140 Characters or Less-Is the Social CV The Future of Recruitment?
Social media is the present and the future. It’s fun, it’s social (obviously) and most people who you ask are on Facebook and Twitter. However, does it have any place in recruitment?
There’s no getting away from the fact that social media for recruiters and for candidates is a hugely powerful tool and by not using it, you could be missing out on a wealth of potential candidates and clients.
The Social CV is becoming big business
Many job hunters are creating social CVs to; generate an online presence, stand out from the crowd and demonstrate what they can do. Social CVs can include videos, websites and Facebook pages with some applicants even going as far as to cram their CV into a 140 character tweet.
This list is not exhaustive, social CVs created by ambitious candidates are becoming increasingly more creative with how they advertise themselves to recruiters.
How exactly is this Relevant to Online Recruiters?
Social CVs are great for recruiters because they give you the chance to check out your candidate before inviting them to interview. It’s saving you time, the candidate time and usually gives you a good indication of what someone is like before you even meet them. If you like what you see online, there’s a good chance you will like them in person.
You can often find out far more about someone from their social media presence than you ever could from a two page word document. If potential employees are putting their social CVs out there online to be seen, why shouldn’t recruiters take advantage?
Most decent recruiters know
LinkedIn is a well-known and established site used in recruiting and is useful for building connections and networking. What about the less obvious social media and social networkingsites ?
Did you know that when it comes to finding great candidates you can use; Twitter, Google+ and Facebook with apps such as BranchOut. Many recruiters are already posting their jobs on Facebook and Twitter, as well as looking for potential employees on these sites.
Recruiters are now able to use sponsored tweets and pages, and target them at specific groups of people. The great thing for recruiters about these sponsored updates and pages is that they come up in the activity feed alongside the usual status updates of friends and followers, making them difficult for your ideal candidate to miss.
Though social media and all its various platforms can be mutually beneficial tool potential employees need to be aware that their social media presence can very much work for or against them. For example, the recent Facebook timeline update lays bare a user’s full social history.
If left public, a recruiter could easily read everything their potential candidate has written and it may not always be favourable. From the recruiter’s point of view though, this could be a good thing! As social media is growing more popular, it seems a mutually beneficial tool for both recruiters and job seekers alike.
Till next time,
Cheryl