Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Some Thoughts on Social Recruiting

In case you have not heard, there is a Group on Twitter #socialrecruiting. This appears to be have been spawned by @dmanaster of ERE fame and @scottbaxt as far as I can determine. Another great site for this @socrecruiting. Follow these people and Sites.

This is a terrific and timely idea for the direction that the two disciplines of Social Media are heading or should I say colliding. This could very well be the “Big Bang” theory we have been seeking in Social Media and Recruiting.

How do we leverage the best of both disciplines? I have some thoughts. These thoughts are mine and in no way reflect the thoughts of anyone mentioned in this brief paper aimed at stimulating discussion.

We need to partner with the Social Media influencers and all of the experts in Social Media to leverage their clients for us to have an impact on Social Recruiting. We need a workable alliance of SM and Recruiting voices to develop an infrastructure that will allow us all to be successful in providing high quality cost effective solutions to our clients for Human Capital Sourcing and Acquisition and Social Media services. The time appears to be right for a radical shift in the thinking of corporate America on how to attract and retain Talent. Much is written about this daily. We need a blueprint and we need builders to execute this blueprint. Social Recruiting can be this blueprint. The manner in which these highly experienced and intelligent professional interact with their clients will enable us to leverage our Recruiting agenda. Without this partnering endorsement and our own efforts and experience in alliance we will have a much more difficult task ahead of us

We need people with strong influential Recruiting voices, who are willing to share their experience. We need the best of both SM and Recruiting for a thesis, antithesis synthesis to occur (my apology to Hegel) for a powerful solution to our challenge. The SM relationships and expertise and our Recruiting relationships and expertise are the mechanism for entry into the conscious of an enlightened Corporate America. We need to identify companies conducting business in the SM space being responsive to their customers by going where their customers are and listening to them. This will be paramount for our collective success.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Dreaded Word...Metrics

In my experience most Recruiters or Human Capital Sourcing and Talent Acquisition Specialists (I like writing that:)) dread the word Metrics. I will agree that in our profession the most basic Metric is number of hires in a defined time frame ie 30, 60, 90 etc days. Oversimplified? Yes I do believe it is.

Metrics is much more than that. Metrics, when used correctly, is a road map for the successful hires. Allow me to outline some KPIs.
  • Date position was opened and made available to the Talent Pool.
  • Number of Candidate Partners applied thru the ATS and whatever other tool (s) used ie Job Boards.
  • Number of Candidate Partners Sourced, this includes passive candidates.
  • Number of employee referred Candidate Partners. I have seen numbers that indicate 30% or more of a company's hires take place thru this mechanism.
  • Number of Internal Candidate Partners.
  • Number of Candidate Partners interviewed by the Recruiter.
  • Number of Recruiter Candidate Partners that were interviewed submitted to the Hiring Manager Partner.
  • Number of days from when the Candidate Partner applied to the interview with the Recruiter.
  • Number of days from when the Candidate Partner was interviewed by the Hiring Manger Partner.
  • Number of days for the Hiring Manager Partner to make an offer to the Candidate Partner.
  • Number days from when the Candidate Partner, who was made the offer, applied to the position.
  • Number of days from when the offer was extended to the Candidate Partner to accept or decline the offer.

There are many ways for us to dissect and analyze this data. These are by no means all of the KPIs, but this does give us an impetuous for discussion. An Excel spread sheet can be built to record and average this data quite readily. This data can be a powerful tool for Recruiters, HR Partners and Hiring Manager Partners to analyze "productive activity".