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Recruiting on a Budget Without Using Social Media follow this blog post

posted by on June 19, 2009

Lingering hiring freezes and close-scrutiny of overhead costs are forcing an increasing number of recruiters to develop and execute recruiting strategies on a shoestring budget. As companies begin to move away from pricey job boards, recruiters are left scrambling to find cost-effective (read "free" here) ways to both source and communicate with candidates. Although I am a devoted fan of social media sites, I always recommend a smorgasbord of options before words like Twitter, Xing and Friendfeed find their way into the conversation.  

Social media can be intimidating and confusing even to those who consider themselves to be "tech-savvy." I would be doing both the recruiter and the social media site a disservice to recommend its use without being able to provide a comprehensive tutorial and personal walk-through complete with a Q & A session. Studies have shown that sites like Twitter have a high abandonment rate, meaning that users create accounts and then either cancel them or let them become dormant. Why? Because for many the purpose of the site seems abstract at best, and the most beneficial features are often perceived as hard to set-up. It is important to never assume that any skill set, regardless of how basic it seems to you, is universally intuitive. While I am referencing skill and knowledge sets needed to understand and deploy social media strategies, the same principle can be applied to knitting, fishing or skiing. I am the perfect case-in-point. While I can spend hours discussing Boolean, SEO, SEM and social technology, I cannot throw a Frisbee in a straight line to save my life. I have spent endless summer afternoons practicing, but this presumably basic skill has yet to click.

The truth is that job boards will always be one of the easiest way to access candidates. While the passive candidate is still a prized commodity, few recruiters, especially those who consistently recruit for a high volume of positions, have the time to spend writing Boolean search strings to sift through the Deep Web for obscure personal web sites, let alone cold-call into companies and convince fully-vested professionals to leave their jobs in a tumultous economy. It is for these reasons that I direct recruiters to a multitude of free (or very cheap) job boards. While they are not as well known as Monster and CareerBuilder, an increasing number of candidates are discovering them. Some of the most popular sites include:

job boards recruiting online social media
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6 comments

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  • 1 point 8 months ago

    Greetings from California, Emily:

    I wanted to applaud you on both your genteel writing style and for your sound faculties of reasoning.  I do plan on looking into the American Journal of Nursing's Twitter profile.  I do need to make one correction however.  I don't think that it's fair to assume that because we are in the healthcare industry that all facilities or even most of them are slow in adopting new technologies.  I have many friends in different health systems (some of the largest in the nation) across the U.S. who adopted the latest in social media before anyone else I know (including me).  I myself am also an extremely quick adopter of the "latest and greatest" but I still have yet to see the efficacy of Twitter in any capacity.

    During my days as a Recruiting Manager for Mercy Medical Center Redding (a Catholic Healthcare West facility) in California, I was allowed to explore many different options in recruiting.  Social media was one that I was encouraged to explore and I knew about Twitter easily two years ago.  But I had the same apprehension back then and many of my concerns about Twitter are actually coming to fruition.  Likewise, many colleagues I know on the 3rd party side of the desk are also equally skittish so I know this concern transcends well outside of the "corporate" world as well.

    I do agree with you about Twitter not being equally relevant to all industries alike.  Thank you for responding to me and I look forward to more from you. 

    Cheers,

    Sung

  • 1 point 8 months ago

    Emily,

    Well written article.  Unlike some people who blindly are proponents of any type of social media, I renounce Twitter as a farce.  I have yet to see that Twitter will make any type of impact and until someone can show me empirical quantifiable results on an industry-wide basis, I hold my ground.  And rest my case. 

    Thanks for the great reading though.

    Sung N. Kim

    Managing Partner

    Servane Cross, Inc.

    www.servanecross.com

     

  • 1 point 8 months ago

    Sung-

    I can understand why you feel that Twitter is a farce. Servane Cross is a Healthcare Recruitment Firm and many high-demand professions within healthcare (e.g. nursing) have been slow to adopt online professional communication mediums. While there has been a recent social media push by many nursing publications / associations, the reality is that the adoption rate is still not where we, as recruiters, would like it to be.

    This being said, check out the American Journal of Nursing on Twitter (username "AmJNurse") and examine their followers. A large percentage of their followers do seem to be nurses, not recruiters or PR executives. This is where I believe the value of Twitter for healthcare recruitment will be found, although it may still take some time for quantifiable results on an industry-wide basis to become available.

    Also, it is important to realize that Twitter will never be equally relevant for all professions. For example, the time-intensive nature of some positions may mean that certain populations never actively (or at least pervasively) adopt social media.

    Best,

    Emily

  • 1 point 8 months ago

    Emily,

    Although I am a big proponent of Social Media (even at the drop out rates Twitter is still a strong sourcing tool), one of the easiest things a company can do is get their jobs tweeted on twitter, you can do that for free (yeah free) at www.hashjobs.com

    Check it out.

    Geoff

  • 0 points 8 months ago

    Emily,

    I'd like to thank you for the kudos to TeleportJobs. We've been working hard over the past couple of months to make TeleportJobs a more useful site for job seekers; which I think will be beneficial for them as well as recruiters looking for them.

    Regards,

    Doug Snyder

    www.teleportjobs.com

  • 1 point 8 months ago

    Doug-

    You have a great site, and I am always happy to promote it!

    Thanks,

    Emily