With a precise concept of the target demographic, recruiters can source with laser precision – here’s how!

It’s no secret that in the past five years, recruiting has espoused marketing tactics to attract passive and highly sought-after talent in this time of skill shortages, especially in technical fields. Email campaigns, creative advertising, and meetups showcasing the company culture and values are all popular means by which Talent Acquisition (TA) practitioners try to attract top applicants.  And they can be highly effective provided one thing, the team has designed these programs with their candidate persona in mind.

So what is a candidate persona exactly?

It’s very similar to the buyer persona used in marketing and sales, which Hubspot defines as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

Replace customer with candidate/employees and you’ve pretty much got it.

A candidate persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal [candidate] based on market research and real data about your existing [employees].”

Why bother creating a candidate persona?

Consider your candidate persona as the framework guiding your team’s creative efforts.

The truth is, defining your candidate persona prior to the launch of marketing and recruiting efforts will save you and your team a lot of time in the long run by ensuring those campaigns are well tailored to the people you want to attract.

The key here is research! But with so much information available in our digital world, it can be hard to know where to start. The following is a four-step guide to honing in on your target audience so you can start sourcing the best talent for your company.

1. Create a questionnaire

Below are some example questions, and largely they are similar to questions sales and marketing use to define their buyer persona, but there are some important differences. The questions your team use to define the candidate persona should not encourage bias, meaning protected classes such as age, marital status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, should not be factors. For example, you wouldn’t want to say ‘my candidate personae is a 40-year-old married man who goes to church every Sunday.’ Even some non-protected classes like ‘level of education’ should be left out if the role could be filled by someone with equivalent experience.

• What social network does your candidate use?
• What types of music and podcasts does my candidate listen to?
• Where is your candidate in their career (Jr, Management, Sr. Etc)?
• What’s the biggest project my candidate has ever taken on?
• What are your candidate’s professional goals?
• What benefits does your candidate care about?
• What does your candidate do for fun?
• What are your candidate’s strengths and weaknesses?

2. Find Successes

Current and past employees know firsthand what the company has to offer, and what is missing. The goal is to be as precise as possible to create a better marketing and recruitment strategy, so it’s best to offer anonymity to ensure honest answers.

Look for people within the company (or outside if it’s a new position) who are successful in the role already. Talk to them to understand what motivated them to join the company, what career level they were at when they were hired, and if they know of any professional groups on or offline that you could approach to learn more.

3. Use your CV database

When using your CV database to surface applicants make sure to test your assumptions. Let’s say you are searching keywords to surface candidates, add in the resumes of people who were hired into that role previously to see if they appear in your search, if not then that search may be irrelevant.

4. Get online

Analyze the online behavior of some top candidates, including the type of content they share and with whom, their activities, their groups, etc. can provide insight into their motivations and interests.

If you engage in an online forum as a researcher, be sure to be respectful of the space and opt for the ‘quiet observer’ role. If you start spamming the feed, you will be removed and recruiters in the future won’t be allowed in.

What now?

Once you have your questionnaire completed and you feel like you know your candidate persona inside and out, it’s time to start engaging. Use what you have learned (not assumed, this only works if you get real information) to message your candidates effectively both in content and channel.

This can mean finding the right job board (check out Jobboard Finder) or even creating a ‘coding playlist’ on Spotify. Maybe your candidate persona loves a certain type of podcast so you want to advertise there, or they can’t get enough artisanal treats so you set up a booth at your local farmers market. Get creative, the sky’s the limit!

Recruiters and TA professionals gathered for the second day of SRD18 to share insights, network, and beef up their recruiting toolboxes—here’s what we walked away with.

“What is your power word?” asked Anna Ott and Robindro Ullah as they welcomed audiences to the main stage of the Ellington Hotel in Berlin for the final day of Social Recruiting Days 2018. “Transparency”, “Surfacing”, and “Algorithm” flitted across the screen as the two conference emcees discussed how these terms are quickly becoming part of the modern recruiting lexicon.

More than a simple etymological exercise, exploring the ideologies behind these words is important when considering the future of candidate experience, workflow, and technology in the TA industry. After all, with issues like candidate experience and artificial intelligence moving to the forefront of conversations surrounding new trends in recruiting, it’s no wonder why “Transparency” and “Algorithm” made the buzzword short list.

Discussions about what’s next in recruiting were the major focus of the day’s schedule, which featured interactive sessions that armed recruiters with new tools to do their jobs better, explored topics of diversity and inclusion, and took a deep dive into the challenges of being human in a digital industry. For those who were unable to attend the conference, here are five of our biggest takeaways from Social Recruiting Days 2018.

1. A candidate’s resume or CV does not indicate their performance in the three major criteria of top performers.

Traditionally, resumes and CVs have been a recruiter’s bread and butter, but according to Bas van de Haterd, truly evaluating a candidate goes well beyond what’s on paper. In his session, “Beyond the CV”, Bas shared his insights after experimenting with a number of industry-grade digital assessment tools to see how data reveals a candidate’s job compatibility.

