Social and mobile recruiting connect candidates to company brand

More and more 21st century recruiters are turning to mobile and social recruiting techniques to scout and scrutinize exceptional employee talent. This smart and savvy technological approach — featured by prevalent use of texting, mobile apps and social network sites as opposed to only conventional networking outlets, like email, job fairs and referrals — redefines how corporate recruiters establish a candidate pipeline. It also provides an information-based platform for companies, like Apollo Group/University of Phoenix, to establish employment brand recognition among prospective job seekers.

In general, formulating a company employment brand while recruiters proactively target prospective job candidates proves to be a natural technological progression in today’s communicative environment, says John Newkirk, an Apollo Group talent acquisition operations analyst.

After all, he adds, communication is the heart of recruiting.

“Prospective job candidates are more creative in their investigations of companies,” says Newkirk, previously an Apollo Group recruiter. Therefore, he adds, companies with internal recruiting staffs, like Apollo Group, are developing equally creative outlets to ensure job seekers find an end connection. These “end connections” (like landing pages or job boards via social networking sites) effectively redirect job seekers to company-driven brand content and job-related information designed to simultaneously market the company’s mission while allowing recruiters to broaden a talent base.

Within his Apollo Group department, Newkirk says, "we decided to venture into some of these recruiting techniques this year to establish brand recognition … and to leverage our social and professional networks in order to expand our talent pool” in an attempt to reach out to tomorrow’s workforce.

Apollo Group is still formulating the direction of its future mobile and social recruiting strategies, he notes. However, recruiters like Evan Elbert already tap into social networking sites to establish employment brand and recruiting presence among the general public.

Social recruiting is today’s company buzz word

“Social recruiting has exploded,” says Elbert, talent acquisition manager at Apollo Group. “It’s definitely been the buzz word for the last year and if you would interview most public companies it is still being defined as of today.“

The professional networking site Cachinko concurs that social networking in particular will take flight this year among recruiters because of its ability to help establish the high quality staff needed to boost a company’s brand.

“With over 85 million members on LinkedIn®, 175 million registered users on Twitter®, and 500 million active Facebook® users, social recruiting will be a great asset to those employers that plan on increasing staff by attracting the best, multitalented candidates through transparent, two-way communication sources like talent communities and social networking sites,” Cachinko says in its report, "2011 Social Recruiting Trends & Strategies."

From a recruiting perspective, Elbert says social recruiting — especially using LinkedIn — is shaping up to be a wonderful candidate referral source among users in the same way one might ask a friend about a quality service, like a repair shop. This is why employment branding and modern recruiting techniques go well hand in hand, he says.

“There are lines of communication with passive job seekers within the social arena, and a company like Apollo Group wants to display our employment brand out there for candidates so they know exactly ‘who’ Apollo is and what it is like to work for Apollo Group. We use social media to really build engagement with possible candidates and get them excited about the great things we are doing here within our organization,” says Elbert.

The June 2010 joint study by ROI Research and Performics called "Consumers Open to Social Branding" furthers this perspective.

“Social networks have made real and substantial changes in the lives of their users, in part by empowering them to more actively participate with brands and each other,” Performics CEO Daina Middleton told The Strategy Web upon the study’s release. “More than a third of all respondents reported using a search engine to further learn after seeing an ad on a social networking site, for example, and more than a third think social networking sites are good sources of information about companies and products.”

Apps and such

Mobile networking is also taking hold of the recruiter world. In fact, texting and apps are the next two buzz words with texting offering recruiters and job seekers the advantage of real-time communication, says Newkirk. Texting allows companies to instantly notify job seekers of new job postings, he says.

Recruitingtrends.com also states that with 98% of workers accessing cell phones, texting recruiters benefit in several ways. These are the ability to:

• Prequalify thousands of candidates quickly by text message and voice.
• Identify the best contenders for job offers in hours, not days.
• Extend your online recruitment efforts offline to the mobile phone.
• Discover new data insights which drive business farther, faster.

The general popularity of apps also seamlessly crochets itself into the recruiting realm as an extension to social networking. Even though they are still catching on, leading workforce solutions company Manpower Inc., for example, recently introduced a suite of applications — the Direct Talent Recruiter Mobile Application, the Direct Talent iPhone® Application and the Direct Talent Candidate Mobile Application — designed to connect recruiters and candidates “via many different operating systems,” states a Manpower press release.

“Candidates can apply for a job using ‘Quick Apply’ with their name, email address and telephone number or with their LinkedIn profile. They can also connect quickly and easily with a Manpower branch office, search jobs by employment type — temporary, contract or permanent roles — and location, and receive notifications directly to their iPhone or other smartphones.”

Here to recruit

Overall, Elbert says modern recruiters are embracing these newfound recruiting methods due to the doors they open.

“The recruiters are getting a broader audience and able to find the exact candidates that hiring managers want to fill their positions,” he says. “And that’s really what we are here at Apollo Group to do regardless of the networking mode: find the best talent for the open position to help create a world-winning organization.”

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