But a crack of light is beaming through the masses of job applications, dole forms and crowds of disheartened job seekers. And that golden crack is the finance industry, which actually wants to hire graduates and junior level executives to fill permanent positions. According to Robert Half CFO Confidence Index over two-thirds of financial heads want the best of our country’s Generation Y to be the next batch of financial head honchos.

'We're Gen Y and we are in fact virtual' by Debe Maxwell, Charlotte NC Real Estate

The chief financial officers who were surveyed deemed Generation Y graduates as the way forward for the industry. They felt that because Gen Y are younger they’ll be more adaptable to changing markets, so will therefore be more commercially susceptible, which is something the financial sector is crying out for after the mess we’ve been left in.

Which leads me to ask-on a brief tangent-if Generation Y are people born from the 1980s to the 1990s and Generation X are people born during the 1960s and 1970s, then what do we call the people who were born before that?

Generation W? Which I suppose would make sense, but that’s kind of easy…and dull. Generation Baby Boom? Generation Veteran? Whatever you choose to call it, the people who are making the end decisions on who to hire are a part of this generation and there seems to be something of a split attitude towards whether Gen Y or X are better candidates for the job.

Is Gen Y less hard working from lack of experience-and a lack of motivation from recent unemployment slumps? Possibly. Does Gen X have a better understanding and tolerance of business? Probably.

The two generations are now fighting alongside each other to either get onto that job ladder or get back onto it, and each industry will have a different view for what is best for their particular organisation.

Gen Y has had a rough time of late. Up against hundreds of other applicants, where competition is stiff. CVs and cover letters get swallowed up in the sea of ‘unsuccessful’ submissions just because of the sheer volume, which means they have to be nothing short of excellent to get through the first stage. Knowing someone is no longer a nice convenience but a desperate hope that perhaps a family member’s friend’s golfing partner might help you.

No wonder finance is so appealing. It’s welcomingly asking for graduates and young people to apply.

But what sectors like the finance sector are proving is that no matter how much of an influx of graduate schemes and junior level positions they are awarding to young people they are still one of the most willing industries in the UK to take a chance on Gen Y. They know they’re the future and that fresh, innovative minds are desperately needed to revitalise the wounded industry and empower the recruits who will one day make it to the top.

What are employers looking for in a CV? What criteria do job seekers need to make theirs stand out? As many a recruiter and HR professional has professed over the years, concise, punchy, well written, imaginative CVs are the way into the offices of employers.

Of course during our current economic fiasco, the job market has reduced in size and the number of job seekers have increased. Every position available has a swarm of competition around it, so in order to wade through the rabble masses and make it to the other side you need to be on top of your game in a big way.

Research from Myjobgroup.com proves that people with twitter accounts are in the top pile of applicants who actually get the job. They studied 500 UK CVs and found that twitter users were being shortlisted more than non-twitter users.

The prognosis behind this is that the more time people spend tweeting and getting used to writing snappy, engaging copy in an abridged format, then they are probably more likely to produce better CVs, which is what the research proved.

Users are asked to submit their tweet CVs via hashtag ♯TwiCV and Myjobgroup.com will pick the best one, and that tweeter will win an iPad touch. Not bloody bad.

They have also invited users to tweet celebrity CVs for fun. Here are some of the more amusing ones:

snoopjiggyjigg #TwiCV Jonathan Ross – Wecently made wedundant, looking for large salary, pwefewwably no phone calls involved. I like meeting people. @wossy

ChrisRowett Gordon Brown: Unemployed. Reason For Leaving: Nick Clegg. Strengths: Fudging Numbers. Weaknesses: Old people, Bigots. #TwiCV

Peter Andre: Musicia.. Err… Celebrity. Likes: Jordan. Loves: Jordan. Worships: Jordan. Weaknesses: Singing & handling emotions. #TwiCV

And Myjobgroup.com’s celeb tweet showed some good old patriotic spirit, and of a very timely nature:

“Fabio Capello: Italian England manager. Likes: goal-line technology & Emile Heskey. Dislikes: Uruguayan linesmen. #TwiCV”

A professional summary on the average British CV is only 125 characters long, which is shorter than twitter’s allocated space. I must confess, that that is extremely short and I’m still a little dubious as to whether it’s true, but in any case it’s a great exercise to do when writing your CV, which has to be a of a very high standard and has to be punchy and intelligible.