According to Bas, ambition, talent, and character, are three key areas that distinguish great candidates from good ones, and many of them can be quantified with assessment tools. “It’s about testing the candidate’s genetic and psychometric abilities,” said Bas, through game-based tests like those from BrainsFirst, which accurately measure a candidates’ cognitive abilities, their eye for detail, problem-solving abilities, or communications styles—skills that would not be found on a typical CV.

2. Having an LGBT+ friendly culture is in the top 3 criteria of choosing where to work.

In fact, in the US and DACH regions, having an inclusive workplace culture was ranked number one priority for LGBT+ employees, more than salary level and geographical location. This reporting came from Stuart Cameron, founder of Uhlala, who survey over 4000 LGBT+ professionals worldwide for his presentation about one of the largest underserved talent communities in the world.

According to Cameron, the number of self-identifying LGBT+ people worldwide is roughly 340 million people, but only 50 percent of the population feels comfortable enough to be open at work. Moreover, 80 percent would go back in the closet if they changed employers. In the UK, 33 percent of LGBT+ employees feel that being out would be a career risk.

Cameron highlights companies that are working to build more inclusive work cultures for their LGBT+ employees, applauding PayPal, McKinsey, Adidas, Allianz, Apple, Facebook, and Google for their efforts, but recognizes that we still have a long way to go to make this community feel safe, celebrated, and included at work.

3. The more digital we become, the more human we must be

“Feel first, think second”, says Dave Hazelhurst, partner and director of client services at Ph. Creative, a global marketing an advertising agency. “Think about the actions and behaviors you want to drive”, he continues, addressing the recruiters in the audience. To Hazelhurst, understanding your customers and clients—or in this case, candidates—is how you not only build a killer employer brand, but how you attract the best talent.

Hazelhurst looked at the pain vs. pleasure dynamic, claiming that we are far more motivated by pain than we are pleasure, so recruiters should be thinking about how to ease a candidate’s fears, doubts, and worries first. From there, we can consider how to make the candidate experience more enjoyable—”effortless” according to Hazelhurst.

4. If you want to continually hire the wrong people, stick to traditional recruiting practices

Dr. Uwe Kanning, professor of Business Psychology at Osnabrück University, brought equal parts knowledge and laughter to the main stage with his tongue-in-cheek session about the ways that companies are making the wrong recruiting and hiring decisions. Dr. Kanning claims that, despite hundreds of HR-related publications are distributed each year, most hiring teams still “go with their gut” rather than look at what the data says.

Dr. Kanning argues that most interviews follow a similar pattern that rarely includes job-specific evaluation criteria. As a result of our human bias, we base our decisions on criteria that has nothing to do with the actual job requirements—factors like attractiveness, weight, or ethnicity. Traditional “assessment systems” are built on intuitive decision making, and the longer we rely on the old way of recruiting, the more companies will be stuck with the wrong candidates.

5. We may soon get rid of CVs, resumes, and cover letters—and both candidates and recruiters will be better off for it.

MoBerries, Talents Connect, and Talentcube took over the main stage to discuss how their services are redefining the status quo of talent acquisition. From changing how recruiters source candidates for IT and STEM positions, to swapping the traditional CV and cover letters for video interviews, the future of recruiting looks to be going all digital, mobile-optimized, and no longer reliant on candidate-provided documentation.

Video interviewing remains a top tech choice for companies this year, with two-thirds of the World’s Most Attractive Employers (WMAEs) already using the technology according to Universum’s 2018 Employer Branding Now report.

These changes, they argue, represent what candidates want from their job-search experience, make it easier and more convenient for them to apply, and limits the probability of candidate misinformation or misrepresentation. It’s clear that recruiting is moving towards a more candidate-centric model, and these slick startups see a chance to make the process faster, better, and more technology enabled for both candidates and recruiters.

We talk to the woman behind one of the most successful localized TA communities, and it turns out being social in 2018 means straddling the online and offline worlds.

Online groups are no longer the domain of trolls and haters, there’s a whole world of cyber communities centered around skill/profession/interest that are galvanizing members to follow these passions, and even taking it IRL with meetups.

The localization of internet groups is an interesting turn for the technology synonymous with globalization and anonymity, but it could be a great one. People who once lamented the disappearance of in-person interaction may now dry their tears and logon, or at least that’s what one social recruiter predicts.

Kasia Borowicz started on the localization trend three years ago and is now seeing great returns in the network of Polish recruiters she built from scratch out of a UK basement. We sat down with Kasia ahead of her session at Hiring Success 18 EU to understand what this new trend means for recruiters and what businesses need to do offline to stay relevant online.

Is there a secret to building online communities?

My guiding principle of social media is to think: would I do this on my personal channel? A personal channel is usually about conversations and multi-level interactions where you like, comment, tag, crowdsource, and stay in touch, whereas business channels almost exclusively broadcast their own needs and send mass messages.

To steer away from the latter, I always suggest starting groups. Groups give you the opportunity to share your content, but more importantly, they provide a space for your community to be social together.

What are you into right now?

Something that has caught my eye recently are local online communities. I started a Facebook group for Polish recruiters three years ago, just me in a basement hoping for one or two likes, now it’s 2,300 active people.

