Author: PCRecruiter

Whatever your recruitment vertical, when it comes to making the right hire, social media is an essential tool for sourcing the best candidates. But it’s not as simple as pushing out a job posting across multiple social channels and expecting the best candidates to come calling. Find out how to get social recruiting right by reading the latest blog post from PCRecruiter in collaboration with Steve Gipson from Recruiters Websites. Read it now.

Recruitment is one of those industries which, in terms of processes, hasn’t changed much over the years. The core principles have remained pretty much the same since people first started hiring. However, as it currently stands, with so many opportunities on the market, the emphasis falls heavily upon employers (and their recruiters) to make their organization an appealing place to work for both prospective and existing employees.

Regardless of the recruitment vertical, when it comes to making the right hire, social media plays an increasingly important role in sourcing the best candidates. As digital natives, who have grown up with social media, continue to trickle into the talent pool, social media recruitment is fast-becoming an essential tool for attracting the best talent.

We spoke to Steve Gipson, Sales Manager at Recruiters Websites, about making the best use of social media in recruitment.

Why use social media recruitment?

In today’s war for talent, an employer’s social media presence is no less than an expectation for prospective employees, with 56% of candidates actively seeking jobs on social professional networks like LinkedIn. On the flip side, nearly 60% of North American recruitment firm employees believe social media is the best source for candidates. These figures represent a clear shift in the way recruitment gets done. Candidates evaluate prospective employers from their social media presence. Likewise, recruiters use social media as part of a more targeted talent acquisition strategy, which enables them to identify and engage with potential hires.

Although social media enables recruiters to reach a wider talent pool, it’s not as simple as pushing out a job posting across multiple social channels and expecting the best candidates to come calling. Different social media channels appeal to different demographics. For example, in 2022, Facebook’s largest user group is people aged between 25 and 34. Instagram is similarly popular with that audience group, but it equally appeals to slightly younger users – around 30% of whom are aged 18 to 24. With this in mind, recruiters need to carefully consider which social media platforms to target in order to drive the right applicants through the door.

Welcome to the world of social recruiting.

What is social recruiting?

Social recruiting – also known as social hiring, or social media recruitment – is a way of sourcing potential candidates through social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, and other online channels, like blogs. However, it is also a way of marketing an employer brand by raising awareness about their value proposition to potential employees.

In order to engage in social recruitment, employers need to build out a presence across social media channels as part of a wider effort to enhance their employer brand. In doing so, they can promote their brand values, offer an insight into company culture, and invite engagement from prospective future candidates.

The rise in social recruiting correlates with changing generational habits around the use of social media in working-age prospects, with social networks reaching 90% penetration in the U.S. during 2022.

How is social media used in recruitment?

Recruiters use social media in two main ways. Firstly, many recruiters still follow the age-old model of using job postings and paid advertisements to announce and promote available roles. However, instead of using print media, they appear on social media. Secondly, they use social media as a tool to drive traffic to a job site, whether that’s an external recruiter or a company’s own website.

Whether as a recruiter you use one or both of these methods, the most important thing is to have a clear strategy for reaching your target audience. If you’re posting on Twitter, but the most ideal or suitable candidates hang out on Instagram, your recruitment efforts are going to be wide of the mark.

Recruitment has always operated within different verticals, and within those verticals, specific niches. The platform you choose to promote your latest opening needs to align with your target candidates. With an estimated 70% of the global workforce considered passive talent, targeting potential candidates through the right social channels is a strategic way of reaching people who aren’t actively seeking a new position.

The benefits of using social media to hire

Social media is an important channel for boosting your employer brand, demonstrating your expertise, promoting your company culture, and employee value proposition. It’s important not to think that having a wider reach means all the hard work is done for you.

The vastness of the Internet means you have the potential to connect with more of the right candidates for the role. That’s why making strategic use of social media is so important. What that reach actually gives recruiters is the potential to drill-down and uncover suitably qualified and experienced candidates based on the role’s criteria, whether that’s a particular type of degree or a certain number of years experience.

