Last month, we brought you Part 1 of our Essential Guide to Developing a Social Recruiting Strategy Workbook, which helps recruiters to define and understand their existing recruiting strategy and how they can seamlessly integrate social for higher volumes of success.

With this information in hand, Part 2 will provide with the steps needed to craft a specific social recruiting strategy, tailored to your company’s unique needs.

In this workbook, you’ll learn how to:

• Lay out the groudnwork of an effective and evolving social recruiting and hiring strategy.
• Determine which tactics or social outlets to devote your energies and how much time to allot to each.
• Narrow down your talent pool and determine how to best engage job seekers using the right mix of content, social media and company information.
• Develop a successful employee referral program and encourage your employees to refer their social networks.

On May 1, Jobvite launched our 2012 Index, which illuminated just how important employee referrals are to a successful recruitment plan. The data from the study inspired us to launch the first annual Employee Referral Month, in honor of the amazing results generated from our customers’ employee referral programs. Participate in Employee Referral Month this May and encourage employees to refer.

Download Part 2 of the Essential Guide to Developing a Social Recruiting Strategy.

Yesterday’s Jobvite Customer Summit 2012 attracted customers from all over the United States, Canada and from as far away as Taiwan. Companies like Dropbox, Hulu and Evernote were all represented. For those who couldn’t make it, here are some highlights from the event.

The Future of Work – Winning the Dating Game
Dan Finnigan, Jobvite President and CEO, kicked things off with a speech on the State of the [Jobvite] Union. Dan talked about the rise of the “disposable worker,” the creation of a permanent class of temps and contractors. He also discussed the troubling disparity between the decreasing number of high school graduates and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) students, and the increasing requirement for employees with higher education.

Moving forward to the recruiting realm, Dan reviewed the declining longevity of an employee with a company due to a growing mentality among younger workers that each job is a stepping-stone to the next, rather than a permanent fit as it was in the past. As a result of this high turnover rate, hiring and recruiting are constant jobs.

Additionally, Dan also reminded customers about the Facebook applications for Jobvite. The Work With Us app allows users to provide you with their professional information and “opt-in” to your company’s talent pool to later be mobilized when a job matching their skills opens up.

Endless Innovation
After Dan, Kevin Nanney (VP of Product) and Adam Hyder (CTO and VP of Engineering) delved into the details of what customers can expect from Jobvite in 2012. Kevin talked about the various external and internal inputs that go into the product team’s Roadmap Planning process,and discussed the process’s constantly evolving nature.

For 2012, the Roadmap includes a LinkedIn widget, wider ATS integration, Facebook a

pps, enhanced resume searches and a brand new user interface approach. Innovation is endless at Jobvite to allow for better touch screen and mobile accessibility.

Next on board was David Lahey, VP of Customer Success. Lahey assured customers that Jobvite will be progressively rolling out all the changes that Kevin and Adam touched on to ensure customers have an easy transition. The Customer Success Team will also be conducting more Expert Series, during which Jobvite experts will provide classroom training to customers seeking to maximize their use of the Jobvite platform. Also new to Jobvite is an enhanced certification program for customers who have become Jobvite experts themselves.

Learning How to Enchant
Next up was keynote speaker Guy Kawasaki and his unveiling of the nature of enchantment. He spoke about his three pillars to achieving enchantment with anyone: Likability, Trustworthiness and a Great Product. And Guy had certainly achieved the first pillar. We were treated to a series of fun anecdotes, parables and advice, leaving with all the tools needed to do a little enchanting of our own.

Jobvite Experts at Their Best
The remainder of the day customers filtered into two rooms for the Beginner and Expert Tracks, where product experts and customer speakers from eHarmony, GREE International and TriQuint Semiconductor regaled them.

Customers also had the opportunity to receive free, one-on-one, strategy consultations with a member of the Jobvite Customer Success team at the Power Center.

Summit 2012 was a resounding success. Customers left with a better idea of what’s going on in the Jobvite world and in the broader recruiting universe. If nothing else, they did get a nifty, Jobvite-branded Timbuk2 bag.

