The time has come for companies to take a closer look at Recruitment 2.0 and embrace this concept as the future reality of recruitment.

Over the next few years, recruitment will undergo significant change, beginning with a rapid acceptance of virtual sourcing as the norm. Companies will turn to Internet search, online job advertising, and candidate attraction via social media platforms and corporate career sites – and eventually even virtual job interviews – to engage talent who’re increasingly connected. Cheaper and quicker Internet access through smart phones and broadband connecttions will continue to grow rapidly making the Internet more accessible to all global citizens.

Up until a few years ago, the Web was characterised by ‘brochure-ware’ – companies communicating their side of their story through static websites where consumers could only receive information. This has now made way for a second generation of web development and design, called Web 2.0, which enables heightened levels of interactivity and engagement between companies and consumers, where web pages can potentially get changed and updated and commented and added to all the time, by almost anyone.

Companies (and their HR departments) must become more skilled in this new online world. However, very few local companies are actively practicing Recruitment 2.0. Most recruiters have no idea what Web 2.0 means, how the web has evolved to where it is today, or how this will impact recruitment practices into the future. The majority of recruiters still equate online recruitment with standard job boards and basic corporate recruitment websites that are little more than online brochures. Recruitment 2.0 goes far beyond this.

The advent and rapid growth of social media technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube videos, RSS and many more further supports information sharing and collaboration by making it easy to create and distribute content. This provides companies with opportunities to increase their visibility, extend their reach, engage with passive job seekers, foster relationships, and thoroughly research candidates (it also gives a whole new meaning to the concept of reference checking). Far beyond the capabilities of traditional job boards, Recruitment 2.0 enables referrals to go viral through a social media push, seeing one job alert reach hundreds of people in hours as it is passed on to the friends of friends of friends.

A recruitment 2.0 campaign may take the form of one or more of the following: rich media microsite, targeted PPC advertising on search engines, streaming video for staff testimonials, chat with candidates on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, application screening via SMS, multimedia CVs, or interviews via Instant Messaging.
If implemented properly, Recruitment 2.0 can deliver a significant reduction in recruitment spend. Companies with the relevant skills, currently relying on recruitment agencies, can save up to 80% in time, money and admin expenses. This is aside from the millions of Rands they can save on recruitment advertising over time by building their own pool of talent.

The starting point for Recruitment 2.0 is to understand what candidates you’re trying to recruit. Are you dealing with a short, medium, or longer-term talent pipeline? What digital channels do they have access? What is the most effective way is to recruit them?

Once you understand these variables, you can build your strategy accordingly – be the result a corporate careers websites, a social networking strategy, online Internet search or something completely different. This requires a team with a marketing capability, that has an understanding of the web and social media technologies, as well as an understanding of the accompanying recruitment challenges. As this can be a tricky undertaking, best practice advice is to go to a business that has experience in this space.

Recruitment 2.0 is not a fad and will continue to eclipse traditional recruitment practices as the HR space finds itself in an increasingly digital world. To stand the best chance of attracting the top talent, companies need to get in on the game now as the following adage will soon become very real: If you’re not online, you don’t exist.

About graylink
graylink is a cloud recruiting company that provides companies with recruiting solutions for a digital world. It helps companies exploit web and mobile platforms to source the best talent and automate recruitment processes – reducing costs, improving time-to-hire and enhancing compliance.

Founded in 2002, graylink is privately owned and has operations in South Africa and the United Kingdom. graylink’s solutions are used by some of the most successful companies globally. Some of these include: Allan Gray, Bidvest Group, BAT, Coronation, Department of Trade and Industry, Truworths, Discovery, Engen, Mercedes, Medi-Clinic, Pfizer, and Vodacom.

The world has gotten online (well, most of the world, Africa is getting there more slowly) and social networking has gone from consumer darling to corporate bugbear almost overnight. Does social networking have any redeeming features? Brainstorm decided to find out, posing the following question: Twitter – valuable tool or time-waster deluxe?

