Author: Ian Betteridge
Date: 24/11/2009
Recruitment is on the up for some, but how do you do it in a cost-effective way? Social networks could be the answer.
With a quarter of smaller companies looking to hire new employees over the next few months, finding the right staff will be at the forefront of many owner-manager’s minds.
Recruiting is one of those tasks which few people really enjoy. However, getting the right people in the right places is also the biggest and hardest challenge of management.
Ensuring that you cast your net as widely as possible is essential. Tried and tested methods like word of mouth or recruitment ads can only give you so much reach - and this is where the Internet can help.
Social networks are a powerful way of tapping into the knowledge and experience of your contacts when recruiting. As Maureen Crawford-Hentz of lighting company Osram Sylvania told HRWorld.com, "Social-networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting – ever.”
Some companies are already quite advanced in how they use social networks. HCL Technologies, for example, recruits between 7-10% of their overall hires via social media, and expects this total to rise to around a third.
So how should you use social networks? Sending a mass email to all your contacts on Facebook, as you might expect, isn’t the best option. The first thing to do is make sure that you use the right social network for the kind of person you’re looking for. For example, LinkedIn has a executive business focus, which means that it’s the right context to find more senior employees. Facebook, on the other hand, is more “personal” and so should be used with caution when recruiting at a higher level. However, if you’re looking to recruit young people then Facebook may be the best route.
There are generally two approaches. The passive approach involves advertising via sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, creating special pages or personal status updates which detail the job roles on offer. In the case of LinkedIn, you can also pay a fee to have your job distributed to suitable candidates – similar to traditional recruiting, but at lower cost.
The active method takes more time, but can yield better results. Here, you use the search tools on networks like LinkedIn or Ryze to find appropriate candidates. Alternately, you can tap into the social networks of friends, sending out queries to selected contacts detailing who you’re looking for and asking them to pass them on to any appropriate candidates.
Whichever network and method you choose, social networking can be a cost-effective and simple way of expanding your reach – used wisely, it’s a good method of getting the right person for the job.