Can we be honest for a moment?
Maybe, as the kids say, “get real?”
When you and your talent acquisition team started talking about social recruiting, did you actually have a conversation as to why you needed social media, or did you just end up at “we need social recruiting because we need it?” Or “we need social recruiting because everyone else is doing it?”
It’s not a crime. It’s not even rare. We talk to lots of people looking to do social media who can’t really answer the “why” question. It’s not an easy question to answer. In fact, it might even be the wrong question to answer. Because unless you’ve got a lot of content to distribute, the answer to that question is a resounding “no.”
You don’t need social media. You need content.
Focusing on your social media strategy without worrying first about content is like building a network of high-end gas stations before anyone even invented a car in the first place.
Drop The World: Why You Should Stop Worrying About Social Recruiting.
It takes content and helps you get it in front of people with whom it might resonate, allowing them to engage with it and share it. That’s all social media does. But note that the first part of that process is “it takes content.”
Without that content, what are you hoping people engage with? What will people be sharing?
“Remember, social media is a channel, not a strategy.”
You don’t need a social media strategy – you need a content strategy. Having a solid content strategy begets its own social strategy naturally in the same way that inventing affordable mass-produced cars will naturally beget support and supply systems like gas stations, garages, and high-end floor mat manufacturers.
You don’t start by inventing the floor mat and hoping the car will come along to support your business.
Take a look at social media champs. Everyone’s favorite social media success story is Gary Vaynerchuk, who took a struggling wine store to multi-million dollar success with the help of social media. But that’s not right.
He did it by building great content regularly, shooting cheap-o videos on wine and uploading them to the web every week. He was brash, goofy, opinionated and funny in these videos, all while providing helpful and useful information. He educated and entertained. Occasionally, he inspired. And in the end, you bought wine from his store in New Jersey and he became a millionaire.
It wasn’t social media that made this work. It was great content. Had Facebook and Twitter never been invented, people still would have found his videos, shared links via email, and the story would end up the same.
The secret sauce is great recruiting content, not social media.
How To Love: The Secret Sauce for Social Recruiting Success.
Why do you choose to follow a certain person or brand online and not others? Are you in love with the brand enough to listen to bad content over and over again? How many posts about things that don’t interest you will you read before you stop following?
If you live in San Diego, how many posts about job openings in Washington, Chicago and Boston will you listen to before you give up and leave?
The fact that you put content that didn’t resonate with your followers on social media didn’t suddenly make the content better. Social media isn’t fairy dust that makes useless content useful. Bad content on social is just an opportunity for more people to see that you produce bad content.
The level of content determines the complexity of your social recruiting strategy. For example, if you have a lot of great content (white papers, videos, blog posts, stories, pictures, slideshows, conversations, etc.), your social strategy can be as simple as “we should put these online at semi-regular intervals.” Great content can easily be fed into a social media automation process and become a huge success.
But if you have almost no good content, you’re going to spend a lot of time trying to create the illusion of a silk purse made from that sow’s ear. You’ll be focusing on the smoke and mirrors instead of the thing itself. That is time far better spent on building the content, which just won’t need as much propping up.
So stop worrying about which social media channels you are on. Focus on your process for building great content. It will take you much farther.
Read more on the Meshworking Blog from TMP Worldwide.
About the Author: James Ellis is a Digital Strategist for TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest recruitment advertising agency.
For more than 15 years, James has focused on connecting cutting-edge technology to marketing objectives. As a digital strategist for TMP Worldwide, he helps some of the largest companies in America answer their most pressing digital questions.
Follow James on Twitter at @TheWarForTalent or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Learn more about TMP Worldwide at www.tmp.com.
Way back when Skills and Endorsements were introduced (yes, they were announced in late September 2012), I did it myself. I wrote about the Facebook-ization of LinkedIn. Endorsements were frivolous. Recommendations were for serious LinkedIn users and Endorsements were just fluff, confetti to be tossed around and easily gamed. I was one of many people that dismissed it as a poorly thought out attempt to increase engagement on the LinkedIn platform.
Now, maybe Skills and Endorsements was a happy mistake, something that could be incorporated into the Recruiter product, so it was. But I think the more likely scenario is that it was an experiment, specifically with integration into the recruiter product somewhere down the line in mind.