” Most super-duper technologies for corporates to improve knowledge-sharing and communications made little difference to business culture. People are people; they change very reluctantly. The ideal is a technology that synchs naturally with how real people do things. Chat. Share info. Seek status. Forget Twitter. It’s pretty mindless. But take the “Twitter model” of followers/ following/quick and searchable regular updates, etc, and redevelop it for business. It could be incredibly useful in building intelligence in a multinational sales force (intelligence sharwordsing, highlighting successes, storing knowledge). It’s a technology that fits easily into how people live and work and, therefore, has a chance of actually being adopted in daily work life. Forget Twitter – it’s a fad. But the Twitter model? That could be huge. ” Roger Hislop, Account Director at Sentient Communications

“Many people use Twitter as a simple communication tool, merely creating ‘noise’ that often wastes time and can ruin the experience. Twitter is a great networking tool and invaluable as a means to receive and share information because it is qualified by people you value (you choose to follow them), with an attached, albeit implied, referral. This has another dimension of value as referrals – in this case retweets – are the most powerful form of marketing. Used properly, Twitter can also replace RSS feeds and allow you to opt-out of most e-mail subscriptions, resulting in less ‘noise’ in your inbox.” Justin Spratt, VOIP Mobile GM at Internet Solutions

“While social networking may be viewed by business as a personal, work-distracting, playtime activity, it is important to understand that it is in these online mediums where the future workforce exists. The social network worlds of Facebook, Twitter and the like open up new, unexplored markets of opportunity and target audiences previously untapped by business. It wasn’t long ago when e-mail was considered a playtime activity and banned from usage during normal working hours. The world is connected and virtualised and those who don’t adapt internally faster than the world is changing externally, will obsolete their own model.” Rob Sussman, Joint-CEO, Integr8 Group

“The value of Twitter depends on the purpose it serves each individual user. People and businesses can use Twitter to create a network of relevant people with whom they can share content, engage customers, listen to their peers, filter content from great minds or share with the world what they had for breakfast. The value of each of the roles that Twitter plays depends on how much it serves the user’s purpose for being there. Content filtering and community participation seem to be the top personal gains, while customer engagement and listening to the market are top for businesses.” Craig Rodney, MD, Emerging Media Communications

“Twitter is a valuable tool in recruitment, helping companies directly reach top candidates in a far more cost-effective way than appointing a headhunter. Twitter can also be a tremendous time-waster if it’s unsuited to the profile of candidates targeted. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn are deep platforms where people volunteer a lot of personal information, making it easy to segment and target candidates actively looking for work. Twitter is a shallow platform, better suited to targeting passive candidates. Recruitment marketing is still marketing. Companies need to understand how social media platforms relate to recruitment to develop strategies that work.” Mark Gray, CEO, Graylink

” More and more of our personal relationships include an online element. The social web is changing the way we communicate and collaborate and also how consumers and brands interact. Companies need to embrace this change, understand the expectations and participate respectfully to benefit from the opportunities that these global conversations offer. Twitter is one of the channels that Nokia uses to interact with various niche communities to drive conversation with a local relevance. In South Africa, it is no different and we have a Nokia Music Store community with whom we interact on a daily basis, sharing latest news, service updates and also addressing any issues that the members of the community might be having with the service. Twitter provides immediacy, allowing us to gauge perception on the fly and respond accordingly.” Tania Steenkamp, communications manager, Nokia South Africa

“In a world bordering on information overload, Twitter allows people and organisations to share what is happening and what is planned, in easily digestible chunks of information. If we want to take this one step further, we could combine these seemingly random bits of information with other real-time information to generate unique insights about what is happening in the world. The derived intelligence could assist organisations to anticipate events and proactively make decisions on courses of action, ensuring a competitive advantage. Used this way, Twitter would be an invaluable “sensor” in a smarter planet.” Clifford Foster, Chief Technology Officer for IBM Sub-Saharan Africa

“It depends on how and why Twitter is being used. As with anything, it has to be used properly. If you target the right audience and send the right information, it can be an extremely valuable tool for building a brand. Companies claim to want to get closer to their customers. Now, for the first time, they can actually open a channel of communication with their customers that is instantaneous. The question is – are they equipped to deal with this? Starbucks and Google use Twitter admirably. However, if Twitter is used for puerile musings and inane comments, it can be a brand-breaker.” Yossi Hasson, CEO, Synaq

“The extraordinary popularity of Facebook in South Africa, for example, has created a revolution in social networking and its use is quickly expanding to supplement business functions such as brand building and recruitment. This new generation networking tool means users can share quality content and information more rapidly and effectively than before.”

She says recruiters are making the most of the interactive social media, which have the potential to discover new talent, can be short or long term, have a focus on the company showcased and career destination, and a closer match between candidate and prospective employer.

“You can also use social networks as sourcing tools to reach passive candidates and for hard to fill positions. It’s not that the current or traditional model does not work and should be discarded.

