Most people coming out of schools “don’t really want to build bridges when they grow up,” says Andrew McCarty.
McCarty, sourcing manager at the infrastructure/construction company Parsons, is trying to address this recruiting challenge partly by spreading the good Parsons word through social media. McCarty, along with Yahoo’s Carmen Hudson and TMP’s Louis Vong, is speaking at a workshop put on in Los Angeles (where he’s apparently a rare non-car-owner) by SHRM’s staffing-management association. He was brought to Parsons partly to help infuse higher-tech tools into the company, where many employees are in their 50s.
To help craft their Web 2.0 strategies, McCarty says companies should ask themselves the following questions:
- What are the best Web 2.0 options to use?
- What is your goal? Is it branding? Is it sourcing? Is it conversion?
- Who is your target audience? Is it internal? Is it external? Is it both?
- How much content can you manage? In other words, you’ll get out of it what you put into it, but what time can you put in? Says McCarty: “You can create a really great front page, but if it’s not maintained, it’s not marketed, and if you don’t drive people there, it’s not going do you any good.”
- Are there other groups in your company that are currently leveraging Web 2.0 technology, that you can piggyback on? Can you share usage, tools, and techniques with these groups? Can you convince a non-HR entity to pay for costs?
- Do you have the ability to move or reconfigure budget to accommodate costs?
McCarty’s No. 1 source of candidates is still employee referrals. Social recruiting, he says, is merely a way to get more of them, and to get better ones (topics to be explored further in June).
He says that people (the general public, not HR/recruiting types) are just beginning to realize that “everything you publish is there, forever.” He has dropped family members from his Facebook “friends” collection because what they posted was inappropriate. “If you can’t control yourself, I now control you,” he says.