Groups like mine are springing up all over. I’ve seen recruiter groups pop up in Germany, Spain, Israel, Estonia, and more. I think it’s really positive that a global phenomenon like the internet is helping people connect locally and learn in their native languages.

However, even though these groups are local, they welcome recruiters from wherever. So someone who wanted to ask about recruiting norms of a particular area could learn from practitioners who work there.

How does recruiting vary by region?

When I first got into sourcing it was in the British market. To be honest, my English wasn’t so good. I’m from Poland originally, and it was, shall we say, obvious. Not just in my accent, but in how I held conversations. In Poland, we don’t do small talk. If you ask someone how they are doing, you better be ready for a 30-minute answer, because you’re about to hear about their whole life.

Once I moved to London and became accustomed to British norms, the cultural mishaps began happening, funnily enough, when I talked to candidates back in Poland. One of the main differences I noticed was salary discussions. For British candidates, the money talk happens before the offer, whereas Polish candidates expect compensation negotiations to start post-offer.

Some people look at these differences and want to say one is wrong and one is right, but when you look at these particulars as a product of culture, each method makes sense in context.

Do you have any networking tips for the wallflowers out there?

I don’t think of myself as a natural networker. I often get really nervous, but what helps me is preparation, not just memorizing LinkedIn profiles – which I do as well – but thinking about what I want to learn at a particular conference or event. Once I know my objective, I start posting about it on my social media and see if anyone else is having similar conversations, and then I reach out to those people. There may still be moments where I’m standing alone, or feel a little awkward, but I find that making those online connections pre-conference helps a lot.

What’s the number one way people mess up social recruiting?

I think it’s a misconception that social recruiting is tied to the online world and social media in particular. A job advert doesn’t become “social” just because it’s posted on Twitter or Instagram; there has to be an enjoyable human interaction that earns the label “social recruiting.”

To make your recruiting truly social, you have to turn away from the expectation of tangible results and put time into building relationships. Social media is one avenue for building your community, but for me, true social recruiting happens when we shut down the computer and go talk to candidates.

Using tech creatively in recruiting is more than de rigueur, it’s the new standard. But for one German airline, there is still another horizon: right swiping.

It’s Friday. It’s almost quitting time. You don’t have plans. Your phone is in your hand, thumb twitching from an entire 30 seconds of non-use. If you’re one of the 10 million daily active users on Tinder, you may get to swiping on strangers’ faces, based on your synaptic speed of gauging beauty, brains, or compatibility of body parts. This evermore popular and socially acceptable behavior might land you a drink, a date, maybe more; but before today, you’d never think it could get you a job.

Not that kind of job. You perv. Starting this week, a German airline has taken a novel approach to recruitment by creating their very own Tinder profile, in hopes of landing candidates for various positions, both in and out of the cockpit.

Just as Facebook has always used your digital footprint to sell you targeted ads, Tinder has been dealing paid-for product profiles for a while now – you’re seeing the same products you shopped on Amazon yesterday because you registered with your Facebook account, remember? – but as for matching with a corporation and having them message you about job openings and link you to their careers page, that’s a new thing.

“Using a mobile online platform like Tinder to reach additional applicants is digital, modern, up-to-date and maybe a bit tongue in cheek – these attributes are in line with Eurowings,” said CEO Michael Knitter.

Oooh. Edgy.

A budget subsidiary of national carrier Lufthansa, Eurowings was likely considered lower-profile, thus lower risk than the German mothership to engage in this kind of experimental recruiting. Or maybe it has something to do with Eurowings being a domestic entity, in geography and society where “European” attitudes to sex make this kind of hybrid app experience more acceptable? Imagine if United or American Airlines got the way of your San Francisco booty call. That might be bad PR for airlines that can’t afford much more of it.

At this point, it’s all speculation (the initiative is only three days old). If it fails, Eurowings Tinder will just be another left swipe, considered for a moment and dismissed forever. But if it works, in the same way people who once wouldn’t confess to, but now flaunt, their dating-app notch tally, “Hey I got a job off Tinder” could be a new twist on an old taboo. Maybe in a year it’ll be a point of pride. Because like going on an actual date after a Tinder match, you still have to get through the interview, at which, unlike a date, there won’t likely be any booze to help you.

“We need to bring recruiting back to its roots as a social activity,” said SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck. 

But what is “Social Recruiting“? Even Wikipedia admits, “Social recruiting is a contested term. It is a concept at the intersection of recruitment and the embryonic field of social media. There are several terms used interchangeably including social hiring, social recruitment and social media recruitment.”

I’ve updated the crowdsourced social recruiting definitions, and then added a few of the internet’s most respected definitions:

Social Recruiting is…

Matt Alder, Strategy Consultant for HR and Founder of MetaShift

“Social Recruiting is a concept not a defined technique. The three primary activities of Social Recruiting as Push, Pull, and being Genuinely Social.”

Melanie Benwell, Managing Director at PathWorks Personnel

“Social recruiting is using social media and it’s many platforms to buttress existing recruiting methodologies. Social recruiting is a lot more fun than direct sourcing or mining job boards, so one has to be careful not to spend too much time on social media, as its returns are still being evaluated.”

