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Wise Man Say helps Recruitment people use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

Dogma is an opinion or a belief that is not to be disputed, doubted or be divergent from it’s accepted form by it’s practitioners or believers.

One theme was a recurring motif throughout the days of TruLondon 3. And I believe that the idea is in serious danger of becoming dogma: this is the notion that the application of social media to recruitment has to be about engagement.

I think we are guilty of overstating the case. Here are 5 reasons why I think Engagement Is Overrated:

1. We are a clique and do not represent

A quick scan down the delegates list would reveal to anyone with a passing familiarity of the social web that what we had at TruLondon 3 was the gathering of an elite. Make no bones about this – this is exactly why we all paid up and turned up – but when you get people with the same interests, in the same place, saying the same things, there is a massive danger that conclusions will be drawn in a bubble of our own making. And sometimes those conclusions do not map at all well onto the experience of those in the outside world. I enjoyed immensely the contact and communication with thought leaders in the space, but at the same time, I was acutely aware that the people ‘in here’’ were nothing like the people ‘out there’. Those outsiders – by and large – do not tweet. They do not know about, think about or care about, ‘Personal Branding’. And their attitude to ‘engagement’ is largely unknown because they never touch us and we never touch them. Can an unrepresentative elite – a clique of experts – really make generalisations about what the outsiders want or need?

2. Case studies are idealized & flawed by sampling

There’s nothing like a good idea illustrated by real life examples. Let’s chain that hypothetical down to concrete e.g’s on what actually happens. No dispute from me. However, illustration is not the same as representation. Case studies, are, after all, preselected on the fact that they worked; I’ve yet to go to a conference where I’ve seen a company rep step up and say, ‘well, we fucked this right up’. Yet it must of happened. Perhaps many, many more times than we know about. Sampling is the problem with case studies as a rule because we look for success, polish it up, and present it as the case from which to draw conclusions. And the slow accumulation of these examples ossify into the collective subconscious, further strengthening the dogma that engagement is key.

The pattern is familiar and the effects are the same; it is the practice of indoctrination. It’s the reason why no one anywhere, at anytime has ever been able to predict anything, unless they are iconoclasts or exiles from the community.

3. We ignore the fact that job seekers are often pragmatic

As the great philosopher Dave Martin once said, ‘work is an unfortunate interruption to the weekend’. A joke of course, but it contains a kernel of truth recognised by everybody. Certainly it’s been the case for many of jobs I’ve ever had, and I don’t think my experience was in any way unique. The essential truth to a lot of work is that it is a practical exchange of time + labour for resources. Obsessive focus on ‘engagement’ ignores this reality, and leads to an overestimation as to how important engagement is to people looking for work. For every job seeker that needs to be ‘engaged’, I suspect that there are 10 more who might just need a fucking job. People find themselves on the market when they don’t want to be and, typically, want off that market asap. They know it’s no joke out there. They have bills to pay, And they are prepared to compromise. We forget this essential pragmatism drives a great deal of job search, and that the average job seeker journey is often very unlike that idealized by those who (over) subscribe to the talent community ideal. In the end, I suspect engagement might mean very little to people if they don’t get a job at the end of their effort.

4. Social media can be great for post and pray

There is no doubt that broadcast techniques can be effectively, creatively and ingeniously used in recruitment. What made me realise that we had segued from evangelism into dogma was that these techniques were routinely dismissed for no other reason than they did not put engagement at the heart of what they do. They were criticised not because they ineffective, or that people did not get jobs, or that employers did not get hires. It was simply considered wrong because ‘engagement’ wasn’t core to the project. No explanation ever seemed to be offered why this was the case, other than the tautology that……‘it wasn’t engagement’. I thought it was great that foursquare pioneers like Craig Fisher uses guerilla advertising tactics to lure candidates in for his clients from their direct competitiors. I don’t see anything wrong with AllTheTopBananas producing ever more intelligent ways to distribute vacancies to users of their mobile application. I’m pretty certain there’s plenty wrong with Gordon Lokenberg, but nothing at all wrong with his innovative use of Augmented Reality as a metaphorical lighthouse for those Engineers with the skillset to see it.

Sure, we’re not using geo location or augmented reality or mobile to ‘engage’ with candidates, but so what? Broadcast is still OK. Broadcast with social tools is also OK. Nothing is abuse if the players in the game agree that it isn’t. And yet we have developed a very real sense that ‘non social’ use of social media is somehow….wrong. That feeling is an emotional response to an idea that we have allowed to embed into ego, and subsequently removed from the jurisdiction of sober assessment.