Thanks to all who came. See you next year!

While mining through our big data set, we found that over 38 million Jobvites have been sent and 52,000 new jobs have been created since Jobvite was founded. Additionally, May is the month that employee referrals grow in abundance. To celebrate our and our customers’ employee referral success, we are announcing May 2012 as the first annual Employee Referral Month.

As pioneers in the social recruiting business, we strive to stay on the pulse of new recruiting trends. Because it is increasingly apparent how important employee referrals are to recruiting, we set out to quantify just how valuable these referrals are.

Our research shows that employee referrals are the most effective and cost-efficient source of hires than other recruiting outlets, such as job boards or career sites. And we’ve got the data to prove it.

Over the course of the next month, we’ll be providing all sorts of helpful tips, techniques and strategy guides, as well as a whole library of resources for you to increase those referral rates and celebrate your employees.

Additionally, we are hosting a contest for employee referral success stories. If you’ve gotten a job or currently have a job as a result of a friend’s referral, please post your story on the Jobvite Facebook page for a chance to win an iPad3. The story with the most “Likes” will win.

Learn about the value of a referral beginning with the following infographic.

Facebook isn’t just a place for friends anymore.

Job seekers are using this social network to look past personal photos and friends’ status updates for their next big opportunity. Jobvite research shows that over 44 percent of all job seeking activity is happening on Facebook, and that much of the conversation is happening with trusted friends on the network.

These are active job seekers connecting on Facebook, because they see it as one more channel. However, as a recruiter, you have to approach it much differently than Twitter, and it requires users to be more active than other social networks. But it’s not hard, as the Super Socials are finding out.

Here’s how to improve your Facebook to find your next great gig.

Complete Your Profile.

Your chances of finding a job go up significantly when companies know what you do. Fill out your Facebook profile using the information from LinkedIn. For more tips about LinkedIn social profiles, read How to Build a Great Profile on LinkedIn. Every single tip is also relevant for Facebook.

Jobvite and other companies have built Facebook applications tailored for career searches. The application matches your profile information to jobs in their networks, and this allows the tools to better target job seekers and for job seekers to better target companies. Think of it like search engine optimization for your profile: the more relevant the information like using keywords that would match job descriptions, the better your profile matches.

Facebook also targets advertising based on where people have worked and their job titles. Employers can target location, educational background, age range and other demographics to reach candidates. Jobvite is one of the many platforms that can track candidate applications from Facebook, further showing that the platform is a valid place to reach future employees.

It works.

One of the senior product managers here at Jobvite, Lucinda Foss, had filled out her profile and Jobvite used Facebook’s advertising platform to target Product Managers from certain industries. She clicked, applied, and now she’s the lead on several projects here at Jobvite.

Follow Companies You Want to Work At.

Great companies that understand social networks are a great place to find employees — all you have to do it search.

Over 80 percent of employers use social media to find candidates, which means they’re looking for you. And it’s a really easy two-step process: search for companies you want to work at and like their Facebook Fan pages. Once your “Like” is registered, you receive news about the company directly in your news stream.

One of the companies that does it best is Yelp! On its Facebook Fan page they have a Work With Us icon that links directly to its job listings, searchable by region and job title. Through Facebook, you are just a couple of clicks away from applying.

Yelp! does a great job of showcasing their company culture through Facebook with their “Day in the Life” series. They profile employees at all levels of the company and what they do in a typical day so people can get an idea what the company culture is like. These posts are featured directly on the fan page and will arrive in your newsfeed.

Yelp!’s Facebook fan page where the jobs listing icon appears.

Find Common Interest Groups and Conferences.

Facebook is a great place for professional interest groups and alumni networks. The number of these groups is growing, and they’re increasingly being used for more professional reasons.

