Reaching Your Team’s Network: Realizing the ROI of Social Recruiting WWW.BULLHORNREACH.COM @BULLHORNREACH SEPTEMBER 2012 COPYRIGHT © 2012 BULLHORN, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ®
Oct 20, 2014
Reaching Your Team’s Network: Realizing the ROI of Social Recruiting
WWW.BULLHORNReacH.cOM@BULLHORNReacHSePTeMBeR 2012
cOPyRigHT © 2012 BULLHORN, iNc. aLL RigHTS ReSeRved.
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Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have yielded
highly qualified referred candidates for a handful of pioneering recruiters.
But “social recruitment” remains more of an art than a science, and
most staffers and managers at recruitment firms remain in the dark with
regard to what practices work and why. The social mediasphere can
be overwhelming to navigate, to say nothing of mining it for qualified
job candidates. With a centrally managed framework, agency executives can realize social recruiting’s ROI potential.
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Put simply, social media is a channel
for socializing, whereas social
recruiting is the practice of cultivating
that channel to achieve a specific
goal: finding and placing qualified
candidates. More importantly, that
goal should be to cultivate a network
of professionals willing to actively refer
open positions to job candidates on their
respective networks.
As any recruiter knows, referred
candidates tend to be far more qualified
for a position than candidates responding
to a job ad. These referrals not only
distinguish social recruiting from social
media, they are what make social
recruiting such a powerful, competitive,
and profitable, tool for placing candidates.
Social media makes it easy to pass
along information to one’s followers.
But social recruiting requires more than
simply posting jobs on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Although that may land a few applicants,
it isn’t far removed from posting openings
on yet another job board. Social recruiting
requires recruiters to actively engage their
networks to build relationships and, more
importantly, trust. They must be helpful,
educational, interesting and responsive to
the people in their network.
More to the point, it requires an
investment of time on the part of
recruiters — time to regularly check in,
or to create, post, and share interesting
content, or to personally respond to
developments in your contacts’ lives.
The question becomes how to intelligently
manage that time investment so that
“value in” equates with “value out.”
And therein lays the challenge, both for
recruiters and those who manage them.
Social media is a channel for socializing.
Social recruiting is the practice of cultivating your recruiters’ social media networks to find and place qualified candidates.
How Does Social Recruiting Differ from Social Media?
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In many respects, recruiting activities
online are not so different than for
traditional recruiting:
• network with the industry
• maintain a pipeline of candidates
• post jobs
• match candidates to fill orders
But, unlike conventional practices,
online recruitment is largely invisible to
managers. This can be disconcerting, even
for managers at firms that are reaping the
benefits of social recruiting. Managers
can’t always track the productivity of
individual recruiter networks, or measure
which online practices yield better results
than others. Are the agency’s collective
networks growing? Is staff building
targeted connections? Staying engaged?
Representing a unified agency brand?
Today, managers are gaining a vague
understanding of the potential business
value of social recruiting. But they’re
crystal clear on the importance of
monitoring and measuring their firms’
online recruitment activities. The best
way to manage an unfamiliar practice is
to implement it before your staff does.
The challenge is finding time to develop
a coherent, actionable social recruiting
strategy from the ground up, and
implementing that strategy in an
intelligent framework.
A well-run social recruiting program has three elements — centralization, measurement and optimization.
Centralize
In today’s social recruiting landscape,
each recruiter has a network of contacts
to which they reach out whenever they
have an opening to fill. However, before
managers can measure, compare and
manage performance of these networks,
they must first gain visibility into them all.
In addition, individual recruiters can neither
see nor share each other’s networks,
and therefore lack the opportunity to
collaborate and pool their efforts.
Providing this insight to staff should
be as important a goal for managers
as gaining it themselves. One recruiter,
working alone, can tap his or her own
connections. A team of recruiters, working
together, can reach a larger network.
This becomes much easier if recruiters
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have a single portal on which to network.
