my slides from a November 2009 panel presentation in Lexington, MA

1. Social Media & Recruiting:
Making the Promise Real Thanks to
Nov. 2009 - Lexington, MA Seven Step
Social Media panel
Recruiting for
sponsoring &
moderating,
and to my co-
panelists
Maureen
Glenn Gutmacher Crawford-Hentz
(Osram
Sylvania) and
VP, Arbita Education & Consulting Jamie Pappas
Services (ACES) (EMC)
aces.arbita.net
1 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

2. What Is Social Media?
• In a recruiting context, it’s anything that allows for two- or
multi-way engagement in a scalable way, though
Social Media panel
ultimately higher-quality interaction than Web 1.0 tools
(e-newsletter, brochureware career website)
• However, a hire doesn’t happen unless 1-to-many
eventually becomes 1-to-1 so social media needs to
enable that, too.
• Popular channels include: blogs, microblogs, photo
sharing, video sharing, events, social bookmarking,
wikis, podcasting, RSS aggregators (see 7 Categories of
12/1/2009
Social Media, the Social Media Starfish and the
Recruiter’s version)
2 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

3. Social Media Do’s and Don’ts
Do: Don’t:
• Be consistent, honest, genuine • Make job postings the
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majority of your pushed-
• Be responsive: ―respond to every wall out content
post or discussion question related to
the culture and experience of working • Take it on as a short-term
[at your company]‖ – Sodexo project
• Get buy-in vertically and horizontally in • Assume once your
your organization community launches, it
will snowball on its own
• Be where they are
• Assume your best
• Measure everything that could relate to evangelists will come out
your goals of the recruiting team
12/1/2009
Also see slide 11 of Master Burnett’s • Be tied to one platform or
presentation and my next slide… tool
3 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

4. Do’s/Don’ts: Define Your Social Strategy
Ideas adapted from Define Your Social Networking Strategy:
• Survey your audience: know what conversations they want to have, see
where they normally connect with others, etc.
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• Identify objectives: put them in writing
• Identify tools that speed you to goals: e-newsletters and Web sites are
useful, but do they foster conversation? If not, add discussion forums, Twitter
streams, blogs, podcasts, video, etc. to engage participation.
• What’s your user-growth marketing approach? Automatically subscribed
to community when they apply? Opt-in through e-mail newsletters? Offer
content not available elsewhere unless they join?
• Assign a community manager (min. 5 hrs/wk) – most work is inviting new
people and posting new content
• Community content plan: 1) List the kinds of communications you’ll provide
(blog entries, event updates, tweets, LI/FB updates, recorded podcasts, event
videos, photos posted to Flickr or Webshots that link back to your network),
2) when they’ll be posted and 3) what sources they’ll come from.
12/1/2009
• Consistent design – makes people more comfortable
4 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

5. Does Social Media Work in Recruiting?
It already does for marketing, and it adapts well to us. As Forrester says:
• Social media puts buyers job-seekers, not marketers recruiters, in
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control.
• ―Build it, they will come‖ seldom works. (e.g., your v1.0 career website)
• Web 2.0 tool choices are secondary — it is better to start with audience
first.
• Understand how social behavior changes with different buyer candidate
segments at different stages in the buying recruiting process
• Use this insight to craft a winning social strategy:
– Build (recruitment) marketing skills that leapfrog competitors after
economy turns around
– Build community following, participation
12/1/2009
– Involve customers candidates and engender loyalty (for referrals)
– Redefine B2B (recruitment) marketing’s mission and purpose
5 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

6. Risks or Liabilities
• Your corporate culture must be open to being criticized (but your community does
rally to your defense!) – 23% of employers block social network access (ERE &
Knowledge Infusion study, 2009)
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• Current/past employees reveal confidential info or in an inappropriate way (e.g.,
blogs).
• Do you let information found on profiles impact your hiring decision? It can bite
you (e.g., Wrong person’s profile evaluated, discrimination claim from profile
photo evaluation or friends posting damaging material without permission).
• Standardize process for how you use social networks; treat everyone the same
• If you must review job-seeker information on social networks, LinkedIn is slightly
safer.
• Maintain all necessary records (e.g., OFCCP)
• Look for adverse impact (that’s what hurt Wal-Mart!)
• Consider notifying job-seekers that you may examine their social profiles during
hiring process
12/1/2009
• Partial source for above: e-book Social Networks and Employment Law: Are You
Putting Your Organization at Risk? (pp.16-39/slides 15-38)
6 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

