Recruiters & Social Media – Love/Hate or Love/Love?

The most frequent comment I hear from recruiters when we talk about social media is that it takes too much time… they are super busy finding candidates and filling reqs and don’t have 2 -3 hours a day to spend on social channels, updating their statuses and sharing information. While I agree that it takes a bit of time up front, once you have all your social profiles completed you really only need to spend 30 minutes a day monitoring and updating them. 

I’m all about automation to save time.  My favorite tool right now is Buffer App.  This is a free tool that allows you to schedule up to 10 articles at specified times of your choice.  Use this scheduling tool with Feedly.com or whatever reader you use and set your updates to your social networks in advance.  By using a reader you can follow blogs and online papers like Mashable, TechCrunch, Fortune, VentureBeat, INC.com, Wired, Engadget or any of the many, many other great publications.  Then use RSS feeds to your reader or Outlook.  You can quickly scan and click on interesting articles and then use Buffer App to schedule sharing via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

HootSuite or TweetDeck are great tools to manage social feeds and schedule postings.  I use HootSuite and have linked it with my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Feeds.  I have tabs for each stream and can schedule posts to all of these networks, multiple times.  It’s easy to post your current job openings directly from HootSuite.  You can also schedule them to recur every week and keep them at the top of your social profiles. 

Use your downtime and leverage mobility.  While you are waiting, pull out your mobile device and check your social feeds and retweet, share, like and repost articles that you find valuable.  I’ve spent many hours at the salon, doctor’s office, auto repair shop, coffee shop or restaurant catching up on my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds and sharing content from them. 

If you decide to automate (and I hope you do) remember that it is best to read the content that you want to share first and then share with your network.  If you allow the tool to pick the content, you might end up sharing content that is not relevant to you or your network.  People follow you for a reason and you should be sharing what you consider valuable information.  If it’s not valuable to you, it probably won’t be valuable to your followers.  

"I’ll Be Back"… Don’t Take “No” For An Answer

What is your first response when a prospective candidate tells you “no”?  Remember in the movie, The Terminator, when Arnold said his famous line, “I’ll be back”?   All recruiters should take this to heart… it should be our mantra, especially in this market.  How many times have you had candidates tell you that they were not interested in your job?  Maybe they were happy with their current role, not the right time to make a move, looking for a different type role, couldn’t relocate, looking for a higher level role to make a move… we have heard them all.  If you haven’t then you aren’t doing your job properly.  And by your job, I mean building relationships with your prospective candidates.  

Being trained as an agency recruiter has many advantages.  We are taught never to take “no” for an answer.  In fact, on my first recruiting job they told me that I would hear “no” at least 5 times before getting to a “yes” and they gave me a long list of how to overcome typical objections.  The key learning here was that if someone said no, they were engaged in the conversation and giving me the opportunity to turn that no into a yes.  The rule of thumb was that you make your pitch and then shut up… the next person to speak loses.  This brings back memories of very, very long silences over my desk telephone while I was waiting for the person I was speaking with to say “no” or “not yet” or “not now”.  (Yes, I said telephone… we used to actually cold call prospective candidates to recruit them.  Does anyone else remember dialing for dollars???)

Fast forward many, many years to today and these principles still hold true as a corporate recruiter and perhaps even more so in the executive search world.  My world now is all about building relationships with the people I talk to, promoting my company, creating awareness, being a brand ambassador and helping them find the right opportunity here.  Just having conversations about our company values, new products and technologies, global expansion, company culture and personal growth and development can keep me talking to people for 10 – 15 minutes.  And they really get excited when they hear these things!  (Of course it doesn't hurt to work for one of the best companies in the world.) 

Many times just having that initial conversation with a candidate will get them thinking about outside opportunities and before you know it, they are looking at what else is out there.  Especially when they had a bad day, a change in work or family situation, were passed up for promotion… you get the idea.  It all goes back to building that relationship with the prospective candidate.  Really listen to them and figure out what they want and the best path to get them there. 

These days I’m finding that more and more of the candidates that told me “no” the first time are now actively seeking me out and asking for my help, even people I haven’t’ spoken with in years.  This is a win/win because it saves me time when they come to me with resumes in hand (most times they have seen a job posting that they are interested in and are asking for my help getting them to the hiring team) and I’m better able to help navigate them to the right group or business leader. 

Bottom line… the next time you hear “no” your response should be “I’ll be back”!  

The Other “F” Words…

How many times have you heard negative conversations lately?  Things like; the world is just getting worse, the economy isn't turning around, people don’t respect anything or anyone or appreciate what they have. We are bombarded with these messages via multiple channels; TV, the Internet, music, social media, newspapers and just overhearing conversations. 

I believe that it’s time to focus on the positive...  in fact I heard someone say recently that they were “too blessed to be stressed and too grateful to be hateful”.  That prompted me to think about my reasons to be grateful and the joys and blessings in my life and how to carry this “attitude of gratitude” into all areas of my everyday life. 

We have been going through a teaching series on TIME at my local church.  The first message called us to evaluate what is truly important in our lives and prioritize our time accordingly.  The pastor used a visual example that you may have seen before… filling a vase with golf balls and asked us if it was full, then adding sand (was it full?) and finally adding water.  If you haven’t seen it, here is an example from YouTube, Rocks in a Jar. 

Thinking about what is important to me, I started this list and decided to focus on other “F” words that have meaning to me.  I came up with quite a few things that sometimes get pushed aside during my busy days.  Refocusing my time to fill my day with what’s important may take some effort, but I’ll get there.  See if any of them resonate with you.  Thinking about doing several of these with different letters… I’d love your feedback if you have other words that are important to you. 

Faith, Family, Friendship, Fun, Food, Fitness, Favor, Fellowship, Fashion, Forgiveness, Fidelity, Fondness, Forever, Future, Flexible, Fabulous, Fair, Focused, Feisty, Fortunate, Fierce, Funny, Feline, Finished

*Picture is from the Apply Radical Truths Blog