Earlier this year, Universum, a company focusing on employer branding, released a four-part study entitled "2020 Outlook: The Future of Employer Branding". The survey analysed more than 2,000 responses from HR professionals and CEOs from companies around the world to map the current situation of employer branding and estimate development for the next five years. "The Social Employer: Using Social Media for Talent Attraction" is the fourth and final part of the study, whose findings were published by Recruiter.com.
In an age when social media are more or less a normal part of our lives, it should not be difficult to use them for our different needs. However, David C. Brudenell, global vice president of product at Universum, argues that there is a huge difference between the way we use the media in our personal lives and when we try to attract talents with a well established corporate brand.
The problem is that while we know there are talents on social media, we are often completely unable to work with them. We publish dozens of posts without being aware of the ROI of each. Due to the number of posts and offers, it is relatively easy to be a consumer on social media but a recruiter currently has a worse position. “To ensure that users continue to come back to these platforms, friends and connections’ posts are prioritized over businesses’ posts,” says Brudenell.
This means that with a declining number of options to build corporate brand for free, firms are forced to pay more for their activities on networks. Brudenell offers the example of how the organic outreach of posts on Facebook is inversely proportional to the price of its shares. LinkedIn and Twitter have chosen a very similar strategy.
Shift from organic to paid outreach of posts on Facebook
Source: Study of Universum company, taken from Recruiter.com.
In other words, the more difficult it is for companies to build their brand on websites, the higher the revenues from paid services for social networks. A number of recruiters and employers additionally have to face a "more educated and highly skeptical audience," as Brudenell describes them. Another growing problem is that more and more companies appearing on the network, are gradually improving at building content that looks natural – marketing without marketing.
Talent searching will be increasingly challenging. What to do?
Investments, metrics and training. Brand building and recruitment of quality people requires more than just a team of recruiters with LinkedIn or Facebook accounts. The Universum study indicates that most of the organisations surveyed do not invest enough in recruiting via social networks and employer branding. As a result, relatively few companies around the world measure the impact of social networks. Marketing on social networks is still new and insufficient resources are allocated for such activities.
Brudenell adds that measuring the impact is fundamental and offers a few tips:
1. Measure the conversion - the number of talents who will ask for a position through social networks. This measurement can be connected to the traditional metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire etc.
2. Involve employees - employee involvement in employer branding should go beyond "liking" posts. Comments and sharing are more meaningful.
The study recommends companies seeking to build their brands on social networks to consider creation of a so-called "Social Media Center of Excellence", which is a group composed of people from HR, marketing, corporate and public relations. Possible involvement of external agencies to share best practices and ideas cannot harm you. This center clarifies common goals for action on various groups on social networks, streamlining the processes and needs of each division.
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