Are the people who tweet and keep blogs better at capturing more succinctly and more creatively what their talents are, thus making their CV more engaging and stirring for the employer?

Ok so yes it is true, tweeters are used to shedding the fluff and being snappy and inventive with their language in the least amount of words, and the more they do it the better they get at it. That’s the theory, anyway.

A lot of twitter users are very good at getting to the point and doing it in a headline grabbing way, especially if they are taking a savvy slice out of a long, complicated topic.

Whether you choose to enter this competition for a laugh and poke fun at one of the more pitiful celebrities or sharpen a smart summary of yourself, it is a useful test to see what you can come up with. And I for one believe there is definitely some merit and correlation in spending your days tapping out 140 insights and knowing how to cut to the chase in your CV summary.

From blogger David Gaines http://davidgaines.com/nucleus/itsjobvious.php?itemid=425

The continuing conundrum over whether super-skilled candidates, or the more commonly used term ‘overqualified’ candidates should have to go through that initial screening process is still a source of active debate. Often that process ends in an unsuccessful application for them.

Recruiter recently interviewed a number of professional people in the industry to gauge their views on whether hiring these “OQs” is the way forward or not.

Some said that it’s a shortsighted approach to disregard such candidates during our lingering economic troubles. They say that candidates who can offer insight and experience at a time when it is needed the most should not be overlooked. Providing that the hiring manager and the client fully understand what the candidate wants and that the candidate understands how that role is structured, leading to a formal agreement.

Some are not, however. A lot of common grumbles include ‘they’ll just up and leave when the market improves’, ‘managers feel threatened’, ‘they’ll get bored’ and ‘the team dynamic will be affected’. Or one of the most popular ones that hiring managers like to whinge about: ‘they’ll get bored and won’t feel challenged’. Oh no…an unfulfilled working adult who has managed to get past the interviewing process, won over his or her employer and yet still forgotten to read the job spec properly! I think candidates need to be given a little more credit, actually.

If they are applying for a lower-grade job it’s probably for a fairly sound reason. I’ll hazard a guess at a few: they were made redundant, and in a voracious sea of other redundantees there’s little room to step back into the once ample space of available senior management/executive positions.

They took some time out and perhaps don’t feel confident enough to go straight back in at higher roles.

Or some of the more strategic game players took a less senior position with the express intention to work up the ranks quicker than they would have done at their previous company.

With these reasons in mind, it’s probably a pretty safe assumption that they’ve considered the potential ‘drawbacks’ of taking a lower role. I think it’s also safe to suggest that they’ve managed to grapple with it, had a little moan to their partner and friends, and well, just got over it.

In an unsettling economic time I reckon most candidates, after being on the job hunt for some time- a survey from earlier in the year said that the highest percentage of people asked search for up to four hours a day-are only too thrilled when they get any job offer.

So I can’t see that the ‘they’ll get bored’ argument is the weightiest of them all.

Managers who might feel threatened hiring someone with an equal or superior skill set should probably reassess how they feel in their job. Surely working with the best will only enhance the company’s output and improve people’s ability and professional experiences?

You hear managers saying about how OQs might jump ship if they get an opportunity elsewhere. Well, yes, but so would anyone. It is down to the organisation to look after their employees and make sure they are happy and on-track to what they want to achieve.

But when it comes to talent it should be excellent. If I was having open-heart surgery I’m fairly sure I’d want the most experienced surgeon to operate on me.

