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It's Time To Get Serious About Social In HCM

Oracle

By Joachim Skura

Social recruiting is one of the hottest topics in human capital management, yet precious few businesses are implementing it in a meaningful way. The result is a missed opportunity to recruit the best and the brightest and build the most effective internal recruiting force.

The problem is a misunderstanding about what social recruiting actually is. Most organizations will post job applications on social media and engage with potential candidates there. That surely is what social recruitment is all about, right?

Social recruiting is a far more rigorous, transformational process that upends conventional practices. There are four main characteristics:

  1. Volume: Simply posting the odd job placement or sending a tweet from time to time is not social recruiting. True social recruiting involves posting many posts, often, and on multiple channels, building up awareness over time.
  2. Word of mouth: Social recruitment is just that: social. To make it work, employers must build a robust social network that joins together the networks of employees past and present. This is the foundation of social recruiting and is the difference between success and failure.
  3. Transparent rewards: Employees will agree to leverage their own social networks for recruitment purposes only if they see a clear upside. This may sound mercenary, but you must reward employees consistently for any referrals they generate.
  4. Automation: A key component of a social recruitment platform is to automate simple tasks, letting HR teams focus on more complex, value-adding tasks.

It isn’t enough to simply broadcast job placements over social media. Social recruitment requires facilitating a conversation between recruits and the people who know your business best and are best placed to sell it: your workforce. Any social recruitment program must treat potential employees as human beings, embracing all of the complexity and sophistication of this relationship-building.

To bring this message home, Oracle is hosting a unique event in Munich on June 25. Together with partner Promerit, the event will give attendees the opportunity to improve their social recruitment activities in front of an audience most likely to engage with it: students.

This “social slam” seeks to answer questions most HR professionals have asked themselves: Are our social efforts actually working? Are the millennials we hope to reach actually listening to us?

For more about Oracle's approach to talent management, check out:

Joachim Skura is Oracle’s HCM sales developer for Germany. You can follow him on Twitter: @JoachimSkura.

(This post was originally published on the Oracle United Kingdom website and has been slightly modified.)