“Recruiters should use the methods that best suit their business, incorporating all the advantages of available media.”

Facebook has more than 200 million active users globally, and it has caught on in SA very quickly with more than 1.6 million South Africans using it. Singh says about one-third of users are between the ages of 25 and 35 and just over a third are between 18 and 24 years old.

“Based on these statistics, companies need to ensure that Facebook plays a role in their sourcing strategy when it comes to the hiring of Generation Y and even Generation X candidates.

“With the Seacom data cable now online, it will no doubt spur an increased SA online presence.

“Blogs can be another useful recruitment tool for building relationships with potential new candidates and clients. They can provide a source of valuable industry and company specific information, promote working through a recruitment company featuring various divisions and highlighting key vacancies.

“But most important, blogs allow readers to offer opinions and give feedback. This is essential to create that two-way conversation to build customer loyalty and have an accountable and strong brand.”

The new IOL Jobs is free for jobseekers and features include: state-of-the-art search functionality; instant job matches to thousands of print and online ads; job alerts; career and interview advice; and instant profile alerts for recruiters. Jobseekers will be notified if jobs that match their profiles comes up and employers will be notified if jobseekers’ profiles match their requirements, says IOL general manager Peter Rhoda.

Mark Gray, head of online recruitment specialists, Graylink says Twitter is the latest buzz on the hiring scene as employers are turning to social networking platforms to supplement their traditional methods of searching for talent.

“This social networking platform allows people to post quick, short text updates of up to 140 characters on what they are doing right now. People can select other Twitterers to follow, and others can in turn follow them. This ability to quickly learn from and share information enables powerful relationships to be built, providing employers with a great way to connect and network with passive job seekers.”

He says by integrating Twitter with other social media platforms, for example embedding it in a blog or LinkedIn profile, job alerts can be extended to even wider audiences.

“Employers need to get connected and understand how social media platforms relate to recruitment to develop strategies that work.”

Source Article Here

Excerpt from a feature article on ITWeb, asking the question “Has the corporate world hopped onto the social networking bandwagon? And more importantly, why should it?”

“Social networking is relevant as more than just a tool to interact with customers, however. Says Graylink head Mark Gray: “Social networking offers faster, cheaper and more effective communication, networking and collaboration, especially when it comes to recruitment. Compared with the cost of newspaper recruitment classifieds, social networking sites are much cheaper to push out information about a company.

Easily segmentable groups of very active audiences on these sites make it easier to reach the right people than the untargeted approach of newspaper advertising. Additionally, the neutral environment social networks provide to share information makes it much easier for companies to start conversations with top candidates, as they don’t feel they’re being sold to.”

Full Article at http://www.itweb.co.za

Source - www.it-online.co.za

The campaign is from human resources software and services company Graylink.

A challenge for BDO in attracting the top graduates has always been the strength of the brands of the big four accounting firms it competes against.  Even though BDO is the fifth largest accountancy network in the world, local graduates still tend to automatically approach the big four for employment without considering alternatives.

Under the slogan “think different, think BDO”, Graylink proposed meeting graduates in their own environment, using the popularity of social networking platforms.

With Facebook being the biggest social networking platform in South Africa with about one million users between the ages of 18 and 25 visiting the site daily, Graylink set up a Facebook fan page for BDO to communicate the company¹s values, culture and employee involvement to candidates and give them a glimpse of their potential workplace.

“Social networking platforms are tremendously popular among high school and varsity students. Visitors invest hours a day at the sites, view hundreds of pages and disclose a tremendous amount of information about themselves and their friends,” says Mark Gray, head of Graylink.

“The familiarity of the environment and the direct nature of the interaction means you¹re much more likely to attract the right people. Rand for rand, there is no comparison in cost savings and effectiveness when it comes to traditional methods for recruitment.”

Graylink recommended a fan page over a group page for these campaigns as fan pages resemble friends’ personal profile pages, and are easier and faster to update while offering more communication options.
BDO’s fan page markets the brand with pictures of the company¹s sports days, events, social responsibility campaigns, and offices. Together with job opportunities and general BDO information, all communicated in a relaxed style, the Facebook page positions the company as one with a serious employment proposition. 

Interest generated through Facebook and the company¹s broader marketing strategy is used for a call-to-action, inviting potential employees to register their CVs on the BDO career website, which is powered by Graylink’s recruitment automation and applicant tracking software.

“We saw the online environment as an untapped channel to promote our employer brand and get more graduate applications,” says Jaco Nel, HR director at BDO.

