This is part of a series of blog posts written for UK Recruiter by the team at BlueSky PR. If you didn’t make the event (or this particular session) it’s a nice summary of the key points.
Last week we blogged about the importance of using social media and internet features to enhance your recruitment, which was presented at the UK Recruiter’s Network Conference. As well as this, we also learned from Kevin Crews about the importance of mobile technology in the sector.
Kevin’s principal theme was that communication (and particularly quick communication) is vital within recruitment. This is mainly due to how efficient candidates themselves are when job-seeking, and the mobile technology that is available to them. For example, 51% of people use their phones as their primary connection to the internet, which means that most people are online 24/7. This provides recruitment agencies with both an opportunity and a problem. Clearly communication with a candidate is easier and more flexible. However it is also just as easy for your competitors, making it vital that you are just as prepared to communicate immediately as your candidates are.
Whilst many recruiters may think that email is the most conventional way to contact a candidate, Kevin explained to us only 22% of emails are read, compared to 98% of text messages. Clearly texting is the most effective way of reaching the target audience, as well as being the quickest. Even if you can detail an entire job specification through a text message, it is still an important way of making initially contact.
Kevin’s presentation also highlighted the three most important things you need in order to connect to talent:
1. Authenticity
2. Transparency
3. Interaction
As social media publicises almost every piece of information to candidates, it is vital to be transparent and give a realistic understanding of what it is like to work for a company.
As a recruiter it is also your responsibility to understand job-seeking from a candidate’s perspective. This means considering the keywords they will search for on the internet. For example, whilst the company position “Operations Specialist B2” might be the official internal title of a position, no candidate is ever going to search for that. Make it clear in the job title exactly what the role is.
If building relationships is important now, it will only become more and more vital in the future. By the end of 2013 the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the number of people on Earth. 91% of US citizens have admitted that they have their phone in reach every minute of every day. The fact that candidates have access to this amount of technology means that when they are looking for a job they are literally on call every minute of every day. This means as a recruiter, you must be too.
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