Our world is changing faster than we can realise it is. No sooner
have we learned new skills and new ways of doing things than some new
idea comes along.
I spent a lot of time last year learning about
social media and starting to use it.. twelve months later I find that
things have moved on.. and not always in a way that is helpful! Google
keep altering their algorithms, Linked In have stopped putting my
Twitter feeds through to their site ... And the challenge is that the
recruitment market is changing all the time too. Employers and
recruitment agencies are constantly looking for new and more cost
effective ways of attracting the candidates they need. And whilst lots
of that effort is targeted at attracting passive job hunters, it also
means that those who are actively job hunting need to shift how you do
it.
Major employers, including those in the public sector no
longer spend their recruitment budgets on print but on social media. In
2005 UPS spent 90% of their budget on print and now they spend 97% on
social media. Deloittes have a dedicated career website which is
populated with blogs from their staff and has three distinct sections
targeted at graduates, young professions and professionals. The site is
content rich and attract traffic through well managed twitter streams,
facebook pages, and Linked In company pages. Employers seek to build
long term relationships with people who have common interests with them
rather than waiting until they have a specific job to advertise. They
want to hook your interest before they recruit you by building
communities of interest, what is known as 'crowdsourcing' (I think!)
The
recruiters placing a single advert in a magazine or newspaper are in
the minority and nowadays on line advertising is much more common. So if
you are looking for a job you need to be on line as well. NB
yesterday's Telegraph had a single page of jobs! But where to start?
To
make life easy there is a brilliant tool called 'indeed.co.uk' This is a
web crawler, you set your search parameters and then let it do the
work. By 'crawling the web' it will bring you the jobs that you have
specified by salary, location and title.
You need to sign up to
major jobs boards and post your CV, CV Library, Monster, Total Jobs,
JobsGoPublic. And whatever professional Boards apply to your work. Again
set your parameters, search, press email alerts and wait for the
vacancies to drop into your in box. Job Boards are the second largest
source of hires. And don't forget Linked In. For professionals it is
the 'go to' source of candidates for head hunters. It is also
increasingly a place where vacancies are advertsied. get into the Groups
and see what is happening and what openings you can spot. At least 90%
of recruiters are already using social media to find, source and
connect with talented candidates.
- English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What
you do need to do is to ensure that you have your target list of
employers and that you have a routine of checking their job sites and if
you can register for alerts from them. See if you can register your CV.
Follow them on Twitter and on Linked In.
Sadly, the public sector
seems to be lagging behind the other sectors in embracing all this
technology. When I checked half a dozen County Council's in the South
East, only one was posting vacancies on Linked In. However there are new
products around that are designed to catch your attention even when you
are not job hunting. JGP have developed 'smart search' which uses
digital marketing to place a vacancy in front of people who are looking
for information and not just for jobs.
I can remember laughing
when they told me that people would use their phones to job search,
(well I also laughed at the idea of mobile phones back in the 1980s) but
there are now Apps which will help you search and bring alerts to your
door. eg
Jobs.ac.uk, this free international jobs
board has launched on the Android and iPhone platforms with more than
3,500 employment opportunities in universities, research institutions
and commercial organisations.
It s not all bad news for the job
hunter.. as long as you are looking where today's vacancies are to be
found and not using the tricks from twenty years ago.
The rise of social recruiting
- 66% of recruiters have used Facebook to find new talent
- 54% of recruiters use Twitter
- 93% use LinkedIn
- 71% of HR and recruiting professionals consider themselves moderate to exceptional social recruiters
Source:2012 Social Recruiting Survey, Jobvite (base: 1,000 HR professionals)
