We’ve enlisted the help of the Master Sourcers themselves, The Sourcing Dude and the Sourcing Dudette, to answer some questions that are at the forefront of many of our minds. In each issue of The Source, they will respond to some of these questions.
If you have a pressing issue you’d like the Sourcing Dude and Dudette to answer, please email us and we will bring it to the SourceCon shrine for consideration.
“There are people in the sourcing world who are on both sides of the fence when it comes to social media. Some think they are great resources, others think they’re just a time suck. What are your thoughts on engaging in community using social media from a sourcing standpoint? Is it worth your time, or should we be spending our time elsewhere, such as Googling or searching resume banks?”
Since we all agree that Recruiting is akin to sales and marketing, the leveraging of social media has to be seriously considered as part of a company’s strategy. Not so much for pure sourcing, but rather, as part of a bigger strategy that a company needs around leveraging these solutions to help create brand awareness and mutually meaningful relationships with candidates.
Gone are the days of slick marketing that tries to give the impression that the company is perfect. Candidates in this day and age expect more transparency from an organization on what it is actually like to work for a company and do the companies values, opportunities and goals effectively marry up with the interests of the candidate.
Social media should be used as a vehicle to reach a targeted audience through both push and pull marketing that feeds up relevant and added value information to potentially interested candidates and acts as part of the conduit to help establish and develop candidate relationships.
In the future I believe these social communities will become better defined, more relevant and targeted to the needs of the demographics which will provide the Sourcer/Recruiter the ability to connect with potential candidates that have mutual interest with what a company has to offer. Do I think that social media and social networking sites will become the greatest source of hires in the next few years, No. Do I think that if a company correctly leverages social media and looks to establish targeted and relevant communities that build relationships based on mutual interest ahead of demand, could they one day become the greatest source of hires, Yes.
But in reality, until companies and recruiters understand that social media should be a vehicle to help promote brand awareness and create relevant and targeted relationships with future-interest candidates vs. thinking they are next big thing from which to source candidates, then I do not believe social media is the savior of us all.
Make sure you follow the Sourcing Dude (and Dudette!) on Twitter as well: @SourceConDude