that so many of us aspire to increase the size of our network. It's also part of the reason that many people who are starting out in their career are looking for a mentor.

There seem to be two schools of thought about mentorship. The first is that your mentor will spoonfeed you the knowledge, experiences, and professional contacts necessary to move you up the career ladder and that this will be done in a way that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The second is that the best mentors have a tough love approach.

So, which type of mentor is better? I'd like to tell you a story. Several years ago I was determined to make a career change from Marketing and Business Development to Human Resources. I had the transferrable skills to go into recruiting, so that's what I set my sights on. I spent months applying for recruiting jobs online. I had a few interviews. Nothing panned out. Then I got a call from Sean Quimby, whom I had interviewed with a few weeks earlier, and who had called me in person to inform me that GL Advisor had decided to hire a recruiter who had vastly more experience. This time, Sean was calling to tell me that the budget had increased and that, if I was still available, he would like me to join the team.

At the time, I had no idea how lucky I was to have landed this particular job with these two individuals. Sean had been the VP of HR at Zipcar when the company went public and the Director of two HR functions at Equinox. And the person that had beaten me out for the first recruiting opening? That was Jamie Palmer, who has an astonishing amount of full-service recruiting knowledge and experience.

GL Advisor had never had an HR division before, and I had never recruited before. Needless to say, there was a large learning curve on both sides. Every day I felt like I was faking it, until one day I didn't. A few months later, GL Advisor dissolved the HR department. (It had never been their intention to keep it. We were all brought on as independent contractors who would stay only until their short-term needs had been met). I began interviewing for Talent Acquisition positions right away. The interviewers kept asking me the same question: How did I know so much when I had only been doing this for a few months. My answer? I had two great mentors.

When I was working with Sean and Jamie I thought that I was just adapting to my new role. It was only in retrospect that I realized that they had both taken me under their wings and were teaching me everything they knew - even if it wasn't related to the task I was assigned at that very moment. They involved me in projects and assignments that were way out of my league. They expected me to be able to keep up and add value. I think that I lived up to their expectations, although I know that I made some mistakes along the way.

Sean and Jamie did mentor me through fear. But the fear didn't come from tough love; the fear came from being scared of disappointing them. They were my Yodas. They saw the awesomeness inside of me and helped me learn how to harness it. They taught me lessons that I didn't know I needed to learn.

The truth is that mentors come in many different forms. Sometimes you won't even realize that someone was your mentor until your life moves in a direction that takes you away from them. I still speak of Sean and Jamie with fondness in my interviews and in other parts of my life. They didn't just mentor me in Human Resources or in Talent Acquisition. They mentored me about life, about the benefits of risk propensity, about seeing the true potential in others, and about the kind of person I want to be. 

I hope that one day I can pay it forward.

It's not what you know or who you know. It's what you learn from who you know. It's also how you choose to implement that knowledge. The best mentors will get you nowhere if you don't take any action.

Have you had a mentor (or do you currently have one)? I'd love to hear about your experience and about their mentorship style in the comments section!

Is Your Drug Testing Policy Decreasing Employee Morale & Productivity?

I once worked for a retail corporation that drug tested all of their store employees and candidates, but did not drug test executive or corporate office employees and candidates. One day, I happened to have a few minutes alone with the head of the HR department. I took the opportunity to ask why this was. He looked me in the eye and said, "Because if we drug test our executive candidates then we won't have any executives!" And he was serious.

Does your drug test policy treat all of your employees the same? It should. After all, what does it say about your company if the cashiers can pass a drug test but the directors and VPs can't?

Of course, there's always the question of whether or not companies should be drug testing at all. According to Quest Diagnostics and SHRM, drug testing improves employee morale and productivity while decreasing attrition and absenteeism. But according to the Houston Chronicle, the DOL, and ACLU, drug testing decreases employee morale because employees view it as an authoritarian action by the employer and find the process itself to be demeaning.

Which side of the issue do you take? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section!

How to Avert Corporate Scandal by Leveraging Talent Acquisition

Corporate scandals have been sadly rampant over the last 15 years. In 2001 and 2002 alone: AOL inflated sales figures and exaggerated revenue by as much as $49 million in 2002 to secure its purchase of Time Warner. Arthur Andersen was convicted of shredding documents containing information about the Enron audit in 2001. Enron falsified its levels of profits and debts and also bribed government officials in other countries in order to win international contracts in 2001. Halliburton booked $100 million in construction costs before clients had agreed to the cost in 2001. Tyco’s former CEO was indicted for tax evasion in 2002. Xerox falsified five years of accounting, which resulted in showing an additional $1.5 billion of non-existent income. I won't even get into the more recent banking and loan scandals that caused the housing bubble to burst.

The impact of these publicized ethical lapses is diverse. First, employees who already struggle to uphold ethical standards may be inclined to try and copy-cat others. On the other hand, the attention paid to the harsh punishments and devastating effects of ethical breaches may encourage employees who are on the fence to choose the more honorable path. Most importantly, when corporate ethical lapses are publicized, it allows other companies the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others. For example, Enron had a well-written ethics policy, but did not have a corporate culture that promoted ethical behavior. By analyzing the factors that contributed to the ethical lapses, companies can take a proactive approach to encouraging employees to act ethically. Incorporating ethics into company culture and creating incentive programs that reward ethical behavior are just two examples.

So, how can the recruitment team be a resource that help an organization avoid the fate of the companies mentioned in the opening paragraph? Recruiters are the gatekeepers of company culture. They should be viewed as essential to the current and future success of the company. Recruiters can only gain an in-depth knowledge of the company’s future goals by participating in planning meetings with senior management. When recruiters understand the future needs of the organization, they can hire candidates who will perform well and fit in with or enhance the corporate culture. Recruiters who are participants in strategic planning sessions can support and expedite the execution of managements’ business strategy and contribute to increasing company profits. Additionally, recruiters who understand the company’s future plans can hire not only for the company’s current needs, but also for the company’s future needs.

References

Neuborne, E. (2003). Incentive ethics under fire. Potentials, 36(3), 5.

Patsuris, P. (2002, August 26). The Corporate Scandal Sheet. Retrieved from Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/25/accountingtracker.html

Phillips, J., & Gully, S. (2012). Strategic staffing (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.