8. Recruiting in the Facebook Era
“Friends of our employees are more likely to have the same characteristics our employees do—hard-working, smart—so they’ve gone through a natural filter.”
—Ed Scanlan, chief executive of Total Attorneys
It’s hard to find good people, and it’s only getting harder with time. Even with the recent periods of economic recession, people are complaining about “the war for talent” and “looming talent shortages” for highly skilled labor. To make things even more challenging for employers, people today are switching jobs more often, creating sometimes very sudden staffing gaps that can disrupt company growth and productivity—after all, backfilling key positions can take time.
As the competition for talent grows, recruiting is becoming an even more vital function, and recruiters who understand how to tap the social Web will be at a disproportionate advantage. Most people find jobs through someone they know and accept job offers from people they trust. Recruiting through social networking sites takes advantage of these facts and makes matching job opportunities and candidates a faster and more efficient process.
I have experienced this firsthand at Hearsay Labs while trying to find great software engineers and other talent. I never imagined, that as the CEO of a company, more than 90% of my time would be dedicated to recruiting. But that’s exactly what happened as soon as we raised venture capital and got our first set of customer orders. Suddenly, it came time to deliver, and we needed to hire people fast without compromising quality. Our personal and extended networks on LinkedIn and Facebook were invaluable in helping us get through this period and continue to grow. The concepts, tips, and tactics in this chapter come from my own experience and from interviewing dozens of in-house recruiters, free-agent recruiters, and hiring managers from companies large and small.
In many ways, recruiting resembles a sales cycle. The recruiter is “selling” the employer, role, and job opportunity. She has to generate leads and pipeline, and manage candidates through a qualification process that hopefully results in some percentage of successful hires. As in sales, recruiters and hiring managers need to take a longer-term view that even if a candidate is not ready to close today, it is worthwhile to maintain that relationship for tomorrow or for referrals.
But compared with selling a product or service, people on the receiving end of a recruiting call are generally more open to learning about job opportunities. Because of the fixed supply of good jobs, the ratio of jobs to job seekers is typically low. In contrast, product advertisements and sales pitches greatly outnumber interested buyers. Recruiting is also more personal. Job decisions can determine people’s livelihoods and how they spend most of their waking hours. They can be life-changing. This means that interpersonal rapport between recruiters and candidates is even more important than in sales, and that online social networking tools can potentially be even more transformational in human resources.
This chapter explains how recruiting and human resources can use social networking sites. First, let’s compare LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in terms of recruiting.
Which Social Network Is Best for Recruiting?
Should you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or business-oriented social networking sites such as Doostang or Ryze to recruit new employees? A recent survey of recruiters across the United States revealed that 80% of employers are already using or planning to use social networking sites to identify and attract job candidates this year. Depending on your industry, what types of jobs you recruit for, and where you are in the recruiting cycle, one or a combination of these online social networks might make the most sense. The default rule of thumb for many recruiters is to focus on LinkedIn only, but you might miss out on a big opportunity to reach people who either aren’t on LinkedIn or aren’t as open to communications on LinkedIn. This largely depends on your audience demographics and preferences. Great recruiters go where the candidates are—and, increasingly, this is not only on LinkedIn, but also on Facebook and Twitter.
Used by more than 95% of white-collar employers in the United States, LinkedIn is by far the most established professionally oriented network and has already become a standard recruiting tool in many industries. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn now has more than 50 million business professionals among its membership across 150 different industries. Member profiles are akin to a living version of a résumé, which is ideal for recruiters seeking up-to-date information about a candidate. LinkedIn is good for posting jobs, requesting candidate referrals, and making contact when it’s explicitly related to a concrete business objective.
The biggest challenge of using LinkedIn is that it can feel impersonal and undifferentiated, especially for highly sought-after candidates who are contacted often by recruiters. To help improve chances of getting a reply, some recruiters use LinkedIn to generate a list of candidates and then use other means—including Facebook, phone, and email—to actually reach out to the candidates.
Used by 59% of U. S. white-collar employers, Facebook is emerging as a popular recruiting tool because of its extensive reach to 500 million people around the world—more than an order of magnitude larger than either LinkedIn or Twitter. Certainly, for any positions geared toward college grads, MBAs, or other Gen-Y hires, Facebook is a must. Recruiters also like Facebook (generally used in addition to LinkedIn) because it feels more personal and can more effectively build relationships with candidates over time, whereas LinkedIn or Twitter can feel more transactional.
