Social Media – A Primer
There is a lot of confusion and uncertainty about social networking and its role in recruiting. Conferences and seminars are everywhere. There are hundreds of social media blogs and websites, as well, and an expanding number of social media applications and tools.
But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace and what makes them useful?
What are Social Networks?
Very simply, social networks are Internet-based applications that allow you to connect to and grow the number of people you know. They allow you to easily send messages, notes, and pictures to a single friend or groups of friends. They also give you the opportunity to market your organization or your services to a targeted group of people.
Social networks as an idea are neither new nor unusual. We all have our own networks of friends, college mates, sports mates, relatives and so forth. The only difference is that our networks are physical and most likely interactions only occur face-to-face or over the telephone or by email.
The social networks we all know best are LinkedIn and Facebook – both of which connect you to millions of potential candidates. They have been around for several years and through their own marketing and promotion have assembled a huge number of people. Other well-known social networks include MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning and others. There are also many smaller networks, some more focused on a particular age group or interest group, but still very valuable.
What are the benefits of a social network?
If you are in recruiting, social networks let you reach out to targeted groups of candidates to let them know about new opportunities or to just provide them with background information about your organization. By doing this on a regular basis, you can slowly inform candidates about many aspects of your business, the culture of your organization and the kinds of opportunities you generally have. This helps candidates to self-select out of organizations they are not comfortable with and prevents many bad hires. It also creates excitement in potential candidates who feel they are a good fit.
If you are employee development, social networks allow you to offer regular communications and information through a blog or some other media. Some organizations create regular video casts or podcast about their business, offer videos of the CEO or other leader, and provide broad perspective on the organization, its leadership, strategy and culture.
If you are in succession planning or work on internal mobility, social networks increase your exposure to potentially qualified and interesting people. They allow you to get in-depth understanding of people, who they are connected to and how they communicate.
As you can image, using social networking well is challenging and time consuming. It requires you to develop a social media strategy, decide which of these many tools are best for your organization, learn about new technologies and practice a more proactive type of recruiting.
While at first it may seem overwhelming to embrace social networking, people are getting accustomed to being part of many different networks and generally find these experiences to be useful. The next few years will see an explosion in ways to use social networks and they will be the backbone of most recruiting and educational activities.
