How to convince your CEO to grant you budget for social recruiting
As a talent sourcing professional, you have left no channel unexplored to source candidates. Almost.
You work hard at optimizing resources to meet targets and off late you’ve been exploring social media channels for recruitment.
But when it comes to building a business case for your social recruiting budget you feel the need make it rejection proof.
You tried using credible statistics in your presentations like this one: "94% of recruiters use or plan to use social media for recruiting. This number has increased steadily for the last 6 years." (Source: Jobvite)
Maybe you even tried to present individual social professional networks in a different light like this:
But all you got were top 3 reasons for not staying ahead of this unavoidable trend:
- Perception errors – Aren't the same people accessible through traditional channels?
- What will be the ROI?
- Special case of management blues
Where can you start?
1) Social recruitment pyramid: Start your presentation with the social recruitment pyramid. People work for people and companies. Not for job descriptions. Also the most important factor that professionals today consider before accepting a job is the reputation of the company as a great place to work (source: LinkedIn Talent Trends 2014). Traditional channels are most effective to promote jobs. Social recruitment channels are the best place to let your people and your company shine. This tackles the perception error.
2) Candidate reviews: While statistics can garnish your final presentation, real candidate stories form the core foundation of your proposal. Engage with candidates to represent their perspective. Select three professionals from your peer group across different seniority levels. Get anecdotal feedback from them on professional branding, how they look for opportunities and how do they perceive employer brand. You can put them as real stories for real people.
3) Relevant plan of action
Most social recruiting channels offer a demo of their tools. Try the demo and take it seriously - make notes of all the features that can help you save your resources while you improve over all recruitment quality. Include a relevant and realistic plan of how to intend to use social recruiting tools. This will make the entire exercise more relevant to your organization.
4) Complete picture of ROI: A cross channel RoI snap shot is incomplete if you haven’t yet added qualitative parameters. Qualitative parameters can include – quality of hire (this could take a minimum of 3 months), hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction, referral rates, talent pipeline potential and niche parameters that may be relevant to your industry.
5) Competition and peer evaluation: The most effective way to drive away any management blues is to talk about competition. Can’t find your competition recruiting on a social professional network? Even better! Pitch for being a frontrunner.
Create an elevator pitch - chalk out your vision, goals and journey – this proposal is your ticket for improving and evolving into a social recruitment champion for your company – go for it!