Social Recruiting ROI

I hate to use the term ROI as it is so over hyped for social media.  I attended a social media conference in Exeter recently that had some a great speakers and was very well organised but, when it came to the ROI bit I felt they were trying too hard to justify the use of social media.

I remember back to the early days of the Internet.  It would never be used for recruitment.  Then the job boards came along; but they were just for IT geeks.  Normal people would never search for a job online.  Then Totaljobs and Monster started to grow but they were for low skilled people and definitely NOT professional people. 

Of course now every recruiter uses a job board but, how many really know the ROI of using any let alone all of their job boards?  Same with print media or TV.  They are still used but how often is the exact ROI calculated for each channel.  Oh, I forgot. 50% of marketing is a waste, just don't know which 50%.

So rather than look for every reason NOT to use Facebook or Twitter etc find what you can do and add it into your general mix.  You don't have to do everything from Day 1; start slow and work it out.  Hell, it's got to be better than throwing money at job boards.  Of course there will be plenty of doom mongers that will tell you there is little or no proof about the likes of Facebook for recruiting which is fine but, if you don't try you don't know.  We are tracking every Twitter application for a client as an example but don't yet have the hire data; but when we do - now that will change the game.

The real point is, find the ROI of what you already do and use that to decide what else you could be doing. Oh, you don't know so best do nothing maybe.