I’m an HR guy, so I’m heavily involved in the recruiting efforts for my agency in the Atlantic region. What those close to me also know is that I’m a closet IT “wannabe”. I dabble as much as I can in all things tech, I’m actually (slowly) trying to teach myself how to do some coding.
I’ve been promoting and using social media for several years as a mechanism to share recruitment opportunities with candidates and I’m slowly seeing others become more comfortable with using these tools as well. Our agency has student ambassadors who work on campus during the school year and they use Facebook and Twitter to promote events and job opportunities. We also use social media to stay in touch with each other. I’m always looking for ways to use technology to help me in my job.
I recently read an article by Heather Huhman titled “Why HR Should Bet on Tech to Find Top Talent”. In it she highlights the overwhelming evidence that the majority of companies are planning to use social media and technology in their recruiting efforts.
One item that really jumped out at me were are the stats around mobile devices. “Only 7% of employers have a mobile version of their recruitment site yet 70% of job seekers use their mobile device to find jobs.” Definitely an area that all employers will have to focus on. As recruiters in the public service we’ll have to keep this in mind when planning our recruiting efforts.
As Heather states: “Your hiring efforts should never be a gamble. Using new technology increases your odds of finding the top talent your company needs to thrive.
I’d be interested in knowing how your department or agency is using social media and technology in it’s recruiting efforts.
Originally posted on www.govlife.ca
There are some great ‘Talent Management’ SW/Apps/Companies out there too, that we should be leveraging.
You are way ahead of most US Federal agencies, who don’t use social networks, but rely mostly on a website (USAJOBS) and agency career websites. Most are still new to the idea of using LinkedIn, Twitter, and other readily available social networks to extend their reach, especially for locating “passive” candidates. We have a long way to go to exploit social networks for recruiting.
Fortunately, most agencies do have an external presence on social networks for mission-related work, including Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, etc. So it won’t be too much of a reach to start using them for recruitment.
I had a very interesting shock the other day when announcing a vacancy for a Radiological Technician. Because of some minor glitches in USA Staffing [it could have been USA Staffing or it could have been our network, or it could have been my way out of date workstation that seems to jump into virtual memory if I have more than 2 programs open]…back on topic now, just couldn’t let that opportunity go by. I had to publish the announcement to the public, and then after getting a link to the announcement, immediately update it to facility employees only and restrict it so that if you didn’t have the link to it, you couldn’t find it (would not show on USAJOBS). I have since found a workaround that will preclude this. But, the couple of minutes that that the announcement was on the Agency Job Board, and USAJOBS, it seems that any and every private sector job board (to include Govloop) snatched it up for their site. The first hint was getting all sorts of calls from non-facility applicants asking question about one of the assessment questions being “do you work at our facility”. About every hour I would get 1 or 2 calls like this for the 2 weeks it was open. During this 2 week period, I asked the applicants where they were getting the announcement from. There were more job boards than I can remember where this announcement was posted. So, for those in the US Federal Government that think our jobs are only listed on USAJOBS, well think again. Anybody and everybody is data mining the announcements. Only down side is, if there are any updates (such as area of consideration), the job boards don’t pick up on that. I was also surprised that it only took a couple of minutes for all them to snatch the job announcement. Made me feel like, wow, almost every job board out there has my announcement posted and then also kind of used because most of the job boards are for profit, either directly or indirectly for advertising.