RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Social Media & Employer Branding

Social Media has enabled us to communicate, engage and collaborate with the wider world like nothing ever seen before and presents progressive organisations with a new way of looking at talent attraction, engagement and of course the overall Employer Brand.

We use Social Media to connect with friends and family, and now the business world is using it to connect and communicate in ways we only dreamed of 10 years ago.

We recently ran a survey to assess the actual take up of social media in the recruitment context in the lead up to our webinar for HR Professionals to discuss this emerging recruitment medium.

The results were compelling with over 80% of respondents stating that social/professional networking was a part of their attraction strategy.

Yet what we found was that the majority of organisations are still reviewing their strategy, with a lot not quite knowing when or how to join this exponentially growing community.

The main barriers preventing full scale adoption of Social Media for recruiting seem to be a lack of time, resource and knowledge of available tools. Just 14% of respondents had a full-time resource dedicated to managing social media. 50% of respondents ‘Always’ use LinkedIn (the clear leader in professional social networking) – but does this represent a social media strategy that 80% of respondents claim as part of their attraction strategy?

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Comments

1. Martin Hallworth says:

   April 8, 2010 at 9:01 am

   Interesting article and the timing is spot on. Recent announcements re Facebook and Google and the amount of traffic and time actually spent on sites tie in with this. Ten years ago it was the job boards that were either going to be the death knell of recruitment, or the saviour, now in recruitment we have the social media “Phenomenon”… be careful the actual return you get using Social media as a route to market, and candidate attraction tool are ltd with actual data regarding their effectiveness especially in the UK lacking. Additionally in the UK there is no clear delineation of business and social aspects on Facebook, unlike FB in the US and elsewhere.

   As an attraction tool FB, and the likes of Twitter etc do not provide a justifiable return. As a platform to build your employer branding (Advertising) etc and a vehicle to assist in driving talent to your website it has it’s uses. Again be careful when using such SM websites for anything other than the above, as they can soon become a forum for negativity, which is very difficult to shake off.

   LinkedIn however is a totally different kettle of fish, a “business networking tool”, populated with people who are interesting in networking and looking at other opportunities (isn’t everyone!) we should not lump LI and FB etc together. With LI you target a receptive audience, and can with a sound knowledge around recruitment quickly raise your/organisations profile and tailor to suit different recruitment needs quickly and professionally.

   Using LinkedIn in my book is not a social media strategy; it’s a mainstay, a standard tool, head and shoulders above “Social Media”.
2. Sam Woodward says:

   April 8, 2010 at 10:27 am

   Nobody knows how long social media will stay around – it might be the next email, it might be the next Google Wave and die out. But the fact is that at the moment it’s making such a massive impact that employers can’t ignore it if they want to stay ahead of – or even in – the ‘game’. As these are such new tools there is no rule book on how to use them so it’s not surprising there is some confusion; having a dedicated resource to social media and finding the most effective ways to measure its ROI are the next steps we need to take for strategies to be more successful.
3. Chris Hornsby says:

   April 9, 2010 at 10:46 am

   ROI is an interesting point when it comes to social media as well. We can quite happily track source of hire (e.g. LinkedIn) – but the impact/ROI of employer brand etc gained by using these tools is much more difficult to gauge!