How social media and effective employer branding can help your company attract the best candidates. Times are changing. The primary concern of HR practitioners has rapidly shifted from minimising the effects of the downturn to the procurement of talent, as business growth in the region begins to accelerate. HR Magazine took this opportunity to talk to Erik Schmit, Managing Director APAC for StepStone Solutions for his take on the changing recruitment landscape in Hong Kong.
StepStone has adopted a very different approach from the major HR players from the US who typically set up in the region to provide HR solutions to US clients. StepStone takes the view that it wants to engage locally and serve the HR needs of local clients. This means taking a local view in terms of recruitment of staff, marketing and advertising of the organisation’s services.
Work or play?
HR Magazine was curious to know more about candidates’ jobseeking behaviour in recent times. Schmit pointed out that it has been a common problem in many industry sectors that people haven’t realised how drastic the changes have been. Schmit likened the whole process to booking a vacation in a travel agent.
“If you were to booked your vacation 10 years ago you would go to a travel agency without having access to a lot of information. You would go along with a certain vacation in mind and whatever they would sell you, you would go for. Nowadays it’s a completely different ball game. If you do some research on the internet, you can make over 50 comparisons and you can do a comparison of all the deals you could get. You can even go and look on YouTube and check out your hotel room. Likewise you will be able to read reviews of your destination [online].”
Schmit continued: “If you transpose this to the industry of recruiting the right people, you’ll see the same thing. When you were applying for a job 10–15 years ago what you would see is someone applying for a job with very little information available—or very brief information. It would be more about hearsay than anything else.”
Twitter and YouTube
Today, when candidates are looking for a job they have a huge amount of tools available to them. Schmit explained that many employers are still uncomfortable with this because they don’t believe it is taking off—but it is taking off. Some organisations have Twitter accounts, movies on YouTube to present a culture, there will do a lot extra to provide potential candidates with the information that candidates are looking for. The proportion of companies projecting this kind of powerful online presence is growing steadily.
“If I do interviews with the younger generation, what I generally find is these people are very well prepared—they know a lot about your company…these changes are something that we as employers have to take into account. People make the difference in any organisation and if you want to be successful you have to make sure that you have the best people,” said Schmit.
What candidates are looking for goes much further than the job specifications. It is not only reading about the job itself—the candidate will also like to know about the culture of the company and how the company deals with its people. Candidates are very much interested in how their development is likely to track in an organisation.
Mobile workforce
What is now much more prevalent than was the case a few years ago is that when organisations interview candidates, they are much keener to have training that will help them build up a skill set that they can use in future. Schmit also observed that the situation of graduating and then spending 25 years with one company is longer expected—and often not even desired.
“What you see now are candidates that develop individual skill sets that will suit different types of organisations. It’s no longer a necessity that a person sticks with a company for 10 years. After around two to three years they build up their skills and their skill set becomes more comprehensive and they offer it to another organisation. It is a win-win situation for organisations as a whole.”
Social media and branding
Also part of effective branding, it is important to embrace the technology that the next generation will be using. For example, making effective use of a company social media account. And this is the reality now. Companies need to embrace Twitter, they need to embrace Facebook, they need to embrace LinkedIn (a business networking site). Companies can then use these accounts to communicate what is going on in the organisation—this is useful for candidates.
The company can mention projects they are doing, not just business-related but also Samaritan work such as helping children in Africa or community work such as putting more computers in local schools. This all helps potential candidates gain a snapshot of what the organisation stands for. In the long term, making use of the technology can help organisations attract more candidates and a better quality of candidate.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