Unlike static job boards or print media postings, social media content helps you to broaden your reach with company information and open roles, increasing your chances of engaging with both passive and active candidates. Drawing upon established employee networks and connections can also help to attract the right talent, as they share and re-share social content which might lead prospects through the door.

Promoting your employer brand and job postings through social media is also a much more time-efficient and cost-effective way to reach candidates, as opposed to more traditional one-to-one methods such as cold calling potentials or even attending job fairs.

Strategies for using social media in recruitment

Most recruitment professionals are highly disciplined and plan the next day’s calls the day before. For recruiters new to employing social media tactics to bring in the right hire, it’s important to treat social media in the same way as your call list. Consistency is key.

Here are six strategies to consider when implementing social recruitment:

  1. Focus on the right channels to find your target audience, and don’t be afraid to look beyond the main players – certain industries have developed their own niche social platforms.
  2. Clear and consistent social media profiles are essential for presenting your employer brand and delivering content relevant to potential candidates, aligned with your company’s culture and overall brand values.
  3. Social media is awash with images and video because it attracts engagement. Relevant and on-brand visual content is a sure-fire way to increase engagement from potential candidates.
  4. Encourage employees to share your posts. The number one way people discover a new job is through a referral. When employees share your posts, you not only tap into their network, but you improve the chances of finding the right hire through personal recommendation.
  5. Paid ads on social media can be surprisingly affordable and can be targeted based on a range of key criteria, from current job titles to relevant experience. They’re also easier to track in terms of engagement.
  6. Content marketing is a great way to build a connection with your target audience, from videos and images to blogs. Use social media to point potential candidates to content that can provide added-value and a stronger connection with your brand.

Simplifying sourcing from socials and the wider web

The right technology can also help your social recruitment efforts.

PCR Capture is a seamless browser plug-in from PCRecruiter which enables recruiters to import and update candidate data found on a variety of popular websites, job boards, and social networks.

With PCR Capture, you can import new candidates and clients, and also update existing records by merging data. You can even use it to look up names you find online and determine whether they’re already in your database, with quick access to contact functions.

To learn more about PCR Capture or how PCRecruiter can help you make more of your social recruiting strategy, contact a representative today.

Our series of free PCRecruiter webinars will be moving to Tuesdays! Dates are scheduled throughout the summer on a variety of topics in PCRecruiter.

If you missed any of the previous sessions on topics including Profile Forms, Contractor Features, and our Open API, check out our webinar archive.

If you can’t make it to the live session, don’t worry – a recording will be sent to all registrants afterward.

Job Board Overview (April 19, 2022)

PCRecruiter’s Drew Rothman walks through how the PCR Job Board is set up and what its capabilities are. A useful session for those who aren’t currently using the Job Board and want to know more, or who are using the older ‘Candidate Web Extensions’ and considering an upgrade.

Contractor Features (May 3, 2022)
In this session, you’ll learn more about how PCRecruiter facilitates your contract or contract-to-perm process. In this session we’ll discuss expense tracking with the ability to upload receipts and clock-in/out via the PCRecruiter mobile app. We’ll also discuss hours approval and reporting.

Searching in PCRecruiter (May 17, 2022)
In this session, some of PCR’s top trainers will discuss different methods of searching for names, companies, and jobs within your database.

New PCRecruiter Pipeline – May 31
This session will cover the all-new PCRecruiter pipeline (coming soon) and how to set up and navigate all of the great features it has to offer. A great orientation for those moving from the older version or for those new to PCRecruiter in general.

PCRecruiter Sequencing Features Part 1 – June 14 Part 2 – June 28 Part 3 – July 12
The brand new sequencing features (coming soon) in PCRecruiter will help you automate marketing, communication, and other processes. Learn all about what they can do in this session, to be presented in a three part series.

PCRecruiter Customer Demo – July 26
How do PCRecruiter users work in the system? In this session, we’ll be talking with a PCRecruiter user about their particular configuration and how they’ve made PCRecruiter work for them.

