Go online, save time and money

With more than 300 per cent growth in the users of social media in the past three years, it is imperative that recruiters and employers focus energies on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogs. While this opens up a haven for finding professionals, it brings with it challenges and risks.

Engagement — sending the right message on the right platform: A common challenge that companies face is in deciding their social media messaging strategy. Focus needs to be on answering not only what a brand is saying but also to whom and finally tying this in to the company’s own websites and job boards. Often, we’ve witnessed companies disperse all of their messages via all the tools available, resulting in a lot of irrelevant information. Consequently these companies end up with a negative and sometimes even “boring” online presence.

 

The most popular employer brands online have deciphered the combination of the “what” and the “whom”. While LinkedIn and blogs have worked well for mid-management professionals, Facebook and Twitter are great tools to create viral discussions, “buzz” about the brands.

The idea is to add value through customising the messages on these platforms rather than overwhelming the audience with an information overload.

LinkedIn has proved effective for discussion forums around specialised skills/industries and quick polls while Facebook has been excellent for long discussions and affinity-based networking. Blogs and Twitter have proved to be the best information dispersion and crowd sourcing tools.

Credibility – it’s all user-generated: Arguably the biggest challenge recruiters’ face arises from the very cornerstone that has made social media so popular — it’s unregulated! Typical examples include inflation of skills, titles and experience. While a hiring manager might deem an online profile a perfect fit, there is no foolproof validation method. The opportunity for doing specialised background checks as a service is thus, of growing popularity and indeed an effective solution. Even with some of our own clients, these checks have proved imperative in deciding on the right candidate and eliminating fraudulent candidatures early on in a process.

Online is social. Online is viral: From a risk perspective, the fact that all current, former and future employees of a company are already online — becomes a big challenge to manage. Several reputed organisations have suffered blows in the last 2-3 years with former employees publishing blogs and posts, bad-mouthing former bosses or opinions on practices. Given the nature of the space, this is going to be a challenge. In several cases, in fact, it brings to light some genuine issues internal to the company, but unknown to its management. That aside, the best way to address this is by engaging the target audience from a positive and proactive perspective as opposed to an aggressive and reactive approach. The company has to make peace with the fact these are but opinions and they can be influenced over time with the right messaging and use of these platforms.

The important point to remember is that despite all the progress in technology and mobile platforms, social media is a great sourcing, long listing and branding tool — but nothing more. The hiring process involving human interaction is irreplaceable and social media should never be considered an alternate to physically interviewing and selecting candidates.

Tulika Tripathi
MD, Michael Page International (India)