Can Twitter Social Recruiting Prove Its Worth? Yes, but…

Apparently a challenge is in place where Twitter specialists were asked – “using your Twitter broadcast methods, find me candidates for XYZ job and prove your worth”. (Thanks to James Mayes and his excellent UK-based social recruiting blog which brought this to my attention in The #day socialrecruiting got challenged if anyone knows where this challenge was posted, please share it in comments here). The fairly typical response to such a challenge is ‘yes we can do it, but…’ and my folks taught me that when people say ‘but’, they really mean ‘no’.

Requests for measurable effectiveness of social media recruiting are often met with remarks that redirect the topic instead of directly addressing effectiveness. A request or challenge asking ‘Can Social Recruiting fill positions x, y and z?’ frequently lead to lectures that social media is about community, dialogue, transparency, etc. Would we accept similar arguments saying that asking for results from Pay Per Click is misguided because it’s about the user’s post-click experience?  No. We simply need to get to the point where best practices are an assumed part of any such challenge or request for results. Asking for results is never misguided.

Maybe I’m tired of running into arguments saying that asking for results from social media recruitment efforts is misguided because it’s all about community-building. Or maybe I’m just too close to the issue.

While Social Recruiting is not a one-off campaign tactic and community building is crucial, at some point you have to determine your core performance metric. This is recruitment and ultimately core performance metrics have to include: number of viable candidates found through a social media channel, successful hires of candidates found through a social media channel. No amount of best practice caveats can side-step this ultimate goal.

If I am properly building a social media strategy will I be able to generate an on-demand stream of qualified candidates when positions are open? Will the results of my social recruiting efforts reap the rewards for which I am going through this effort and will they be of an appropriate volume and effectiveness to justify the content development and labor costs associated — because saying social recruiting is free is only true if your time, talent and expertise is free as well.

Should you expect to get these results right off the bat through the social media ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality? No, not at all. You still have to build community, diversify your social media footprint, engage with your audience and build value — all the standard best practices of social media marketing.

Just saying ‘you need to do it right’ doesn’t remove the need to ultimately determine that a well-run recruiting effort/tactic/strategy/whatever actually works and is financially viable. However, given the mind-set of most companies, we will probably all have to get used to repeating variations of this phrase and the attendant details since many seem determined to view social recruiting as a simple ‘plug-it-in’ tactic that will produce immediate results. Yes it will produce results, but…