SocialJobWorking™ Heats Up The Recruitment World
According to TweetMyJobs (TMJ) founder Gary Zukowski, “Social Media Recruitment is hot, even sizzling, in the HR community these days and many consider it the Holy Grail for finding the ever-elusive passive jobseeker. TMJ, part of the CareerArc Group, has pioneered social recruiting on places like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They are the inventors of the “Who Button” on Facebook, as well as the proprietary technology that makes all this magic happen. With more than 11,000 category and location specific job channels on Twitter, they are the largest repository of jobs in the Twitterverse. Zukowski realizes though that like anything else, Social Media recruiting is only one arrow that should be in every recruiter’s quiver, albeit a very important one and an unlikely partner is moving the bar in many markets across the country: your local newspaper.
According to published studies, Social Media recruiting is growing fast. Forbes cites 86% of all SmartPhone owners in the US have used their device to search for a job. Further, it is expected that mobile devices will eclipse desktop in job search applications in early 2014. This is astounding news that is backed up by usage statistics from some of the top providers of job search technology in the industry.
At the International Association of Employment Websites (IAEWS) Annual Congress in Las Vegas this year, three top panelists each came up with the exact same conclusion. Mobile and Social Media are here to stay and for each of them (SimplyHired.com, Beyond.com and Madgex) 37% of all job seekers were using mobile regularly to look for a job.
How does this relate to Social Media? Well, Social Media is the number one use for smart phones and tablets, period. In fact, Twitter and Facebook come preloaded on most devices built today. Within social media usage, Twitter is the most used and fastest growing application.
Twitter? Really? Isn’t Twitter that site where people tell all their friends (and the rest of the Twitterverse) where in the world they are and what they are eating or doing at that precise moment? Well, it used to be and some of that still goes on but Twitter has evolved into one of the world’s most popular search engines seeing about 2.1 billion searches everyday approaching Google itself. Many of those are news related. People are turning to Twitter to look for up-to-the-second coverage of an event. Real time information is in the palm of your hand and currently there are 9,100 “tweets” or messages every second of every day with approximately 512 million channels and growing rapidly. So it really is no surprise that job searching has grown to regularly be in the top ten of Twitter searches. Companies and publishers have learned how to effectively use Twitter and its Social Media counterparts Facebook and LinkedIn for recruitment with outstanding results.
Newspapers, once thought to be dead or dying have re-emerged as important resources for employers. Just ask Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos, both of whom have made significant investments in newspapers in the last twelve months. Newspapers provide one-stop shopping for the latest and greatest in recruitment strategies and many have recognized that Social Media is the real key to job recruitment.
For example, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has worked with Cross-Post Classified Networks for years in offering its clients popular niche recruitment boards in categories such as healthcare, diversity and veterans. Cross-Post, a ten-year old Petaluma CA based company is an innovator in the classified recruitment advertising space. In mid 2012, they partnered with TweetMyJobs.com and began providing newspapers with a Social Media/Print/Digital strategy called SocialJobWorking ™. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quickly added SocialJobWorking ™ to its product offering and the results have been solid. Their clients now have the ability to get their jobs out to prospective candidates faster than ever and their job views have increased along with revenues and results.
According to Susan Quinn, Multi-Media Recruitment Advertising Manager at the Milwaukee Journal/JSJobs, “We now have the ability to give our clients an easy, cost-effective solution to incorporate social media into employers’ recruitment strategy”.
So how does this all work?
SocialJobWorking ™ takes the employers recruitment ad and optimizes it for search (using proprietary SEO technologies), geotags it for location and then uploads it to Twitter, Facebook and other Social Media venues.
Google then picks up the posts and the viral process begins. Social Media is inherently viral and jobs are broadcasted far and wide by the users/candidates themselves.
“It is the perfect storm for recruitment,” noted Carl Braun, CEO of Cross-Post LLC and a 30-year industry veteran.
Ads appear in the activity feeds on social sites of candidates searching for jobs and who have opted in to receive category/location specific job alerts. The newspaper print ad is shrunken down to its most important elements to fit into the 140- character maximum on Twitter but expands to the full ad when clicked on. All of this is optimized for the mobile and desktop job searcher. Mobile users can also use the TMJ phone app to locate employers that are hiring and can even point their smartphone at a building and see the job openings inside using new technology called “augmented reality”. The Who Button on Facebook, a job referral tool, compounds the effect.
SocialJobWorking ™ combines the inherent “local” power of print with digital, social and mobile to complete the turbo charged recruitment package. Newspapers across the US have seen excellent candidate response rates and revenues are up substantially as well. The newspaper retains the ability to remove adds from Social Media once they are filled protecting future revenues. This is an exclusive feature of SocialJobWorking ™.
“Many newspapers that currently use Social Media for job postings independently, are not aware that those postings could be costing them future ad dollars. The ability to remove the ads from Social Media once filled is critical,” added Braun.
So much for the newspaper dinosaur. Where the Internet used to be a macro “shot gun” recruitment tool, SocialJobWorking ™ has changed the landscape. Targeted, local, viral, social recruiting combined with print is here to stay and Cross-Post Classified Networks is adding new converts each month.
While employers continue to add new arrows to their recruitment quiver, their local newspaper is once again becoming a valuable resource.
For more information on SocialJobWorking™ contact Carl Braun (carl@cross-post.com) or visit: www.cross-post.com
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