Google Analytics & Duplicate Handling – July 2019 Update

PCRecruiter v.9.7.29 includes integration between PCRecruiter Analytics and Google Analytics for our Job Board, plus improved duplicate handling for the Job Board, a CSV Export for Profile Forms, and more.

PCRecruiter v.9.7.29 was released on our hosting system this morning, and with it comes several great new features, in addition to our usual round of performance improvements and under-the-hood preparation for upcoming announcements.

Google Analytics for the PCRecruiter Job Board

Job Board Analytics
Integrating the PCR Analytics with Google Analytics gives you fresh insight into your Job Board’s performance.

The PCRecruiter Analytics can now share event tracking with Google Analytics, sharing the web traffic events from your PCRecruiter Job Board. The result is new insight into your candidate sources and a better handle on the paths taken through your job board. Once you’ve set up Google Analytics on your website, see our Learning Center for further setup instructions.

Related: PCRecruiter Job Board, PCRecruiter Analytics

Updated Job Board Duplicate Handling

The Job Board now has a completely revised method of handling applicants who apply using new credentials or who apply with a record that’s already on file. In short, PCRecruiter now recognizes them based on a matching email, resume, or LinkedIn profile URL and then updates the current record without allowing the visitor to access any of the existing data for that record. Learn more about Job Board setup and duplicates in the Learning Center.

Related: PCRecruiter Job Board

Export Profile

You’ll find a new action menu item on the Rollup List screens. With this feature, you can select a group of records and export the answers to any attached profile form into a .CSV file. For more information, see our Learning Center.

Simplified History Fields Dates

We’ve replaced the calendar picker with a simpler month/year dropdown combination on the Work History, Education History, and Military History collection blocks. This will make the interface clearer and more reliable for applicants, who often do not know the exact day on which they began or ended a particular engagement. Learn more about History Fields in our Learning Center.

We’ll be making further exciting announcements about new features and integrations in the coming weeks, so watch this blog for more, and follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Also…

Financing SolutionsWe’ve also added a new company, Financing Solutions, to our roster of strategic partnerships. Financing Solutions can provide up to a $100,000 business line of credit for small businesses as a backup when cash flow is low. They offer no-cost setup and inexpensive fees when used. No collateral or personal guarantees are needed. You’ll get an easily understood written quote after completing a fast 2-minute online application. Lines are renewed yearly and can be paid back at any time. $400,000 in yearly revenue and 650+ credit score required. If you’re in need of credit for your recruiting or staffing agency, please visit www.financingsolutionsnow.com/pcr or call Christina Verduchi at 862-207-4118 x 18.

The Main Sequence team has released a fresh update to PCRecruiter this week. This update includes enhancements to the Job Board among other things, and also behind-the-scenes changes to prepare for some great integrations we’ll be announcing soon. Let’s look at what’s been updated this week.First, we’ve integrated the PCRecruiter Job Board with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free product from Google that tracks your website traffic for analysis and reporting. But Google can only tell you where visitors came from and what pages they visited. It can’t tell you who they were or whether they were a qualified candidate. On the other side, the PCRecruiter Analytics help you visualize your recruitment metrics, but PCRecruiter alone doesn’t know how candidates arrived at your website or travelled through its pages to reach a job application.

By combining these tools, you’ll bridge that gap, allowing you to associate the sourcing and navigation data tracked in Google with the candidates in your PCRecruiter pipeline.

Once this connection has been enabled for your website and Job Board, the two systems share tracking events, giving you insight into which paid and organic traffic sources are generating the most value, and helping you to better identify trends in candidate engagement and falloff. The result is a more informed recruitment marketing strategy.

This update also includes changes to how the Job Board handles duplicate and returning candidates. The Job Board offers multiple ways for a new candidate to generate a Name record, including popular social networks or an email and password combination. These credentials serve as their login on return visits.

But what happens if someone returns to the Job Board and uses a different network to register than they did the first time? Or if the candidate was already in your database from an import or a manual entry before they ever came to the Job Board?