Why is there such a fear to recruit the best of the best, and especially in this climate? It’s even more baffling when a lot of these candidates are taking a pay cut as a result, so the company is actually getting more for what they’re shelling out.

It would be great to hear anyone else’s views on this, especially ones that endorse a no hiring of OQs policy.

From Samuel Zschokke

The thing with social media is that it’s always active and on the move. It’s constantly weaving its way into businesses and new pockets of communities and has really developed into its own entity-an entity that has stormed the online world as well as one that is defining a valuable existence and precursor to the offline world.

It has evolved from a global buzz of new and old friends and acquaintances communicating online and creating a vast interactive platform to a fully fledged PR and marketing network for businesses. Social media has very quickly swept through many companies’ internal and external communication practices and into their daily routines. The recruitment industry has been one of the many to experience this the most.

To use an analogy, I like to think of social media as something of a multi-legged spider, crawling around the web, spiking each of its spindly limbs into new communities and reaching new users who create avatars for themselves-a common character within social media.

And it seems to be crawling at a faster speed all the time. In the last two years social media’s enterprising spirit has certainly gripped and engaged many people and its ever-growing presence is attracting more.

The web that the spider weaves is the digital media landscape, which is present everywhere and harnesses social media. But we believe it to be something more than just a foundation. It’s much more of a deeper platform that delves further into various websites, communities, forums and networking sites. It allows people to become heavily integrated in their relevant areas and niches.

This is where online journalism meets social media. Forward thinking organisations that are consistently working to build their brand and presence have started to contribute to publications in their niche. If you are producing good quality blogs and acquiring some followers and receiving valuable responses then start thinking about pitching a relevant story to a publication in your niche.

If you have something to say about your industry, specialist publications are great platforms for it to appear on. Recruitment titles, which include Recruitment International, People Management, Recruitment Consultant, onrec and Recruiter, are great places to have your voice heard.

Titles like these are always eager to get commentary from people who are actually working in the niche they cover. It enhances the publication and demonstrates that they are a progressive company that provides readers with real insight from the people working on the front line.

It’s also a very customer centric approach to take. After all, we’re in it together and by sharing thoughts and opinions you are initiating a dialogue so people can connect further. You are also acknowledging the importance of understanding your clients and candidates and how to improve your service. If someone in your industry reads your article, which is very likely, then not only are you exposing your company, but you are potentially opening up windows of opportunity.

From myblabs.wordpress.com/.../ on-corporate-blogging/

Just as the new wave of corporate bloggers are proving; that the quality of writing in blogs has to be of a very good standard and is considered of huge importance and value, so should any other piece of content you produce to represent your organisation.

If it is going into an industry publication that presents a great opportunity to have your voice and company’s ethos heard by many, many people. It will also propel you into a position of authority within your sector, providing it is written well.

You don’t need to necessarily wait until after you’ve got your blog cracked to pitch an idea for a story, but we suggest, as always, doing one thing at a time. If you look to introduce a social and digital media desk into your company then the individual who you employ will be responsible for pitching, researching and writing good articles that represent your company’s values.

But your content really does have to be top notch across all of your outbound communications, especially in your social media tools. You can’t have a super savvy, smart, witty twitter with a link to an empty, wishy-washy blog. It has to all flow consistently and you have to make sure it’s unanimous in tone, style and value.

Whether you start your twitter first or your blog first, you need to make sure that before you hit ‘tweet’ or ‘publish’ your content is what you want your followers to read, watch or hear. Will it interest them? Will it be of use to them?

And will it resonate with them and their approach to searching for jobs and hiring recruiters. Of course not all of your followers will necessarily be candidates and clients but they will probably be other business associates and individuals in the same sector as you. Some of these contacts could be great referrals for you and your company, and this depends of course on how good your content is.

But it is a common mistake to focus all attention on one tool and let the others slip by the wayside.  You may find that posting blogs first helps you to set a foundation, a flow of insight and opinion, where you can then start tweeting, either about the blogs (where you will have the direct links between them) or about ideas you have while writing the blogs.