I think there is a lesson here: LinkedIn has a road map. We are privy to it in only the broadest sense through what LinkedIn says at conferences or earnings calls. From time to time new features pop up that seemingly make no sense, or features and capabilities disappear or are modified – but all these things serve a higher purpose, one that we will discover somewhere down the line.
Salma El-Wardany, Head of Marketing, Recruitment Entrepreneur cut her teeth in recruitment at a global Plc, working in business development to win new clients and accounts into the company. She gave up corporate life in favour of the startup world, specifically recruitment startups.
Finding talent is easy. When you need to 
Rather than regress into a rant, I’ll share this must-read: 
Continuing the travel metaphor, you wouldn’t go into a country unless you knew something about their culture, too. Likewise, if you really want to impress candidates, you’ll need to know something about their culture – the geek world.
Take the process of hiring a corporate manager. Starting with a field of 38 competencies that can be used to help select successful talent, we’ve narrowed the field to the 6 competencies that – according to the data – are the most important for selecting corporate managers:
I had the great pleasure of representing my beloved employer – 
About The Author Jim Stroud: Over the past decade, Jim Stroud has built an expertise in lead generation strategies, social media recruiting, video production, podcasting, online research, competitive intelligence, community management and training. He has consulted for such companies as Microsoft, Google, MCI, Siemens, Bernard Hodes Group (acquired by Findly) and a host of startup companies. Presently, Jim Stroud serves Randstad Sourceright as Senior Director of RPO Recruiting Strategies and Support where he alleviates sourcing headaches for his clients. Connect with him on 
I’ve been at this recruiting thing for almost 16 years now, and I can’t say that I knew I’d be doing what I do for a living in my 40’s. And it’s always good to take stock of your life and path when you’re hitting a milestone that either makes people go skydiving, hit up the coffeeshops in Amsterdam, or eat a bullet. 
I’m relatively certain that about 103% of recruiters live with ADHD and being Type A. I’m sorry to break the news to you on this, but better that I tell you than you finding out at your first SourceCon and having an aneurysm when you see junkie-like multitasking in action. Needless to say, while we can get insane amounts of crap done with all the tools at our disposal, we need to be cautious not to overdo it.
If you’re not already, become a voracious learner as you embark in the recruiting world. Read the books, blogs, and industry publications that are out there. You can’t ever know it all, and shouldn’t purport to, mainly because hubris has a nasty stank to it.
About the Author: Pete Radloff has 15 years of recruiting experience in both agency and corporate environments, and has worked with such companies as Comscore, exaqueo, National Public Radio and Living Social.
You don’t read a lot of articles on RecrutingTools about Video Interviewing platforms. That’s because I, like most of you, I couldn’t figure out why I have to pay money for video interviews when I can use Join.me, Skype or Google Hangouts. So I went on a mission to find out.
A business doesn’t grow by accident.
Savvy businesses use metrics to fuel development. 
At the end of the day, understanding how and why candidates are looking for jobs is the key to developing effective recruitment marketing materials. This is why hiring data from every step of the process is integral to creating an efficient system. Eighty-four percent of HR professionals agree that recruitment marketing is a worthwhile investment with 76 percent saying that their company has received a strong ROI from using a recruitment marketing automation or CRM tool.
With election year in full swing, you’ve probably already noticed that your social streams and news feeds have become like some weird version of Fox and Friends. It seems like everyone has turned into some sort of partisan pundit these days.
The natural reaction to overhearing or unintentionally getting dragged into a controversial conversation might be to ignore it; HR pros have a habit of choosing flight over fight, as a rule.
While you might personally agree with a coworker’s political viewpoints – and to take their side in a contentious conversation – if you’re a part of the HR function, you’ve got to remain neutral, no matter what your personal beliefs may be.
This one should be pretty obvious.
To preempt any possibility of political arguments going over the line of acceptability (and legality), 
Earlier this year, 
Their goal with this round of financing is to focus on their technology, driving a “
Think about your friends. Some like to communicate via Facebook, others via text message. Some may use Word and others, Google Docs. So if you were tasked to get your friends together and plan a party, what do you use? Considering you have friends who are active in every corner of the social media networks, how do you pick the “best” method of communication for everyone?
Choose which Slack community best fits with the role you’re working on. In my case, I was actively searching for Python developers using 
Each community has a team directory that looks like the one on the right. Click on ‘Team Directory’ and you now have a list of all the members of that community.
Angela
