Online networks – your new best friends
Guest post by Britt van Capelleveen
Recruitment (Corporate) has changed over the last few years. Or, at least it should have, in my opinion. Yes, we are still looking for the perfect candidate, and sometimes it still seems like we have to look out for that purple squirrel.
Yes, we occasionally have a different opinion than the hiring manager and we still have to deal with candidates who lose their interest because of ….(you can fill this in with your own frustrating moments, I’ m sure you’ll have them too). But one thing has changed dramatically. Most of our future potential talent has discovered the different social networks. So, we as recruiters have to discover them too.
As Advisor e-Recruitment @Tempo-Team (part of the Randstad Holding), I –together with our corporate recruitment department– have come to the realization that it is important to get to (already) know our future colleagues. We do a lot of hires each year, in particular for commercial roles. Despite the economic circumstances top-talent aren’t waiting side-by-side to find a new job. We became aware of the fact that our target group needs to know us too. And better yet, they have to like us.
This led to the corporate recruitment department of Tempo-Team setting up a small sourcing team. For every open vacancy we do not “post & pray”, like we used to do. We resort to spectacular boolean searches and Facebook searches. LinkedIn and Twitter became our new best friends to quickly fill the pipeline with perfect profiles. Candidates whose keywords and experience match with the company’s needs. And not only do we initiate contact. We also engage with them and do a first screening by phone. If it turns out to be a wonderful fit, our corporate recruiters specialized in selection will do the official interviews.
Secondly, through our online endeavors, we quickly realized we have to find a way to attract (but also keep) our future talent. This led us to build online talent pools and communities of different types, and introducing a Recruitment page on Facebook. Both underline what a great place Tempo-Team is to work at. We developed a Facebook app, so our Facebook Friends will be directly informed of new opportunities at Tempo-Team (and of course make it able to easily share these fantastic job opportunities with their friends).
In my opinion the old recruiting ways are insufficient. Sourcing and those wonderful online networks will be necessary to do the job right. At #sosueu you are able to add some serious sourcing and online recruitment knowledge to your recruitment department too, and you will see things start to change… If you don’t believe me, come and experience the love for sourcing yourself at #sosueu, http://sosueurope.com/ 12 and 13 September, Randstad HQ Amsterdam.
Britt van Capelleveen, is e-recruitment advisor at @Tempo-Team and will lead one of the tracks at #SOSUEU unconference session.