Now is probably a good time to mention shortened links when using twitter-in case you haven’t come across them yet. As you only get 140 characters a lengthy link can take up most of the allocated space for tweeting. A good site that allows you to input the link and it then shortens it for you is http://bit.ly/.

Once you have decided what tools best suit your recruitment business-and not all of them will-you can start forming your social media strategy. For example, Facebook may not cater for the right audience for the sector you recruit in and twitter may not be right for a particular niche industry, in terms of numbers of followers. But whatever tool you use, your content has to be quality, quality, quality.

But what does quality mean? It means well-researched, relevant commentary on breaking news in your industry, well written reviews on events and regular posts that reinforce your brands values. The content needs to be in direct empathy with your brand and literally sing its vision and ideas.

Content is King so unless you are prepared to put the 3 Q’s at the heart of your content agenda don’t rush into starting one, but start thinking about what you’d like to say that represents your company, and of course start absorbing as much content from other active bloggers to get a feel for how they are doing it.

Content falls into two broad quality categories. What you are communicating and how you are communicating. Video and multi-media is a great opportunity to explore and YouTube is the platform to deliver it. Vimeo is another popular one, but we think YouTube is more effective. And apart from anything else it is the second biggest search engine in the world. So if your clients or your candidates are looking for something that you can offer them but you are not in the space they are searching for it in then you are missing out on potential revenue.

Good content is also critically important for boosting your SEO and your blog is a very useful way to do this. By making sure you are including key words or metadata as the techies refer to it as, you will be increasing the visibility of your blog on Google.

Google Adwords helps you decipher which words are being picked up by Google’s search spiders the most so you can use the best words in your content. Also do not be afraid to bring your blog to life, to speak your mind and to critique things that mean something to you. People will always appreciate a good critique, and if they don’t agree with it, that’s fine because they are still reading it and it might even encourage them to leave a response. That just means you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Think about the kind of content your candidates and clients would be keen to read about, or watch.  If you work in a particular niche then think about what is important to people in that niche. Above anything else, make it engaging and injecting a bit of wit is always a winner.

Our blog is about social and digital media and how to get started with it. But we also have another blog about social media marketing and all new apps that are popping up at the moment. We don’t like over complicated, techie talk so we keep it simple and hopefully interesting to read.

The Good- Starbucks

MyStarbucksIdea was created in order to get people to suggest ideas for the giant coffee corporation. The site allows people to post ideas, read other people’s ideas and get involved in a global conversation. Rather like Facebook’s ‘Like’ button with the thumbs up logo, MyStabucksIdea lets people choose whether they like the idea or not and then it displays the amount of points that idea gets. A recent idea was for introducing a coconut drink for the summer, which received 5,230 ‘thumbs up’. This couldn’t be a more powerful and shiny example of social media. So what are they doing right?

Letting the customers power the venture just with their voices? Check

Interacting with their customers and understanding what they really want? Check

Facilitating a platform whereby their customers can communicate with each other and bring them closer together? Check

Constantly introducing new ideas and products? Check

Building a community of Starbucks aficionados? Check

Having a focus on corporate social responsibility? Check

Starbucks’ twitter account is also a hive of activity continuing the general chitchat and idea focused flow of the MystarbucksIdea. And the best part of it all is how they’ve created a mass community of happy customers by simply involving them and letting them come up with the ideas.

The Bad-Vodafone

Vodafone experienced a bit of a hiccup earlier in the year, where one of their employees posted a homophobic tweet on their twitter account. Suffice to say it didn’t’ go down well and the phone network was inundated with posts from very unhappy, offended customers. At first it looked like it must have been a hacker, but shockingly enough it was actually a Vodafone worker, someone representing the company.

At this point senior management at Vodafone must have realised it was a bad situation to be in and the only thing they could do was respond appropriately. In all credit to them, they did. They posted an apology and said that it was a breach of rules by staff and it was being looked into internally. But unfortunately, the damage had been done.