Bill Boorman, #Tru Recruiting Unconference Founder

“Taking a “social” approach to recruiting on and off line. It;s not technology, its more talk to than apply for.”

Allison Doyle, Job Search and Employment Expert at About.com

“Social Recruiting is when companies and recruiters use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites to source and recruit candidates for employment.”

Sean Charles, Social Business Development Consultant

“Today’s social recruiting is a conversation that takes place in several spaces– public, private and internal (to organizations), where social networking facilitates hiring opportunities.”

Holly Fawcett, Digital Marketing Manager at Social Talent

“Social recruiting is about defining your employer brand that gives employees reasons to pursue their career with you. It’s not poaching staff, it’s not about mass-hires, it’s about jobs and livelihoods with your company, and that message is delivered through contemporary social ideals and methods that reach real people.”

HRZone, Leading Human Resources Publiaction.

“Some people criticize the term social recruiting when used to mean using social media to source job candidates, and say that recruitment that’s truly social needs to be conducted within a purpose-built social network rather than what are essentially public forums.”

Doug Kerken, Employer Branding and Talent Attraction Consultant at HireClix

“Social Recruiting is not simple. It means maintaining a fresh, authentic and accessible employer brand message on 3 major channels; Social Media, Search Engines and the Mobile web. Whether we like it or not society is moving quickly toward a digital, social, on-demand reality. The people we’re trying to “Recruit Socially” expect us to share only the best information with them on their favorite channel. They expect us to be ready for THEM when THEY are ready to engage us. That could mean someone is ready to apply to a job from our Facebook fan page on their iPhone. Social Recruiting is not an endless Twitter feed of job links and instructions to go to our ‘website or ‘this job board’ to browse and apply to our jobs.”

Holly Kolman, Online Problem Solver

I find that as a hyper-active social media user, I meet many people from different geographic locations and different business backgrounds. I do find that it is a lot easier to get recommendations (and give them) via Twitter and Facebook, even though the predominant recruiting network continues to be LinkedIn. I also find a number of experts by the answers they give on Quora. My favorite example of “social recruiting,” though, is the sheer randomness with which a Louisville, KY CFO made a hiring decision based on a chain of events set in motion by a single tweet that I made in 2008. Here’s the story, it’s a good one.

 Dave Lee, Brand Builder for Amazon and US Army

In 2007 as I was taking over the Army Strong campaign for recruiting I began to look at the value of using social media to communicate the value of being a Soldier. Based on my experience I take Social Recruiting to be more than the use of tools (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to aid in the recruiting effort. Social recruiting is about connecting candidates with your employers. Its about providing a chance to learn about your culture. We did this in many ways, video responses from Soldiers in Iraq, a website filled with blogs from now almost 800 Soldiers as well as connections on Facebook, Twitter, etc. More about the program can be found on my blog http://DavidALee.com.

Autumn McReynolds, Employment Brand Sourcing Manager at Sodexo Careers 

Social Recruiting is more than sourcing candidates and advertising career opportunities on Facebook or Twitter. It’s about being present and active in a space lends itself to conversation, feedback and the sharing of information between an organization, job seekers and even consumers. You never know which customers today will be candidates tomorrow.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, Founder & CEO Blogging4Jobs

“One must identify, follow, share, and contribute to grow relationships, build rapport, and woo the top talent to your organization.”

Salima Nathoo, Workplace Innovator

“Social recruiting is an ecosystem of discovered and deliberate encounters. Interactions that lead to employment are those where organizational identity aligns with individual stories. Social media is where these narratives are both written and rewarded.

Maro Onokpise, Recruiting Consultant at Healthcare Support Staffing

“Social Recruiting is the future of recruiting. I had a candid conversation with a recruiter friend of mine last week who works for one of the largest recruiting firms in the country. Many of these firms are stuck in the past and don’t want to embrace the concept of social recruiting and the fact that it is getting ready to run them over.”

Robin Richards, CEO of TweetMyJobs

“It is a proactive process for job seekers and recruiters to search, converse, share, engage and refer each other using social media, web-based and mobile platforms.”

Todd Raphael, ERE.net Editor in Chief

“The term “social recruiting” is about as useful as the terms “diversity,” “empowerment,” and “robust’ — in that it has so many meanings that it essentially means close to nothing. I certainly don’t consider the use of social media in recruiting to necessarily be “social recruiting” (I’ve met people who like social media recruiting but dread phone calls and other interaction).

Tony Restell, CEO Social-Hire

“We would define Social Recruiting as being behaviour that encourages free and willing dialogue between both parties in the hiring equation: that’s to say between candidates and recruiters.

This is the equivalent in the connected world of a careers fair. Any candidate coming into the fair can choose to go and talk to any recruiter at the fair – and through discussion they will mutually decide whether there is a good basis for progressing hiring discussions further. In this sense Social Recruiting is highly inclusive.