Hundreds of recruiting applications have been built for the Facebook, but most have fewer than several hundred monthly active users. The problem is that these applications are hard to find among the jumble in the Facebook Application Directory. Candidates must install the applications, which means recruiters typically will not reach passive candidates. The most popular application is Jobvite’s Work With Us, which has approximately 5,000 monthly active users (see Figure 8.1) and uses a different approach. Instead of targeting candidates directly, Work With Us is meant for existing employees at a company to help refer candidates from their networks of Facebook friends, presumably motivated by referral bonuses, social goodwill, and enjoyment from working with friends.
Recruiting site Jobvite has one of the more popular job applications on Facebook. Work With Us is available only to employees of companies using Jobvite, and it enables those employees to easily refer their Facebook friends for job openings at their company.
The more common way to recruit on Facebook is to use the same techniques on how to market and sell products that we talked about in Chapters 4, “Sales in the Facebook Era,” and 6, “Marketing in the Facebook Era,” to market and sell job opportunities. You can apply these marketing and sales techniques to recruiting on Facebook:
• Hypertargeting—Recruiters can target job advertisements based on candidates’ profile information, such as location, current and past roles and employers, and interests.
• Social word-of-mouth—HR can create a Facebook Group community for employees to discuss topics (nothing confidential, of course). The group appears on employee profiles, and any new activity appears on their News Feed and is visible to everyone in their networks.
• Transitive trust—When recruiters are trying to reach a candidate, they can improve their chances of a positive response by going through a mutual friend. Because the candidate trusts the friend, and the mutual friend trusts the recruiter, the candidate is more likely to transitively trust the recruiter and at least be willing to hear about the job opportunity.
• Relationship building—People might not be ready to switch jobs when a recruiter first reaches out. Facebook can be a low-cost but effective way to stay in touch with candidates until they are ready to move from their current employment.
For example, hypertargeting is ideal for recruiters who are generally seeking a very specific set of skills and work experience, education, and location. Starbucks Coffee Company is one employer that uses Facebook ads to recruit new employees (see Figure 8.2).
Starbucks used this recruiting ad on Facebook. An increasing number of employers are using hypertargeted Facebook ads to source job candidates based on profile criteria such as age, college, work experience, and location.
Approximately 42% of U. S. recruiters surveyed have tried using Twitter for recruiting, with mixed but mostly positive results. Twitter is especially popular for finding contractors, generally by tweeting or searching on hashtags that describe the role or skills you are seeking—for example, “Looking for a good #web #designer in #Chicago.”
Twitter can also be very effective at finding thought leaders in a given space who might be good candidates for your marketing and communications team, particularly if you are seeking a social media manager or community manager. Because most Twitter users have public profiles, you can easily see who is tweeting about which subjects most often, who is getting retweeted most often, and the full history of any user’s tweets. If someone is good about tweeting regularly, has interesting things to say, and has a strong following, that person could likely do the same on behalf of your company. Hiring managers for these kinds of positions might source candidates from more traditional routes, but they often check Twitter, Facebook, and blog accounts as part of candidate due diligence in the hiring decision process.
Depending on the audience you are seeking, it might make sense to invest in a combination of these networks (see Table 8.1). In the following sections, we talk about candidate sourcing, reference checks, branding and reputation, and how recruiters can keep in touch with a greater number of candidates.
Table 8.1 Advantages of Different Social Networks for Recruiting
Sourcing and Screening Candidates
Hundreds of millions of the best-educated, most qualified job candidates have joined social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Increasingly, smart recruiters are also joining these sites to connect with these individuals and cultivate lasting relationships.
Why do social networking sites attract top candidates? One reason could be that high-achieving professionals become successful because they are savvier with technology and are better networkers. These individuals are more likely to periodically reevaluate their careers and seek out, or at least be open to, new opportunities for career advancement.
In the past, a big problem with job boards was outdated résumés, sometimes making it hard to even get in touch with candidates if they moved, got a new phone number, and so on. Social network profiles have the benefit of being self-maintained, living documents. Social pressure motivates you to keep your profile up-to-date. Social network profiles go even further than traditional résumés to make the recruiter’s job easier, such as showing who you know in common, testimonials from colleagues, and profile search. Recruiters and hiring managers have access to more information than ever before to find and then qualify candidates earlier in the cycle, resulting in less wasted time if the employer and the candidate aren’t a good fit.
Two kinds of candidates exist: Active candidates are proactively seeking a job, and passive candidates are usually currently employed but still might be open to hearing about new opportunities.
