Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

Jackie Ross, one of the owners of JRoss Hospitality Recruiters and JRoss Retail Recruiters and I go way back.  When I was looking for a razor sharp retailer with a great reputation for hiring, there really was no competition.  She took to the recruiting industry like a duck to water and the rest is history! This is a candid read on her early steps into using social media to recruit.

Our journey into the world of social media.

Someone wise once told me that you will never grow and develop unless you push yourself outside your comfort zone.  I think this sentiment captures JRoss’ and my personal journey into the world of social media.  I am putting myself out on the ledge again by jumping into the blogosphere for the very first time to tell you about our experience.  So here is my free fall….

In my personal life, I jumped on Facebook and enjoyed connecting with friends (new and old, near and far) sharing photos, joining groups, playing games, planning events etc.  I was an early adopter and joined Linkedin to build my professional network and quickly learned the power of connecting and reaching out to contacts in my industry with limited effort.

Along with my partners, I run a recruiting agency that services Canadian Retail and Hospitality sector.  We have offices across the country and work with many national and international companies supporting their hiring mandates.  As an agency Recruiter, it is essential in our business to get to the job seeker first.  In the last couple of years, it became apparent that the recruiting function is continuously being transformed and a skilled Recruiter always needs to stay ahead of the curve.  Our job used to focus on filling open vacancies, now our focus is on building relationships and communities.  This shift marked a sea change for the world of recruiting as the use of on-line networks to find candidates became the new normal.  After taking countless numbers of webinars trying to learn to navigate through a new world where buzz words like “tweetcruiting”, “talent hubs”, “mash-ups”, “digital marketing” were popping up weekly, we knew we needed help.

We turned to an expert for guidance. Brenda Dumont, whose persistent curiosity about how people interact, seek employment, and engage in discussions online about service industry jobs made her an invaluable resource to us.  It was apparent that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most widely used sites for on-line recruitment and we chose to focus on them given their huge following.  In 6 weeks we built a corporate Facebook page, a LinkedIn company profile and a Twitter account for each of our 2 divisions.  Plus we updated our website to include a positions page where candidates can view and apply for many of our current open opportunities. There were lot of planning, discussions and questions about how to build a strong, focused on-line presence.

The big questions that needed to be answered were – How do we use these tools to connect with the job seeker? What do they expect in terms of high value content and messaging?  How often do we engage them?  How much time do we spend on this daily and who will manage the response?  How do you handle potentially negative or critical response?  How do we continuously build and grow our talent community?  And the biggest one….what is the ROI on all this activity and investment?

We developed a plan we execute consistently so that we can measure our results.  Since late July, we have been tweeting daily on all things retail/hospitality and recruiting plus extending our reach by publicizing our searches.  We update our Facebook and Linkedin status daily as we attempt to develop a service industry talent hub as an epicenter for Canadian service industry career information and industry news.  This takes a lot of time, careful research and some level of creativity.  We also recognize that what we do now may be entirely different a year from now as technology changes and passive and active job seekers look elsewhere to connect to potential employers.

Our findings – When we engage our followers with questions, we get more interaction and better responses.  Casual, social banter works better than a formal style.  Also, our online community is slower to build than anticipated and this requires patience and daily effort to reach out and promote it.  And an unexpected side benefit is we are more on top of our game in terms of what’s happening in our industry because we are always on top of the late breaking news.

In the end,  I think the following sums up our findings to date in a very straightforward way. When it comes to recruiting: Facebook = Converation, Twitter = Awareness, and Linkedin = Connections.  Was it worth the investment?  Definitely, even if the financial return is difficult to measure. It has helped elevate the JRoss brand presence and strengthened our connections to the communities we serve.

What comes next?  Blogging? Video?  We shall see.  In the meantime we will continue to press on leaning, listening, engaging, sharing, building and connecting on-line.

So please please Like us already!

http://www.facebook.com/#!/jrossretailrecruiters

http://www.facebook.com/#!/jrosshospitalityrecruiters

Filed under:
Restaurants, Retail, hospitality, recruitment by Brenda