Now this could be looked at in one or two ways. One: Vodafone were truly unlucky and that an employee had a personal vendetta against the company and acted out in a despicable manner. Or two: there was a serious lack of core values and customer centricity running through the company from upper management down.

But this seems quite an incredulous reason to accept. Perhaps the worker thought it would be funny and never took into account the serious repercussions and their probably doomed employment at Vodafone. Either way it is a good example of how crucial it is that all employees follow and operate under the same ethos and central mission, especially those that have the responsibility of managing the company’s twitter or blog.

Yes, Vodafone is a large company but it demonstrates how quickly news and comments travel and the bad ones always spread the quickest. So when you gain more followers and subscribers, which you will, be absolutely clear with all your employees what your core values are and how they should be adhered to. For a company as successful as Vodafone to let something like this happen has only marred their reputation. This incident also demonstrates the power of social media.

The Socially Inept-Nestlé

Now we’ve picked this as the crème de la crème of social media disasters. But some might view the Vodafone incident as worse, and we certainly ummed and erred over it. We’ve chosen the Nestlé vs. Greenpeace case as an example of what can happen if you choose to ignore something and try to cover it up. Big no-no.

Greenpeace made a video showing an office worker munching into a KitKat in the shape of orang-utan chocolate covered fingers. When he bites into it blood oozes out onto his keyboard and all over his chin, to the horror of his colleagues. At the end of the video the famous red and white logo is shown but instead of KitKat it says Killer and with the tag line ‘give the orang-utan a break’. Nestlé uses palm oil from Indonesian rainforests, where they have to clear vast areas and destroy the endangered orang-utan’s habitat in the process.

The video quickly went viral and the environmental organization made a microsite for the campaign. It was posted on YouTube but Nestlé swiftly took it down. Video platform Vimeo then quickly got its hands on it and that was it. Nestlé had exposed itself for what it really is and had completely ignored the strength of social media, especially powerful viral video campaigns like this one.

The video had been seen by less than 1,000 people when Nestlé took it down, giving Greenpeace the extra ammunition to re-post it onto Vimeo, posting along with it on twitter the confectionary giant’s suppression of the video. Many people said that they probably wouldn’t have heard of the video had Nestlé not taken the video down.

What essentially materialized was a massive social media attack, which will now be logged as a top case of social media crisis management. And not to mention the damage it has done to Nestlé. But it certainly worked as Nestlé have now said they will start to use sustainable palm oil by 2015.

The campaign was backed by Greenpeace’s 440,000 fans on Facebook and 37,000 twitter followers. They even used Google ads to promote the campaign.

Nestlé’s fundamental error was first of all removing the video and then trying to cover it up. They received a massive increase in Facebook fans all defaming the company on its wall posts and then bizarrely enough reacted to them rudely, where they had to eventually apologise for being rude. It was a total disaster.

The point is that brands and companies shouldn’t turn their backs on a conversation that is being said about them. Nestlé suffered a PR nightmare and lacked serious understanding of what viral means, how social media will surge on no matter what, and then to top things off responded in a sarcastic and arrogant way.

Did they not realise how crippling the video alone was to the brand? If they’d stood up and accepted the situation immediately and operated in a polite manner it would have been infinitely better for them. It also supports the rise of corporate social responsibility and how important it is for companies to think about, particularly if your business produces food.

But make your own mind up which one you think is potentially worse for a brand.

We’re pretty sure that Nestlé made the biggest blunder here.

Some of the Success Stories

Jonathan Hart-Smith, director, CK Clinical-pharmaceutical recruitment

http://ckclinical.co.uk/

Jonathan learnt how to maximize his pharmaceutical company’s use on various social media tools, including Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter and what other free tools there were available, such as Zing and YouTube.

Implementation

They carried out an overhaul of his market strategy and website, where they integrated social media tools and started using videos for vacancy ads. He bought his flip camera the day the conference ended.

