I came across this (so-called) social recruiting case study via Gautam Ghosh last week – it was on how Bilal Jaffery was hired by Vala Afshar for Enterasys.
I use the ‘so-called’ without any malice, more to point out my perspective on this.
Enterasys was looking for, in Vala’s words, ‘a six-figure salary, director level marketer responsible for digital and social marketing direction for our company’. So, it made sense to hire someone who is active on social media and knows is stuff around here, online.
But, as I have also wondered earlier, I’m not sure if I would want to hire a McDonalds store manager via his/her social media exploits/footprint. I may, of course, check his/her social footprint to corroborate what they have said in their CV and to see that they haven’t done anything stupid online, but I don’t think I’d base my opinion on their online footprint as a starting point. You could however argue that a prospective McD floor manager could have posted his/her perspective on his role/career in his spare time/evenings and that could help me understand how good he/she is – of course, I agree! Like this – could apply to just about anyone: How are you helping the ?who are you?? and ?what do you do?? questions?
The other problem I have with the Enterasys case is that it undermines candidate confidentiality. Traditionally, companies can and have advertised openings. Candidates do not advertise (with rare exceptions, of course) that they are looking for a change, lest they annoy their current employers and lose their jobs. It isn’t an ideal situation – candidates should have the freedom to do it, in my opinion, without fear of repercussion, but that’s how the world is. Let’s say that it is similar to a social customer care query and resolution from a sector where privacy is critical – like banks. I may leave the basic problem explanation in an open place like the bank’s Twitter timeline, but would need to use direct messages or email to explain private account-level details.
But this post did get me on to another, parallel thought that is away from social recruiting, per se.
We have been talking about attention deficit disorder with information overload. About instant messengers and how they always keep us occupied. About real-time internet and how we’re all hooked all the time. But, the truth perhaps is a bit different.
All this real-time’ness merely seems to be getting us back to ‘my-time’.
Email was the best example of ‘my-time’ – you mailed someone and waited for their response. You had no indication whether they have read your mail (beyond ‘read reciepts’ that most email clients allow the reciever to control the read-reciept) or if they are online at that point in time.
Instant messengers let you see that – if that other person is online, but even that is merely a sign-in based feature – it still does not guarantee that they are in front of the device or not.
Most social media updates too fall in this category. You Facebook and Tweet to a lot of people or brands and wait for the response, depending on when they read your update/query.
Social recruiting, explained above by Vala, seems like a passive ‘my-time’ effort too. You leave your online footprint to help you in the long run as a showcase of who you are and what you are capable of. Interested companies can go through that when they want and not necessarily subject you to a real-time interview to take that call. They could perhaps do that interview at the end, after they have been able to verify your credentials via what you leave online and what others have said about you, again, online.
As I had explained a couple of weeks ago, even customer care is getting into the ‘my-time’ zone. It may be becoming incresingly difficult to pin down a customer care executive on phone or on chat, in real-time to explain your problem. It may also get increasingly more expensive to do so. So, we leave our messages on myriad social media properties online and trust the brand customer care team to look into them and get back to us at the earliest. It is no different from emailing them or leaving a phone message, but, in this case, we leave the message in a publicly-viewable platform (Twitter/Facebook) and two, we don’t need to hunt for relevant email IDs (or phone numbers) – we simply go to a place that we already reside all through the day (our Facebook page, or Twitter timeline), search for the brand name and leave a message.
So, what we have been calling ‘real-time’ all this while isn’t perhaps real-time at all. It all goes back to ‘my-time’. In essence, we merely seem to be leaving messages all over the web – to individuals, to groups of people, to the world-at-large, and hoping that they would be seen/addressed/consumed. That depends on the time and inclination of the people who see that messages and they can respond/react when they want, or when they get the time to do so.
I did touch upon the fallacy of real-time some time ago (‘implied real-time‘), but I never thought it was this drastic, as an evolution! Imagine… the entire so-called real-time web is one massive answering machine with the only difference being that most of those messages left can be accessed by the public too, besides the intended recipient!
What do you think?
Pic of Sartre’s Answering Machine courtesy Stephen Hicks!