Anyone reading this blog is likely to have found it through social media, so I don’t need to explain how much of a buzz there is around social media in recruitment at the moment. However as a PR company I like to think we have a slightly different take on it – although we know how to how to use these tools in the recruitment process, our focus is more on using social media to promote the recruiter’s brand and expertise.
As BlueSky’s resident social media ‘leader’ if I can use that word, I recently went to PR Week’s Digital Media Conference, where I could listen to big names speak about their social media presence. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but was interested to hear what fancy things the experts were doing.
The answer was: everything that we’re helping recruiters to do. Social media really is so new that we’re all still figuring out what works best. Vodafone had some impressive Google and Twitter mash ups and Action for Children managed to get a massive 9,000 people doing the Time Warp in Trafalgar Square through using social media! These campaigns were really interesting to hear about but it was nice to know that even know that although these companies have techie experts to call on and big budgets to spend, they’re still using the same ideas and technology that many SMEs are using – leveraging blogs and twitter to promote themselves.
It was even more interesting to listen to how companies like Eurostar managed a crisis; I’m sure we can all remember back to the snow trauma which left people stranded and complaining that they had no information. Eurostar at this time actually had two twitter accounts which they used for marketing purposes, but it hadn’t occured to this huge organisation to use Twitter to actually speak to and engage with customers! This only changed when they brought in a specialist digital agency to help them out. All this at a time when recruiters were already on Twitter, talking, networking and engaging with other people.
So, the point to this post is really to tell recruiters that as an industry they are really staying ahead of the game. Of course we still have a way to go though, with many recruiters still not seeing the value of some of web 2.0. However it was Gabi Whitfield, Communications Director at Nissan that said “ignore Twitter at your peril” and I thought that was very apt. I may just use that phrase when trying to convince the next sceptic!