Anti-Social Media
ByI spent the day walking around the ERE Expo in San Diego on Tuesday, talking to technology vendors, recruiting agencies, and corporate recruiters alike. It was interesting to see how enamored we all are with social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook just to name a few.
Booth after booth, session after session, it seemed almost every discussion focused on a piece of technology designed to eliminate the need for real communication with potential candidates. Text messages, tweets, and other electronic mediums seem to be the wave of the future for all of us in recruiting.
As the day went on I was introduced to a newly minted corporate recruiter who just joined the industry and was at the conference to learn the business. She showed me her pages and pages of notes from the sessions and vendor discussions and made the comment: “I thought recruiting would be a lot harder. With all of these tools available to us, we should all have more candidates then we know what to do with!”
Obviously this comment showed her lack of experience, however it also showed an attitude that is very pervasive today.
Later in the evening I was having a discussion with Phil Hendrickson from Starbucks and two other industry veterans on this subject. As we were all discussing war stories around this subject of social media, Phil used the term anti-social media to describe the effect of recruiters who rely only on these tools to identify and engage candidates. He went on to mention the many social media and related tools made available to Starbucks recruiters, paused, and then pulled out a small piece of paper from his portfolio. Printed on the piece of paper was printed a single word – Phone. This, Phil went on to explain, is the one tool that a recruiter cannot live without.
It is obvious to me that Phil and Starbucks team really understand the correct use of all of these tools available to us today. Social media in the broad sense is a tool to be leveraged, not to be relied upon. Relying on these various mediums could wind up causing recruiters to become anti-social.
As Phil Hendrickson stated so clearly, there is no substitute for the phone and a recruiter’s ability to build a relationship with a candidate. Phil – you are truly a leader in our industry!
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Good Morning!
I just finished reading your editorial about Anti-Social Media and I give it a gold star. You are 100% correct when you mentioned the “phone” is something we recruiters can’t do without. It all comes down to the person-to-person contact and first impressions. Technology is wonderful and we should use it to our benefit; but when one wants to really convey the culture and opportunities within an organization, there is nothing like speaking to a real person.
Elaine,
Thank you for the comments. Its exciting to see recruiters who understand the concept of leveraging technology and not relying one. If recruiting truly is sales (and it is), then in order to be effective we must be able to identify/create the need in the candidate – something that is done more effectively through a verbal conversation then through Twitter or Facebook.
Hi Steve. A well crafted response with great intentions to help recruiters get SM back into context but, in the end, equally misleading.
Let me explain.
By the end of the last decade the same hype over “The Internet” and “e-recruiting” dominated the discussion to the point that many began trying to calm the storm of enthusiastic but exponentially proliferating, over promising tools, books and experts with cautionary tails to remember the phone and that nothing “replaces” the basics.
DejaVu all over again. Just substitute SM for Internet.
I’ve little concern that the person entering our field will get the wrong impression. I know they will. They will ALWAYS get the wrong impression no matter when they enter it because something hot will always be over hyped.
In the end however, your blog didn’t emphasize as you nowmally do …and as Starbucks can do as well that its about the data. Whether its a script, a method, an approach, a strategy or a tectic, it works…or not…under some conditions or all. That’s if you bother to measure it and SM is so hot and so rapidly evolving that few even bother to do so.
In 2009 of the 176,420 positions that firms attributed a source of hire to (from the 41 firms whose data they let me see) only about 500 openings were filled where they could attribute a hire to social networks.
Two points I would make:
1. We have much to do to collect and understand how SM influences, leverages and helps or hinders the process theat we call hiring. Clearly other things were correctly or incorrectly attributed in the data I collected and so I have no allusions that it does or doesn’t add value. However IMHO I’ve learned not to try and convince folks that the latest and greatest should be approached with care. Thats why I think you are misleading. It’s ike saying to someone who just saw the ocean that you should take a safety course in how to swim. Let them jump in, they probably won’t drown and, if they do, they’ll find another ocean soon enough. Jobs are a part of life and should be explored with gusto. A few failuresd early on is a odd thing. An important few will learn to swim and want more..some will find you looking for the context and, most imortantly, special few will demonstrate some new strokes…and that… I can use.
2. Until we have a discipline where there is agreement on the “what” that constitutes recruiting (ten years off in my opinion), the medium has no relevance but will likely be the thing attended to. Folks are so entranced by the medium they too often fail to attend to the content. I’m sure we both know many recruiters who are equally unsuccessful with phone, twitter or in person. They simply cannot satisfy the stakeholders. And we need to develop competencies to satisfy ALL of them to be world class. Since there is no standard “license” in this country that is required to be a recruiter, the price of entry is so low that anyone and everyone can and does get in. .Just not for long. I simply see it as the way it is…for the moment
So I was at the same show and saw the same attention to the latest and greatest. And in that sense it hasn’t changed in 20 years when Tim Berners Lee went to his colleagues in Bern, Switzerland and said I’ve got this really cool tool that will help us share our data on a common platform.
Gerry – Thank you for the excellent comment and points of clarification. I completely agree that this is in fact “DejaVu” all over again. As recruiters we continue to get so caught up in the newest technology, newest tools, newest gimmicks, etc that we forget to even measure their effectiveness. The data itself should be the driver and your comments have provided me with great inspiration for a series of new blogs to further look into this! Thank you as always!