If you’re like me than you know that these three words are really burning a hole in your head. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t get a email, a tweet, see an event or read an article about Social Media Recruiting. Now I see that we actually have titles for these people within companies that just focus on Social Media Recruiting?

Have we all gone mad, yeah we all know how much search volume Facebook is getting, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go out and create a brand new title and category for this. Now we even have conferences dedicated to Social Media Recruiting. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s all a big lie. I recently had a conversation with a respected sourcer in the industry and just to see how crazy I really am. As I began saying that this whole thing didn’t exist, and before I could finish she is already shaking her head. Maybe it’s cool to say it and maybe all the newbies in recruiting love it but guess what it doesn’t exist.

By now I hope I have your attention and you maybe saying to yourself hey Jason you have a social media recruiting service listed on your website. The answer to this is yes, it’s not that I believe the hype but to be able to sell the service I have to use those words (oh yeah and we also do it to increase our SEO rankings to get more clients.) So now I’m going to reveal to you why there is no such thing as social media recruiting.

When I started in recruiting back in the day my title was Technical Recruiter. It wasn’t social media recruiter or a resume database recruiter or even a open web recruiter. So why should we now be designating conferences, titles etc for social media recruiting. The net-net result is that social media is a tool not a function. You would utilize social media tools to recruit, just like you would use Google, internal resume databases, job board resume databases, Linked name sourcing and the list goes on and on. As these are considered tools, software, technology, and websites I don’t think that we should start classifying them as individual skill sets.  If we do head down this path than let’s do just that.

That would mean a real Social Media Recruiter would be purely that. It would be mean that you never leave Social Media. Your ats (applicant tracking system) is built on social media, all of your interaction is done on social media sites, all jobs posted or listed are done on social media, and 100% of your hires come from social media.

So spending so much time on social media means the following:

· No job posting to job boards/open web
· No use of ats (applicant tracking systems) unless they are only social media ats’s.
· No use of resume databases either internal or external

There is one source of hire/tool that I have omitted here which is the highest source of hire to date. It’s a source that is truly considered social networking (notice that I didn’t say social media because social media doesn’t really exist either). The source of hire that I speak about is employee referrals. Employee referral is the one true social networking tool that is our biggest asset to date. So if you really want to make your social networking program a success stop spending so much time on Twitter, and start walking around your company and ask employees who they may know for open positions.

So I ask you. Does Social Media Recruiting really exist or are they just tools that we use to recruit?