Software development company Atlassian boosted the number of applicants for its open positions in 17 weeks by 350% using social networking, and its HR manager, Joris Luijke, says SMEs can do the same.
Where did you start with your social networking recruitment push?
We kind of took a marketing approach like a megaphone, we wanted to tell as many people what was happening. In our case we tried to sell jobs, and the customers who saw that tried to spread that message as quickly as possible because of a few things we did. Bear in mind we're a very small team, only three of us, so we needed to be creative.
We needed to get around our small budget, so we used Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to draw people in.
Lots of companies have a Facebook fan page. How did you make sure this campaign was going to be different from the competition?
You have to provide something of value to the outside world. The example of an organisation which just puts a profile on Facebook and expects people to follow them is wrong. It fails, and I'm not surprised, because it doesn't offer value.
So just creating a profile isn't enough. You need to create something that you and a friend will talk about over a meal. Our main proposition was that we gave away a free holiday to people who got a job, so they get to go on a vacation before they even start. Something like that gives value, and is more likely to go viral on the web.
You need to have something quirky, and let word-of-mouth drive it. That is what's going to give you popularity. Many organisations fail to recognise you can't just have a profile and expect people to follow in this respect – it's hard work.
Unfortunately, not every business can afford to give away a holiday. What should companies do if they have limited funds but want to create a campaign of their own?
Get the whole company involved by giving some sort of bonus. We gave away a $2,000 referral bonus to any employee who found someone who we hired, and that gave them incentive to talk about it. HR departments should set up strategies to get employees involved, and if people do it, that will help the campaign by a large magnitude.
Now, not everyone gives away $2,000 but some sort of bonus system is good. We realised it was cheaper to do that than hire a recruiter. And in doing that, people will see that and try and think about the opportunity we have for them. It's the responsibility of the entire organisation to laugh these campaigns.
Why do small businesses need to go on these campaigns? Isn't a newspaper or internet job ad good enough?
This is something that small organisations struggle with. For every applicant a giant like Google hires, they reject about 130. From that huge pool they are obviously bound to find someone extraordinary. We realised we had to do the same, so we embarked on this and now we hire about one person for every 120.
You're going to reject a lot of people out of that group. Why increase the workload for your staff?
If you get fewer applicants you cannot be as critical during the hiring process because you have nothing to work with.
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And in this scenario the 1 in 130 hire ratio is distorted, because it is easy to build a list of 129 CVs that don't match what you need. The objective shouldn't be in achieving the ratio, that is easily achieved by pulling in CVs, the objective should be in having excellent hiring criteria.
And it is the hiring criteria that is the hardest part to define. Google hits the 1/130 ratio partly because lots of people want to work there, but mainly because they have a very clear idea of the people they want and there lack of compromise on their standards in this regard. Most organisations don't have this discipline, nor the patience to deal with the ramifications of a 1/130 ratio.
The 1/130 is a possible outcome but should not be an objective. The strength of all internet marketing technologies is in the ability to measure and set targets. The downside is that we drive the wrong numbers, achieve our objective and still get a poor result.
Mark D Nicholls