Then they can learn from each other,
experiment, and make adjustments based
on which channels and networks are most
responsive. Plus, this ensures that their
individual networks point to the same lists
of jobs.
More importantly, combining networks
increases the potential for generating
referred candidates exponentially.
Compared to job board applicants,
referrals not only tend to be more qualified,
they are generally more likely to accept a
client’s job offer.
If colleagues cannot refer candidates, then
often someone in their network can. And
even if they or their contacts have fewer
connections, or only a fraction share a
posted article or job opening, individual
recruiters can still reach more active job
seekers, passive candidates and hiring
managers than by their network alone.
Sharing job openings on an enterprise-
level social recruitment platform should
be a very simple, beneficial and hopefully
obvious goal.
Uniting your firm’s individual social
recruiting efforts under one centralized
platform can make those collective efforts
more time efficient. Online tools already
exist to post job openings to share and
track content and to proactively spot
passive job seekers. To consolidate these
tools makes it easier for management to
track and measure team’s individual and
collective effectiveness.
Measure
You cannot manage what you cannot
measure. Today, managers see the end
results of individual social recruiting
efforts, but they lack any way to gauge
what works, or why.
Once all recruiters are on a centralized
social recruiting framework, management
can begin to apply measurement and
tracking tools that are characteristic of
traditional, offline recruiting programs.
Managers need to see what jobs have
recently been broadcast to the enterprise’s
collective network of contacts. Then
managers can track, in aggregate or
job by job, the number of shares, visitors,
and inquiries each job is receiving.
In addition to tracking how job postings
fare on the network, managers can gain
insights into the network itself. They need
to see which recruiters have connections
online, whether or not the firm’s network
is growing, and how many visitors social
media efforts are attracting.
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With the right tools, managers can dig
down and see how their firm’s networks
and social recruitment practices
compare — both between individuals,
and collectively over time. Managers
can stop reacting to the end results of
individual social recruitment efforts —
however positive — and start proactively
managing them.
Optimize
Once all social recruitment activities
share a unified platform, managers move
from measuring to optimizing. In other
words, managers can exercise some
leadership over their agency’s social
recruiting efforts.
A firm’s administration should convert
best practices into institutional
knowledge to train less connected
or new recruiters. Managers can also
ensure their teams stay engaged with
their networks and continue to add
contacts, so the firm can maintain
sustainable value from social recruiting.
Even veteran social recruiters can take
advantage of management support,
such as interesting content generated to
share with their networks.
Plus, everyone benefits when the firm
benefits. Recruiting from a centralized
online platform allows management
to capture interested applicants if and
when the recruiter decides to leave
the firm.
But most importantly, management
can get the jump on the competition
by turning social media into an entirely
new channel for finding highly qualified
candidates more quickly. In the end,
social recruiting’s value must be
measured by the same metrics that
talent agencies already use to measure
their business. This gets back to the
“value in” versus “value out” issue.
Can social media improve your firm’s
bottom line?
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Social recruiting has an impact on your
bottom line. More connections in a
recruiter’s network lead to more views
for new job posts — and subsequently,
more applicants, qualified applicants and
placements. More placements translate into
more revenue.
Adding more qualified, relevant candidates
to your pipeline will accelerate the cycle
time between opening a new job order
and placing a candidate. It also reduces
sourcing costs by minimizing your reliance
on using job boards to find people, and
cutting the phone time necessary to
screen out unqualified candidates. The
more qualified candidates you add to your
pipeline, the more your firm will quickly fill
orders and make money.
Social Recruiting’s Return on Investment
One out of every ten jobs you fill will be sourced from social media.
33 views for 10 jobs
15 applicants
4-5 qualifiedcandidates
1 placement
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The question is, how does social media
compare to conventional channels
for filling the pipeline with qualified
candidates? Does it help produce better
candidates? Or fill orders more quickly?
Some real-life numbers, derived from
observing more than 100,000 recruiters
who have used the Bullhorn Reach online
platform, can help.
