Talent Pools and the Social Storm: iCIMS Social Recruiting Solution

As Linkedin’s frothy IPO washes over the market, the few people that haven’t been paying attention to social media are finally opening their eyes wide. The most staunchly conservative employers are building social distribution into their recruitment marketing and social networking into their sourcing efforts. Social recruiting can now, finally, just be called… recruiting.

Building Talent Pools

If you look hard enough, you can still find a stray employer here and there that has a team of recruiters each sorting through their own personal pile of paper resumes. Not too many companies actually do this anymore, but it is where we came from. Recruiters would each manage a stash of resumes carefully notated with candidate details (in pen, near the coffee stain.) Paper recruiting was marvelous in a certain way – recruiters feel a sense of tactile ownership of their resumes, job orders, and candidates.

Of course, this era came to a close with the rise of applicant tracking systems. Over the course of a decade, most candidate data made its way into recruitment software systems. Delighting in the new power of distributed candidate databases, both employers and recruiting firms invested heavily in applicant tracking systems.

From this development, the job of a recruiter became intertwined with working inside these applicant systems, appending resumes with rich context and recording history and preferences. Over time as recruiters used these systems as their primary workflow, the databases became the lifeblood of many organizations. Organizations scaled to managing millions of candidates and built massive “talent pools” for the current and future hiring needs.

The Social Storm

In the past five years, consumers have been enraptured in a love affair with social networking and social media. In five short years, social media has shaken up old media networks, challenged Google and Microsoft, and, in the case of Facebook, practically taken over the entire web.

In recruiting, you have to go where the candidates are. Since that place has quickly become social networks, smart recruiters were among the first to realize the potential of social networks. Recruiters were among the first power users of Linkedin and other niche social networks. The first to join built mini-empires of candidate data which in some cases dwarfed or rivaled that of their employer’s candidate database.

But the size of the pool is not what breaks the dam. What cracks the system is when the daily workflow of recruiters moves out of computer systems and into the social networks. Recruiters have gone rogue by necessity, working outside of the system in order to access the massive amounts of candidate data available on Linkedin and other networks. They live outside internal recruiting systems, sourcing and even communicating with candidates outside of a company system.

The result is chaos – recruiters don’t document and track candidates through any system. They rely on Linkedin and other web  systems as their method of communication. Once again, the recruitment process has completely broken down. Recruiters are left with no sense of history with their candidates. Candidates have to remake their relationship with each new recruiter at a company. Employers are left with an empty shell of a candidate database instead of the richly nuanced and fleshed out applicant system that they spent years building up. Internal talent pools become as dark as the ocean.

The iCIMS Integration
The next generation of recruiting tools has to both leverage the power of social media and internalize and capture that social recruiting process inside the enterprise. With access to the distributive power of social networks and the rich history of internal recruiting systems, applicant tracking systems can finally become what they were promised to be.

iCIMS is leading the way in integrating social media into a fully featured applicant tracking software system. It’s a way for recruiters to tap into the massive networks of talent outside the enterprise, while building deep candidate history and keeping track of resumes internally.

Using their integrated social media solution allows recruiters to:

• Distribute optimized job posts to 300+ social media networks through one portal
• Feature career videos and social media profiles on every job posting
• Automate and schedule the frequency of social posts, as well as post through personal connections

Recruiting departments are caught in a bind – if they block out the storm of social media, talent pools stagnate and dry up. If they jump into social media with no regard for the value of their own systems, they risk not only chaos, but the destruction of their entire work history.

Integrating social media within your own internal applicant system is no longer a luxury – it’s a must-have technology for recruiting in 2011. Get a free demo of the iCIMS talent platform  or tour their social recruiting solution  to find out what you’ve been missing. You can also read more through our past featured product review of iCIMS on Recruiter.com