June 2008 – Recruiters need to understand social networking

I met an old friend the other day and we spent a little time reminiscing over our school days. He reminded me about the poor careers advice at our grammar school more than thirty years ago.

During his time in the sixth form, he said, he had picked up a leaflet from the BBC and was showing interest in TV camera work. The careers teacher dismissed his interest and gave him the name of a company of gas appliance fitters.

This was typical of careers advice at the time. Teachers didn’t just suppress our desires, they trampled all over them. My friend lasted nine months at the company, left to take a degree, joined the BBC and is now a highly respected TV director who knows everything there is to know about camera work.

Back in the early 1970s television work was still regarded as something quite rarefied – not for the likes of working class boys from a northern mill town. While times have changed, I’m still not sure whether an older generation is best qualified to give career advice to the next one down.

Even traditional careers such as those in the law, medicine, accountancy and insurance are changing. But, at the same time, new possibilities are emerging, sometimes mixing and matching personal interests with opportunities for profit or for voluntary work. Some of these opportunities can be pursued alongside a more traditional job.

Given these broadening arenas for earning a living, employers must adjust their attitudes to those they employ. Chiefly they must begin to drop the idea of ownership of employees.

The term: “my people” or “our people” is becoming anachronistic and beginning to sound slightly presumptive. People have a life outside work and sometimes an identity inside work that does not always correspond with the job title.

Tensions are emerging where these separate lives overlap and people “borrow” time from employers. Speaking in London last week with a group of recruiters at a meeting of the The Forum of Professional Recruiters, I was surprised to find that a big majority of them had banned the use of internet social networking sites in the office.

Only one of the agency managers had continued to allow such use. “I’m finding that our policy on such sites is raised at every interview these days when I am recruiting new staff. These sites are not important to me but they are to young people,” he said

The implication is that to ban such sites is to lose out on candidates. It’s far better, I would argue, to draw up a policy on internet usage, ideally in consultation with staff. If people understand work expectations then most of them will take a reasonable attitude to web site usage. If they’re working in teams, the ones who are good at getting work completed will soon tire of those who are constantly accessing the web.

The problem is that the web is becoming increasingly seductive, drawing people in to forums, emailing, blogging and posting habits that can prove a significant distraction. But at the same time, these habit-changing influences can sometimes prove useful to employers.

Recruiters, in particular, must become aware of the powers, particularly in job referrals, inherent in social networking technologies and applications.

Some time ago in this column I wrote of a paper in the 1960s called The Strength of Weak Ties, published by Mark Granovetter, a Stanford- based sociologist who had been investigating the way people used social connections to secure jobs. He noticed that acquaintances - the weak ties – were far more useful in finding work, than close friends.

Such acquaintances are typical of the people you find listed among your Facebook friends. That’s the irony of Facebook. Very often you will find that some of your closest friends are not among those you have listed while some at the periphery of your acquaintance are on the list. It really doesn’t matter.

We don’t have to be friends with our friends. By that I mean we don’t need to see them all the time. Indeed that’s probably true of some of our best friends. Friendship is a bond that can be reignited at any time. When it was time to go our separate ways last week my old friend, who I hadn’t seen for maybe 12 years, gave me a big hug and it felt good. I don’t know when I’ll see him again but I do know that he’s no more than a click away on Facebook.

That’s what social networking has given us. Today we are no more than a click away from thousands of people and that has to be useful for potential recruiters.

Most recruiters, however, are still only scratching the surface of the possibilities within social networking. That’s because they are wedded to finding people for jobs since that remains the prevailing system for undertaking work.

A vacancy arises in a full time job and the post is advertised as always. It’s becoming more common for some jobs to be advertised as a potential job share but generally the position is “permanent” even if that word has all but lost its meaning in work.

The recruiters were reminding me of the potential fees to be made in referrals – as much as £5,000 a post in some cases. Even though I understand the costs of recruitment, I am still shocked by the sums involved.

No wonder some companies have sought a presence on social networking sites. But a site presence cannot guarantee recruits. Keying in the word “recruitment” to the Facebook search box brings up more than 500 companies, mostly recruitment agencies. Potential job candidates can sign up as an agency’s Facebook friend. Unfortunately very few of these turn out to be ideal candidates.

So many people are out there on such sites that companies must still search to find good people, or try to encourage referrals. This is why alumni groups are proving popular.

It’s tempting to conclude that the ubiquity of social networking has left recruiting back at square one. But this is a fast-moving marketplace. I have no idea whether Facebook will continue to thrive. Newer sites, such as FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/) that aggregates social activities from various social networking sites, have the potential to create super-networks among existing internet communities. In addition different types of social networking are emerging such as that offered by Twitter.com (http://twitter.com), restricting messages to less than 140 characters.

In the meantime some recruiters are concentrating instead on specialist forums. Such forums often attract people who are active in their work and it’s possible to make a rough assessment of their concerns, even of capabilities, by trawling through their contributions.

One problem with forums is that people often hide their identities behind nicknames but this happens less on serious work-related sites. My advice to forum contributors is to be yourself, be identified and contribute sensibly. You never know who is looking.

See also : Facebook: workplace scourge or saviour? and: Social networking