It’s no secret that social media has and continues to make an impact on the way we recruit, compared to the way we engaged with each other say 6-8 years ago.

When I first started out the traditional method of seeking candidates was through the generation of endless job ad postings and the inevitable long and laborious task of visiting numerous CV search engine sites, all to find that gem of a candidate amongst all the noise that tended to clog up your search. None of these sites can I add, at the time, were linked to the words, low cost!

This process, although straightforward and effective to a degree, was without a doubt a very costly exercise; you couldn’t just sign up with one site. You had to have an account with them all. Partly because job boards seem to go through peaks and troughs when it comes to popularity and you can bet your bottom dollar the one site you weren’t subscribed too would be the one site that everyone seemed to be uploading there CV on that month. Admittedly, this merry little dance would always provide results if you had the patience to follow a rigorous structure to your day. The down side of course was the costs involved and the impact it had on your profit.

Don’t get me wrong there are always be job boards out there that are tailored purely to your individual sector and although they may provide limited results, you can pretty much rest assured that you will find relevant candidates.

However, since the introduction of the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other preferred social media sites, slowly clients, candidates and recruiters are finding new methods of utilizing these tools far more cost effectively and with much better results.

For example a couple of years ago 90% of our annual budget for advertising and CV search engines was spent on traditional methods like Monster, Total Jobs and Reed to name but a few, along with print advertising. This model would deliver on our targets and give the business the profit margins that set us in the comfortable bracket.

It wasn’t until we invested time into understanding how best to utilize and maximize on these new social media channels that were being talked about so vigorously in the market place, that we really felt the impact. At the time the general consensus by others is that they couldn’t see how you could “monetize” these channels. Many recruitment agencies seemed baffled by this technology and more so were/are reluctant to take that leap. Sadly, today there are recruitment agencies out there who still rely on traditional methods and although their results may be seen as steady or even perhaps slightly declining, the inevitable will happen, which is they will get left behind.

Since we made the decision to understand and action how to engage with our audience via these social media channels, we now invest over 50% of our advertising and CV search/job board spend on social media recruiting, which before were a minority investment for us. I can see this increasing as we look forward to 2012/2013.

This decision has allowed us to build much stronger relationships with our clients and candidates, as well as allowing us to build brand new relationships with candidates that would otherwise be harder to interact with on a daily basis. To put this into some sort of perspective, since making the transition in the way we find and communicate with our audience we have seen an increase in business efficiency, revenue and – that all important word – profit.

As our world embraces the social media revolution or evolution (depending on how you look at this) we as individuals, whether it be for personal or business, are interacting with social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter on an increasingly regular rate via all kinds of devices, such as smart phones, tablets and desktops… and this movement isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

With so much face time via these sites can you really afford not to invest in understanding how best to utilize these tools? Especially when these channels are far more cost effective than other traditional methods that our industry tends to rely on.

Obviously, the proof is in the pudding but from our point of view the results speak for themselves.

In closing, what I will that we recruit for the marketing and broadcast sector. In this case our audience does tend to be the early adopters to the social media wave, which now dominates most of our professional or personal lives in one way or the other. So it’s probably fair to point out that this article is based on our own experiences. For example, if you recruit for the building and construction trade then the chances are that your audience will have less down time when it comes to social media.

Tom Howe is the Founder of WE ARE THOMAS*, the specialist Search, Selection & Retention Consultancy that focuses within the Marketing arena and lover of all things bespoke!

Photo Credit NSDesigns & KramiumHR

Business is about people. What do they want? What do they make? How do buyers and sellers meet at Market Street? The rub is, too many Americans are being excluded from business – involuntarily. This is involuntary deadweight loss; involuntary to the business owners, who currently have over 3.5 million open jobs they want filled; and involuntary to the 18+ million Americans (12m+ unemployed and 6m+ underemployed), who are actively seeking more work. Let them produce!
 
The employers want to hire, the worker wants to work, but the employer and worker are not meeting on Market Street – so to speak – the America labor market has significant search friction. This bothers me:

 
• The overall time to hire is estimated at 96 days! (Luxottica Group)

 

• Hiring for a government job takes an average of 105 days!  (Performance.gov)

 

• If all 3.5 million open jobs would be filled today, Unemployment rate would decline by over 3% (Clinton Global Initiative)

 

Last year, we saw positive growth in the economy, and a reduction in unemployment has slowly followed. This year is the time for us to take the next step. This year is about getting America back to work. Help us beat the government’s unemployment expectations, and we’ll help you hire the best talent to beat last year’s bottom-line. 2012!