Active Candidates
Increasingly, people who are actively seeking jobs are looking to LinkedIn and Facebook. A typical scenario is for people to discover job openings from company Web sites, alumni communications, or even Craigslist, and then to use social networking sites to see how people they know could connect them to these jobs. The other scenario involves people searching directly on LinkedIn for job openings.
We all know that the easiest way to get hired is through someone we know who already works at the company. The job search is a big investment that requires a lot of time; today’s job seeker doesn’t want to waste time on long-shot job opportunities. Applying for jobs within her social network is the best way to maximize the odds of getting hired while having greater visibility and influence in the process.
For recruiters, this means two things. First, list your jobs listed on social networks. By filling out a few basic fields, recruiters can post jobs to their networks for free on Doostang, and for a small fee on LinkedIn. Ask hiring managers and other employees to help spread the word about these jobs to their networks. Second, use the information and public references about candidates on their social network profiles as an initial screening step.
Passive Candidates
Social networking sites are great for finding active candidates, but they are even more powerful for discovering passive candidates. Many of your greatest potential hires might not be actively looking because they are happily employed. These passive job candidates don’t post their résumés on Monster or CareerBuilder, but they do sign up for LinkedIn and Facebook. Why? Because their friends and colleagues are there.
Social networking sites have drastically expanded the talent pool we can recruit from by including passive candidates who previously were hard to reach. Instead of waiting for candidates to come to you, you can proactively reach out to your ideal candidate profile. Using advanced profile search, recruiters can specify very precise criteria based on information such as past employers, roles, projects, education level, location, and relevant skills and experience to find potential candidates in their network.
LinkedIn Recruiter, shown in Figure 8.3, is a premium service that enables paying subscribers to search by title, company, or keywords across all LinkedIn members, not just people in their network. It also includes collaboration tools to enable recruiting teams to group candidates into folders and tag them with comments.
LinkedIn Recruiter is a premium corporate recruiting service that helps recruiters identify, contact, and manage passive job candidates.
College and MBA Recruiting on Facebook
Just about every high school, college, and graduate student today is on Facebook. It’s the best way to reach that demographic. What remains to be seen is whether this younger generation will also join LinkedIn as they reach post-graduation working age.
Recruiters are using Facebook more often to provide information about prospective employers, promote campus information sessions, connect with student groups, stay in touch with interns, and even perform due diligence on prospective applicants. Many college recruiting teams are setting up Facebook Pages instead of Web sites to provide company information and foster communities of recruiters, employee alumni (current company employees who are alumni of the school), interns, and prospective applicants. (See Chapter 11, “How To: Engage Customers with Facebook Pages and Twitter,” for how to set up and manage a Facebook Page.)
Recruiters use Facebook Events to promote information sessions, campus talks, and other recruiting events. Events can be associated with Facebook Pages, enabling people who have “liked” a Page to receive updates when event details change or new events are posted. For example, P&G created a Facebook Page for its recruiting efforts at the University of Dayton (see Figure 8.4). The page describes job opportunities at the company, invites students to attend an upcoming “Meet and Greet P&G Engineers” session, and introduces a current P&G employee who recently graduated from the university, encouraging interested students to get in touch.
Facebook Page for P&G recruiting at the University of Dayton
Similar to the word-of-mouth marketing scenarios described in Chapter 6, “Marketing in the Facebook Era,” enthusiasm and awareness about employers spread across friend groups on Facebook. When prospective applicants look at your Facebook Event page, they can see which of their friends are also planning to attend. When students RSVP for a recruiting event or “like” your recruiting page, their friends are notified via News Feed. As mentioned previously, employers can amplify the effects by sponsoring social ad campaigns hypertargeted to the right campus and majors. Recruiters can time in-person events and ad campaigns with the recruiting season or school calendar, such as offering a study break during midterm exam week or placing an ad for résumés submissions a few weeks before on-campus interviews.
Another effective, low-cost strategy that college recruiters use is engaging with campus student groups. Most student organizations have a Facebook Group that lists their officers. Recruiters or employee alumni can send a Facebook message to these individuals to say hello and perhaps offer to sponsor or speak at an upcoming meeting. Afterward, the company can follow up with group members by posting the slides presented, related links, and speaker contact information to the group.
Many employers offer summer internships or co-op programs to provide students with an opportunity to work at the company before graduation. Facebook is a great way for recruiters and hiring managers to stay in touch after the program ends. By keeping these students engaged with the company, recruiters not only increase the chances they will join full-time after graduation, but they can also treat students as campus ambassadors to find additional candidates. The second-to-last section in this chapter goes into greater detail on using social networks to keep in touch.