The data shows that the average job
posted by an active Bullhorn Reach user
gets just over 33 views. That number
represents people who clicked on a
short link that directs them to a Bullhorn
Reach job portal with a job description.
Just under half of these postings on
the Bullhorn Reach portal elicit an
application — in fact, they average three
applications each. These are visitors who
send an inquiry to the recruiter about the
opportunity, submit a resume, or apply via
their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.
Crunching these numbers, it turns out
that about 4.4% of all Bullhorn Reach
job views result in an application. This
is where the comparative value of social
recruiting begins to appear.
A recruiter trying to fill 10 job openings would attract about 330 views and convert an average of 15 applicants from
these views.
But how many of those applicants will
be qualified candidates? That number
could be anywhere from about one to
two percent, which is the return that
many recruiters expect from job board
applicants, or as high as 40%, which
studies have cited as the rate of qualified
candidates from referrals. Depending on
how motivated a recruiter’s network is
in recommending the post to their
network, those 15 applicants should
generate between 4 and 5 qualified
referrals candidates.
That leads to another question: How
many of those well-qualified candidates
need to be submitted to the client to
win a placement? Like all numbers here,
this may vary by industry and vertical.
However, the industry average is about
four, which finally translates to one
placement secured through social media.
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To recap: One recruiter actively using social
media can expect to fill one out of every 10
job orders completely through their social
recruiting efforts. This ratio was recently
corroborated by one recruitment firm, which
cited similar numbers one month after
implementing Bullhorn Reach.
It could be argued that a recruiter might have
placed that candidate using conventional
means. But this misses two key points. First,
only social media allows a recruiter to reach
beyond his own network and tap into his
team’s network. Second, highly qualified
referred candidates are more likely to find
recruiters on social media, which is the exact
opposite of how things work when an opening
is posted to a job board.
Conventional recruitment practices do not
allow a team of recruiters to easily combine
their networks. Social recruiting means more
connections scanning each job posting and
sharing postings with their own networks.
It means more referrals, either to active or
passive job seekers, and more qualified
candidates applying for an open position.
Faster placements means more revenue within
a given time.
The biggest variable is how much your
company earns for each permanent
placement. But in terms of “value in” versus
“value out,” the time and money required to
implement a social recruiting platform can
begin to provide returns after only
one placement.
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CONCLUSION
Social recruiting delivers more qualified candidates more quickly
through the power of referrals. But, to date, adoption of the practice
has been scattered and non-strategic. This creates an opportunity
for firms that get on board early by first implementing a centralized
platform for their recruiters to build and pool their social media
networks. Once firms take this first step, they can begin to intelligently
advance along social recruiting’s learning curve to measure and
optimize the impact of social recruiting on their bottom line. Staying
competitive amidst these trends isn’t impossible, or even difficult. But
it requires firms to take quick and intelligent action, as the history of
social media demonstrates how rapidly an effective business practice
can go viral.
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ABOUT BULLHORN REACHBullhorn Reach is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) social recruiting
solution, designed to help recruiters leverage social media to source
candidates and identify potential movers more efficiently. Launched
in February 2011, the Bullhorn Reach social sourcing suite offers
robust recruiting solutions that empower recruiters to engage as
thought leaders, enhance their personal brands, and increase their
visibility online.
With more than 100,000 registered users worldwide, Bullhorn Reach
delivers advanced technology that brings recruiters and job seekers
together more efficiently than ever before. Bullhorn Reach is a division of
Bullhorn, Inc., the global leader in software-as-a-service for recruitment.
Headquartered in Boston, with offices in London and Sydney, Bullhorn’s
recruiting ATS/CRM and social recruiting products serve more than
130,000 users across 126 countries.
33-41 FaRNSWORTH STReeT5TH FLOORBOSTON, Ma 02210
WWW.BULLHORNReacH.cOM1.617.478.9110@BULLHORNReacH
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