5. We mistake presence for participation.

Once ideas become embedded, they spread like fungus. And like fungus, they often appear in places where you might least expect them. Nothing brought this out more clearly than when an assertion was made on one of the tracks ‘that most people are on LinkedIn are there in order to engage’. Not so. Not at all in fact. This assertion not only didn’t feel right, it’s also not backed up by the facts – facts produced by LinkedIn themselves. It took one of my sourcing heroes – Irina Shamaeva – to summarize the counterpoint that, ‘most people are on LinkedIn.…..because think they ought to be’. In essence, setting up profiles when they need to look for work, and then, more or less forgetting about it when looking for work became less important. We’ve all the seen the figures and the graphs of social media sign up – they are spectacular – but it is a mistake to assume the hockey shaped curve represents greater participation or engagement. The 80/20 rule still applies – the vast majority of activity on two of the three major social networking platforms comes from a small and shrinking (in terms of overall share) percentage of the ‘community’. There may be more people there, but it’s more people doing very little. Indeed, it would seem that most people sign up because they feel they should, then don’t see the point – or maybe don’t like the point – and in fact, disengage.

Conclusion

Understand this: I am not criticising Engagement. Engagement, conversation, dialogue is what makes the social web the transformatory force it is, in recruitment as well as in other places. It creates a new space, with fuzzy parameters, giving room for the sorts of experimentation that is easy to get passionate about. It is what makes social recruiting special, and I’m glad I’m in it. But we need to remind ourselves that we are playing with models, no more. These models do not mesh very closely with the reality of job search for the majority of the people who are looking for work, and the engagement we have conditioned ourselves to see as ideal may not always be what job seekers want, expect or need. Social media, used for recruitment in ‘non’ social ways is not any worse for the fact that it doesn’t have ‘engagement’ at the core of what it does. We should simply applaud when it works. And there is nothing wrong with looking at LinkedIn as it might well actually be – a giant database of self updating information, to be mined for candidates, by recruiters, looking to fill jobs.

So…….TweetMyJobs is the worlds largest twitter job board…that still true?
Yes, I think that’s still true (laughs). We’re the biggest. We got in really early in 2009, just about when the mainstream media had started talking about Twitter and social media, we got some great press straight away and we sort of hit the ground running immediately.

The name is kind of self explanatory, but let’s not overestimate the readers of Wise Man Say’s blog. Can you put TweetMyJobs in a nutshell for us?
I’m not sure I can put it into a sentence for you. We are……. a robust social media recruiting platform for companies who are looking to get brand, and career openings, out on the social web. Wait a minute, let me ask you something…..who is your audience, the readers of your blog?

There are probably not enough people to constitute categories, Gary.
OK. Well, can I give you two sentences?

Please do
Well, if you are talking to HR practitioners and Talent Acquisition people, I think that first sentence applies. For job seekers on the other hand, it may be a very different sentence. TweetMyJobs provides job seekers with instant notifications of job openings that are catered for their need, to the point where they could be the first to know of the job opening within a business or area that they are interested in. What the job seeker gets from us is the ability to get the jobs they are interested in fed straight into their twitter stream as soon as they have made their selections on the set up page.

So…TweetMyJobs is kind of like an alerts system for Job Seekers? Why have you gone for the distribution rather than search model ?
(without pause)
Pretty simply, that’s the way society is heading. In many respects, this is one of the main things with social media – that the consumer no longer needs to search for information, but have that information come to you. With TweetMyJobs, job seekers can profile the type of job vacancies they want on our JobChannel and have those vacancies tweeted to them as soon as they happen. This is not only about jobs. It’s with any product or service that goes B2C. It’s the way the world is going. Our model is aligned with that paradigm.

Is TweetMyJobs doing anything specifically on mobile devices? Do you have an Iphone / Android App in the pipe?
Absolutely. Everyone has a smart phone, and we think that 2011 is going to be year of mobile. In fact, the widespread adoption of smart phones is forcing companies to get into mobile, even if they didn’t initially want to – I don’t think there is a single company out there that is not attempting a mobile play. As far as TweetMyJobs is concerned, we are going to add a mobile site, but to be honest with you, I don’t think it will add as much value as some of the other mobile initiatives we are running. I’d love to tell you about them, but I’d rather our competitors not be aware of what we doing just as yet!

Fair enough Gary…..
But the beauty of TweetMyJob is that we are tightly integrated into what Twitter themselves do – as soon as you set up your profile, Twitter is taking care of the rest. To a large extent, we can continue to piggyback off what Twitter do; as they move into the geo location space, so we will be able to provide those services on top.

