Last week I introduced this series by stating that a majority of social recruiting initiatives currently in progress in organizations around the world would fail primarily because they relied solely on the limited resources of the recruiting function to establish visibility online, engage an audience, and service that audience throughout a multi-stage conversion cycle.
This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out.
A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All
There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications.
I recently tried to arrange a meeting with someone visiting the Twin Cities and learned from his office that he’d asked that anyone wanting to reach him should “Tweet me.” Tweet me? E-mail or text messaging not good enough? Let me get this straight: I should try and arrange a private meeting to discuss a potential business deal using a medium that is literally open to the world. I have a better idea — Tweet yourself.
Many years ago, the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, had more than its fair share of fires. Most of the buildings were made of wood, and the city literally burned down several times.
Social media presents progressive organizations with a plethora of recruiting-centric opportunities. Every day, new ways to directly source talent, support the engagement of people with the organization, market employment opportunities, and influence the employer brand arise.
The global recession has taken a toll on workers everywhere, but except for a few high-profile departures and bonus forfeitures, CEOs have seemed mostly immune. Now comes a report from 
I have officially lost control of the remote on Sundays, Saturdays, and Mondays. In 15 years of love and marriage with a football fanatic, I haven’t learned a whole lot about the whole pastime, but I have learned that most men know a lot about football and care about it a lot more than recruiting. I also have noticed that most men use football to talk to each other on holidays, campouts, and soccer games. I would imagine it accounts for about 70% of all guy small talk. So I started thinking about using football as a metaphor for getting managers to do what I want, which is help me sell the company, the candidate, and get me hires. I didn’t come up with this idea, and it isn’t very original, but by golly, it works. Here’s how to do it. 
The proliferation of recruiting videos since the advent of Web 2.0 has been staggering. Candidates can review an abundance of organizational information in videos that previous generations of job candidates did not have the opportunity to view. A job candidate needs only to peruse career pages on organizational websites or go to Career TV, Social Networks, and YouTube to find information in this format.
The 21st century has opened with a flurry of disasters, economic crises, acts of terrorism, and wars that underline the need to adapt quickly. The skills of planning, goal orientation, and consistency that we taught and practiced widely in the 20th century are no longer success factors. Workforce planning seems oxymoronic, and a three-year plan is looked at with both skepticism and humor. Trying to predict who we should hire in February or May is most often a futile act, yet we are still required to produce the right people — fast!
Great people don’t make a job change for money. Great people have to be enticed to talk to a great organization. How I overcome this is by arguing that my “tribe” is a better fit for them than their current tribe. My tribe is cooler, funner, more interesting, faster, more successful, and contains less management-by-spreadsheet than their company. Come jump ship and work with us. This is the difference between “sourcing as selling” and resume mining.