Click the thumbnail below to view the article.

This is echoed by statistics covered in Maverick magazine recently. In 1978, 80% of US adults could be reached by three sixty-second advertisements, Simon Waterfall, creative director of UK digital agency Poke, said during a recent trip to South Africa. In 2002, to achieve the same impact, an advertiser would have to book 117 prime-time commercials.

Many companies search for candidates in the wrong environments. This equates to looking for a baracuda in your swimming pool. Some fish also move around a lot, making them even more elusive. Unless you know where to throw in the line, you can spend as much money on advertising as you like with little success.

My advice to HR managers is to look at the experience of traditional advertising agencies, which have been open to the shifts in audience attention. An IBM study, “The end of advertising as we know it”, predicts a third of broadcast advertising spend will shift online by 2012. This does not mean the need for bigger budgets, but rather a more discerning approach to media allocation. Active and passive job seekers also live in different waters. For active job seekers, who are plentiful in middle-tier management (the sardines), newspaper advertising makes sense. The challenge is recruiting senior and specialist skills (the blue marlin). Passive candidates do not read job supplements as they are mostly happily employed. They may also register their CVs with only one or two employers directly. To get these candidates’ attention takes a special approach. So, how can you successfully engage them? HR managers need to think about how they put strategies, media plans and campaigns together to attract the special skills candidates.

Relevant media, targeting the right audience, often enough, is the basis of a successful recruitment advertising campaign. A lot of HRs don’t understand this space yet and don’t like to take risks. As their suppliers are often similarly unfamiliar with such strategies, many opportunities pass by unnoticed. I suggest developing a generic plan for middle-tier candidates, which can be fine-tuned according to a specific audience. Tactics could include anything from traditional print advertising and online job boards to social networking, sponsorships, blogs, search engine marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns. Insight into the audience’s psychographic profile will reveal additional opportunities. Using media cleverly, HR managers can engage candidates through communities they belong to, which may have nothing to do with recruitment, but instead are based on personal interest.

A great example of an offline campaign is Google’s recruitment drive for software developers. This consisted of a billboard next to a prominent road in Silicon Valley, featuring a mathematical equation. Candidates able to solve it were directed to a specific website where they were asked to crack another equation. Using the answer as a password they were able to gain access to Google’s campaign-specific career website. Aimed at top-level coders, this campaign successfully tapped into their love of problem solving, eliminating job seekers lacking the right skills from the application process and providing Google with a targeted list of top talent. Companies are also increasingly leveraging online platforms.

The Vancouver police department has successfully used the virtual reality world, Second Life, to recruit candidates. Online opportunities consist of much more than job boards, although these are a valuable part of the recruitment media mix. For example, applicant-tracking can support media placement by pushing positions to job boards and other online platforms to drive candidates back to a company’s own website. A new breed of HR manager is required that can drive change.

Successful recruitment advertising at the lowest cost per head requires understanding of media planning, as well as a comfort level with the Internet. HR needs to empower themselves with this knowledge. Supper depends on it. Mark Gray is the head of Graylink (www.graylink.biz).

FORGET the credit crunch, what about the career crunch? A survey of graduates and students conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers last month found that 81% were more concerned about their job prospects than they were a year ago.

Getting a job as soon as possible, they say, is a top priority. So much so, in fact, that more than 50% conceded that they are willing to look for work that is not relevant to their qualifications to ensure that they are employed. Furthermore , 42% anticipated less pay than they had initially hoped for.

And that is only one side of the recruitment coin.

As budgets come under pressure to facilitate the economic downturn, companies and their recruitment agencies are increasingly looking for more cost-effective and creative ways to fill positions.

But while in some places employers are cutting back, indications are that the majority of businesses across the world are still looking to recruit, particularly those in budding economies such as that of the Middle East. This means that overall, there are more applicants in the mix and that an increasing number of hopefuls are prepared to consider global assignments. The result for many human resource professionals and recruitment agencies is an increase in workload and the call to make greater use of technology to more effectively manage the rising flood of applications.

Technology, says Mark Gray, who heads up South African-based recruitment and technology company, Graylink, has had a huge effect on recruitment processes — for candidates, recruitment professionals and employers alike — in the past five years. Not only are employers and their agencies increasingly adopting online-only recruitment policies, but more and more are using social networking platforms — such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Linkedin — to hunt for candidates. These sites, he says, are also increasingly helping job hunters market themselves online by providing potential employers with access to profiles, work history and details of specific skills.

