3 Worst New Years Resolutions for Social Recruiters

A New Year is filled with boundless hope and promise…until February rolls around and you’ve lost all hope by breaking every promise made on New Year’s Eve. Increase the likelihood of sticking to your resolution by making a good one worthy of your will power.

As you evaluate your personal and professional goals, we give you the top 3 misguided social recruiting resolutions you should omit or revise before midnight strikes on January 1st.

1. Continue chasing just that one KPI = No. of Applicants

Of course increasing the amount of applicants is a good goal to have—a goal which social recruiting has proven to help meet time and time again —but increased applications should not be your only marker of success. If it is, you may be limiting the impact of your social recruiting campaigns and likely overlooking some key benefits you could be attributing to your efforts.
Remember that Social Media is NOT a job board. Requisitions posted on job boards and picked up by job aggregators do not live in the same dynamic, real-time environment as other social networks—like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—and they hardly ever reach the gaze of the passive job seeker. Enhanced employer branding, increased brand exposure, and enriched candidate engagement are among the many surprising benefits social recruiting can offer. But if you don’t track KPIs like engagement—number of likes, shares, retweets, comments, clicks on original or curated content, etc.—you will have a harder time proving these results.

Sharing quality content is a key to increasing real engagement. FB posts and tweets that express the company culture, employer values, or even a healthy sense of humor, could help attract better culture-fit hires, driving higher candidate quality—rather than only quantity—into your candidate flow.
Related: 3 Keys to a Results-Driven Social Recruiting Strategy

2. Do everything on your own

Self-reliance is a virtue, but there comes a point when it turns to vice. We know many talent acquisition professionals—because of lack of funds, staff, or executive buy-in—don’t have much choice but to lead a one-person army in establishing and executing a social recruitment strategy. So allow us to revise this resolution and offer alternative goals to shoot for:


• Do more, but with good help (yes, this requires you to ask for help.)

Chances are your company’s marketing team handles corporate social media accounts on the same social networks you either plan to or already have established career-focused channels. As social recruiting continues to nudge HR pros into becoming and thinking more like marketers, a relationship with the marketing team will soon move from recommended to required.
Start small: Ask the marketing team to feature one job post every 1-2 days on the company’s main FB page. See where content can overlap—does the marketing team share inspirational quotes or original images that you can also post or retweet on your feed? The key is to start with an initiative where everyone will likely gain more exposure and engagement so the partnership can be founded upon positive results.

• Do less, but more effectively. Set yourself up for success by limiting your load and dialing up your focus. What’s key to prioritizing your efforts is clearly communicating the possible, realistic outcomes to yourself and anyone evaluating the program’s success or failure. This is not the time to overpromise. Setting expectations prevents you from overextending and becoming overwhelmed. For example, instead of managing multiple communities at once, start with growing one community at a time to really be able to gauge what types of job posts, content, and even optimal times of day that drive the most engagement on your page.  

 
Related: Recruiting Just Got A Lot Harder: 5 New Reasons Why

3. Commit to social recruiting…in Q2…or Q3…or maybe after a year…give or take…

The worst kind of resolution is the one that doesn’t start on time. But like blogging in the early 2000’s or vlogging on YouTube in 2006, social recruiting will continue to favor early adopters. Companies first to adopt a social recruiting strategy in their market or region will gain a competitive advantage that will only wane as more players join everyday. This early advantage will expire once social recruiting moves from today’s innovation to tomorrow’s HR norm.

 
Just as David Creelmen comments in his recent, opinionated post on TLNT:

The HR technology world moves quickly and last year’s hot new idea becomes this year’s commonplace feature. HR needs a technology road map and they need to update that road map every year. The road map isn’t necessarily the path you will end up following, however it keeps you aware of the terrain.