Recruitment Methods

Today’s technology has certainly changed a lot in our lifetime. With the introduction of the internet, the world seems to be a lot smaller, with information on just about anything, readily available at our fingertips, with just a single click.

More and more people are now taking advantage of the latest technology, including jobseekers and employers. Online recruitment allows candidates to seek out new roles without leaving the house and enables employers to actively search for the best person for the job, all with minimal cost to both parties.

Using a mixture of traditional and online recruitment, I feel, gives some companies the leading edge over other recruiters in Gibraltar. Traditional recruitment practices have worked well for years, so why change the way that the industry works?

Traditionally recruiters have worked hard to build long and healthy relationships with their Clients. Building these solid, lasting relationships gives strong working practice and gives candidates reassurance that the recruiter are striving to be the best and working hard for them.

The telephone is a recruiter’s friend and historically recruiters were required to make up to 200 calls per week to perspective clients. Nowadays and especially in Gibraltar, this number is significantly less, due to the technological advances within social media, recruiters are now tending to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype and Messenger to contact people.

More and more people are now using their private social media accounts for business. However many candidates a recruiter has on his or her database, it is never going to be as many as the amount of potential candidates who are on social media sites. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have a combined active usership of over 535 million people.

Using e-Recruiting methods such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for business helps get your name “out there”. It gives recruiters the tools they need to advertise vacancies and search for prospective candidates.

Competition for quality candidates has always been fierce and even more so now, during the present upturn in the economy. Conventional recruitment methods like newspaper and job websites are overrun with job advertisements and it is often difficult to stand out.

Over the past few years, online marketing has come a long way. With targeted advertising opportunities, social media monitoring, advanced SEO strategies and new multimedia content all playing a part in an organisation’s recruitment strategy. Creating a strategy with the right mix of old and new recruitment methods is vital for businesses of all sizes.

While traditional advertising methods often rely on blanket coverage, online advertising allows us a much more focused approach. Companies are able to target by variables such as geographic location, keywords, time of day, length of time registered and interests. Online advertising also allows for complete tracking, allowing us to better target and attract the right visitors.

Reference checks will always be necessary in order to gain an insight into employees. Although, often, a far from perfect way to gain this insight, they are often the only way to gain 3rd party information on a candidate.

Now, media savvy companies are turning to social media to supplement their reference checks. It’s astonishing how much information can be unearthed about an individual through a few social media searches.

These searches offer an amazing insight into how people communicate and relate with others, what they think of former employers and employees, who the person hangs out with and what the individual does away from work and how they behave. With a bit of digging, employers can gain additional assurance that they’re making the right hiring decision.

However, when information provided on social media sites is used to screen or clearly discard a candidate from consideration, difficulty occurs. This disregard, when based on information found via social media sites, opens the employer to the potential risks of liability and discrimination claims.

More and more companies are using employee referrals. This is historically a win-win situation. Firstly, this reduces advertising costs to the employer, as they will avoid using external recruiting methods and give more importance to the internal referring. Secondly, this gives employees to suggest the right talent in the form of friends or acquaintances. Employees are financial rewarded for these referrals, helping to retain existing talent and reduce attrition.

Sarah Pike
Recruitment Consultant
Zestrill Limited

www.zestrill.com