Here’s an example: I’m involved a group called the Product Design Guild, an invite-only professional group in San Francisco for User Experience Designers. Jobvite needed a freelance front-end coder for a while, so I used the group to reach out to several resources, including Pete Fecteau, a designer with coding experience. Pete’s passion for design, shown through his newsfeed, kept him in front of mind. When we needed someone like him, we brought him in; and within a couple of weeks he was working at Jobvite.

Many conferences also set up very robust Facebook presences to advertise the event, which is an awesome way to grow your networking reach. San Francisco Design Week, a conference designed for visual and user experience designers, is a very active group page on Facebook where both the event organizers and fans have a very robust dialog about the wealth of design resources available to them.

The events are also great because you get public access to the people attending the event — you can see everyone that’s joined the group — and use this to build your professional Facebook networks after the event.

Stretch the definition of “friend” to people you work with and the potential for future opportunities will grow with each connection. You spend more time at work than anywhere else. And people change jobs today more than ever — on average of four years, according to a Jobvite Infographic.

Each person that changes a job could open a world of possibilities for you. Reach out and ask if they have opportunities that fit your experience.

Build Your Network.

Don’t limit your Facebook network to professional and personal contacts. Become friends with people in your social circles, follow pundits that allow subscriptions and talk to people with similar professional interests that are half a world away. Like my friend and colleague, Kenneth James Hamer  – it’s about the conversation with people that may not help you now but will help you down the road.

Post on the newsfeeds of people you subscribe to and your friends about what you want to do. Recruiters and companies will want to see passion in what you talk about, and that conversation keeps you in the front of mind of those that might be looking for someone like you.

Seriously, you never know where your next opportunity is coming from, and all you need is one.

Ask Your Friends for Help.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, I’m looking for new opportunities” on Facebook. Most people on Facebook have networks between 100 and 300 people, and when you think about the networks they have, you’re now reaching approximately 90,000 people.

It’s important to remember that you’re not only using your friends but also their friends to find your next next gig. At least one of them works for a company that has a job just for you.

How to Approach It?

It depends on your situation:

• If you’re an active job seeker, tell people you’re looking. Talk about what you like about your career and what kind of position you are looking for. Talk about how you’re keeping busy with activities related to your career and post interesting articles that might attract attention of recruiters. Post early and often, because the more you post, the more you appear in your friend’s newsfeeds.
• If you’re a passive job seeker, message people that can help you privately. Remember you might have people that you’re working with now (like, uh, your boss) as friends on Facebook, so it has to be a private job search. Your updated information isn’t broadcasted to your wall.

When you craft the message, don’t sound desperate — talk about the great opportunities you are looking at, and how the job market is growing. Also talk about how you are working on your skills.

Also remember that over 40 percent of Facebook’s activity happens on mobile, so you aren’t only reaching people when they log in, you’re reaching them at work, with friends or even at networking events. This allows you to cast a wide net, possibly within the context of future opportunities. It’s the best way of maximizing who you’re talking to.

Patrick Neeman is the Jobvite’s Director of User Experience. His previous experience includes working with startups to launch their products, User Experience and Social Media consulting with Microsoft, and managing a team of 25 User Experience professionals for a technology consultancy. He also runs a blog, Usability Counts, that covers topics such as User Experience, Social Media, and Web Marketing.

This year’s Summit on May 3rd, 2012 at the Hotel Sofitel is slated to be the recruiting event of the year. We’re bringing the best and brightest minds of the industry to one jam-packed event. Here are the top five reasons customers are excited to attend.

1) Be Inspired by Guy Kawasaki on Enchantment
Ever heard of Apple? Well this guy is one of only a handful of Apple Fellows, an elite group recognized for extraordinary technical or leadership excellence in the company that includes such innovators as Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay. He was the chief evangelist at Apple, and was partially responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984, which went on to become a cultural icon.

Now Guy spends his time as a renowned author and venture capitalist and being a partner in Garage Technology Ventures and co-founding Alltop. He’ll be delivering the keynote speech on how to inspire people’s actions and motivations.

