Canadian HR Reporter

December 15, 2014

Canadian HR Reporter is the national journal of human resource management. It features the latest workplace news, HR best practices, employment law commentary and tools and tips for employers to get the most out of their workforce.

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Canadian HR RepoRteR december 15, 2014 6 News Register today for industry recognized live or on demand webinars at the Carswell Professional Development Centre. www.hrreporter.com/cpdcentre Join a live 1 hour webinar during your lunchtime that includes a presentation and/or a panel discussion led by industry experts and a live Q&A session where participants can submit live questions to be answered by presenters. These accredited courses are aimed at professionals and employers looking to further their professional development within HR and contextualise acquired knowledge and skills in their workplace. Current industry partnerships include: • Human Resources Professionals Association • Human Resources Institute of Alberta • Human Resources Association of New Brunswick • Canadian Human Rights Commission DO YOU HAVE 1 HOUR TO SPEND ON YOUR HR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT? THOMSON REUTERS CARSWELL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE WEBINAR SERIES Social media recruitment far from perfect Not many employers are looking where job candidates can be found: Report BY SaRaH doBSon While there'S been plenty of enthusiasm around the power of social media as a way to connect and engage with others, few Cana- dian employers are using the plat- form to find talent — even though potential job candidates are there in droves. Just one-quarter (23 per cent) of employers use social media for recruitment — most commonly LinkedIn — compared to one- half of candidates, found a report by Hays Canada. Both groups are on par, however, when it comes to using job boards and recruitment agencies. "We love (job boards), we use them and lots of our clients use them and they produce results — you just can't rely on it. It has to be just part of your strategy… they're not the dominant force that they used to be and there's lots of other choices," said Rowan O'Grady, president of Hays Cana- da in Toronto. People who are on job boards are active lookers, said Juliet Tur- pin, manager in the permanent search practice at Randstad Tech- nologies in Toronto. "Conceivably, you could go and find them anyway by doing a keyword search," she said. "e people that you re- ally want are in fact the passive lookers." And employers may see them- selves as using social media but the effectiveness is another ques- tion, she said. "Every single employer that is looking for someone will at least have a LinkedIn profile and would have that posted up and they would check their repository or connec- tions to see whether or not there's someone there. But would they actually go searching for it? at's a completely other question." For employers, it's often a mat- ter of too little time — plus, it can be a daunting endeavour. "If you're looking at LinkedIn and Facebook… it's only the con- nections that you are connected with or the secondary connec- tions and the assumption is that they are connected with anyone who would be interested would come forward, and if they have to search for them, those individu- als wouldn't be available to them in their network. So there's just a belief factor that they don't have the connections," said Turpin. Missing the target ose employers that do use so- cial media often miss their target by posting jobs on consumer- oriented channels, found Hays. Ninety-five per cent of employers that use social media to promote products and services use the same channels to promote career opportunities. "at's where it gets confusing," said O'Grady. "If you go to any company's Facebook page, they're using Facebook to sell their prod- ucts and then they're trying to put the jobs through that same chan- nel and (the message) gets lost." Two-thirds of an employer's network, on LinkedIn, Facebook, "the whole lot," are consumers or potential consumers, said O'Grady, meaning the remaining one-third are potential candi- dates. But only about one-third of those are the right ones an employer wants to be in contact with. "A company might say, 'We're connected to 5,000 people' but it turns out that only 10 per cent of those are actually candidates that they're interested in hiring. at's the dilemma that companies are faced with when they're trying to use social media. eir social me- dia strategy is built around raising their profile to sell their product and then, through the same chan- nels, to the same audience, push- ing a message about coming to work." When asked how social media fits into their company's network- ing efforts, 58 per cent of employ- ers believe growing a following is important — but cannot pinpoint exactly why, said Hays. A further 34 per cent are unsure about the size of their current social media following, found the survey. Employers kind of look at it as a popularity contest, said Furtado. "Businesses think the more numbers you have, that means the more valuable your information is but, at the same time, you want to make sure that you're getting value out of what you're following and you're also sharing the value with people who are actually ab- sorbing it. With Twitter, it's really hard to gauge that — there's a lot of spam accounts that will follow and it makes your numbers look good but then it's not a real indi- vidual that you're Tweeting out to," she said. "If someone's actually tweeting us a question directly or sending us a resumé directly, we make an effort to respond to them as a human." A company's strategy should be about starting a two-way con- versation and building credibility and a following by regularly shar- ing useful content, said O'Grady. "It's about engaging with the target audience… trying to en- gage them in meaningful, two- way communication, to create in- teresting content that people are going to want to hear about and they find productive to engage with," he said. "If you're really serious about building a presence and following as an employer, you've got to have a content strategy and that con- tent strategy has to be done over a period of time, it's got to be con- sistent… that's probably the more labour-intensive part." Ten years ago, it was about coNteNt > pg. 20 "It's more about our name and the brand recognition. It's still completely unproven as a recruiting tool."

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