Social Sourcing Saved my Brand

Geoff Morgan, one of the fathers of recruitment, once said something that has stuck with me ever since.

If your idea of recruitment is posting ads, then you’re not actually in the game of recruitment. You’re in the game of rejection.

Which makes sense, for every person you hire you’re telling many multiples more people they are not good enough to work for you.

That is of course assuming you are telling them. You are, aren’t you?

Actually, likely not.

The average job advert today attracts 118 applicants, and this number continues to increase with the proliferation of job aggregators that fling your job ads far and wide across the inter-web.

A national Job Market Survey of 3,000 people recently conducted by LiveHire (ASX:LVH) found that 61 percent of respondents said they rarely or never heard back from companies to whom they applied.

More frightening though is that 39 percent of job seekers said they’d stopped using a company’s products or services, after a bad experience while applying for a job with that company.

Yikes!

That’s what your “rejection team” is costing you.

Let’s do the math;

If your company employs a thousand people, likely your hiring another 200 per year to manage turnover and growth. If you’re a consumer brand, let’s assume the lifetime value of a customer is ~$5,000.

200 job ads x 117 rejected applicants x 39% x $5,000 = $45 million.

Every year.

In potential lost business.

Even if just 10 percent of candidates were your customers (or future customers or decision makers) that’s $4.5m per year.

Go tell the marketing and sales team that. I dare you!

Marketing and Sales work so hard to attract potential customers online, and nurture those relationships towards lifetime customers.

And we drive a truck straight through it all.

This is just one of the strong cases you can make to your business to invest more in building a strong social sourcing capability in your team.

When done right, social sourcing will eliminate rejection of candidates, who are also consumers.

Social sourcing is NOT auto-posting your job ads from your applicant tracking system to all social sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Eek!

Social sourcing is understanding the types of roles you recruit for upfront, ahead of time, rather than recruiting for open roles.

It means understanding, creating, and/or sharing the content that these people engage in, rather than spamming job ads across your social network.

It means marketing this engaging content across your social assets with regular rhythm, and nurturing conversations that occur on the back of it.

It’s basically the same approach a good marketing team embraces to support continuous inbound sales leads into your organisation.

And just like marketing, it’s about having a call to action that potential candidates can click on, to bring them into a space where you can chat with them privately.

This is where Live Talent Communities come into play, because your call to action should not be a job advert that creates a level of expectation for the candidate, and ultimately sets up 99 percent of them for rejection.

People need to be able to register interest in your brand, without feeling like they are “applying”. They deserve a simple and quick process on mobile or desktop that provides a memorable and positive experience for that person and opens the door for a conversation with you.

Your recruitment team is really a talent marketing team.

Your Talent Community are your prospects.

Your Talent Pools for each role are your leads.

Your hired talent are your conversions.

Now go make your business case to your executive team, share this article with them if you like, get the budget you deserve, and start talent marketing today.

Because if you continue to run a “rejection team” you ultimately won’t have a brand left to work for.

Here are some things you can do in the meantime to learn more about Live Talent Communities.

  1. Download the Getting Started with Live Talent Communities Guide
  2. Join the Talent Communities Group on LinkedIn
  3. Subscribe to the Talent Community Academy email series
  4. Launch your own Talent Community and claim your business’ name.

Image: Shutterstock

This article is sponsored by LiveHire.


If engaging and hiring diverse talent is important to you, check out our upcoming Sourcing Social Talent conference:
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