Social Media and Recruiting
The Social Recruiting Summit is being held today here in New York.
Fred Wilson, who is keynoting, posted his presentation and requested comments. What a fantastic way to improve your thinking on any topic, by the way. When this type of behavior gets "into the bones" of up-and-coming scientists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers, imagine how much more quickly we will cycle through all the wrong answers and get to the good ones. Kudos to Fred for pioneering in this regard.
I posted my thoughts in Fred's comments but I thought I would share them here as well for the broader HR community...
Lots of great thinking in this deck, and the exciting part of the internet and recruiting is that we are really just getting started. The newspapers are only now dying, and the Web 1.0 job boards "just" replicated their model. Cool ideas -- GlassDoor, Tracked, and of course, Twitter, LinkedIn, Meetup (at TheLadders, we've sponsored Meetups to very good effect for our recruiting) etc., -- are going to make the next decade even more exciting.
A few points that I think go along thematically with what you are saying but bear emphasis:
1. Social media are fantastic information and communications tools. A question we should be asking is: how do we use these tools wisely and well?
Commenter Melih notes: "I didn't really see you emphasize that while talent is valuable, the real value, to me, of the social hire is vouching for the integrity and the character of the person much more so than their skill set. I think it's fair to say that you wouldn't recommend a friend or colleague who you didn't think was strong enough, but would you recommend a friend who you knew would constantly butt heads with the VP of Engineering?"
As tools, we are using social media very well to find candidates, and to find people who worked with the people who worked with our candidates. But to really close the deal, we need to find a way to make social media better at making the art of referencing better. Because I'm not sure we really have. The cold call out of the blue from the nice person in HR at a company looking to hiring Jeremiah, who saw that you worked with him from 2003 to 2005, is not immediately, to my mind, somebody with whom you should exercise your complete and utmost candor. Legal and social consequences loom. We're finding the information, but we're not generating the right type of communication.
2. And I wonder if you should mention Uber community on the web -- Craigslist. Despite its enormous size today, it started as "social media" -- Craig sending out his favorite events to his email buddies, and somehow that DNA remains at the core of what Craigslist is all about. Especially with recruiting designers and college graduates, we find it invaluable. I think we all sometimes forget to put Craig in this bucket.
3. I agree blog posts and tweets are a great way to get people who are already engaged with your brand. This is the virtual equivalent of the "Help Wanted; Inquire Within" sign: to attract somebody, they need to already be attracted. Which is fantastic. But it's not going to scale for all the needs of a young company. How are we going to use social media to expand our message, not just repeat it in an echo chamber?
4. And, finally, I think it bears repeating: "0" is the number of people you've hired in or invested in without meeting them face-to-face. (Even more interesting if the answer isn't zero -- would love to hear that story!) The internet, social media, tweets and updates can not replace the value of sitting across from a human and learning their story directly from them. That's what we're all about - we are *social* creatures, and the *media* is there to serve us.
