Chapter 1. Becoming a Digital Native

At its heart, recruitment is all about communication between organizations and people, that is, a process of communication and relationship building that leads to an eventual hire. How we communicate has changed dramatically over the past two decades; we can now reach a wide audience of professional and personal connections with an immediacy that would have been mind-boggling 20 years ago! These dramatic shifts have had a big impact on business roles that need to communicate with the wider public.

The "dinosaur" recruiters advertising on job boards online may not see the comet coming to drive them to extinction, but it's certainly on its way. There are whole groups of potential high-performing, highly-skilled employees hanging out with their friends and peers on different social networks. If you're looking to recruit a graduate, it's quite likely that if you're successful in reaching just a few in this demographic, then these few will also be connected to quite a large network of other graduates, all in the same city or town.

Similarly, if you're looking to recruit a senior IT professional, it's quite likely that if you're successful in tapping into one senior IT worker's network, then you've reached a larger group of people with similar experience and in your target location. That's not to say that job boards have no purpose, but you're reaching a relatively small audience of people actively searching these boards for their next job. Let's leave the dinosaurs to congregate in the one spot while we explore other, more hospitable environments for survival as a recruiter.

You are no doubt responsible for recruiting for many different types of roles, and reaching the right candidates means using the most appropriate platform: that may be through Facebook for graduates, LinkedIn for mid-career professionals, Meetup for professional specialties in short supply, or Yammer for internal candidates.

If your company has an online presence and employees who are active on social media, then you have an easy result…or do you?

For many senior managers, it's not good enough to delegate to those employees with the skills to engage successfully through social media: communication and relationship building for recruitment needs to be completely aligned to HR's recruitment strategy in order to achieve the business goals. Otherwise, we're all just sitting around laughing at grumpy cats together.

In this chapter, you're going to navigate your way through social networking platforms to find and connect with different communities. Once you've mastered the art of finding communities across multiple platforms as an individual, it will be simple to translate this to an organizational strategy to find and connect with your potential hires in their own communities.