Point is that organizations that win with social media recruiting will take a balanced approach to creating utility from the tools available.
There are three key problems that social media creates for organizations who have talent acquisition efforts at a modicum of scale (smaller companies have fewer issues):
1. The Social Gap Problem
2. The Social Proof Problem
3. The Backdoor Problem
Problem One: The Social Gap. One of the problems created with social media as it relates to recruiting is rooted in the overall efficiency of the tools available to both potential candidates and the overall efficiency of the tools available to corporate recruiters. One side is efficient and the other side is inefficient, creating the gap. On the candidate side of the equation, social tools are very efficient. For example, you never will have to remember someone’s contact information, as LinkedIn will hold it and users will update those details in real time. Facebook allows you to scale ‘relationship maintenance’ to at least up to 5,000 of your closest friends — never before have the nodes on your social graph been more efficiently maintained.
Contrasting this efficiency are corporate recruiting tools, that because of scale and volume requirements are generally transactional in nature, and as we all know, are sometimes downright anti-social in their abilities to help manage relationships with candidates and prospects.
So at the root of this gap is the fact that candidate expectations and behaviors have changed (and fast) … but the toolsets in corporate recruiting generally have not. Part of the reason this has occurred is because Facebook and LinkedIn (and all the other social tools) have experienced skyrocketing growth during the worst economic downturn that we are likely to see in our lifetime. So corporate recruiting departments haven’t changed much, except for getting smaller with fewer resources (that was kind of a joke except for the fact that nobody is laughing),...