2) Beginner or Advanced – Two Tracks to Extend Your Knowledge
Whether you’re just beginning with Jobvite or are a seasoned pro, the 2012 Customer Summit offers two tracks to choose from. Beginner Track attendees will learn how to create custom recruiting reports, use social media to attract talent and referrals and maximize usage of hiring managers, as well as learn some of Jobvite’s industry secrets.

Expert Trackers will discover how to build effective strategies, increase efficiency, exercise best practices in reporting and design a maximally effective career site. Regardless of your experience with Jobvite, Customer Summit 2012 has knowledge to offer you.

3) Power Center: Free, Private Consultations with Jobvite Experts
Attendees are entitled to a cost-free 30-minute consultation with a certified Jobvite product expert. Our expert will listen to your goals and will give you guidance on your company’s specific needs, and help you to realize your full potential with Jobvite.

4) Network with an Array of HR Innovators
2011’s Summit attracted customers from as far away as Australia and the United Kingdom. This year’s summit promises to be even bigger. Take this opportunity to ingratiate yourself with pioneering minds from a broad spectrum of industries.

5) Cocktails on Us!
Nobody said these things couldn’t be fun.

Don’t miss out on this year’s Summit, register today!

For more information, download the eBook 10 Great Moments in ATS.

Throughout the social Web, you can find articles that exemplify and pride employee referrals as the top source of quality candidates and hires. Statistically, these hires last longer and have greater job satisfaction. However, hard data on this topic is often difficult to come across.

Earlier this year, SHRM indicated that new hires from employee referral programs are roughly 24% for non-exempt positions. Browse around the Internet, and you’ll find varying numbers.

Being the head of technology here, at Jobvite, I decided to delve deeper into our big data (customer data set) to understand the true value of these prized referral candidates. Here’s what I found.

From Source to Hire
Recruiters use a variety sources to capture applications, such as career sites, job boards, agencies, employee referrals – to name a few. Naturally, the top sources of applicants for Jobvite customers are job boards (42.9%) and career sites (32.1%).

But still, recruiters are always looking for the golden ticket – the one applicant that is perfect for the job.

So, which of these applicants were actually hired?

About 21% came from career sites, 15% from job boards and, not surprisingly, employee referrals produced the highest number of hires by source. What’s truly amazing is how many.

Of the small number of applicants coming from referrals (6.9%), nearly 40% of hires came from referrals. That’s nearly double SHRM’s average! If you’re a Jobvite customer, you should be proud!

Moreover, out of every 100 referral applicants, about seven of these will get hired; while job boards will produce one hire for every 246 applicants.

Of course, it’s common knowledge in the recruiting realm that referrals are more likely to get hired. However, they are also faster to hire and stay much longer.

Referral Hires Are Fast and Last
The average application to hire time for career sites is 45 days and 39 days for job boards. Employee referral candidates move through the hiring process 55% faster than those who came through the career site, taking only 29 days from application to hire.

Referral hires also stay at a company for much longer. About 46% of referrals and 29% of those hired through career sites stay for three years or more, while only 14% of those hired from job boards stayed.

Top 5 Fields with the Highest Employee Referral Hiring
It’s true that the more your employees refer, the better your referral rate will be. Jobvite customers show that the largest number of referral hires is within the following fields:

1. Sales
2. Engineering
3. Customer Support
4. Photography
5. Marketing

Interestingly enough, sales referral hires are twice as high as engineering.

In essence, employee referrals are extremely effective when many employees in the company refer and refer often. So keep sending those Jobvites!

There are many definitions for social recruiting, but the most important, and often ignored, one is what it means for your company. Social recruiting is a plugin for your existing recruiting and hiring strategy. It requires a framework, a plan of action and measurement.

As hiring increases this year, so does the competition for quality talent. So instead of searching for definitions and scouring the Internet for more information and theoretical content, check out our new (and free) workbook, The Essential Guide to Developing a Social Recruiting Strategy – Part 1 Bigger. Better. Hired.

This is no ordinary whitepaper or eBook, but rather a comprehensive workbook that you can use to customize your own social recruiting strategy, and finally answer the age-old question of: What does social recruiting mean to MY company’s hiring practices?

