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United States of Facebook: Recruiting via social networks, part I
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When I started college, Friendster was all the rage. Now an afterthought of the social networking phenomenon, its 15 minutes of fame faded for any number of reasons, and being just a bit too ahead of its time could have easily been one of them.
By the time I graduated from college, Friendster’s ubiquity had been replaced by Facebook’s, though at the time it was still reserved for individuals with an active “.edu” email account. But despite its surging popularity as a personal networking tool initially, and more recently as a widely accepted means of professional identification, I didn’t become a member until 3.5 years after my graduation—in other words, until last Friday.
So what prompted me to drink the Facebook Kool-aid? It wasn’t peer pressure (otherwise I would have succumbed years ago). It wasn’t even my increasing professional identity as a digital communications expert (the book that I co-authored on the topic is being published by McGraw-Hill this summer). Really, it all came down to the fact that I was missing out on an—if not the—biggest opportunity to observe social media’s influence on the evolution of talent management, especially in the context of recruiting Millennials.
This demographic encompasses the 20-somethings who are graduating from college and infiltrating the workforce faster than hiring managers can figure out what to do with them. Finding them in the first place is becoming increasingly challenging, as these “kids” live and breathe social media, and most of them don’t know what C.V. actually stands for. Rather, their “resumés,” for lack of a better word, now exist in the most raw, unedited formats: Facebook profiles, where photos, testimonials, likes and dislikes shape these individuals. Granted, many choose to keep this online portal into their psyches private, but a surprisingly large number of people now read like open books.
This, as it turns out, is a Catch-22. Any minor indiscretion could be seen by a current or future colleague or boss, and recruiting managers are scouring these profiles as another form of due diligence when vetting candidates. From a hiring point of view, however, this is the most reactive, defensive approach to using social networking platforms like Facebook; many companies are taking more innovative approaches to leveraging the power of connectivity to recruit new talent—especially Millennials—in the places they spend the most time.
Take Ernst & Young. The financial services firm was among the first companies to really embrace social networks with its Careers page, which has more than 27,000 friends to date. Until last Friday, I wasn’t able to actually see the contents of the page, but I just checked it out and determined it to be a great way to engage my peers in conversations that could lead to very fruitful relationships (for more specifics on what makes this true, stay tuned for my next post). Is this going to be the future of recruitment? The way things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me.
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