Social Technology in HR and Recruiting

I just had the opportunity to read through the HRx Analysts 2012 Index of Social Technology in HR & Recruiting, and I've got to say, if your job has anything to do with using, buying or evaluating social recruiting software, you need to get your hands on this comprehensive paper.

It starts off outlining some interesting statistics around social adoption in recruiting, illustrating just how disparate and sometimes diametrically opposed companies can be, even internally, when it comes to their approach to using social HR technologies.

For example, in this paper, one study by Jobvite shows 89% of companies are using social media for recruiting. But then 71% of companies surveyed by Proskauer are reporting that they block employees from visiting social networking sites at work. Despite the different surveying organizations, you could assume there is at least a little overlap if not in actual data, then certainly in sentiment and practice.

Social recruiting is clearly still very fluid in its adoption and acceptance.

And the Gartner Hype Cycle for Business Use of Social Technologies agrees, positioning Social Recruitment Software only about 2/3 of the way up to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, with a prediction of 2-5 years before mainstream adoption. In fact, Social Media, Social CRM, Gamification, Social Analytics and Activity Streams are all still making their way up to the crest before they fall into the trough, and then finally settle into whatever form their mainstream use will take.

Back to the HRx report, the real meat of this paper is its discussion of the core challenge coming at us with the rise of social technology in HR & Recruiting: the data. What's going to be important, and how are we going to a) organize and b) visualize it.

To illustrate, one of the many areas Sumser touches on is the changing nature of referrals as we change how we think of "friends." Thanks to social technology, our networks are expanding. A referral now isn't necessarily a personal recommendation, and an employee's friend is now just as likely as not to be someone he or she has never personally met. This is great for increasing the number of candidates into a recruiter's funnel, but makes choosing the best candidates to move forward with much more challenging.

It's a challenge we've been hearing about from our customers for years, and what we aim to mitigate with our Apply and Match technologies. And the importance of being able to address it is only growing.

Beyond the technology, Sumser captures the changing landscape perfectly when he says "All of the sourcing and record keeping programs in the world won’t begin to compensate for a Recruiting process that treats potential candidates as objects. To the extent that current systems perpetuate the myth that data constitutes a relationship, they are major contributors to the problem."

Using social tech for recruiting is certainly not mainstream or consistent yet, but  we can't deny it's beginning to have an impact on how we recruit. And right now, I don't think there's a better set of information to help you plan for the impact social technologies are going to have on your workflow. And to help you recognize when you need to toss your plan aside because the game has changed again.