Finally, recruiters and hiring managers are using Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to check out prospective applicants. Is the candidate’s profile consistent with how she has presented herself in interviews and on her résumés? Does this person seem friendly and well balanced, or is her profile blatantly inappropriate and unprofessional? Obviously, recruiters need to balance privacy and due diligence. The last section of this chapter gives advice to candidates on what information to share, when to restrict profile access, and how to manage social network identities.
Referrals from Extended Networks
As we discussed in Chapter 4, social networking sites enable people to reach far beyond just their immediate networks. For recruiters, the capability to find and contact candidates among friends of friends and greater extended networks dramatically expands the pool of trusted talent.
LinkedIn, in particular, lets recruiters reach the extended networks of their extended networks. Instead of asking only N people in their extended network whether they would be interested in a job, recruiters can ask those N people if they know anyone who might be interested in the job (see Figure 8.5), potentially reaching exponentially more people. Recruiters can further expand their network reach by joining a LION network, which we introduced in Chapter 4 in the context of sales prospecting.
This request for referral was sent to me from a LinkedIn connection. LinkedIn enables recruiters to tap extended networks not only for interested applicants, but also for referrals of interested applicants. This has a multiplying effect on how many people within the trusted network they are able to reach.
Jobvite, the company mentioned earlier in this chapter that developed a popular Facebook recruiting application, has a full solution that helps companies create and distribute job posts via their employees on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Because of the high costs of recruiting and the near-universal tendency for many of the best candidates to come through existing employees, many employers offer some form of referral. Motivated by the referral bonus or wanting to help the company find more good people, employees can access Jobvite from either the Web site or the Facebook
application mentioned earlier, kicking off a matching process that compares the company’s job listings to the profiles of the employees’ Facebook friends. As we talked about earlier, most social network profiles contain relevant information for recruiting, such as interests, location, former employers, associations, role, and title. The Work With Us application recommends the matches found between job postings and potential candidates for referral to the employee. The employee can then decide whether to actually submit the referral.
Say an employee, John, refers his friend Kelly for a business development role at his company. The next time Kelly logs in to Facebook, she will receive a notification that John referred her for this position. Behind the scenes, John’s company can track where candidate referrals come from, and if Kelly eventually gets hired, it can ensure that John receives his referral bonus.
LinkedIn recently added a similar feature that matches profile information to job titles and descriptions (see Figure 8.6). LinkedIn’s feature goes even further in suggesting not only first-degree connections, but also friends of friends.
A popular feature of LinkedIn is the capability to email job opportunities to your network. LinkedIn enhanced this feature by automatically suggesting to recipients who in their network and extended networks might be a good fit for a job opportunity based on profile keyword matching to the job description.
Targeting Specialized Networks
Social network communities and affinity groups are another great source of talent, particularly if you are looking for candidates of a certain background. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups exist, based on company employees and alumni, roles, industries, conferences, and trade associations—for example, the Northeast Black Law Students Association group on Facebook, the Healthcare Management Engineers group on LinkedIn, and the Women Business Owners group on Ryze.
Sometimes membership and access to these groups are restricted, but they are generally relaxed. Several recruiters I spoke to for this chapter told me that they have never been denied membership in one of these groups when they tried to join. After joining, recruiters can post messages, view members, and reach out to specific group members.
For example, my friend is on the diversity recruiting team at a large engineering company in Ohio. One of the first places he goes to find candidates is the Society of Women Engineers group on LinkedIn. He has brought dozens of welcome job opportunities to the group and successfully hired four group members last year. Every few months, he checks on the group to see who has joined and browses member profiles to look for potential candidates. His advice is to take extra precaution to respect the group’s posting policies and to try to send highly targeted and personalized communication.
Reading Between the Lines
Aside from obviously important information that recruiters usually look at—such as experience, education, and current title and employer—a lot of subtle information on social network profiles can be very insightful and valuable. By reading between the lines and “doing their homework,” recruiters can tap powerful data to determine candidate fit, opportunistically go after candidates who are likely unhappy, and increase the odds of closing the deal with a candidate:
• Tenure and stated accomplishments in current role—Most people specify job tenure on their social network profiles. How long a candidate has been at her current employer is an important indicator of how likely she will be to leave for another opportunity. Based on profiles of past employees at this company, what is the average tenure of an employee? How does this person’s tenure compare? If the person is relatively new (there less than one year), with few accomplishments to show, the timing probably isn’t right to try to recruit this person for an immediate opening. However, you might find someone whose tenure has far exceeded the company average, with a lot of accomplishments but perhaps not a proportional number of promotions. This person might be more open to persuasion that another opportunity could be better for career advancement.
• Organizational structure — As most recruiters know, titles can vary significantly among companies. Just as sales reps need to understand their prospective buyer organizations, recruiters can benefit from understanding the organizational structure of the existing employers of people they are trying to recruit. As we talked about in Chapter 4, poking around on social networking sites can yield valuable information about which departments have the best people and what titles really mean.
• Mass exodus from a particular company — Occasionally, companies make poor decisions. Some go out of business, and others flounder and stagnate. Their employees are the people closest to this information, and sometimes recruiters see a voluntary or involuntary exodus of people from a particular company. In LinkedIn, you can see this activity in the Network Updates section of the home page. In Facebook, this activity is broadcast via the News Feed feature. For example, when I logged in to Facebook last month, I saw three updates from my network saying “so and so has left her job at Company X.” If I were a recruiter, now might be a good time to tap Company X’s employee pool.
• Commonality with you — As in sales, shared personal experience between the candidate and recruiter, such as the same hometown or alma mater, can help establish personal rapport. Especially if you are an independent headhunter not affiliated with a particular employer, this rapport can help differentiate you as someone the candidate remembers, likes, and trusts with finding career opportunities.
• Commonality with company employees—It’s common practice when recruiters are trying to close a candidate on a job offer to introduce that person to employees and executives at the company. These individuals can offer different perspectives on the employer and help persuade the candidate. Recruiters can take this to the next level by looking for commonalities between company employees and the candidate, to strategically pair up people and maximize those conversations. We can repurpose a prior example from Chapter 4 to illustrate this point. Perhaps the candidate you are trying to win over is originally from Texas and graduated from Rice University. Among the executives in your company, one is also a Texan and attended Rice. Instead of a random employee, this employee is likely one of the people you want on the phone helping to close this candidate. Deciding whether to accept a job is a very personal and emotional decision, and tapping shared experiences—even if they are small coincidences—can make a big difference.
Candidate References
The shortcoming of traditional candidate references is that the candidate provides them, and any rational candidate will disclose only favorable references. As a result, recruiters might be getting a biased view of the candidate. The openness and transparency of the social Web solves this information asymmetry problem; by publicly exposing candidates’ work history and which individuals candidates are linked to, social networking sites create strong incentives for candidates to tell the truth on their profile (because everyone can see what they write) and provide recruiters with an easier way of finding independent references who might be more objective than candidate-supplied references.
More Objective References
The online social graph can make reference checking more independent and objective. Instead of asking the candidate to supply references, a recruiter can go to LinkedIn and find them. The recruiter might want to browse the candidate’s LinkedIn contacts, including mutual connections, or search for profiles of people who have overlapping tenure with the candidate at a previous employer.
For example, when we are considering candidates at Hearsay Labs, we always do a search on LinkedIn and Twitter to find mutual contacts. We call the mutual contact (or contacts) whom we trust will give us the most objective view of the candidates.
More Accountable Information
Another type of candidate reference comes in the form of professional testimonials on social networking sites. For example, LinkedIn members can publicly recommend another member. The testimonial becomes part of the member’s profile (see Figure 8.7).
Profile recommendations on LinkedIn tend to carry more weight because they are public testimonials that other members can scrutinize.
LinkedIn recommendations are public and last forever unless the members remove them from their profile. Because it’s a public and permanent record, people tend to think twice before providing an endorsement that they’ll be accountable for. Providing a testimonial on a social networking site is a much higher commitment than a reference phone call that is private and transient.
The social Web introduces a new level of transparency and accountability to these endorsements that private reference checks in the past might not have supplied. In addition to LinkedIn endorsements, the Facebook application Testimonials offers a similar professional testimonial capability.
Employer and Recruiter Reputation
Online social networking is powerful because it’s a two-way street. Not only can recruiters and hiring managers perform due diligence on candidates, but candidates can also research the hiring manager and other employees, see who they might know who works there, and reach out to learn more. In the competitive landscape for top talent, companies can use social networking to brand themselves as desirable employers and recruiters can use social networking to establish credibility.
Marketing Your Company as a Desirable Employer
With employees switching jobs more often, it’s more important than ever for companies to establish their brand as a desirable employer. As we described in the earlier section on college recruiting, some companies are using Facebook Pages and hypertargeted ads to achieve this objective.
Employee testimonials can be another important resource for providing social proof that the company provides a fun, diverse, stimulating work environment. Some companies have seen great results from asking select employees to blog about their experience working there. Others encourage employees to be engaged in recruiting communities and make themselves available to share their experiences or answer questions. Many of the techniques we covered in Chapter 6 for marketing products also apply to marketing your company as an employer.
Establishing Your Credibility as a Recruiter
Especially for independent recruiters or head-hunting firms not affiliated with one particular employer, public recommendations on LinkedIn from successfully placed candidates are a great way to highlight your track record and establish credibility.
In addition to public testimonials, recruiters can use online social networks to see if they and the candidates have any mutual contacts. As in the sales example, the recruiter could ask these mutual contacts to provide references for both the candidate and the recruiter.
Transitive trust happens at two levels for job candidates:
1. Trust in the employer—Friend X works for Employer Y. Candidate Z trusts and respects Friend X, so Candidate Z is more likely to trust that Employer Y is good. Otherwise, his friend would not be working there.
2. Trust in the recruiter—Friend X went through Recruiter M and landed a good job that she is very happy with. Candidate Z trusts Friend X and sees that she is happy, so he is more likely to believe that Recruiter M is qualified.
Because finding a job is so personal and emotional, transitive trust plays an even bigger role in recruiting than in sales. In most cases, no single job is “perfect” or “best,” and an inherent level of uncertainty surrounds any opportunity. Until the candidate actually starts working there, she won’t have full information about what her experience will really be like. At a certain point, she needs to make a “leap-of-faith” decision based on trust that this is the right job. Employee references, especially from friends the candidate knows and respects, provide the best information for mitigating the uncertainty.
Keeping in Touch
Despite their greatest efforts, occasionally even the best recruiters aren’t able to close a candidate. The timing isn’t right, the candidate decided to go with another opportunity, a personal emergency is preventing the candidate from relocating—multiple reasons could exist. Before social networking sites, it was easy to lose touch with candidates— even those with whom recruiters invested months and even years.
As we first talked about in Chapter 3, “How Relationships and Social Capital Are Changing,” and then explored further in the context of sales in Chapter 4, one of the most valuable aspects of online social networking is the capability to maintain more weak ties. For recruiters, this means being able to keep in touch with candidates regardless of whether they were successfully placed.
Recruiters can then revisit those candidates later when new opportunities emerge. Recruiters can also further capitalize on those relationships by tapping those candidates’ friend networks for additional talent.
Why would candidates want to keep in touch? As we talked about at the beginning of this chapter, most people view recruiting as more mutually beneficial than sales calls. They want to keep their options open in case something happens with their current job or something better comes along. Maintaining relationships with recruiters, especially low-effort weak ties, buys them privileged access to new career opportunities in the future. So more often than not, assuming that the working relationship was positive, we see candidates accept LinkedIn invitations and Facebook friend requests from their recruiters.
Making the Most of Successful Placements
A successful candidate job placement is just the beginning of a relationship. Candidates who have been successfully placed feel the most indebted and grateful. These individuals can become a recruiter’s greatest allies and advocates. Good recruiters depend on trust and rapport from past placements for future placements, introductions, and referrals to other candidates. They might even get employment and contracting opportunities to recruit at the company who hired the candidate.
One recruiter I interviewed who specializes in placing industrial designers said that because of the high turnover in her industry, nearly half of her placements have been repeat placements. During the last decade, she has built up a network of artists and designers who look to her every time they are ready to pursue a new full-time or contractor opportunity.
Keeping Lines of Communication Open with Nonplacements
Nonplacements can be equally important for a recruiter to stay connected to and continually grow her network. The capability to easily keep in touch on Facebook and LinkedIn means that recruiters can take a longer-term view on candidates and not feel as if they have wasted any time, even if things don’t work out the first time around.
According to the same design-industry recruiter, she views every rejection as an opportunity to place the candidate in the future and ask for referrals. Many candidates feel a slight sense of guilt when they turn down an offer and are eager to help by referring other candidates. Usually the designers with whom she works know a large number of other designers socially or from school or work.
The following case study profiles another recruiter, Joe, who uses LinkedIn and Facebook to cultivate long-term relationships with younger Gen-Y candidates. (Incidentally, I found and contacted Joe on LinkedIn.)
Financial Services Recruiting in Chicago
Joe is one of the top financial services recruiters in Chicago. During the last five years, Joe and his staff have helped place hundreds of recent MBAs and banking analysts with two to three years of experience into associate-level roles in banking, real estate, private equity, and venture capital. As a free agent, Joe’s success depends on his capability to network with both employers and candidates. Joe separates his candidate network into three categories: candidates he has successfully placed, candidates he will successfully place in the future, and people he has just met.
1. Successful placements—Joe maintains close relationships with his top placements because they often become repeat job candidates, and eventually even clients who employ his recruiting services. With or without online social networks, Joe invests heavily in these relationships, checking in at least once a month and catching up during lunch or dinner once a quarter. Especially in working with candidates who are mostly in their mid- or late twenties, Joe can use casual interaction mechanisms on Facebook to be more playful and make these relationships feel less businesslike. He sends virtual Facebook gifts for birthdays and other milestones. Joe pokes, bites (with the Zombies application), and shares photos of his newborn son with his top recruits. Far from replacing quality face-to-face interactions, Facebook enriches Joe’s relationships with this top-tier network with more casual but also more frequent and personal interaction.
2. Candidates he is still working to place—Generally, Joe’s relationships with “candidates in progress” tend to remain more professional. Most communication occurs through more traditional means, such as phone or email. Joe prefers to prove his capability as a competent recruiter before trying to establish more personal relationships with people. However, if a candidate drops out of the process because another opportunity emerges that was not sourced through Joe, he adds the candidate to his LinkedIn and Facebook networks to maintain the relationship. Joe benefits from having instant access to the individual’s social network to find additional talent, and potentially working to place this individual in the future.
3. People he has just met— For new candidates that Joe has just met or interacted with only once or twice, chance and timing (a combination of the candidate’s immediate availability and Joe’s pipeline) used to determine whether he made an effort to stay in touch. With online social networking, the cost of establishing the connection is so low that there’s almost no downside to doing so. Joe might or might not ultimately end up working with a particular candidate, but with each connection, he receives a free option—but not obligation—to reach out in the future.
In every case, online social networking has enriched the reach and perpetual value of Joe’s network. Perhaps it’s the secret to his success.
Alumni Networks
Company alumni are another powerful but often overlooked source of talent and new business opportunity. No matter how great the working relationship is between employer and employee, people eventually move on. It’s disappointing for employers, but it can also be seen as an opportunity.
Despite choosing to move on, most corporate alumni view former employers in a positive light. After all, they did choose to work at the company for some period of time. Company recruiters can often rely on these alumni just as they might rely on current employees for referrals and access to their LinkedIn or Facebook contacts. With such heavy competition in the market for top talent, companies should not overlook the very people they invested in so heavily and who likely still feel loyal to their former employer.
In addition, retirees are proving to be an unexpected, indispensable source of talent for many American employers. The rising wave of baby boomer retirements has left some employers suddenly short-staffed, particularly in areas requiring deep domain knowledge where newer hires aren’t as able to contribute because of their lack of experience. As the following case study shows, some companies, such as Dow Chemical, are using online social networking to reengage retirees to help fill the gap.
In addition to the recruiting angle, company alumni are a great source of new business opportunities, such as forming potential partnerships and generating leads for prospective customers. Alumni know their former employer’s product or service better than anyone else and are likely to be an advocate in their new role. Consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company know this and are providing updates on where alumni end up and actively engaging them in everything from conference speaking engagements to recruiting events.
My Dow Network
To address sudden workforce gaps from a wave of retiring boomers, Midland, Michigan–based Dow Chemical Company turned to online social networking. Using corporate social networking software from SelectMinds, Dow created My Dow Network, an online community for Dow alumni, retirees, and current employees. Anyone with a Dow employee ID number from the last seven years can register for the site.
My Dow Network has taken off, boasting thousands of members several months after launching. People are signing up to network with current and former colleagues, renew old friendships, stay abreast of the latest developments within Dow, and explore new full-time and contractor opportunities. Dow benefits from staying connected to its cumulative talent pool, tapping special skills and knowledge from experienced alumni, facilitating knowledge transfer across different generations of employees, and fostering a more inclusive, diverse work environment.
From new moms who take time off to retirees with domain expertise, most alumni are grateful and enthusiastic about the opportunity to reconnect and reengage. According to retiree Jeff Schatzer, “One of the great losses of retirement is the severance of ties that had such meaning. [My Dow Network] is one way to reestablish those ties. After three years of retirement, it’s heartwarming to know that people think of me, that they have a comment for me, or that they want to share some news with me.”
Not surprisingly, alumni who have returned to Dow as consultants or employees are proving to be more affordable to hire and train, more productive, and less likely to leave for another company.
Advice for Candidates
For someone who wants a job or wants to keep a job, the need for social networking has never been greater. The tenure for C-level positions averages less than two years. New hires, especially at the top, are being asked to hit the ground running and produce quick results. With more jobs going overseas, fewer guarantees about employment, and rising competition for the top jobs, people need to take full advantage of online social networks to strategically and opportunistically develop their careers. Many of the concepts from Chapters 2–4 on personal brand, social capital, and social sales, respectively, apply to candidates trying to “sell” themselves for certain roles internal or external to their company.
For job seekers, social graph information available from searching and browsing on LinkedIn and Doostang can help line up informational interviews and uncover tacit information about prospective employers and what it’s really like to work at a particular company. Job seekers can learn a great deal about interviewers, hiring managers, and prospective colleagues. Because online social networks enable people to maintain a greater number of weak-tie relationships, job seekers might discover in their expanded networks that they know people at the company where they want to work, and then use those relationships to get their foot in the door.
However, remember that it works both ways. It’s becoming increasingly common for hiring managers and recruiters to perform due diligence on candidates via social networking sites. (They used to just Google candidates.) It is a good idea to keep Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace pages PG-13, if not G. If you must post photos from a bachelor party in Las Vegas, at least create different profile views and Friend Lists for professional contacts versus college fraternity brothers. Chapter 11 includes a more in-depth discussion on how to manage your professional identity on social networking sites.
Be Aware of Employee Poaching
The unprecedented access that online social networking provides is tremendously empowering for recruiters and job candidates, but it can be worrisome for employers. Poaching is not a new phenomenon. Employees of reputable firms are constantly being sought—these individuals are prescreened and know the company’s best practices, so their experience is highly valued by others. Online social networking can be scary for employers because recruiters can be very systematic about their poaching.
Employers might want to be careful and make sure that employee communities on social networks are properly moderated and watched over carefully to prevent poachers from joining. Some companies have instituted internal policies listing what employees can disclose about the organization and their role in public forums, including social networking sites. Employers should remind employees that any company proprietary work, including sales deals with material financial consequences and not-yet-launched products, should not be shared on LinkedIn profiles.
Ultimately, employers should be aware that poaching is a reality and happens all the time. Second, have backfill plans ready to be mobilized in case a mission-critical role is suddenly left vacant. Most important, create a great workplace environment so that employees won’t want to leave.
In many ways, recruiting resembles a sales cycle, so recruiters and hiring managers should brush up on selling techniques—such as the ones in Chapter 4.
With employees switching jobs more often, recruiters and hiring managers need to take a longer-term view in building relationships with talented professionals. Even if someone isn’t available today, it might be worthwhile to invest in that relationship when that person does become available in the future and for referrals.
Most recruiters for professional positions are on LinkedIn, but a big opportunity remains to reach broader audiences on Facebook, especially those in college or graduate school.
Most hires come through employees and their networks. In addition to offering a referral bonus, make it easy for employees to make the referral by using LinkedIn or Jobvite to suggest who in their network might be a good fit for a particular job.
A growing number of companies are building explicit alumni networks for past employees who have moved on to other companies or to retirement. Alumni have proven to be great sources for part-time or contract work and for referring new business opportunities.
> > > TIPS and TO DO ’s
Especially if your work involves college and MBA recruiting, consider creating a Facebook Page to build community and enthusiasm for the company, and to connect school alums who are now employees with applicants at their alma mater.
Take full advantage of the rich information on LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to decide whether someone is likely to be a good candidate before you even perform a phone screen.
Join and participate in organization, alumni, and diversity groups on Facebook and LinkedIn as a means to find and engage large numbers of individuals who might fit your ideal candidate profile.
During your due diligence process, don’t just rely on references provided by the candidate, which are likely very positive. Search for mutual contacts on LinkedIn and others who might have worked with the candidate at previous employers to hear a more well-rounded and balanced set of perspectives.
Be aware that other companies’ recruiters are likely actively pursuing your best employees, and take the time to put a policy in place for what employees are and aren’t allowed to disclose on their profiles. For example, sales reps shouldn’t be allowed to put any confidential deal information on their LinkedIn profiles—especially if it’s a highly competitive situation, a nondisclosure agreement has been signed with the customer, or you are a publicly traded company and the deal has material implications for your quarterly earnings.