Going Above and Beyond Social Recruiting

Above & Beyond Social Recruiting - Ashton & Associates Recruiting Top candidates are being searched for more easily, and being pursued online with a speed and efficiency unlike anything ever seen before.

More tools and resources are available to job seekers making them easier to find.

Resume boards, job boards, mobile apps, news feeds, social networking sites, search engines, recruiters and keyword scanning technologies have completely and fundamentally changed the way we play the recruiting game.

Why Social Recruiting Works

More and more candidates today are posting their resumes on job boards – Monster, Indeed, Workopolis to name a few. And who today doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile? Employers can easily enter their chosen key words, quickly scan and find talent that is potentially a right fit for their needs.  The word potentially here is key.

Social Recruiting has it’s Mixed Blessings

It’s not rocket science to see that as sourcing becomes easier – almost everyone becomes findable on the internet and social media – the once critical role of sourcing will be reduced. The focus today is on how a candidate sees their prospective story, and whether or not they are sold on the story that you create online.

Credentials will become less important as social sharing tools such as YouTube Mashable LinkedIn are becoming more and more mainstream. People post examples, pictures, videos and entire portfolios of their work online. Not only can you find talent that may or may not be looking, you can actually evaluate this talent before you even make contact.

Taking an objective look at your organisation from a potential employee’s perspective. Learning about the person you are trying to hire, and what is truly important to that person, then determining whether values, motive, skills and competencies are in alignment. This is what set’s real recruiters apart from a social sourcers.

Personalization is key.

If you are not targeting your ideal candidate individually in every promotional recruiting ad you place you are throwing a lot of money away. Too many recruiters think (and employers) think that having a huge response to a a job posting spells success. What about the countless hours spent pouring through those hundreds of resumes screening for key words? Tens of thousands of dollars are at play in that one aspect of recruiting alone! Or worse, relying on software to do the sorting? How many great candidates are being overlooked because of the burden that mass recruiting mass advertising campaigns places on those poor HR folks?

Start by thinking like a job seeker.

The number one reason top talent changes jobs is because they don’t get along with the people they are working with or for.  99% of the time this is because values are not in alignment.

These people want to know that there is a right cultural fit with their next employer, that their values, skills, ambition and work ethic will be rightly aligned so they can achieve more success than they are currently able to.

Identifying candidates’ hard skills is the easy part.

The trickiest aspect of sourcing and recruiting today is attracting the people you want to attract to your brand. Promoting your company’s culture so that it is attractive to your ideal candidate or audience is absolutely the most challenging, and most critical, aspect of social recruiting.

Let’s assume now that you’ve found some potential right fits, stop detach and put away your excitement. You’ve been on one or two swooning dates and you’re now in the dangerous honeymoon phase. Everyone is in love. Use psychometric assessment tools to objectively screen candidates for motive, ambition, competencies and values.  The essential soft skills that make our break every candidate you hire will help you to make the right, and fully informed, hiring decision.

 

Ashton & Associates are specialists at identifying right fit candidates on the basis of values alignment, ambition and drive, skills, competencies and need.

More expert information on this topic from Ashton & Associates.

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Barbara Ashton is the President and Founder of Ashton & Associates Recruiting.

Ashton & Associates Recruiting… Hiring Right. Every Time.

This post has been approved for public release by Barbara Ashton. All certified posts carry this Google Authorship link to Google.