Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant | International speaker
In any good marketing mix, there’s more than one channel. That’s why it’s called a “marketing mix” rather than single channel marketing. An international social media consultant is there not to take over your whole job advertising and recruitment strategy, but rather to ensure you maximise all the channels available to you.
An international social media marketing consultant is able to help you recruit both internally and externally by harnessing the two great powers of social media technology. On the one hand, social media is where people go to join relevant networks. And on the other, it’s a place where people leave a lot of information about themselves – including their previous employment history.
The international social media consultant can help you understand how the existing flags and tags in a person’s social media graph can help you locate the right people for your business, or for your client’s businesses. For instance, if a candidate has certain key industry areas listed in his or her employment history, he or she may be of use even if his or her current position is not directly aligned with your own. Also, a person employed in one area, but connected to groups specifically rooted in other areas, may be looking to make a move that you can capitalise on.
The international social media marketing consultant will also be able to show you how the networking capabilities of social media can help you create the teams of the future. From an HR point of view, your social media consultant is also able to help you learn to groom likely prospects in advance, by using job or team specific network circles to deliver informal training and conduct informative interviews prior to a candidate actually applying for a job.
From the candidate’s point of view, the ability to research a job and prepare for the skills required in advance, means he or she feels she or he has much more control over his or her employment future. And as any international social media consultant will tell you, the candidate who feels he or she has control of his or her future is the candidate who works well within his or her team.
Ultimately the question is this. Given that people are already using professionally oriented social media networks to develops their careers, shy shouldn’t HR take advantage of the trend to find and prepare the best possible network of contacts?
An international social media marketing consultant, then, is there to help you use the technology to widen your pool of potential future employees. Bear in mind though that plenty of candidates, particularly at higher levels, use other routes into employment. Job boards are one, where they are specific enough. Others may not even utilise online technology. So the social media avenue is simply one of many – and the more you have in the mix the more rounded your HR capabilities become.
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