This is quite distinct from traditional recruitment. Prior to Social Recruiting, all forms of recruiting activity had gatekeepers that would act as barriers to conversation taking place”

Daniel J. Smith, Peer Support Professional with Good Shephard Centres

Social Recruiting to me is the ability to use all the tools at your disposal to create, develop, nurture and watch relationships grow between client and candidate. It is also the ability to find the right people at the right time for the right situation. Timing is key and taking the time to nurture the relationship is one of many keys to success. Thanks for asking for my opinion.

Karen Siwak, Job Search Strategist

Speaking on behalf of candidates, social recruiting involves two way engagement with candidates before they ever submit a resume or access a career site. Without two way engagement, ideally in real time, it’s just regular old recruiting using the latest cool toys.

Tom Summit, Director at Genero Search Group

“Things like “conversations” or transparency or “free and willing dialogue between 2 parties” are all things that good recruiters have been doing for decades. Facebook or Twitter are not required for any of these. In fact wouldn’t you agree that the phone or face to face are really where conversations happen? There isn’t much meaning in the term Social Recruiting.”

Dany Traversy, Editor in Chief at Affaires de Gars

“It’s the process of extending our recruitment strategy to the social media so we can recruit not only the active job seekers, but also the passive ones.”

Madalina Uceanu, Executive Search Consultant at Career Advisor

“I find it very useful to see how different and how common, in the same time, are all definitions of Social Recruiting. I think that we are facing a higher focus on Human than on Resources, making better sense of the need to relate at a more profound level to organizations or individuals, with the support of Social Media channels which increased the visibility of people and/or their interests (making thus sourcing &connecting easier)! But beyond that, I find that face to face interactions and relationship building abilities are still very valuable for the success of the recruitment projects.”

Jacqui Washington, Career Coach

“Social recruiting is when job seekers and recruiters use social networks to connect, educated and inspire people.”

Chris Young, CEO & Founder Async Interview

“Social Recruiting is removing barriers to geography, companies and people by utilizing web communities to increase transparency about a company and/or its employment opportunities.”

Stacy Zapar, CEO at Tenfold & Zappos Employer Branding

“Social recruiting is just communicating with candidates, being accessible, transparent. Better than hiding behind curtain.”

Social Recruiting is the buzz. Is it more about sourcing talent? Engaging with people? Or assssing potential hires? We can be certain that it is evolving into something big. How do you see it – what’s social recruiting?

Finding the right candidate for a growing company can be a challenging task regardless of your industry. As a growing skincare and mineral makeup company, we knew we had a receptive group of knowledgeable beauty and brand enthusiasts right at our fingertips in our social media audience. However, reaching this potential gold mine of candidates would mean targeting them with the right message, at the right time. Working closely with our Corporate Recruiter, Cassandra Murray, we developed the following social media recruiting strategies, and you can repeat them!

1) Integration is Key: To attract the best candidates the key for us was to seamlessly integrate our social recruiting strategy into our current content marketing strategy which focuses on beautiful images and highly shareable content.  It’s important to blend our recruiting posts in with our existing content for a positive and cohesive brand message for both potential candidates and our customers.

2) Customize Your Message: Our talented designer created a beautiful image that we knew would appeal to our recruiting target –  beauty lovers and industry professionals. Since at any given time we are recruiting for several different positions, we kept the message simple and direct while providing a link that referred interested candidates to more detailed information. Keeping the message simple, pretty and concise helps the post be more “shareable” and less like a fussy ad. We had several fans share our recruiting image with comments like, “Great opportunity for Esthetic graduates!” We couldn’t have asked for a better genuine endorsement!

3) Timing is Everything: As with all posts in the social media world, there is a fine line between providing regular and relevant content and bombarding followers with posts that can be seen as spam. Since “We’re Hiring” posts are relevant to just a small portion of our followers, they can teeter on the edge of being spam-like to the majority. So instead of posting on our organization’s fan page every time there is a new opening, we plan our recruiting posts once a month. This keeps our followers engaged and loving our content and leaves the daily posting of openings to relevant job sites managed by our Corporate Recruiter.

By implementing these strategies we’ve seen a surge in qualified applicants while maintaining our loyal social media fan base and staying true to our brand. Using social media for recruiting has helped attract candidates who are already passionate about what it is that we do which can make a world of difference when it comes to finding the right match.

Amy Foster is Digital Community Coordinator (Digital Commerce & Media) at gloProfessional, a cosmetics and skincare company dedicated to providing our customers with what we call beauty with a higher purpose.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates and make the right hires.

I was immediately impressed when I saw @HarrodsCareers responding personally to hundreds of employment related tweets. This Twitter handle wasn’t simply a feed of automated job postings. There was person behind @HarrodsCareers, a person putting candidates first and boosting the already amazing brand that is Harrods. I had the pleasure of chatting with Nicole McLennan, the Social Media Resourcing Coordinator and Jenny Parry, Head of Resourcing at Harrods, and this is what they had to say about their social media recruiting strategy.

How did Harrods make the decision to use Social Media in their recruiting strategy, and why? 

