Job boards took a quantum leap from two-person organisations to multibillion-dollar-valued organisations. The concept was simple: companies pay for their job to get published, the job board buys exposure through commercials, advertising and rich content to attract candidates. A hugely successful model in the early 2000s and a pull strategy that worked. Up until now... with the labour market becoming more competitive and the spectacular rise of social networks the game is changing again.
In the nineties, only the top tier employees would be headhunted. Why was that so? There was no visibility in the market, let alone the systems to monitor the labour market. Today, if you want to know and find out about the top performers of your competition you can simply go to LinkedIn to find out their names and look at their recommendations. This was unthinkable only 10 years ago. Smart organisations at the time, would use so-called ambassadors at universities to make themselves known to students. But then, companies would carry little information on the best students, if at all. Companies were ‘hoping’ to pull candidates based on great exposure and brand awareness—things only available to the big players.
A radical revolution has taken place in recruitment since the arrival of internet. With huge amounts of opportunities, but also a lot of risks. Recruitment has evolved from a dusty, undervalued discipline to something sexy these days, and its lifeline is called ‘marketing’.
Some companies realised the importance of marketing in the early days already and have grown to integrate marketing knowledge in their recruitment processes early on. One such example, and a big exception, is a large brewery I once spoke to. They, very early on, realised the potential and risks of the arrival of internet. Their global head of graduate recruitment explained to me, “We do get, on an annual basis, thousands and thousands of applications from graduates. But, we only hire around 10 management trainees per annum. So basically, we have to turn down 99.99% of all applications—all of these are, of course, potential beer drinkers.” He continued, “Over several years that means we have to deal with a very large amount of applicants that were rejected and we realised we needed to act to try and overcome this…increasing the chances that these rejected candidates would keep consuming our beer.” The brewer went ahead putting in place technology, working with marketing and utilising the capabilities of the internet to at least try and minimise the impact on the psychology of a candidate.
Then with the intense shortage of labour around globe during the dot.com period a paradigm shift of unexpected proportions took place. Recruitment asked Marketing out for a first date! And Marketing accepted! How did this happen? Recruitment turned to Marketing to ask for help recruiting the right number of people in the shortest possible period of time. There were hardly any candidates out there and companies would do the most bizarre things to attract the right candidates. One example is that of a large IT company attracting salespeople. The interviews were held in the showroom of a car dealer. If the candidate was successful, he would immediately after get the opportunity to select a company car to his likings. Another example is that of a large American retailer that would hold interviews in a hot air balloon—accompanied with the slogan, ‘the sky is the limit’ to attract more candidates.
Marketing got increasingly involved with recruitment in designing tailored recruitment campaigns, with a focus on pulling candidates. The relation between marketing and recruitment started to grow as they appreciated each other. Finally marketing had more input than only designing the job advertisement for the newspaper or the job board. Recruitment started to realise the marketing specific knowledge, if applied correctly, would help recruitment to realise its objective finding the right people at the right time for the right job at a cost as low as possible.
Then came Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and over 150 other initiatives referred to as ‘online social networks’, another major game plan changer. With the sudden emergence of these social networks, there was a potential not to push jobs to a job board, but instead start searching the online social networks to find suitable candidates for a particular job.
Marketing is now needed to understand how to better utilise Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and similar networks. So HR needs to know both how to be present in these networks and how to use them to channel the right ‘potential candidates’ in the right social network. Recruitment has always been required to identify the key skills and capabilities of potential hires. Today, recruitment is moving from a pull to a push strategy these days. Ultimately, companies should be able to approach the best candidate for a particular job with the push of a button. For recruitment to become really successful it will be essential to link it to the marketing of the organisation: working together not only on employer branding, but at the same time formulating innovative strategies on how to stay one step ahead of the competition to locate and approach the right candidates.
Do use networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to push the right jobs to the right people at the right time. The most attractive companies are already doing so. Find the candidate—let him not find you.
By Dr Erik C. Schmit, Group Manageing Director, StepStone APAC
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