Well, it would be a security risk for PCR to show someone data from an existing record if they’re not using the same credentials on file for that record. It could also be problematic for first-time visitors to your Job Board to discover that you’ve already got information about them on file.

To avoid exposing data or complicating the apply process, earlier versions of PCRecruiter would simply create a new record for these candidates and identify them as probable duplicates for the user to merge. The latest update simplifies the process and reduces effort without complicating the candidate experience.

If someone applies on your Job Board with a resume, email address, or LinkedIn profile URL that matches a record already in the system, but they do not use that record’s Job Board credentials, the system will update their existing record with the newly supplied information without allowing that visitor to see the old data on file.

Rather than having two name records for the two different logins, you’ll have one record for that candidate in the system, and their independent logins will be treated as separate Job Board identities that can only see the data that was created while using that identity. This will greatly reduce the chances of duplicate records in your database, while also protecting the existing data from being seen by any visitor who doesn’t use that record’s login.

Another change that may affect your Job Board or custom forms is a new simplification of dates in the History Fields. As of this version, the Date fields in our pre-built blocks for Employment, Education, and Military History will only collect Month and Year rather than requiring a full date, as the specific day for these sorts of entries is often unknown or irrelevant. For Licensing entries, the specific day is still required.

Lastly, we’ve added a new Export Profile action to the Rollup screens. Using this feature, you can select a group of records, pick a profile form which is attached to those records, optionally choose a cutoff date, and then export a comma-separated file of the answers stored in those forms. This can be useful in evaluating or charting responses to questionnaires, or in importing answer data to other systems.

For more information on these new features, get in touch with your Main Sequence representative. We have a lot more to show you this summer, so be sure to follow our social networks and watch for the announcement banner when you log into PCRecruiter. If you have suggestions for future versions of PCR, post them in the Ideas forum at help.pcrecruiter.com.

Split-Desk Recruiting Features

PCRecruiter’s new split-desk features make it easy to manage the complex calculations required when multiple people participate in sales or performance commissions and incentives. If you need to apportion dollar amounts and manage multiple players in your contract or permanent placement process, these built-in tracking and calculation tools will put an end to your splitting headaches.

PCRecruiter’s new split-desk features make it easy to manage the complex calculations required when multiple people participate in sales or performance commissions and incentives. If you need to apportion dollar amounts and manage multiple players in your contract or permanent placement process, these built-in tracking and calculation tools will put an end to your splitting headaches.

Textkernel and PCRecruiter

PCRecruiter’s direct integration with Textkernel reinforces our native full-text search engine to empower recruiting, staffing, and sourcing professionals with deeper search and smarter matching capabilities based on the content of their resumes, job descriptions, and other keyword-rich content.

PCRecruiter’s direct integration with Textkernel reinforces our native full-text search engine to empower recruiting, staffing, and sourcing professionals with deeper search and smarter matching capabilities based on the content of their resumes, job descriptions, and other keyword-rich content.

William Kubicek, Martin Snyder, and Mic Harris of Main Sequence will be attending the NAPS Conference in Houston. They will be found from time to time staffing booth #2 at the event; if you are attending, Bill, Marty, or Mic would be pleased to provide an in-person demonstration of PCRecruiter9 or discuss any aspect of your recruiting software needs. Serving the professional and business development needs of the search and staffing community for more than five decades, NAPS has been a force in establishing the highest standards of ethics and performance for recruiters and staffing operations people. More information about the event can be found at http://www.naps360.org/?page=Details

Main Sequence has released an updated PCRecruiter API documentation, which details new methods and improvements for interacting with PCRecruiter account data. The API can be used by developers to create self-integrating assessments, background checking, onboarding, telecom, and other third-party tools and systems for recruiting or applicant tracking.

The new documentation can be viewed here: PCRecruiter Rest API Documentation. (Please note that the XML functions described in this documentation remain under beta development and may not be functional for immediate use.)

Some people need both.

Some people need one or the other. Some people need one, then the other…

Many organizations have selected recruiting software when they want to track applicants, and selected applicant tracking software when they really had recruiting needs. PCRecruiter is effective as both an ATS and a recruitment software highly suited to conducting sourcing operations or operating an agency.