After the success that Harrods has had on Facebook and Twitter combined with the retail industry move towards social recruiting, we saw an opportunity to give our company a voice and reach out to potential candidates; social media would give us the platform to build relationships with people, share stories, photos, interesting information about our company all the while providing friendly advice and support. We started small with a Twitter account and a Harrods careers page on LinkedIn, crafting an ideal balance to get the backing from across the business, with the aim of attracting talented candidates that are passionate about Harrods.  We wanted to portray Harrods as a place of work with as much pride as we have for the store, to allow people to experience Harrods as an employer in way that was far reaching beyond our careers website.

How has Harrods benefitted from this? What has this done in terms of amplifying and creating an employer brand?

Being on social media has opened up a useful avenue for us to communicate with prospective candidates, as well as past and present Harrods employees. It’s been an arduous process adopting social media into the overall recruiting strategy, but a year on we are seeing the benefits on multiple levels. We are better able to communicate our company and employer values as well as improve our recruiting process by taking on board feedback and being connected to candidates through a real-time platform like Twitter.

Before we launched on social media, a lot of effort went into re-branding our employer brand and Twitter and LinkedIn have provided a space in which we can truly showcase all the amazing benefits and career development that Harrods has to offer. Now more than ever, it is essential to cement your presence alongside competitors, and what better way to do it than through such dynamic mediums? It’s important to be innovative and explore communication technologies because it allows you to look at your offering from a generational perspective which helps our progress. 

What is Harrods’ “Hiring Philosophy?”

On one hand, our hiring philosophy at Harrods is striving to provide a service-driven process in which we highly value candidates’ feedback to make the recruitment journey as friendly and as positive as possible, regardless of the final outcome. On the other hand, we focus on behavioral skills rather than just weighing up technical skills. The right attitude is highly valued, combined with different kinds of skill sets and experience. 

What does it mean to be a Harrods employee? 

Being a Harrods employee means different things to different people, but at its core it means going above and beyond in everything you do. Our motto is “anything is possible” and through cultivating a culture of excellence we have a strong company ethos of exceeding expectations. Working here can seem intimidating, but we believe that the development of employees is just as important as, if not essential, for the development of the business as a whole. We wouldn’t be able to achieve high standards without investing our people. Being a Harrods employee means passion, opportunity and growth. 

Harrods’ move towards recruiting over social media demonstrates the rise of social recruiting. If we can learn anything from Harrods, Nicole and Jenny it’s that big brands need to be dynamic and responsive if they expect to get the best candidates. By responding to each interaction Harrods shows they care about their people from the very start.

Jenny Parry (@JennyParry79) is the head of resourcing at Harrods.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform.

Even CEOs are taking time to participate, and ones that do show potential candidates they are involved in their recruitment process and dedicated to the transparent nature of social media. When it comes to utilizing social media to hire the right people, these are the Top 10 Social Recruiting CEOs.

10. Bob Fish, CEO of Biggby Coffee, is dedicated to sharing his coffee culture. This CEO writes a blog, sharing tips for entrepreneurs, updating fans on Biggby Coffee, and showing the world the open culture maintained by Biggby Coffee. This is an example of a CEO who loves the company he represents. As a candidate you want to know the people you are working for believe in what they are doing and love it too. Fish does just that. The Biggby Coffee CEO invites everyone to be his friend on Facebook and retweets fans constantly. I bet there’s a line of people wanting to work with him.

9. Robert Hohman, CEO of Glassdoor emphasizes transparency for everyone in the workforce, from salary to workplace reviews. Finding Top Talent is difficult enough, add the competitive job and skills market to the mix and it can feel like the odds are working against you. You need to utilize everyone you have to help you find the right people.  When the CEO tweets a job it is going to get attention.

Glassdoor seeking top talent! Interested in working in sales?Come join our team bit.ly/nuRWrN Spread the word!

— bobhohman (@bobhohman) July 8, 2011

8. Jerome Ternynck, Founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters has famously said, “hiring IS social.” This is his fundamental belief. “The CEOs that understand talent is a competitive advantage, use social media to attract. We should leverage social media. I consistently connect and keep up with everyone that I meet that has high potential whether it’s a good time to hire them or not. Networking is key. Ultimately, the aggregate network between my employees and me represent several million people in our industry. The likelihood of hiring someone outside of our social network is extremely low.” Ternynck reiterates the fact that EVERYONE is a candidate, and your candidates are your customers. Treat them like gold.

7. Rick Marini, CEO of BranchOut, has built his business around leveraging social sites to further develop your career. He told me, “Leveraging social media is the future of recruiting.  Using sites like BranchOut, LinkedIn or even Facebook allows you to explore your extended network to identify your inside connections.  This allows you to find your path to a warm introduction, which is the best way to get in front of the A-players.  Those personal introductions convey trust, credibility and upfront knowledge of the role/company/fit.  In recruiting, it’s often “who you know” and social media can unlock that powerful network of connections. A recent survey revealed that 89% of companies are leveraging social media in their recruiting efforts.  Therefore, it’s no longer a competitive advantage… it’s the minimum requirement to keep up with the competition.  CEO’s should not only leverage social media to attract top talent but also use social media to build their company brands.  The best CEO’s understand that great companies embrace transparency so they encourage their employees to post publicly.  This can help retain your best talent as well as attract other A-players who want to be part of that culture.”

