I have been writing about utilizing social media and social networking to connect to candidates and build candidate communities here on EXCELER8ion for about 3 years, and in just the last 6 months, I have felt a very powerful wave of corporate acceptance and understanding that they need to have a social recruiting strategy. Large corporate clients are asking en masse to have their teams educated on social recruiting techniques and it is the number one topic that I am asked to speak about.
Does this mean that you should launch a blog (like my favorite MicroSpotting.com), start a facebook page or use Twitter to hold public chats with candidates like E&Y, or should you develop a YouTube channel to distribute video like Deloitte? Should you create widgets to distribute your jobs, events, and other career related content? Should you develop a social game or an employee social network where candidates can interact and ask questions to get the insider’s perspective?
Maybe you should do all of this. But before you buy into the latest service trying to sell you a socket page or build you a community – Do you know the status of your Employer reputation online?
Are you regularly monitoring what people find in Google when they search for information about working for your company? (and they are searching – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of career related searches every month.) Do you know what people are talking about as it relates to working for your company? Do you know who is talking, where they are talking, if it is positive – negative – or just neutral, and why?
No, this isn’t a test. Auditing, analyzing, understanding, and monitoring your online employer reputation should be the first step to developing a successful social recruiting strategy. Without first listening to and understanding what people are already saying about you as an employer, without knowing what issues exist or topics that are already being discussed – your company is in no position to begin effectively participating.
Launching social recruiting initiatives without understanding the state of your online reputation first can be a recipe for disaster. You may discover that launching a recruiting blog is the way to go, but you might also discover that there are issues that are actively being discussed that should be addressed as a first step.
So how do you gather this info about your online reputation? Google “Online Reputation Management” and you will find a myriad of resources from how to set up Google Alerts to full monitoring software packages such as Radian6 and SM2.
The information that candidates find online about you as an employer can be highly influential and considered more credible than the info they find on your corporate career site. I will cover these options, time needed, and how to tailor/focus your monitoring efforts to discussions that affect Employer Brand and candidate opinions specifically in the weeks to come.
Shannon co-authors EXCELER8ion with her other half Julian Seery Gude. EXCELER8ion is a blog about digital engagement.
Shannon is a regular speaker in the HR & Talent Acquisition space where she’s known for her work in social media and integrated digital engagement. By day Shannon works at a Recruitment Marketing Agency.
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Related content : Monitor employee activity online
Hey there Shannon & Julian,
Glad you brought this topic up as not many have yet. Monitoring around a company’s rep for recruitment purposes is definitely a great application of listening online. I had pointed out “looking for new recruits” (by monitoring for keyword phrases that may help find people you want to hire full-time or as contractors) in one of the posts on our Radian6 blog but you bring up an excellent point on also staying close to what people are saying about a company from a “is it a great place to work” perspective. What’s the first thing any person should and generally would do before applying for a job at a company – they Google it. And if half of the top hits are consumer generated (which they could be) and they aren’t good then a person could decide not to bother.
Looking forward to more discussions on this in the future. Thanks for getting the thinking going in this area.
Cheers. David
PS> Thanks for the Radian6 shout out as well
A few years ago ‘Reputation’ was the buzz word. The way in which we could remove spam form the web and make certain that we are who we say we are.
Unfortunately this has not managed to penetrate the market to the level of it’s importance.
However, back to your post. Reputation is a two way street and while there is, without doubt a move towards searching for candidates on line by companies through various social and business networking sites there is often a lack of understanding by the individuals that the Internet Lives On, as does every word ever posted to it.
As an Outplacement consultant I work with my clients to make sure that their reputation is as clean as it can be and all job seekers need to do the same.
Please keep up the fight
Barry at VirtualOutplacement.com
- Your personal job-search assistant
Link Building
Besides monitoring employer reputation.
Monitoring employees computer use is more important
56.5% of employees feel that surfing the Net or sending non-work-related E-mails decreases productivity, and 31% of employers said that they restrict employee Internet/E-mail usage. (Vault.com survey)
“Without first listening to and understanding what people are already saying about you as an employer, without knowing what issues exist or topics that are already being discussed – your company is in no position to begin effectively participating.”
I am so glad you said that. I think a lot of companies forget this incredibly important first step to monitoring reputation online. We monitor, measure, and get involved in relevant online conversations for small and medium businesses. But before we start participating in conversations, we listen to what is being said and determine how best to respond.
Cari
Buzz.io
Cool, make Q&A widget for company to show its insider may be cool
I love it!
-Willian
Online employee monitoring is important too
Good post about Online Employer Reputation Monitoring.
Thanks!!!
This is FASCINATING. I blogged about something vERY similar last week. I had been refused a job because I was checked out online and my potential employers didn’t like what they saw from a Google search:
http://julianmeteor.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-problem.html
I am still unemployed and wish I could delete all my stuff from Google
Hi Shannon,
Great post, and I couldn’t agree more. It seems you and i (although on opposites sides of the world) have been preaching about social recruiting for some time now. Interestingly enough coming at it from completely different angles. You from an employer branding/ online reputation perspective, and I from a job distribution and candidate sourcing perspective.
We described our company 2Vouch as a social recruiting platform in early 2007 and people were looking at me very strangely. I am amazed by how the term social recruiting has been adopted by our industry.
I really enjoy your blog/tweets and you’re doing a great job evangelizing social recruiting.
@rigesyounan
I agree in spades that the first step is a measurement of the current employer brand. If a company were really interested in it’s current employer brand they would hire someone to do informational interviews with past employees who left the company and candidates who were not chosen for past positions. These are 2 groups who are likely to give some solid information concerning the perception of the company