The vacancy ad was for a social media person, who they employed soon after. This allowed them to set up the tools and make sure content was going out everyday in one way or another. This is how much of an impact the prospects of using social media had on him and the future of his business.

Big mistake

They did too much talking, too much outputting and not enough listening and reading and interacting. This is a very common mistake for new starters in social media.

Overall Impact

Their primary goal was to improve their SEO. They received a lot more traffic through their site within six months, which exceeded their expectations. Their traffic went up by 2077% in 2009 and through Analytics they discovered that 12% of the traffic was directly linked to their social media efforts.

How they treat social media now?

They use it as a listening tool and a multiple platform where they can identify key messages and trends to communicate with their followers and vice versa. It is very much a two-way process.

CKClincal’s YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/CKclinical

Elkie Holland, director, Prospectus IT Recruitment

http://www.prospectus.co.uk/

How Elkie viewed social media before

“Like a big 3D jigsaw that I couldn’t quite put together.”

“You have to mold your SM approach to fit in with your brand’s personality and realise that there are no right or wrong ways to do it. It’s what works best for you.”

What she learnt

Elkie learnt to reconsider her pre-conceived notions on certain social networking tools, such as YouTube and Facebook, which she had always discounted but now feels inspired by.

YouTube became a major part of her social media drive, using it mainly for breaking news, where Elkie is interviewing clients on launches, new software and so on. She said that just knowing how to do it and not having to be perfect either was a great encouragement.

“Social media is a mixture of communicating, interacting and using business signposts, and in turn, increasing the visibility of your business.”

“This was mega to me. We revamped our whole website.”

“It’s not just talking, but actually doing your business and working hand in hand with clients and candidates.”

Elkie applies the three D’s of top selling: Dedication, Discipline and Determination to how she uses social media.

• If you’re going to do it, do it, and not on a half-hearted basis
• It can become a time trap, so you need to manage that well and just keep at it
• The results do not happen over night, it comes in time so you need to be patient and focused

Impact on Business

“Amazing. We have more noise, more interest, more notice and more business now”.

“Interacting with the clients and candidates in a variety of ways; being more innovative and more involved in the community has brought as closer to them and we are really enjoying it”.

Prospectus IT YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/ProspectusIT

Lucian Tarnowski, founder of BraveNewTalent www.bravenewtalent.com

Lucian deals with Generation Y in his line of social media recruitment so naturally embraces the tools.

Lucian’s social media validation

“Generation Y are internet authorities who have the best skills that can add great value to businesses.”

“Social media as interaction and not interruption.”

“Using advertising on social networking sites is not using social media.”

Case study

BNT did the global social recruiting for One Young World (global forum for young people with leadership qualities) and managed to reach 15 million people, engage with over 100,000 in 140 countries. As a result they obtained some excellent caliber candidates and with no marketing budget.

Brave New Talent’s videos:

http://www.bravenewtalent.com/videos/

Andy Headworth, Sirona Consulting http://www.sironaconsulting.com/

Andy learnt how to use twitter so effectively that he has gained a huge following and has really got to grips with the different apps and tracking functions available to grow your knowledge of others and your own presence online-which as of course correlates to your offline presence.

His blog was recently named one of the top 25 blogs in The Talent Management Blog Power Rankings 2.0.

Link to a video interview with Bill Boorman about video interviewing conducted by Andy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJv6jzzyfdc&feature=player_embedded

Tips from the Top:

Bill Boorman, BB Consultancy: “start with the end in mind. Decide what you want out of it before you start and make that very clear in your mind”.  **

Paul Harrison, Carve Consultancy: “Listen to conversations about your brand. They will give you the basis to create a strategy”

Any Headworth, Sirona Consultancy: “Don’t sell; don’t preach, just engage and enjoy!”

