Daemon Group Blog

12 steps to finding staff in the social web…

Posted on 09. Jan, 2012 by Croaghie in Employer Branding

The traditional channels for finding new staff (read: great people that will ‘fit’ with your business) as stand-alone sourcing opportunities are increasingly ineffective: we’re talking jobboards, press ads or ringing your trusty recruiter.

No surprises here.

What is surprising is the glacial speed with which many ‘innovative’ organisations are moving, in accessing all that the social web has to offer, for building tribes of great talent.

I say ‘tribes’ as the old ‘talent pipeline’ chestnut, although a meaningful idiom, never really stuck in execution. The global community in which we now live is increasingly tribal. And we run in multiple tribes…. by interest, hobby, gender, religion, profession, skill set, ethnicity, politics, opinion, experience….

These tribal habits which candidates are developing online (and let’s face it, everyone is a candidate), are providing a clear pathway for smart organisations wishing to cut-through and grow their own tribes of best-fit future staff.

Prospective hires for your workforce (or your client’s workforce, recruiters), housed on your candidate database or CRM, are not real prospects. Why? Because they’re not a community, they’re a number. They’re not treated with insight and intellect. They’re a back-stop.

And before you know it, they’re being fed great content by, and forging relationships with your talent competitors: which means, you fall further down the list of ‘organisations I want to work for’.

The approach for sourcing talent on the social web is simple. Below I’ve defined the 12 key steps. They’re sequential, and they’re easy to achieve.

1. Defining goals
2. Listening
3. Stakeholder buy-in
4. Planning
5. Strategy development & sign-off
6. Optimization
7. Content
8. Going live: action/execution
9. Engagement
10. Management: of the strategy
11. Management: of the tribes
12. Review

Importantly, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for hiring. Start by thinking about altering your traditional approach to finding people. And combine this with simple social sourcing strategies that are tailored to your talent needs NOW and in the (near and distant) future.

Over the next few days, I’ll shed light on each of these steps.

Today’s about getting your head around the concept. And on that, I have enormous respect for Deloitte’s lateral approach to tapping into candidate tribes online. Have a read.

Have you started to think about using the social web for your hiring needs?

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Tags: Hiring, Human Resources, recruitment, social media, Staffing, Talent Sourcing