Everyday, more of the public takes occupation in the streets. More than 14 million Americans are unemployed, actively searching for a job. And 3.4 million jobs remain open, an increase of 22% over the last year.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 671,000 less private sector jobs existed in the first quarter of 2011 when compared to the previous quarter. This full first quarter report was not published until November 17th…

I’m not relying on the government to put the six plus million workers who have been unemployed for six plus months back to work.

From the tents in the city parks to the debates for unemployment benefits in the federal buildings to police brutality, the frustration with the economy is on the tip of our unsatisfied tongues. Without satisfying work, humans are just not satisfied. McGill University reported that prolonged unemployment while under the age of 50 increases a man’s chances of dying prematurely by 63%. On top of that, Gallup-Healthways Well Being Index measured underemployed workers as 83% more likely to be diagnosed with depression than fully employed workers.

In my opinion, the frustration spewing from the Occupy Movement is due to the lack of fiscal accountability in the financial crisis and ensuing bailouts. Transparency was missing. Speculators, who were at the root of crisis, received the bailout tax dollars of the speculators and the average worker, creating more disgruntled workers. To satisfy the 14 million unemployed and 9 million underemployed Americans, the practices in the labor market must combat the frustration of the Occupy Movement by becoming more transparent today.

The Internet will increase transparency, which will increase accountability, in the labor markets. On November 15 in TechCrunch, Erik Schonfeld pointed out the Internet’s ability to match jobs: “New forms of work that use the Internet as its organizing principle (instead of the firm) are beginning to become more commonplace.” While social networks have a lot more of our information and footprint than a resume, social networks are still young. Social networks are maturing to the technology in terms of the sharing only the relevant information.

Even with all the personal and connected information on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Facebook Apps, the barriers to entry for the candidate to get an interview remains too high. In a recent survey by research firm Staffing.org, 47% of job candidates said they had not applied to a particular employer because the firm’s hiring process was too frustrating. It is taxing enough to choose a suitable job (for culture, talent, location, compensation, and timing) out of over 3 million, let alone expend the energy to actually apply.

“Nothing keeps the best candidates away like a lengthy and bureaucratic form,” said SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck.

There is no business without talent. Too often businesses expect to hire the perfect candidate. The vast majority of entry-level job descriptions “require” 2+ years experience. It is not rational for a business to expect a new entrant in the labor market to have 2+ years experience.

Recently, Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post (“The Great Jobs Mismatch” ) and Peter Cappelli in the Wall Street Journal (“Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need” ) both described this situation as a “Catch-22.” Samuelson wrote:

“You can’t get hired unless you have experience; but you can’t get experience unless you’re hired. With technology changing rapidly, workers need to know more, even as their skills-support systems weaken.”

Samuelson is correct; today, the worker must evolve quicker. However, with rapidly improving technology at the worker’s disposal, the worker will be able to learn new skills faster. Cappelli aptly points this out, “Only about 10% of the people in IT jobs during the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s, for example, had IT-related degrees.”

“Race Against the Machine,” a book by Erik Brynjollffson and Andrew McAfee, both of MIT’s Center for Digital Business, elaborated on how technology is a tool to empower the worker because technology allows the individual worker to become more productive. They wrote, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”

As the rate of technology accelerates, the skills “required” for the job accelerate. This means – that over the same duration – less percentage of candidates will possess all the “required” skills upon being hired. Now, more than ever, companies must abide by the 80 / 20 rule for skills / training. Candidates that can perform 80% of the tasks initially, will learn the other 20% upon working, and should be hired today, possibly with steady pay scaling to more accurately compensate the worker for the increased fluidity of skills accumulation in today’s economy.

Abiding by the 25 bullet points on a job description of “required” is purely hubris. It’s very unlikely that any candidate will have all 25 skills. And if someone did, that candidate probably has more than those 25 skills, so paying him or her for only those 25 skills would be a gross underpayment. Businesses must adjust their expectations. Cappelli described this results based approach as, “Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully.”

While jobs in tech companies are booming, this type of hiring for raw skill is not occurring across enough industries. A recent survey of 2,000 firms by McKinsey Global found that 40% had positions open at least six months because they couldn’t find suitable candidates. Businesses must re-evaluate what determines “suitable.”

When the economy tightens, businesses must fight the urge to apply tension to spending. Businesses must not hold out for the perfect candidate because they will never regain the lost production through the period. If businesses communicate to the candidate what tasks need completed – as opposed to what skills need to be present – transparency will create more hires.

By David Smooke, an Internet enthusiast who brings free recruiting software to market.

Photo Credit David Smooke