** Stephen R. Cobey’s bestseller-‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind’

Achieving more traffic is the aim. It is the quantifiable purpose social media is used for.  Of course there are other reasons it is regarded as such an effective tool, namely for interactive purposes and a way to communicate with your candidates and clients. But they need to get there in the first place.

SEO and SMO absolutely have to be assessed and activated in the right way based on who you want to communicate with.

Key words and ♯Hashtags

In order for search engines to pick up content and search for it they need to be supplied with search criteria they can digest. Your website, blog, twitter, LinkedIn all have to be found and using the relevant keywords will do this. Google Adwords lends a hand to deciphering what are the big words being used on the web and in what areas for your industry. This will give your company great insight into what you need to be saying and how often.

Hashtags refer to keywords that online systems understand. On twitter they act as a conversational kind of metadata, encouraging users to participate in a mass discussion. So if you want to start a discussion on twitter, say for example, on ‘traditional job boards verses LinkedIn’, you would create a hashtag for it that might read ‘ #JBVLIN’ and then start talking. It’s essentially like a large forum, but by microblogging standards. These hashtags work particularly well during an event, where you can start a mass conversation throughout the entire day or however long it is on for. Tomorrow we will look at some good examples of this.

Top Tip

Having a good title for your webpage/blog page- search engines will crawl through your pages for information on your site so it can work out where it’s best placed on the search results. So having a popular and well informed title is absolutely key.  You can use Adwords to help you understand what are some of the buzzwords being used in your sector.

What about actual contact? Face to face dialogue, where expressions can be gauged and relationships can be cultivated? That won’t happen by just using twitter and LinkedIn.

So, yes my point is that of course you must turn your online efforts into offline relationships. That’s a give in. But how?

By making sure that you are communicating your message and values to your audience and getting involved with their messages too, you are already on the right track.

And now more and more groups and offline events are being posted online with initial discussions and introductions taking place around whatever the specific topic is.  The online space that networking events occupy is just as important as the actual offline event. Companies that understand this get involved with such groups and sites prior to the event and keep an eye on what subjects are being discussed and what they can contribute.

Often questions are put to the group in preparation for the event, which allows people to suggest topics they’d like to learn more about, get introduced to others and hopefully gain some good business contacts.

Good Example

The Social Media in Recruitment Conference, which took place in April this year built a website with a blog embedded into it and information about the event. This included preliminary videos from recruiters who went to the conference the year before and were explaining how social media has benefited them, news of who would be speaking at the event, success stories and information about groups on twitter. The hashtag ♯SMIR was running before, during and after the conference and was in the Top 10 trending topics in London on twitter. Only one behind Nick Clegg’s hashtag. That’s pretty impressive and not to mention rapid networking.

This is the best example of how online and offline communications merge together. Here is a selection of some of the top tweets during the day:

‘Superb case study from CK:Clinical of how social media has worked within a recruitment company’;

‘Doing YouTube videos giving interview tips was very valuable in social media strategy’;

‘Liked the CKclinical presentation, really good to see a company who new nothing a year ago really using social and committing’

‘hired a Medical Director for a pharma company just from a YouTube video’;

‘3D’s of social media: dedication, discipline and determination #smir > make it 4 & add Differentiation’

‘But corporate tweeting is a skill’

‘the “The CEO is the one who should be tweeting, not the intern” <- quite right – should be people at all levels’

Some stats

Over 60% of active online users have joined a social networking site; 96% of all udner 30 year olds have joined a social networking site; over 73% read blogs and over 85% watch videos.

Your brand is not what you say it is, it is what people tell you it is

Naturally all of this tweeting throughout the event allowed people to engage with one another and got them shifting their dialogues, knowledge and desire to learn from online to offline. Meeting face to face and doing proper interviews or consultations is key for a successful consultant or company to gain clients or recommend quality clients.

Facebook: from personal social to business social

Facebook has been getting a hard time of late over privacy settings and various squabbles of the like. The mass technorati are up in hands over the issue and to be honest, it’s getting a little boring now. So I won’t take you down the route.