6. Chris Russell, CEO of Career Cloud, explained to me, “Social media is a giant resume database. It also tells you much more about a candidate than just his/her paper resume.  If the paper resume is what they did, then the social resume is who they are. Companies need that information to help evaluate the hire.” A good hiring decision can’t be made from a resume alone, you need context and background. Russell knows that there is more to a candidate than meets the eye, and having a holistic view of your candidate is dependent on their social footprint.

5. Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData, like any big data believer, is focused on measurable results. For businesses to be successful they need a great team. Stanek engages his audience by posting relevant articles, retweeting employees, and retweeting available jobs at GoodData. You need to offer great candidates incentives to apply to your company, showing them they could have a CEO that likes to participate and take an active roll is a great start in sparking their interest.

Sales Director – San Francisco – GoodData -San Francisco, CA bit.ly/11h7spI #jobs #sales #sf — JobShoots (@sfsales) March 20, 2013

I’m on the way to exceeding my sales goals with @gooddata. See how you can too at bit.ly/ZjwF6d — Hubert Palan (@hpalan) March 22, 2013

4. Jon Bischke, CEO of Entelo, rarely leaves a question unanswered. If you’d like to meet someone who is Quora famous, here is your chance. Entelo’s mission is to make sure you NEVER miss out on great candidates, so why would Bischke take that chance? Respond to everyone, one of the people you answer could be your next star employee. Read Quote of Jon Bischke’s answer to Startups: As a startup CEO what are your favorite hiring hacks? on Quora

3. Assaf Eisenstein, Founder and CEO of GooodJob, understands the power of a referral. Eisenstein told me, “Leveraging your employees’ social media networks is the key to effective referral programs. Even better, optimize your program for mobile devices, and watch as the top talent pours in. Empower your workforce to make valuable referrals from wherever they are directly on their smartphones and tablets with solutions like GooodJob Mobile. Remember, referrals are born outside of the workplace – make sure you are there when they are.” Eisenstein reminds us it is not enough to just be social in the office, you have to take initiative to find great talent outside as well. Read Quote of Assaf Eisenstein’s answer to Social Recruiting: What’s the best way to get started in social recruiting? on Quora

2. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla Motors and Pay Pal, has the ability to make stocks rise with just one tweet. If that’s not an example of Social Media strength, I don’t know what is. Elon understands that transparency is important to today’s consumer and candidate. He keeps his followers up to date by informing them of the day-to-day of his business endeavors and his company’s updates. You can tell he is a “hands on” CEO, he knows exactly what is happening in each of his companies.

Really exciting @teslamotors announcement coming on Thursday. Am going to put my money where my mouth is in v major way.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2013

1. Pete Cashmore, CEO and Founder of Mashable, has a name synonymous with social. Mashable is, ” THE social networking blog,” ahem… social blog, social recruiting, social networking. See where I am going with this? Having one of the most successful blogs ever is not an easy task. You need to hire talent. Cashmore said, “Generally we like writers who can take complex ideas and explain them in simple terms: we hire people who have deep knowledge combined with good language skills.” Where are these skilled employees? Reading Mashable, of course. Mashable has a job board, and they often posts jobs right at the bottom of an article.

Mashable is hiring.Come join us!OPEN POSITIONS: mashable.com/2012/11/20/mas… fb.me/2ehFJA9dc

— Pete Cashmore (@petecashmore) November 20, 2012

CEOs that are involved in social recruiting prove that they are not just figureheads.  Social media is the best place to start speaking with your candidates, ignoring the public is not anoption. The most successful businesses will be transparent, and allow their candidates an in depth look into what their work is like. Social recruiting has changed the way recruiters and hiring managers work, not only can they attract talent but verify information the candidates give. Not only that, but HR and recruiters are no longer working alone to find talent. Social media provides a recruiting medium that everyone can use- yes, even the CEO.

We live in a digital world where every question, criticism, and kudos can be found online. Companies have broadly recognized the power of social media for advertisement, brand differentiation, and customer service. However, there is also the potential to be globally publicized in a not-so-flattering light. These highly visible PR fiascos may indicate poor financial health or even worse, that the service your company provides just stinks.

On that note, we can’t just “shut Twitter down” when things have gone awry. People pay to utilize services like Angie’s List, but to research a company’s reputation and level of service there are many consumer satisfaction forums such as Yelp!, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. All will certainly point you in the same direction at no cost. Everyone is now a researcher due to the massive amount of information right at our fingertips; whether it’s to check out a potential candidate, a product, a recruiter, an employee, a prospective client, an employer, and the list goes on and on.

The similarities between a corporate brand and a recruiting brand don’t stop there. Our candidates are our customers. They will shout from Twitter mountaintops about how wonderful or horrible their experience was with you. A candidate could possibly vent on their personal Facebook or LinkedIn page, advising their hundreds or even thousands of connections and friends that they should run (not walk) in the other direction when considering that particular staffing agency, recruiter, or company.