High-value recruiting is a choreographed and sophisticated interpersonal sales process. Failing to equip salespeople with appropriate CRM / Sales Automation tools can create obvious barriers. “Applicant Tracking” can be an unfortunate term in a recruiting context, because applicants are late-stage results of recruiting processes; by the time a person becomes an applicant, they are likely well down the recruitment track. The degree of recruitment v. applicant processing in the overall value chain varies by industry, business cycle, geography, and individual company cultures, but PCRecruiter is built to adapt to YOUR value chain.

Core CRM functions include;

  • Dealing with organizations as entities- as sources/targets/customers, either before or during activity touching the individual people connected to those organizations.
  • Creating maps of titles and names, and keeping those maps current as information changes.
  • Automations for email communication based on events, updates, and rules.
  • Flexible boundaries between candidates and applicants to support compliance tracking for EEO/OFCCP both before, after, or without expressions of interest in a particular position.
  • Clustering groups of organizations, names, or positions for marketing/sales purposes.

If you already have an ATS, but need technology to support activity that occurs prior to the entry point, PCRecruiter can integrate with your current process. If you need to track compliance and gain the value of the traditional ATS in a flexible, affordable way, PCRecruiter can fit that brief too. If you have open CRM and ATS needs, PCRecruiter is the only widely used solution with a portfolio of winning customers doing corporate direct-hire work and agency / third-party work on the same platform.

Host PCRecruiter in our cloud or your own!

A common misperception among solution buyers has developed because the terms “Web-Based Software”, "SaaS" (Software as a Service) and "Cloud" are often used interchangeably, but they often mean different things.  It's helpful to understand the usage differences between Web-Based, SaaS, and Cloud when selecting software systems; the differences can be meaningful.

Defining Web-Based Software v. Saas v. Cloud

Web-Based:

A “Web-Based” system is software delivered to end-users via a web-server, over a network using the TCP (Internet) protocol. (A network protocol describes how information is moved between devices on the network; the Internet protocol is a worldwide standard).  Virtually any software can be enabled to work over a browser, and can be marketed as web-based, so the term may also mean that a system uses native web technology, which delivers HTML and objects directly to the browser rather than some kind of remote control for users to operate non-browser usable applications on a server.     

Compared to the (preceding) software model that required software to be installed on each end-user’s computer or device, delivering software from a single computer (the web-server) over the public Internet (or a private network running the Internet protocol) offers huge savings in technical support and enables much greater performance (because one very fast computer is less expensive to buy and support than many computers), and greatly simplifies mobile access for end-users. These advantages are so compelling that today nearly all business systems offered or under development use the web platform for their basic architecture.

There are effectively (at least) four portions of any Web-Based software solution;

  1. web-server/storage infrastructure
  2. Internet connection
  3. actual software code, which is installed on the web server
  4. data administration/ software maintenance services

Almost any device can operate a webserver.  Every new Microsoft Windows equipped computer may perform as a web-server, but so can various coffee pots, digital cameras, and automobiles among other devices that can also serve web pages in our connected world.  PCRecruiter runs on Windows servers, but the concepts are the same on any web server.

Larger organizations typically possess all of the elements needed for a given solution except for the software code, which is either licensed for use by a software vendor, created by the organization itself to meet a business need, or rented. Smaller organizations may lack one or more of the required parts, and larger organizations seeking cost savings and flexibility may prefer arrangements where they do not need to provide ANY of the four parts, even with capacity to provide all four.

SaaS and Cloud:

The result is the now realized market opportunity for SaaS vendors to provide solutions where they provide all four portions.  That's marketed today as cloud vendors.  The term "cloud" arose from the graphic used on flow-charts symbolizing the Internet, which was shaped like a cloud. SaaS vendors all use the cloud, but organizations can use the cloud too: the so called "private cloud" which is just a fancy way of saying company-owned datacenter/networking arrangements. There is also a hybrid approach which is becoming more common: SaaS vendors create the software, but they use a second vendor (often Amazon, Google, or Microsoft) for cloud service, which covers the web server/storage and Internet connection. So in reality, there are "private clouds" where the organization can own/license everything, there are public clouds where either vendors or organizations can run systems but not manage infrastructure, and there are vendor clouds where the vendor does it all.