7. How Do You Define Success?
• What were the goals you started with? Is it easier to
connect with candidates? Did you want more diversity?
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• Quantify goals as much as possible and track related
metrics (growth in LinkedIn group members / Facebook
fans, Twitter followers, video views, blog visitors, click-
throughs, candidate satisfaction, etc.).
• You’ll need that to ensure management’s continued
support, anyway.
• LinkedIn: Companies using most of its functionality save
much time and reach greater number of relevant talent
(anecdotal), but 82% use it for recruiting vs. 44%
12/1/2009
Facebook (ERE/Knowledge Infusion, 2009)
• Look at success stories like EA and Sodexo
7 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

8. What Tools Do You Need to Use?
How Do You Find & Engage Candidates?
• Examine where social media can help • Use search engine hacks to search
you at various recruiting stages profiles outside your network (e.g.,
(sourcing through onboarding) or types Arbita OneSource speeds process)
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of actions (employer
branding/marketing, competitive intel, • Referral networks: boosted with, e.g,
education, etc.) Jobvite (see anecdotal success)
• Use tools and systems that support
• Ping.fm or HelloTxt to get your
integration (cross-platform, open APIs),
content distributed across all your
convergence (pulls data and
networks
functionality from many places like Pipl
and Ziki; also support mobile devices)
• RSS feeds for sourcing and
and portability (Facebook APIs are
marketing (search engine results
great, but can’t export a Facebook
feeds, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, etc.)
network)
• Search multiple social networks with • Your community-building tools:
Wink, Spokeo, etc. Facebook Group or Company Fan
12/1/2009
Page, LinkedIn Group, Ning (free);
• Mashups – still in infancy (e.g., this) but
Jive Software (upper end of
goes beyond Google CSEs
functionality); others
8 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

9. Some Social Media ―Best Practices‖
In quotation marks for a reason, but…
1. Leverage crowdsourcing – first across your own company, then focus
externally and give credit to all contributors (those sources will remain loyal
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content suppliers, halo effect on you)
2. Great evangelists can come from anywhere (don’t be biased against external
people)
3. Give them content to put on their blogs (e.g., your RSS jobs feed or content
widgets they can put on their blogs (use WidgetFinder, WidgetBox, for
TypePad blogs, or any of these)
4. Ask young people (e.g., interns) how they use socnets – get creative ways to
utilize
5. Go where your audience is (e.g., LinkedIn skews older than Facebook;
internationally, top networks vary) and get involved (they want you there -
e.g., tivocommunity.com)
6. Tap existing groups first, then create your own, but focus on a talent niche
rather than a company-branded community if your company is not a brand
7. Monitor what’s being said (use IceRocket BigBuzz, Backtype, Boardtracker,
12/1/2009
etc.) and apply to recruiting (e.g., have an inventory of stories to share)
8. Break up and repurpose your content for multiple channels
9. Create social guidelines (see US Air Force’s)
9 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

10. Tasking Resources / Time Commitment
• There are so many channels and they’re only proliferating
• Assign people to channels, let them become SMEs (e.g.,
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have you tried Sidewiki?)
• Seek curious staffers: give them freedom to experiment,
but reel them in if metrics don’t keep improving
• Train them on how to stay productive (e.g., super-targeted
feeds that flow in)
• Hold periodic CoP meetings where people can share
learnings from internal trial-and-error and external sources
• I’ll let the practitioners cover the time part…
P.S. Two more resources: how to make the social recruiting
business case and social media gurus’ 2010 trend predictions
12/1/2009
10 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.

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Social Media panel
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Shally Steckerl Glenn Gutmacher
EVP, Arbita VP, Arbita ACES
shally@arbita.net glenn@arbita.net
12/1/2009
http://aces.arbita.net/shally http://aces.arbita.net/glenn
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11 Copyright 2009 Arbita. All rights reserved.