Interesting. Would it be fair to say that your interest in recruitment ends at distributing the information?
Our core value is getting jobs distributed. We have not got into assessment or candidate management or those types of activities – we are not going to be an ATS. In fact, there are many great products out there that we have integrated with and we see ourselves as providing a means by which the clients of those companies – that is, clients of the ATS’s – a way of getting their brands onto the social web for very little resource investment. So it’s really a Win-Win-Win situation we have as far as the ATS market is concerned.

I can see TweetMyJobs might be very useful for a company that is looking to take the leap into the social web, but not having the resources to do so…..
Yes, that’s true. Well, it depends on the level of maturity of the business, but a lot of companies now know that social media is not free, and you need to invest in it to make it work. Our clients are of all types; some of the bigger brands like, and need, to look after their own branding. Others – medium sized companies – where perhaps branding is less important, like us to take care of it. We see all types. After the first generation, companies start integrating strategy, engagement and monitoring into how they do social media. And we are getting wrapped into a larger social media strategy as those companies mature.

Do you see that as a potential revenue stream for TweetMyJobs?
That’s a great question. We are starting to get requests from our clients to do things like monitoring brand. And, as you know, social media is all about brand. There are a lot of companies that don’t have the bandwidth to handle it, and we are actively looking at value add. We’re probably going to offer a service for it.

I know how you make your money, but I have to ask – how do you make your money?
(laughs)
We don’t monetize from the job seeker, so that’s first and foremost; if they want to use the core service of getting targeted jobs in their twitter feed, there’s nothing to pay. If you are an employer or an agency, then you typically take a annual subscription with a cost of between $4,000 (£2491.00 GBP) to $10,000 (£6228.00) USD. Our pricing model is very different from most job boards out there. Our aim is to get every job a company has out on the job board – we don’t nickel n dime on a per job basis.

I read a statistic the other day that only 30% of corporate openings make it to the job boards because it is cost prohibitive. That is ridiculous. And it doesn’t help the job seeker, especially in the economic market as it is. Early on when we were thinking about this business, we took a philanthropic decision to get every job a company has out on the job board, and not to make price a barrier to that. At the end of the day, we’re trying to get society back to work.

So we price by brand – a large client that has many brands like Sears Group has multiple brands – and each one requires work to customize the channel. So a corporate client takes an annual subscription and we create the branded channel from which we tweet their vacancies. Of course, we also provide an a la carte option. For a smaller company who doesn’t have many jobs, it doesn’t make sense to take out an annual subscription. So you can treat TweetMyJobs just like a job board. We would charge $2-$20 according to the duration of the tweet, and 0.99 cents per retweet, with no limits on how many you want to do.

Hang on….what do you mean ‘duration of a tweet’?
It means how long that tweet is out there before it’s deleted. Let me make a point of this – it’s very important but amazingly neglected by the market that is supposedly sensitive about brand. We can say that TweetMyJobs are the only service out there that manages the tweets from inception of the job to the death of that job. What people have forgotten is that the tweet still exists even after the job is filled or closed; this isn’t just technical issue; this is a huge branding issue for companies. When a job seeker clicks on a link to a job that no longer exists, they aren’t going to blame twitter or Tweetmyjobs. They are going to blame the company that posted the job. So, after the given period or when the job is closed, we go into the Twitter and we delete the tweet.

Delete the tweet. Like it Gary, like it. So, how long until world conquest?
Well, we’ve done the US (he’s not joking), so the next stage is Europe. We’ve reached out to Asia, then South America, Africa and what else is left? Antartica

Yes, lets get those penguins Tweeting. Thanks Gary, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you.
No problem Wise Man Say, lets talk again.

Thanks to Gary Zukowski, CEO at TweetMyJobs. TweetMyJobs is the worlds largest twitter job board.. Follow them on Twitter @TweetMyJobs

So before we have a fall out, have a quick look at this: A Survival Phrasebook on the 5 most commonly used Twitter terms.

1. Tw___.
Yes, thats right tweeps, Twitter pioneers have shown their true geek colours by rebranding old words by the simple device of adding the prefix ‘Tw’ or ‘Twitter’ to any English word that will take it. Examples include:

twitterverse – the sum total of everyone on twitter
twitterati - active users of twitter
tweeple – people
twestival – a twitter organised festival
tweetflash – a breaking news item on twitter

You get the picture. Thankfully, the semantics haven’t changed, only the spelling.

