When entertainment personalities Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross started to post messages on the micro-blogging site Twitter, it seemed of little relevance to the average recruiter. As other celebrities and sports stars started posting 140-character ‘tweets’ to stay in touch with their fans and Twitter’s user base grew, it became clear, however, that the site had a value to anyone looking for new ways to engage with their audience.

So it was little wonder that it quickly became a buzzword in recruiting circles and March this year saw the launch of recruitment tool TwitterJobSearch.com. Twitter’s rapid rise shows how fast recruiters need to move if they are to keep pace with the new channels that are being presented to them and they need to proactively work with their web development company to explore these new opportunities.
To illustrate the point, Bruce Stander, group chief executive of Optimal Internet, which provides recruiters with a range of web services, says that his company already offers integration with more than 38 job search or aggregator sites as well as with social media sites such as Friends Reunited and Facebook. “Twitter-style job aggregation is very much alive and job boards are already ahead of the curve on this,” he says.

So it seems there is little time for agencies to waste. In future, it may no longer be enough just to have and maintain an effective website. David Johnston, business development manager at web development company HotLizard, says as a minimum recruiters should still ensure their sites tick those “level one” boxes of featuring a vacancy search, candidate application, good content and search engine optimisation (SEO), but they must then look at how they can move the site forward. “By simply setting up an RSS (really simple syndication) feed, for instance, you can get jobs out to Twitter as a tweet and put them on the Facebook wall for free,” he says. “Jobs by RSS is starting to be part and parcel of every website like jobs by email was five or six years ago. Recruiters should also be aware that we’ve moved away from the days when integration across different systems was a costly black art. Application programming interfaces (APIs) which, put simply, allow web-based applications to talk to each other, provide users with seamless access to different sites.

As Johnston explains, while many recruiters are using the business networking site LinkedIn to find candidates, they don’t realise that its use can be more fully integrated with their own recruitment system. An API built into HotLizard’s NetResourcer recruitment software can open a LinkedIn window on the desktop enabling a recruiter to view company profiles. “So you have a headhunting resource without even leaving your recruitment system,” says Johnston. “Many recruiters don’t realise how open the Web is. This is really what Web 2.0 is all about.”

The Orion Group, a worldwide leader in providing personnel for the engineering industry, has explored the use of social media for the past six months and has devised a streamlined way to get vacancies out to various channels.

Scott Burns-Smith, head of marketing development, says that it automatically feeds vacancies to Twitter and messages to Facebook from its OrionJobs.com wesbite, which is itself updated by Broadbean job-posting technology.

“So while Broadbean is focused on the job board market, it is actually also updating the social networking sites. This is great as it’s getting the information out there as quickly as possible and it’s targeting a very new audience,” he says. “Everyone is networking a lot more, they’re talking to people about where the vacancies are and the way people look for jobs is changing. We’re adapting to what people are doing on a daily basis.”

Integrating more closely with social media sites will also help an agency’s search engine rankings and SEO remains high on a recruiter’s priority list. Stander describes “social media optimisation” as a “complimentary buzzword” to SEO which should form part of the mix of marketing activity that recruiters need to undertake if they are to ensure they are found by the right candidates.

“The focus still tends to be on SEO, but we need to educate clients that it’s not the only form of marketing they need to be concerned about,” he says. “Social media optimisation, aggregation and off-page SEO activity, such as articles and PR, is as important in the greater scheme of things.”

Website development and online marketing company 4MAT agrees and says its digital marketing teams work with clients to write copy, submit guest posts on specialist forums and update community groups on LinkedIn and Facebook as well as an agency’s own sites to boost search engine rankings.

“This also allows agencies to push their brand forward as a knowledge source in their industry and interact with candidates about topics of interest,” says Meetu Mirpuri, client services director at 4MAT. And she stresses that it is important to evaluate each social media channel so that you understand the best conversion rates. “It’s all very well to go with the trends but if it doesn’t work for your company, then you’re wasting time and effort,” she says.

Another area likely to see a change of emphasis as the industry emerges from recession is candidate search. Rather than automatically posting a vacancy on a job board, recruiters will need to extract maximum value from internal databases and previous searches. Advances in software and web services mean that this does not have to result in a reduced candidate pool.

Daniel Richardson, chief technology officer of Bond International Software, says the next generation of software will allow recruiters to view candidates’ CVs on job boards without having to advertise first. “For example, if a recruiter conducts a search on its own database for a Java programmer, the software will automatically carry out a search on the key job boards in this area, in this case IT, and bring all of the results back at the same time,” he says. “In short, the internal and external candidate search processes will be incorporated.”

Broadbean’s CV search tool Stream, meanwhile, will allow recruiters to simultaneously search online databases and track the success of each channel. Marketing director Ricky Wheeler says recruiters are becoming smarter by tracking and recording the success of CV searches and job postings and are using this information to reduce time spent searching and posting on channels that are unlikely to yield the best return.

“Where they are sourcing externally it’s often a toss-up on whether to search then post or post then search,” he says. “Inevitably it’s different for every job and that’s why it was so important for us to develop a product that allows clients to interpret historical data.”

But despite the rapid rise of social media sites, it is important to keep a sense of perspective and remember that recruiting is about far more than tapping into the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook. As Alan Whitford, co-founder of the Recruitment Community Europe network, says, with all of the channels available, recruiters must ensure they don’t lose “direct” contact with a candidate.

“Yes we’re integrating social media and can pull everything together on one desktop but at the same time we have to remember to talk to the candidate,” he says. That said, an agency’s web activity and online presence will play a major part in its future effectiveness and David Johnston advises that recruiters “paddle before the wave” ahead of the market picking up. “Get your website ready before the market picks up and you’re in a position to maximise it. If you wait for the market, you’ll be three-to six months behind your competitors,” he says.

“We’re seeing an upturn in traditional recruitment consultancies contacting us saying ‘we need to do something about our website’. They don’t have a big budget and don’t want to spend what one of them called “the entire survival” fund, but they do want to do something before the autumn as that next six months will go very quickly.”