In this workbook, you will have the opportunity to learn:

• Begin the framework for a lasting and evolving social recruiting strategy.
• Outline your hiring objectives and map out your goals.
  
• Leverage an employment brand to attract quality talent.
• Build job seeker personas to target the right candidates.
• Define how you stack up against your competitors.

What are you waiting for?

Begin your strategy framework today with Part 1 of your workbook and deliver actionable and practical social recruiting knowledge to your hiring team.

Twitter works.

How do I know? The senior visual designer I work with, Kenneth James Hamer, got his job through Twitter. Five recent high quality applicants I had for an interaction designer position came through the channel in a time where interaction designers are in high demand.

How hard is it finding a job through Twitter? It’s not. You don’t have to be clever. You don’t have to tweet ten times a day. You just have to listen and pick your spots.

For Kenneth, it started with a single message after several informal conversations.

“Hey, could you look at my resume? I want to get your opinion about it.”

He didn’t ask about a job — he asked what I thought of his resume. Kenneth knew that I was hiring freelancers for other work at the time (he did his research), and he worked at building a relationship that included several Skype calls. He understood that the results might not be right away. We were just having a conversation anyway.

Several months passed, and now he’s working at Jobvite.

Twitter works.

Here’s how you can make it work for you.

Do your research.

Twitter is a flood of information; what you want to do is turn it into a manageable stream.

Watch your feed and start a list of people that you enjoy reading. I literally call mine “Stuff I Follow.” People you follow might post a relevant article, sage advice about a career, a funny comment or even a job posting. Favorite posts and add them to your own personal lists. Pare down the list so it’s at a pace that can be browsed comfortably in a few minutes.

There are several tools that help you manage that flood. TweetDeck is my favorite because it allows me to filter my feeds by certain search terms. Flipboard has an amazing social client that helps you read through tweets.

Next, understand whom you’re following. LinkedIn is a great resource for this, and all it takes is a simple name search. Then, not only do you get to know the person’s professional background, but also if the person is approachable. The main thing is to identify that the users are ones who can help you make a job connection.

Find people who have the right audience.

Find people that tweet articles about your industry and start following them. Target users that have between 500 and 5,000 followers and over 5,000 tweets. Not only do they have a great audience, but also they’re very experienced with the platform and can show you the ropes, if you listen. Most people in that range not only engage but also encourage conversation with their audience.

The best way to find content is to search for hashtags. These are keywords that are used to find categorized content on Twitter. Most job categories have most hashtags defined for them. Additionally, people will include hashtags for specialized tweets (Job postings will carry the #jobs or #careers hashtag, for example). There are also hashtags for Human Resources (#hr), Java developers (#java), Marketers (#marketing), Social Media (#socialmedia) and more.

But there’s a catch. Most of those job postings are a) posted by automated bots and b) don’t carry the cache of a personal referral. Those probably won’t get you hired, but it shows who’s hiring.

Another place to look is people that have several lists of Twitter users. I have 15 lists that categorize User Experience professionals by geographic region. Several Twitter users are subscribing to these lists.

Start a genuine conversation.

True engagement begins with a one-on-one conversation. It might be a comment about something posted or a straight direct message asking for tips or advice.

People love to talk, and conversations on Twitter are short, personal communications. You can start a conversation with, “I consider you an industry expert. Can I get your opinion on this?” Nothing works better than flattery.

The key is starting a real conversation that has banter that can become a personal acquaintance. You want to develop a sense of trust that will extend the Twitter conversation to a professional relationship.

Twitter is a great personal branding platform. If you acknowledge the other party’s brand, that person becomes very approachable.

Turn yourself into an employee referral.

Remember that your ideal audience includes recruiters. Many companies that are hiring use Jobvite and Twitter to advertise and track applicants. People that use Twitter are open to referrals on the network, because they understand that the platform is a great place to grow professional contacts. And they’ll remember someone much more if they’ve had previous conversations with you.

Those that engage become employee referrals – like my friend Kenneth.

