Social Sourcing and Staffing

Social Sourcing and StaffingBy Eric Schwalbe

One of the keys to our success has been our ability to consistently provide top notch event staff in even the hardest places to find them.  Eric Schwalbe is an account manager at On Tour 24/7 and pioneer in the field of Social Sourcing and Staffing.  Here is his account of how he uses emerging social media trends and technology to enhance our recruiting strategy.

9/8/2014

Social Sourcing & Staffing is the utilization of an individual’s social content to engage and drive targeted employment applications. We will cover using established and developing networks for active candidates and how to use social searches for reaching out to passive candidates.

Active Candidates

People are on social media, and they are easy to contact. So if you’re looking to recruit staff, certain techniques applied to social media platforms can help you find exactly who you are looking for.

Recruiting resources and the access to people have rapidly evolved with technology, especially in the digital and social media age. Facebook and LinkedIn “Groups” have grown virally in the past several years, especially in high volume staffing industries. While we are going to focus on experiential marketing contractors, other professionals like actors and bartenders have also developed similar networks locally, nationally and worldwide.

Clutch Media Group started a job sharing network utilizing these groups with 20 people in 2010 and in two years grew to over 3k members and 110+ regions. Another two years later it boasts 15-20k US members, over a thousand UK members, 160+ regions, 150-200 recruiters, and an exponential growth rate fueled by viral recruiting.

Clutch Media Group’s main group serves as an umbrella for the nationwide social media groups and its regional job boards. Check it out! Type into your Facebook search bar ‘Clutch Chicago, Clutch NY, Clutch TX, Clutch FL, Clutch, etc.’ and see what regions suit you. A rapid evolution in networking amongst field marketing contractors is taking place as social media connects not only us, but agency recruiters and their clients as well.

These groups are easily accessible from any Facebook profile, simple to post in, and can instantly engage applicants via the push notification system. This approach makes it easy for active candidates and job seekers to connect with recruiters and their application instructions.

There are many different groups.  In the experiential marketing industry alone there are many overlapping groups of similar organization as well.  “Brand Ambassadors of New York”, “Bilingual Brand Ambassadors of Texas”,  and ”Promotional Models of California” are just a few examples that have state by state and sometimes city by city membership.

Exclusive prescreened groups have also seen a rise. Clutch has specific networks of experienced, prescreened Tour Managers as well a group for trained, prescreenedAutomotive Product Specialists. There are several groups on LinkedIn for Tour Manager & Senior Level Managers In Experiential & Relationship Marketing  and websites that host job boards specific to the industry. Similar networks exist for all sorts of high volume recruiting industries as well. You can explore a variety of ways and Facebook will help make suggestions with Facebook’s ‘Find Groups’ Feature.

Passive Candidates

Like-minded individuals frequently flock together whether it’s based on their social or work related interests and aspirations.  Whether you are a college student interested in part time work or a marketing professional aspiring to a full time career, you are often surrounded by friends with similar interests and skill sets.  Your use of social media creates social content which allows someone using social sourcing to find you through your friends, the groups you join and where you live.

Passive candidates are those like-minded individuals that are seeking new job opportunities but have yet to connect with the same recruiters and social media groups.  Passive candidates can also be new to the field all together but are intrigued by their friend’s social media posts about all of the exciting events and locations they get to work.

Facebook Graph Search is one way to reach out to these passive candidates. You can search for ‘friends of your friends’ as well as specific targets such as location, sex, job title, languages spoken, and much more.

If your social presence is made up of professional contacts your leverage on these tools is exponential. Those secondary contacts, or “friends of your friends”/”people who you may know” (fairly interchangeable search terms), are likely to be in or at least familiar with your professional industry.

You can narrow it down by all sorts of factors to find a very specialized staff, someone remote, or someone specific you were looking for:

As you can see from the examples above, Facebook graph search gives you incredible access to individuals online. You are able to directly contact passive candidates through the direct messaging system and invite them to apply to your jobs.

Messaging Best Practices

Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook is geared towards a more personal and social experience so your outreach must be sensitive to this while still encouraging a potential candidate to apply.
With high volume recruiting you must be mindful of the traffic you send through Facebook as it has several spam algorithms which monitor the content and speed of your messages.

While not as strict as Craigslist, Facebook will focus on repeated website URLs or email addresses, mark the messages as spam, and send them to an inbox users rarely check.

If you send too many messages per hour it will begin to slow you down and request captcha inputs.

If you make too many unreturned friend requests or similar actions, Facebook will put a temporary block on your account which limits you from sending messages to people you are not directly connected with, or requesting new connections.

Facebook is constantly updating their code and policy so your social staffer will also need to be adaptive to additional changes.
LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google all have similar search capabilities and are updating and refining their targeting capabilities when searching for individuals.

Social Sourcing can supercharge any existing recruiting strategy. Recruiters who research their candidates can tap into the auxiliary benefits of prescreening candidate’s public content, engaging on a personal level, encouraging social follow up, and viral recruiting.

For more information on how to use Social Sourcing and Staffing feel free to drop me a line!.

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Author: Eric Schwalbe

Eric Schwalbe is a founding member of the Clutch Media Group as referred to in this article. Eric was recruited to join the On Tour 24/7 team because of his staffing resources and use of Social Sourcing and Staffing. Email Eric at eric@ontour247.com or call office 866.878.3609 ex. 105.