If social media is going to be part of your recruitment game plan, it’s worth noting that it’s currently the least trusted source of information amongst 14 measured by Edelman in Australia (refer chart).

Q. Please tell me how credible you believe each one of them is as a source of information about a company

Which means, for no particular fault of yours, many will treat your social media efforts with cynicism. It also means that you’ll need to work very hard to be noticed, be connected and stay relevant; for most it will mean long periods of time before any results can be seen.

The truth is there’s no shortcut to social media success. Trust needs to be earned.

How can trust in a low trust medium (social media) be earned by a traditionally low trust industry (recruitment) ?

I believe the medium rewards generosity. If you subscribe to the idea of openness, transparency and a willingness to give before you can ask anything in return, social media will open up endless new ways to connect and build relationship with candidates and potential clients.

I think we are on the cusp of a new era where recruitment outreach, especially the marketing and advertising component, will be defined by generosity. A change in mindset, more than anything else, is an essential first step towards social media success.

If you are a recruiter, the best way to make sense of the national unemployment rate, which currently sits at 5.3%, is to ignore it. Well, not really. But the real meat of the unemployment story lies in regional data. Broken down by states, Tasmania and NSW lead the nation in unemployment numbers, while employers in states like NT and ACT are likely to struggle with recruiting the right staff (Refer chart. Source: ABS).

Factor in the health of regional economies and one can have a fairly good idea of how difficult finding new staff will be. Commonwealth Bank measured the economic prowess of the states using eight different criteria and ranked them as follows:  

1. WA
2. ACT
3. South Australia
4. Northern Territory
5. Victoria
6. Tasmania
7. Queensland
8. NSW

Unsurprisingly, where a state lagged in economic development the unemployment rate tends to be high. The best performing economies like WA and the ACT have unemployment rates much below the national average. 

If you are a recruiter, arguably there will be more demand per capita for your skills in states like WA and the ACT (From an agency perspective having a presence in growing states would make sense – demand is likely to be consistent and competition lesser.) Dig deeper and one can unearth other data like job vacancies, supply of workforce (broken down by industry), labour productivity and turnover rates. A discerning recruiter can interpret the above sets of data and have a clearer picture on how and where to distribute limited resources.

Recruiting is mostly local, so regional data is what matters. Having a good grasp of local data should be an essential task when planning a sourcing strategy; by all means it should precedes any tactical activity (and yes that includes social media).

The Australian Public Service Commission (APS) released stage one of a report which evaluated recruitment advertising activities across different agencies.

Some interesting results:

• Data collection – Of the 104 FMA agencies only 45 FMA agencies collected source-of-hire data (Only those who collected data were included in the evaluation). Not surprisingly data collection problems exist  – “Response to the evaluation survey suggests that those agencies that utilise an e-recruitment system were able to provide detailed survey responses more efficiently than those agencies that had to manually check through paper files. There was also anecdotal evidence that an e-recruitment system, however, does not ensure accuracy of applicant information. An agency advised that applicants appeared to be selecting the first item on a drop-down list of advertisement sources”
• Source of Hire: APSJobs (the online job board operated by APS) and the Internet delivered the most number of new applicants; but Print channels are not too far behind. The consensus is that online channels offered the most value for money.

• Quality of Hire: Interestingly, when it comes to quality of hire, all media channels performed equally well with 4.6% of job offers coming from APSjobs; 4.4% from internet advertising; and 4.5% from print advertising.

It is never going to be easy to monitor and collect accurate data for a large entity which employs 162,009 staff; besides, APS is going through a period of change. In fact, only 8% of the agencies under the APS have a formal talent management plan, while only 32% conducts workforce planning.

Yet, kudos to the APS for the deliberate effort to improve the monitoring and collection of recruitment data. In their own words  - “The Commission will also continue to assess ways of improving source-of-hire data collection”.

As I have been always arguing – you can’t improve what you don’t measure (or don’t know).

(PS: The APS made references to the work we did on the Source of Talent Report and the Job Board Report).

Linkedin introduced a new Faceted Search functionality. I did a trial run and it’s very impressive. Filtering search results is quick and easy (A search for Project Manager returned 2,608,432 profiles, by selecting ACT as a location it cough up a manageable 17 profiles). I think as far as finding people is concerned, Linkedin is getting better by the day.

PS: On another note, I recently bought Linkedin’s DirectAds and while the setup is painless, the results were far from effective. What is your experience with Linkedin?

An estimated 4,000 open source professionals exist in Australia (a total of 10,000 are employed in the industry). Highly paid and in demand, they form one of the most important subcultures in the technology sector.

If a top-notch Ruby on Rails coder is looking for a new job, which recruitment firm would she turn to? Can you name a company who stands out as an ‘employer of choice’ for open source professionals? Does a specific job board or a community for php developers exist? I know of none. From a recruitment perspective no one in particular owns (serve) the open source space.

One way of looking at the talent landscape is to map the entire workforce into different sub-cultures.  The 250 plus job boards in Australia are arranged to serve various groups. Likewise, recruitment firms are often categorised according to the markets and niches they serve. But, look deeper and you will discover many more groups exist and new ones are created daily. The technology sector alone can be sliced and diced into hundreds of subcultures according to age, ethnicity, location, gender, linguistic, education, gender, education or a combination of factors.

The Internet has accelerated two things – the ability for people with similar qualities or common interests to come together and form a distinct group. Secondly, the tools to find, connect and interact with even the most obscure groups are readily available.

Here’s the opportunity – many subcultures remained either unknown or underserved.  Planning sourcing strategy according to how people identify and organise themselves is rich in potential.  It really is about seeing sourcing from the candidate’s point of view.

If the plan is to serve a sub-culture, it seems to me that the open source community is ripe to be courted.