New media kills the recruitment stars ?

Through reading the article “Social Recruiting Trends in 2012” by Jindrich Liska, a pioneer in the field of social recruitment , published on Recruiter.com,  we can learn how the spreading of Social Media has impacted recruiting methods. Recruiters and companies are now developing their “social recruitment” and one wonders if those changes are leading to the end of recruitment agencies.

Social media networks have become a major tool for increasing recruiters pool of candidates over the last few years . Companies even begun to use their employees personal social networks to get access to a huge number of profiles of talented persons. This new trend called “referral hiring” is a very efficient way to enlarge a company’s range of potential candidates.

In the war between different social Networks in terms of recruitment, Facebook appears to be leading the way. With the new Facebook timeline, which is actually a kind of biography with personal and professional information, recruiters have access to their contacts background. Companies are creating more attractive career pages, with specific content focused on particular job offers in the aim to catch users and potential candidates attention. Furthermore, Facebook Apps like “Branchout”  are developed to enable more and more professional networking activities. Career focus content is being developed on many social media websites and recruiters will try to establish stronger relationships with candidates by using these new media conversation tools. Google+, the fastest growing social network in history offers to its users a compartmentalized platform where you can create different circles of confidentiality and share different information based on whether it is professional or personal . In addition to this , the “Hangout Tool”, a new Google video chatting application will optimize the way recruiters can interview candidates. Also the expansion of twitter and its growing number of members must be taken into account regarding these new recruitment trends. Companies and recruiters are developing their visibility and tweeting more and more career-focused content. Besides this, Twitter’s tools such as the “Who to follow” application will enable users to strengthen their professional network and get in touch with recruiters by being offered, for instance, links to other company accounts. These Social Networks are beginning to make it difficult for specialists in the social recruiting industry.  LinkedIn is not as widely used as Facebook by businesses but its number of members is growing  quickly as it seduces more and more career-focused users. Some companies are dropping their recruiting agencies and are embracing LinkedIn due to the fact that LinkedIn can improve the company’s web pages and add more precise content on its users profiles to compete with Facebook or Google+.

Companies, mainly in times of crisis, are trying to reduce their costs and social recruiting enables businesses to save the money they used to spend on job boards and recruiting agencies. Besides, many firms plan to internalize the recruiting process again to develop a corporate culture in their pools of candidates. But Alexandre Renoult, writer of “5 reasons why social networks will not have the skin of Camels” on lesechos.fr and general manager of Rhésolution, a french recruiting agency disagrees with this last argument saying that companies could develop that corporate culture in terms of recruitment before the spread of social networking.  According to him, the recruiting market has to evolve with the social networks and professionals in recruitment have to adapt to new needs and methods. It might not be easy for big firms with their cumbersome processes, but small agencies should be able to change and adapt. Moreover, using social networks is not that easy and the companies recruiting departments are not trained well enough to make fully effective use of them. That’s one of reasons why recruiting companies will remain useful. Finally,  Alexandre Renoult points out the fantasy that using social networks for recruitment is totally costless. It’s not. First, developing a real community on the web is time consuming and secondly, recruiters solutions developed by some Social Networks such as LinkedIn are very costly while certain recruitment agencies are gradually decreasing their tariffs.

Social media networks are definitely changing the way people are recruited, but it appears that the recruitment field can still adapt to those new trends and survive in a market where new users are very demanding .