How HR have responded to social recruiting. Are you one of these?
Social recruiting is challenging companies - whether they be recruitment companies or corporates - at many different levels within recruitment. Recruiters are naturally at the frontline and therefore get much of the flak for either doing social recruiting well, indifferently or not at all, whether it is their fault, or in fact their managers and directors above them still living the in the dark ages of recruiting evolution!
But that is not the subject for today's post. Today I just want to explore HR a little and share a few responses I have heard from HR Managers and HR Directors when having the whole social recruiting conversation.
These are taken from a guest post I wrote for the blog of the lovely HR Recruiters at Ashley Kate HR - Which emotion does social media recruitment evoke in your HR department? Apathy, Fear or Joy?
When companies first approach me to potentially work with them around social recruiting, it can be a wide variety of levels that I talk/present/discuss social media in recruitment to - Recruitment Managers, Talent Managers, Owner/Directors, HR Managers and HR Directors.
But do you know who ALWAYS give me the most entertaining responses when it comes to the subject of social media? It may surprise you, but it is consistently the HR Teams!
Now, obviously I am not going to share the company names, however much I want to, but here are my favourite five responses given to me, when having a conversation about using social media in their recruitment. All responses were either from HR Directors or HR Managers:
- "Sod-off talking about ***** social media, that's all my CEO keeps going on about! All we hear is - 'according to my son, we should be doing this….'. I have told him on many occasions, maybe he should hire him then!"
- " We can't do social media because we don't have a career site"
- "We tried it last year and it didn't work" [me - please explain] "We hired a grad to do social media, he left after two months and we haven't touched it since"
- "We love it! We have finally found a use for XXXXXX in our team - she loves social media, and actually she is quite good at it."
- "We have done a feasibility study of using social media in the HR team over the last few months. I have decided to put it on hold for six months as our competitors are not doing it."
I would stress these are the ones that have made me smile the most, in the context at that particular time. And just for the record, I am not inferring that all HR Professionals have this approach to social media at all, as many have fully embraced the benefits it can bring.
Do you find them amusing? Maybe you have had the same frustrations with your boss? Maybe you are the boss?
When you consider these (or similar) responses have occurred in the last few months, it would appear that while many people -like me - thinks social media is now mainstream, there are still many 'decision makers' in the recruiting/HR world who don't. (If you have a boss like this, feel free to give them my number!!)
If you have any more responses from your company ("or another") please share them below - if they are clean of course!
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