Corporate adoption of social media to both recruit and retain is becoming very popular in the US at the moment and this phenomenon is beginning to seep into Irish waters as well. This week i had the chance to look at two sites which are leading the charge around video recruiting: VideoJobShop and CareerTV.
In Microsoft Ireland we've been playing with the concept of social recruitment for quite some time and it works. I'm not privy to share any juicy stats on how it works but trust me when I say that the time investment has been worth while. What has worked quite well from a branding point has been a blog I've been running for over a year called Microsoft International Tech Jobs. What has pleasantly surprised me with the site is the number of people who subscribe to the rss feeds and the percentage of visitors that come to the site from organic search listings purely because of the carefully chosen keywords I use in the title or article main page that the search engines indexed. What also is worth noting is the videos themselves also can have a hit count which allows you understand what videos were visited the most or the least and as such can give you some ideas of what to do better to fine tune your content, subject matter and directorial approach.
What we are begining to see is the creation of a new type of recruiter in the HR/Recruitment team of large corporations. Let's call it the social recruitment marketeer. This persons's job is to design and build content for your recruitment brand. To research and locate high-traffic locations where your target audience exists and design sounds bites, video bites or text bites to try lure your target markets attention. This individual also needs to be technically astute and must be prepared to learn new technologies, tinker and play with them and then draw some conclusions about how these can be used to improve your company's sourcing strategies. Whether it be forming a group on Facebook, learning how to write search in iTunes podcast directory, how to optimise your web site for higher visibility or how to automate searches on the web. There is a lot happening out their that needs attention. Those who want to professional cybersleuths and reap the benefits of social computing need to understand that there is a need for an up front investment in resources to get this right. And there is a need to let people test and play with these technologies in order for them to find out what will and will not work for you.
