As an HR professional, it’s one thing to promote your organisation to an existing “customer base” of potential job candidates – but how do you go about attracting a whole new base?
Social sourcing is the key, according to Oracle vice president of human capital management, Aaron Green.
“The easiest area that an HR practitioner could start doing this is social recruitment. There are tools available that are very much geared towards the area of social sourcing and social campaigning, running them just like a marketing campaign to target specific individuals from specific talent pools, understand who's talking about the organisation and what they're saying and targeting jobs or sourcing campaigns at individuals.”
He said it was possible to manage such campaigns through channels like Twitter and
LinkedIn and opportunities to capitalise on it financially.
“That's a big mindset shift for a lot of HR practitioners. We talk a lot about this idea of opt-in. Opting in is like me applying for a job. I've opted in to say that I'm interested in the job. That's great, but what about all the people who didn't raise their hand to opt in but who could make great prospects?
“That's something where we've relied on the recruiter to have a rolodex of people they can ring up and source. That's where social sourcing, from a recruitment perspective, becomes extraordinarily powerful.
“We can start using social media - even though someone hasn't applied for a job at Oracle, they've tweeted about Oracle a lot or they've liked the Oracle page on Facebook or they're part of a group that discusses Oracle or a competitor on LinkedIn. We can use all of that to see that even though you haven't opted in for a job, we can target you as a candidate or a prospect.”
He said that at some point, prospects needed to be converted to candidates, which created an additional talent pool.
Do you use social sourcing to directly target potential candidates?
