By: Rose Patterson, Corporate Director of Human Resources at Richfield Hospitality
Social media is not a fad, it is here to stay and it is transforming not only the way we do business but also the way we recruit talent.? Our success in attracting top talent relies on how well we use the tools available through social media and how we market ourselves in those channels.
In a recent survey conducted by Jobvite, 89% of organizations said they will recruit through social media this year, while 95% said they have already recruited using tools such as LinkedIn. According to a study conducted by LinkedIn in 2010, only 18% of the fully employed pool of candidates was looking for new jobs using traditional techniques.? Trends and statistics support the shift from old fashioned passive recruitment, where we waited for applicants to reach us; we are moving to the new active recruitment, where we are active in the social media channels and in our community looking for talent and engaging both the passive and active applicants.? According to Mike Page with MitchelLake, a recruitment and sourcing firm, ?Today we are seeing a third wave of job advertising as employers move away from ?traditional? online channels into social media. The talk of the town at the moment is how online job advertisements are declining but there is little discussion of how job advertising through social media is gathering pace?.
Does this mean that Hcareers.com and newspaper ads are no longer useful tools?? The answer is no, they are still great tools that you should have available in your recruitment tool box and they need to be used wisely.? Hcareers continues to be the top job board for hospitality careers and newspapers still target your local community, but there are other cost effective and broader tools and those are available through social media channels.? Our active presence in channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other job boards like Hcareers and Indeed.com is critical to spreading a wider recruitment net to ensure that we attract top talent to our organization.
We must remember that our recruitment strategy should be: how are we going to get the applicant?s attention vs. how is the applicant going to get our attention.? Through social media recruitment we can reach a wider network of people and even if they are not looking they may know of someone who is; this is the modern version of networking.? We must embrace social media and ensure that our properties are active in those channels in order to ensure we are attracting the best candidates.