2. RT.
An abbreviation of another twitter coined term, the Retweet. Many people think the real point of Twitter is the ease and speed with which information can become viral. If your update is sufficiently interesting or important, your followers may be inclined to forward it to their followers who in turn may do the same. Within moments your post could be reaching an audience of thousands. ‘RT’ has become the Twitterati’s method of indicating forwarded content – the letters themselves don’t have a technical function (you can forward any tweet without them just as well) so its really a method of attribution, giving credit for the original tweeters tweet, so to speak. It has also come to be used as an appeal to spread the message – significantly used during emergency or disaster situations, such as the Mumbai bombings of 2008 and the Iranian Presidential elections in 2009.

3. # or hashtag.
A user driven agreement to collect tweets on a particular topic to make it easier for people to search for and contribute to a conversation. Agreement is reached simply through hitting a tipping point in usage – users insert the # in front of the topic title and tweet away. If enough people agree to use the hashtag, the topic can ‘trend’ – more about this later. In this way news can spread, almost always faster than traditional distribution channels. Social action (or reaction) can be seen in the #trafigura and #janmoir, where controversial legal and editorial decisions by the oil trading company Trafigura and The Daily Mail led to a widespread outpouring of anger, creating ‘trending’ topics which at one moment had both Trafigura and Jan Moir as the most tweeted about topics worldwide. The negative publicity generated was such that the Trafigura ruling was overturned, whilst the Daily Mail lost most of its online sponsors, with Jan Moir having to post an apology 24 hours later.

4. Trending topics.
A subject of conversation that is popular enough to ranked by Twitter. The subject itself could be anything – a football result, a political summit or the return of Elvis – its the users who decide by tweeting about it. This is the reason why Twitter founder Biz Stone thinks the platform has potential to become a ‘Virtual Water Cooler’ – by tracking trending topics on twitter or 3rd party application like Twitscoop or Trendmaps anyone with an account can swiftly see what people are generally talking about at any point in time, anywhere in the world and contribute to it. It is also a great way to get scoop – trending has proven to be a much faster way of a receiving news – now classic examples include NBA star Shaquille O’Neal’s trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers (Shaq himself found out through a twitter user telling him the deal had been done) and the Continental Airlines 737 crash in Denver when the plane slid off the runway during take-off on Dec 21. Passenger Mike Wilson famously tweeted. “Holy f**king s**t – I was just in a plane crash!”

5. @.
When used in tweets, or in a search, it will look for a user profile rather than the content of that users tweets. For instance, a search on @iran will bring up results of individuals who have the word ‘iran’ in their username, rather than any tweets about the Islamic Republic of Iran. In many respect ‘@’ is the opposite to ‘#’ in the twitterspeak – @ for users, # for content. It is used as a method of attribution and of messaging – the users who’ve been ‘mentioned’ this way can check what is being said about them and who is saying it. For companies and individuals alike, its a great way to monitor brand reputation and even to address customer service issues before they build momentum. Facebook liked it enough to lift the entire concept lock, stock & barrel with its new tagging feature.

And now in Facebook….

And got these replies.

Turns out, he’s absolutely serious and what started as perhaps an ‘off-the-cuff’ idea has become a low cost, high volume, and according to McKay himself, high quality response. Why might this recruitment approach work?

1. He’s the Creative Director of Saatch & Saatchi.
The power of the personal brand is evident. Whilst Mckay himself may not be a business celebrity in the league of a Steve Jobs, he nevertheless works for a globally renowned corporate brand that carries with it a cache by association. It’s probably a fair guess to say that Mike may not have got his response if he instead worked as CD for Hoxton Best Kebab. The lesson for employers is that your senior people need to leverage the power of their brand, especially in the Twitterverse where ‘normal’ people feel like they have the chance to directly communicate with the top guy.

2. He’s pitching to the right audience
Mike only has 634 followers when he tweeted his soon-to-be famous tweet – that’s a pretty low number in the era of auto-follows and automated follower growing software. However, he has received several dozen replies from individuals who appear to be legit candidates. How can this be? Well it demonstrates that numbers are not everything – what matters, is the quality of your following community – real people, who actually are interested in what you have to say. And the people who are following Mike turn out to be advertising executives, content people, editors, and copywriters – in other words, the very audience you might expect the winning applicant might come from. The lesson for employers (& recruiters) here is that you can launch a successful twitter recruitment campaign so long as you are confident that as your audience is the relevant talent community.

3. He’s made is really easy to apply
Read the tweet again. Funniest tweet gets the job. No links to further work, no email to send resume or CV, no request for ID, references or anything of the sort. Want the job? Spend the time it takes to knock out 140 characters on your smart phone. The lesson to employers here transcends social media – make your application strategy simple and low cost for the potential applicant and you will maximise your volume return.