Gray, who is the son of 1980s Johannesburg recruitment buff Don Gray (of Don Gray Associates), and the nephew of Allan Gray (founder of investment management firm, Allan Gray Limited), established Graylink as a supplier of specialised recruitment software to replace paper-based processes in 2002. Since then, he and his developers have advanced and expanded the application — which is delivered to clients over the internet — to make it possible for their 150 active clients to better track, screen, filter and manage applications, and to engage with thousands of job seekers in seven different languages across the world each month.

“Most companies readily acknowledge that recruiting talent is a priority,” comments Gray, whose enthusiasm for the internet survived the dotcom meltdown and which, combined with his understanding of recruitment, has helped put Graylink up ahead in the field of online recruitment in this country.

“Managing the recruitment process is, however, a challenge. When there is no database to source from directly, costs and time-to-hire increase. Done manually, the process requires a great deal of administration, and is inefficient and slow. What’s more, traditional recruitment advertising is increasingly costly and, in most cases, it does little to build the organisation’s brand.”

Graylink — which, in addition to operating out of its head office in Cape Town with a bureau in Johannesburg, also has offices in the UK, France, United Arab Emirates and Singapore, and representation in the US, Australia and, from early next year, South America — provides a single software code base to automate clients’ recruitment processes. Each organisation gets its own database of potential employees, and a recruitment website that is incorporated into its existing website.

The look, functionality and marketing-led approach of an organisation’s online recruitment service are, stresses Gray, fundamental to its success.

“It goes without saying that, like customers, candidates are attracted to strong brands,” he says. “Our approach ensures that each client’s brand is carefully managed and that it wins the attention of the right audience. With more organisations moving their recruitment online, competition has increased and it is no longer enough to have a website that merely lists current vacancies. You have to add value, compete for the best talent and, wherever possible, go out and look for it — and that is where social networking sites come into play.”

According to a study by CareerBuilder.com, which is one of the largest online job sites in the US, one in every five employers in that country uses social networks to research information about job candidates.

Reuters reported last month that “traffic on the world’s top professional web networks has surged since the financial crisis started to make headlines, with top player, privately held Linkedin, notching 25% more registrations in September than forecast”.

Membership on Linkedin has increased from 18-million at the beginning of the year to more than 31-million. It is growing fastest in the financial services, media, education and technology fields.

Increased use of social media, says Gray, compels employers and recruiters to examine, network, attract, engage and connect with potential employees like they have never done before. Companies are increasingly questioning long-standing recruitment strategies and accepting that social media has entered the mainstream as a recruitment strategy.

“While South Africans are slower on the uptake than many of their international colleagues, the more savvy local recruiters are already getting into social networks as a new way to hunt talent and market their clients as employers,” he says. “When done correctly, recruitment via social networking platforms can be a more effective and inexpensive way to reach and engage relevant talent than traditional methods.”

There are two options for recruiting candidates via social-networking sites: recruiters can either set up pages on the sites for passive recruiting or, using various search tools, actively troll the sites for suitable candidates.

Trolling is generally done by using keywords to search targeted sites. This way recruiters dig out high-quality candidates that cannot be found elsewhere. These candidates can then be contacted directly about job offers that might interest them. Organisations can also set up groups to create communities around a shared interest, simultaneously using it to find talent.

The premise is that employers and recruiters have the opportunity to target, sound out and interact with candidates at length before final interviews take place.

Candidates, on the other hand, receive job offers from companies that have taken the time to seek them out, and find out all about their career objectives and skills.

Moreover, the kinds of online conversations recruiters have with candidates can reinforce the organisation’s brand. For example, Linkedin has a very active feature for asking and answering questions. As a member of Linkedin, a candidate is able to convey knowledge and expertise, positioning him or herself as an expert on a certain subjects. Linkedin also allows job seekers to list previous employers to confirm credibility.

But, cautions Gray, using social networks for recruitment and branding is not as simple as clicking and searching.

Recruiters need to understand exactly what organisations need, what each site provides in terms of service to users and intelligence to the recruiter, and which of these their desired candidate audience is actively using. In other words, it requires a specialised approach.

“For employers and job seekers to remain competition, they have to start getting more active around marketing themselves on social networks,” says Gray. “But it is as important to do it correctly to make it work — and to avoid damaging the brand, whether that of the company or the candidate.”

That then, is perhaps the other career crunch of the 21st century.