Mistakes Recruiters Make In Social Media

This is an excerpt from a speech I gave at the AACE Fall Conference.

There are a series of five mistakes we as recruiters make when we first try to tap into online communities. We'll cover those mistakes and then turn to best practices.

The Top Five Mistakes:

1. The Impersonal Connection
2. Not Knowing the Lingo
3. Trying to Be Hip
4. The Disconnect
5. The OverReaction

Mistake #3 Trying To Be Hip

Using the word hip probably wasn’t the right word for today’s college graduate, but it does illustrate something.  I’m not a college graduate, and if I walked around telling everyone the conference was “church,” it wouldn’t go over too well.  Church is supposed to mean good, excellent, as in, you’re preaching to the choir.

I don’t want to call out any companies, but there are plenty of examples where executives try to rap, or dress in street clothes, or come up with crazy characters that are really supposed to connect with a younger audience.  I recommend against it.  The truth is you don’t have to be hip to get your message across, and the chances of being seen as cool are far less than being mocked.  Try to build brands and ideas that would work for any generation, and you’re in good territory.

You can use the new multimedia to connect to your audience.  In this case, the medium is the message.  Using video, or blogs, or MySpace is connecting with them – there is no need to go overboard and risk an embarrassing mistake.

Mistake #4 The Disconnect
The disconnect is an area that is hard enough to control when you’re doing regular recruiting, but with college recruiting, the desire to bring in new employees often overshadows the need to set expectations and maintain high retention. 

One of the problems with using new, flashy techniques is the disconnect that occurs between recruiting and the actual job offer. In many companies, the job fairs and the initial phone calls are great, but the actual employment process is lengthy and more of a grind.  Today’s students are more likely to drop out of a bad employment process, assuming that a company that is difficult to work with is going to be a tough place to work for.

The advantages of building a relationship with a community is access to a wealth of information on what it’s like to really work for your company.  A strong college recruiting experience can be augmented with recently hired employees providing information on adjustments they made in joining the workforce, in the specific field in which they work, as well as best ways to be a successful and productive worker.  Microsoft has done this to a large degree, showing videos of the employment process that go as far as showing off the interview rooms and the hiring managers.  What they’ve done is humanize what was often considered as the great evil empire.

Imagine that – changing your employment brand from evil empire, to bright, talented, and fun people working for a company with $30 billion in cash on hand.  That was done with blogs and Channel 9, which was a employment video channel that now has over a thousand videos showing what it’s like to work at Microsoft.

Mistake #5 The OverReaction

This is all new – in terms of the medium, but it often is just the repackaging of initiatives you’ve used in the past.  The problem is one of speed of adoption.   Everything moves at a faster pace, which means that overreactions are more common.  Companies, especially executives who were mistrustful of a new initiative to start with, often slam the brakes on something you’re trying, bringing in PR and Damage Control to try and contain a gaffe.  This is like pouring gasoline on the fire, because it suggest that a mistake that has been made was deliberate on the part of the company.

You don’t apologize for something unless you know it is wrong, and yet companies often attempt to apologize whenever any controversy rears its head.  The correct way to handle a new media problem is to be open about mistakes, but point out that you’re new to this and still trying, and would like to work with the community to improve how you communicate. Acknowledging a mistake and reaching out to correct the problem is what is needed, not an apology and an abject retreat.

So these are the most common mistakes.  You’ll recognize them, with a few twists, because nothing is every truly 100% new.  In this case, the mistakes are usually made because of miscommunication or a failure to respect the rules of a community.