“Our own employees are some of our best recruiters,” said Janet Van Huysse, vice president of human resources at Twitter. The company has hundreds of employees on their own social network, in essence, turning all of them into “employee recruiters” interested in bringing great resources into their organization.

Our CEO, Dan Finnigan, presented at SXSW a few weeks ago and indicated in his presentation that even though seven percent of the people that apply for jobs are employee referrals, the hire rate is 40 percent of the candidates.

That’s huge.

Employees will prep you, as the job seeker, on interviews, giving you an added advantage. It’s stacking the deck in your favor.

What to do now?

Join Twitter and embrace the conversation. The investment will pay off.

Patrick Neeman is the Jobvite’s Director of User Experience. His previous experience includes working with startups to launch their products, User Experience and Social Media consulting with Microsoft, and managing a team of 25 User Experience professionals for a technology consultancy. He also runs a blog, Usability Counts, that covers topics such as User Experience, Social Media, and Web Marketing.

Early this morning, I read the Associated Press article about the job interviewer who asked a job candidate to provide his Facebook username and password in order to access the candidate’s private profile. Frankly, it floored me. On the surface, it is such an inappropriate and unprofessional act. And while I am not a lawyer, I have to believe it is also illegal.

At this point in our history, I think most people know that it is illegal to ask job candidates about their age or religion. You cannot ask someone if they are married, have children or are pregnant. You cannot even ask their citizenship. Clearly, asking someone to access their private Facebook profile would provide answers to most, if not all of these kinds of questions.

But more importantly, this kind of practice is a blatant violation of someone’s privacy – and it is no way to start a relationship – especially a working one.

I run a company, Jobvite, who’s product is a social recruiting platform that helps companies empower all employees to share open jobs quickly and easily with anyone they know in their growing networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others. This has become a very powerful way for companies to find the highest quality employees – referrals made by your own employees – and the best and most fair way to vet candidates for their fit with a specific job and with your particular company and culture.

But asking a candidate to open up their private profile and network for you to see is not social recruiting. It is the old-fashioned behavior of a bully. And it is not the appropriate behavior of a hiring manager or recruiting professional.
Frankly, there is absolutely no reason a company or a manager would need access to an employee’s or a candidate’s personal and private social network in such a manner.

Facebook’s vision, as stated by its founder Mark Zuckerberg in their S1 filing, is to “accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” In such a world, it will be easier for people to find what they need and want and help others do the same, simply by sharing more openly.

I imagine Facebook employees are motivated daily by people reconnecting with friends, finding new ones, learning new things from their network and finding new and better ways to improve their lives by being more open, honest and authentic in their network… just like we are at Jobvite in helping people find new and better-fit professional opportunities through their networks.

This vision will not be realized if people begin to fear that by sharing more openly and authentically, they will set themselves up for embarrassment, ridicule, judgement – or new opportunities. People will only revert to a more “generic” definition of themselves, an almost fake on-line façade, extinguishing the value of this emerging new social world.

I think it is clear that the promise of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is a world in which people, by being increasingly but authentically open and connected, will be better to reach their potential in all aspects in life, including professionally.

We all intuitively know that it takes “all kinds of people” as my grandmother said, “to make the world go around.” A culture that embraces tolerance and openness is most likely to foster innovation and growth. Companies need all types of people to thrive – introverts and extroverts, logical and creative, passionate and stoic. The freedom to be more open and authentic is the necessary environment for people to find the best people with which to live, play and work!

This interviewer clearly does not get that, and his company will suffer. His is an Orwellian vision, one in which everyone adheres to the same bland standard of behavior. I am certain this interviewer’s defense will be something about his goal to determine if the candidate had participated in inappropriate behavior or even criminal behavior. But that is why we have references and background checks.

His behavior, instead, will only chill the openness that Zuckerberg and many, many others envision and will keep the social Web from its full potential to help people authentically improve their lives.

To companies that ask for such personal information, you are simply bullies, should be ashamed and are breaking the law!