My background in the restaurant biz taught me early on that a satisfied customer will tell one person, but someone who had to wait twenty minutes before a waitress even came to their table will tell thirty people about their experience. Protect your reputation! Since flawed humans run this machine, less than ideal circumstances will inevitably present themselves. What kind of response and empathy that the slighted individual receives is an opportunity, quite simply. It’s a chance to show you care, that you’ll do whatever it takes to make it right, and it’s important to impart that what they think and feel is valid (whether you agree or not).

The internet is a place where people will jump on the bandwagon or abandon ship. After all, they’ve never met you and how else can you evaluate a total stranger? WORD OF MOUTH. Yes, I used the caps…it’s that important.

Your candidates want a way to find you easily, view the positions you’re currently recruiting for, check out the company culture, reach out to you publicly, and interact. Respond to each one of them! Everyone can see if you’re quiet, extroverted, or completely invisible. It’s sort of funny to look at inactive social media accounts. A public presence is well, missing, and that is noticeable.

Make an impression and acknowledge all who inquire, even if they’re not currently a fit. Maybe a few years down the road they’ll be your hottest candidate and they’ll remember how you treated them. This person took the time and interest to say, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing and I want to be a part of it.’ It is pure courtesy to reach out and say, ‘Thank You.’

Colette Resnikoff is a jobseeker in the recruiting and staffing industry with years of experience at Hire International, ManPower and SmartDog. Consider hiring her, or at the very least, follow her on Twitter: @IWannaGetUHired!

SmartRecruiters opened a recruiter marketplace to provide transparency and integration to the values of recruiting services. We display such recruitment firm statistics as CV to interview rate, average time to source, and hiring percentage, as well as, customer reviews and more!

“Resumes are dead. People don’t see it yet, but it’s clearly there. There is no sense of having a resume, because what’s a resume? It’s a piece of paper that has no interactivity, no history, no context,” said Jerome Ternynck, CEO of SmartRecruiters (Video Below).

Recruiters are not just relying on a simple paper cover letter and resume today. Resumes, limited to one page, simply don’t paint your professional picture. At SmartUp: Big Data Recruiting, Peter Kazanjy, Founder of TalentBin stressed the need to look deeper into candidates, farther than just a resume.

With the Resume “you’re talking about thousand characters of content to make a judgment about somebody, its more like ten thousand or one hundred thousand characters of professionally relevant content that describe a human.” (Video Below)

Technological developments in candidate management softwares and sourcing systems, as well as, online social media profiles have changed the game for both employers and job seekers. Recruiters are moving more and more towards the web to source candidates, but they aren’t just clicking through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles. They don’t just want to hear what you’re good at, they want to see it. And what shows them this?

Your social footprint.

Any programmer can say they’re good at something. They can list their certifications, experience, and degrees on their resume. But finding out how good they actually are is a challenge that recruiters face when sourcing programmers and developers. The recruiter’s need to look deeper into a candidate’s job history and experience has led to the development of databases that rank developers and programmers based on their social footprint.

So what is a social footprint? It’s a person’s presence and impact on the internet. When looking at someone’s social footprint, you are measuring what and how well they have done anything online. Kazanjy explained on Quora how you look at a developer’s social footprint, and why you should recruit using it:

“The belief is that using implicit professional information that is visible on the web, properly interpreted (e.g., “This person is a member of these professionally relelvant Meetups, does this on Quora, tweets about these things, and does this on Github, thus they’re into Java, Ruby, Objective-C, and mobile.”) is a better way of finding people who have the requisite skills for roles you’re recruiting for.”

The social footprint gives you an idea of what they’ve done, both professionally and independently.  It gives you an actual idea of their skills and interests, and some companies and recruiting softwares even developed a system to rank candidates. It’s about looking at more than just bullet points on a resume.

Because skills and qualifications of programmers and developers are harder to measure, the social footprint gives a recruiter a better overall profile of a candidate.  Not only does it paint a better picture, social footprints are also more efficient for recruiting both active job seekers and passive candidates. Referring to the current inefficiencies of recruiting, Entelo founder Jon Bischke said on Quora:

“They carpet bomb everyone who looks even remotely like a fit in the hopes of hitting the needle in the haystack and finding the candidate who is actually looking for something new. And that’s horribly inefficient.” 

Instead of spraying and praying for candidates, recruiters can use a social footprint to get a better idea of not only who would make a good fit, but also source passive candidates who are actually looking to move. These databases use an algorithm to track candidates that might be looking for a change in career. For example, the algorithm will take into account a company’s large drop in stock, layoffs, or executives leaving the company.

The social footprint will have a major impact on recruiting in the future, especially for programmers and developers. Companies not only will be able to see concrete evidence of a programmers work. Recruiters will also be able to source passive candidates who are actually interested in a career move, as while as job seekers actively searching for work.

At SmartRecruiters’ SmartUp: Beyond the Resume, Bischke summed up the power of the social footprint, and its impact on future recruiting.

“We believe that when people hire in the future, they’ll hire on the basis of what people do, not what people say about themselves.”

SmartRecruiters is the free hiring platform.

From our SmartUp Events, learn more from TalentBin‘s Pete Kazanjy:

From our SmartUp Events, learn more from Entelo’s Job Bischke:

And SmartRecruiters CEO Jerome Ternynck on the Death of Resume: