Comment by Saleem Qureshi on February 9, 2010 at 4:41am

Well raised questions. Certainly, with the emergence of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook , and Twitter , and their user bases growing by millions, a headhunter’s job has got challenging, and they do have to change for retaining the success of the company. What I think is that the headhunter’s should take advantage of this social media, and must look into the new dimensions of recruiting through online talent assessments for cost-effectiveness.

Comment by Andy Headworth on February 9, 2010 at 5:17am

Saleem,

Absolutely the way to go! However, from many conversation and presentations with Search firms and Headhunters, there still seems to be a "if I stick my head in the sand it will go away" approach taken by many of them.
It is one sector of recruitment that are really dragging their heels in terms of accepting that the world is going social, and that they need to change with it.

Let's hope they take off their rose-tinted specs sometime soon!

Andy

Comment by Nick Gallimore on February 9, 2010 at 11:32am

Andy, aside from the really big companies who have huge budgets and who place a lot of emphasis on workforce and succession planning, how many companies actually find that Social Recruiting delivers them a better return on investment in terms of hiring than the "old-school" approach of locating and approaching top talent directly?

IMO, the Social Web is just a new tool - a really cool and exciting tool - that can (but by no means needs to be) be used as part of a winning recruitment strategy, but to suggest that it in some way replaces the need to (or is better than) directly approach talent (and heck, selling to talent) is a claim based on hope and not on evidence.

I've spoken to a number of companies who have been sold to by the new "Social Recruiting" industry, and none of those approaches even came close to seeing the bigger challenge for those companies - the here and now problems of getting sales closed, getting products made and getting promises delivered.

The world may be "going social" - for now - but it's by no means a given that these techniques, which can, in some situations, work really well, will replace the existing and established best practice of active dialogue and developing real relationships.

Comment by Margo Rose on February 9, 2010 at 11:28pm

Andy, you asked the question of the hour. Everyone wants to jump on the social recruiting bandwagon, but you are also correct when you say it is best to have a sound recruiting strategy in place. Excellent post.

Comment by Paul Alfred on February 15, 2010 at 8:34pm

Andy, I feel that Social Media has to be apart of a Company's Marketing Strategy with respect to better positioning of their product and or service through Blogs and SEO Strategies that drive traffic back to their perspective websites - Even with a sound recruitment strategy in place Social Media Recruiting will become more popular over the long term - I think for now Companies who utilize SM Channels are looked upon as being "With the Times" not so sure it impacts their online recruiting efforts with any major significance. With all new trends lets ask this question in 2011-12 time frame...

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