SaaS has great market momentum because of its ability to deliver high-function (and relatively low-cost per user for complex systems) to organizations regardless of their technical situation. Because of that momentum, many desirable software systems are no longer designed to be available for you to run on your own equipment- they can only be used in the SaaS model.

From a vendor standpoint, it's much more difficult to engineer systems to be customer installable and to then field support them. It's somewhat less profitable in many instances because of the lack of dollar margins associated with hosting and maintenance services and lack of recurring revenue for the whole solution (rather than a small % typically charged for maintenance fees).

Vendors (and Wall Street) also love SaaS because business process software tends to have relatively high potential for customer “lock-in”, which is a reflection of the barriers to selecting and deploying a replacement solution. SaaS vendors generally also have more expertise with their own software, which may lower their service costs as compared to the costs experienced by organizations supporting licensed software.

At Main Sequence, we always start by asking: what's best for our customer?

Each organization has its own balance relating to the four parts of web-based software solutions. SaaS vendors naturally may find it in their best interest to overstate the difficulties, costs, and risks of self-hosting a Web-Based solution, while larger or more dynamic vendors such as the ERP providers (SAP, Oracle/Peoplesoft, Dynamics etc.) and other highly software-centric providers may seek to offer a balance of SaaS and license options to ensure complete market coverage. Main Sequence is in the latter, larger, dynamic category.

Looking at user count as an independent variable, if there will be many users over a long timeline, licensing may be substantially less expensive over the lifecycle for solutions that offer that model. For shorter terms and lower user counts, SaaS may be much less expensive. This pricing behavior is likely to persist because SaaS vendors have limited incentive to separately price hosting and database administration services from the software itself, although the growing hybrid model may force changes in that direction.

Fixed v. Variable Costs

The key driver is fixed v. variable costs. If you already own and pay for three of the four required elements (everything but the software code), you may have mostly a "fixed cost" business case. Paying a vendor margin on stuff you already have is a hard way to save money. If you do not have the other three elements, it may be a variable cost case with a steep early curve, so your particular case might show extreme differences in total lifecycle expense, or your maybe your case does not favor either model.

Other significant decision points about delivery model may include the need for change control (e.g. separating your path from that of the SaaS vendor), specialized needs for unlimited real time interaction with the raw data, differential taxation treatment of licensed software compared to hosting services, availability and security considerations, your DBA and tech capabilities, and other localized factors such as privacy laws.

Self-Hosting Option

Regardless of the overwhelming market hype, self- hosting is entirely a reasonable thing to do to if your situation is suitable and the application software that you want is available for license. The important part to understand is that regardless of who provides the four parts, the end-user experience will generally be the same or very similar if they are using the same or very similar software code; delivery, infrastructure, and maintenance providers are typically indistinguishable to end-users if they perform equally well.

Saas Option

Main Sequence offers a top shelf SaaS solution, where we provide all four elements. We also offer PCRecruiter for license, which you can run on your own infrastructure or use on a public cloud such as those offered by Amazon or Microsoft. You can arrange to move between models to best suit your needs at any time during the lifecycle.

As with many other aspects of PCRecruiter, few competing vendors are as committed to VERSATILITY in their offerings.  Main Sequence sales consultants</a> can help you compare the various options- always with your best long-term interest in mind rather than a preconceived narrative from a vendor who only does it one way or another.

 

PCRecruiter connects with global staffing trends at CIETT 2013 Conference in Toronto.  Reps from Main Sequence Technology will at the CIETT 2013 Conference in Toronto May 15-17th to demonstrate how PCRecruiter addresses challenges facing our global industry. We are looking forward to sharing the event with human resource and staffing professionals from 34 countries, if you are attending, we hope to see you there!

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta