He who arrives first at the battlefield and awaits the arrival
of the enemy will be fresh for the fight; he who arrives
second at the battlefield and must hurry to be ready
for the battle will arrive exhausted.
Sun Tzu
In a context of recession and national and global economic crisis, the period between 2008 and 2016 is turning out to be one of the most difficult most business people can remember, particularly for human resources and talent management departments, which have now been cast as playing second fiddle to labour relations departments.
Despite the current economic situation, certain hints of recovery are detectable and there are indications that we are approaching a real war to attract talent and hold on to it, which gives the appearance of an actual battle to the finish.
The next expansion period in the economic cycle will mean that businesses will have to grow, and payrolls will be forced to expand. This gives rise to the question of what are and will be the most effective approaches to recruiting and how we must enter this battle fully armed and prepared to attract the best candidates. In this new scenario the use of the internet as a battlefield will play a crucial role if we intend to be more dynamic, efficient and wish to reach out to the best candidates.
From the point of view of attracting talent in business, there are a large number of companies and professionals who have set out to explore this particular battlefield:
In the U.S., 93% of recruitment strategy is based on 2.0.
Almost 46% of the world’s population has access to the internet in 2016.
Social media continues to grow apace around the world too, with active user accounts now amounting to roughly 31% of the world’s population.
Research conducted by GlobalWebIndex suggests that the average social media user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day using social networks and microblogs, with Argentine and Filipino users registering the most, at more than 4 hours per day.
Seventy percent of the companies use social media and 90% of these companies said that they benefitted from their use.
Given this evidence of exponential growth, it is easy to state that 2017 will be the year of the consolidation of 2.0 recruitment worldwide and in the following years we will see the consolidation of 3.0 recruitment. Organisations are becoming more proactive in attracting candidates from the 2.0 Web, both actively and passively, as with the supply of references in the future.
The key to success in hiring personnel using social networks lies in perfectly aligning and integrating the existing recruiting processes in the company with the technology provided for human resources departments.
Social networks and Big Data thus become an ideal way to bring businesses and potential candidates together.