Many of us think of Facebook as a purely social networking site for our plans, laughs and viewing pleasure (pictures and videos) with our friends. Most of us have a profile and most of us have pictures, videos and comments from our friends continually littering our wall.

Facebook now has well over 400 million users with fan pages, groups and profiles, many of which detail different brands and businesses.  It is still the leading social networking site and for recruitment agencies that are using it they can expose themselves to a vast number of candidates. It’s about how they work Facebook into their daily marketing and talent sourcing process.

Some more stats

There are more than 3 million events created each month on Facebook

More than 30 million active user groups exist on Facebook

Some tips about how to get Facebook working for you

• Create a detailed, interesting profile explaining clearly what you do and how you do it and upload a good profile picture. All info is indexed for SEO
• Start searching relevant people and groups that are to do with your sector
• Talk about offline opportunities, events, conferences and seminars that your clients may be interested in. It’s OK to promote this sort of thing because it is of use to people and it’s an educational opportunity. It also demonstrates that you are actively searching on their behalf
• Try and host or co-host events that your clients may be interested in-Get involved!
• Post vacancies, as you would on twitter, with a forum-style discussion boards underneath: quick, easy access to communicating with candidates
• Users often create social ads of themselves, which are a bit like profiles on LinkedIn-a great searching pool for recruiters to find candidates
• Searching for candidates: search by  education, company and location
• Use the Facebook Directory for people, pages, groups and applications, which are all alphabetised
• Use Marketplace to search the job market by sector, post jobs
• Use Facebooks Ads to target users with specific demographics and skills, especially passive candidates
• Start up discussions on the Wall: short, snappy topics.
• Crowdsource: this is when you ask a question to your friends and followers in order to start a conversation and engage with your core audience, for example, you may post a question asking ‘What is everyone’s thoughts on video interviewing?’

When we work with recruiters, either implementing their social media or advising them on how to do it we also work on a strategic marketing level. Helping you build more relationships is at the core of our strategy.

So before this becomes another epic post check out some of these visual messages. They come in the form of SlideShares (essentially a slideshow) and a photo montage that hopefully demonstrate the different ways you can communicate your business message. Ordinarily these examples of content would be uploaded to your website or your blog, which I will go into more detail next week. One bit at a time!

An effective photo montage:

Check out this colourful SlideShare presentation from one recruiter on twitter.

More content

Still images, photos, diagrams, cartoons and sketches are crucial bits of content that must be woven into your communication strategy. After all, people tend to respond better to visual messages, especially during their busy work days, when reading a long post isn’t always possible.

Short, snappy and attention grabbing visual content is a great way to get your candidates and clients involved in your brand and to make sure that they remember you and what you’re about.

Social image sites, such as Flickr and PicApp are good places to sign up to search for relevant images and build your own library. You can share images with other members by just sending them a short message asking for permission to use their picture and vice versa. PicApp also has an embedded SEO booster where the images contain the right meta-data for search engines to pick them up. I’ll reference this again when I talk about blogs.

The links below are examples of some fun and engaging ways companies have used images and diagrams on varying levels of design sophistication to get their messages across:

http://blog.sironaconsulting.com/.a/6a00d8341c761a53ef0133ef9e9c56970b-pi

http://www.datadial.net/blog_content/uploads/2010/04/DD_DigitalPR.png

http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2010/04/13/seo-in-pictures-our-seo-infographic/

http://www.slideshare.net/kimuh72/google-facts-216737?type=powerpoint

Audio is another leading contender in the multi-media arena and podcasts formulate it perfectly. Podcasts are often created in series, where each one is about 10-20 minutes long discussing a particular topic that gets expanded on as the series goes on. However, some podcasts are something of a marathon and can go on for longer than 20 minutes. We suggest this is not a good look for your company, as people simply do not have the time or attention to stay tuned for that long. Treat them just like you would visual content: short, to the point, interesting dialogue that will make your audience’s ears prick up.