Recruiting through Social Media
It is well known that one of the first steps that a Human Resources department takes after receiving a resume from a recent college graduate is to head over to MySpace and Facebook and learn more about the candidate. A bad or negative profile on these social sites can mean the end of the application process for many students. Reputation management should be something that every college senior focuses on this year. It can make the difference between finding your dream job or just any job.
Companies are also finding that the social networks are a great recruiting tool way with the uploading of recruitment videos to YouTube being the preferred method. Greg Wineman, brand manager for Vurv, says:
“Not only was it a great campaign idea, it was also a great way to cause buzz internally,” Wineman says. “Posting the video was a cheap way to get our message out; plus it’s free advertising and free brand building. You couldn’t ask for a better combination.”
Even Google has ventured into the video recruiting field using its video rival YouTube. Google’s engineering director Jenn Fitzpatrick narrates a video that sells a happy lifestyle in the San Francisco Bay area, good weather, nice people, effective mentoring, and exciting work. During the course of the video, Fitzpatrick steals a moment with a colleague, a four-year Google veteran who exclaims that it’s great “working on a product that millions of people are using! It’s fun to go to a party and meet people who use GMail, which I worked on for over a year.”
Using video as a recruiting tool makes sense in today’s broadband world. As John Williamson, IT manager and webmaster of candidate recruiting at Williamson Employment Services in St. Joseph, Michigan says
“The newest group coming up cut their teeth on nothing but video games; static text is not catching their attention as much as something that moves.” Video allows you to stand out from the crowd, and appear cool at the same time.
For many job seekers, those are the attributes that they are looking for in an employer.
Filed under Reputation Management, Social Media Optimization : Comments (3) : Oct 2nd, 2006
October 3rd, 2006 at 2:50 pm
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