Tue, 2 May 2012

US recruiters have traditionally been seen as ‘early adopters’ of the latest in recruitment practice. However, in March, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) provider Omni did its bit to reverse this perception when it ran a one-day course in the use of social media in recruitment for 25 US recruiters in New York.  

The course was run by Stuart Jones (left), Omni’s head of training. Among the 15 employers that attended were major household products company Sun Products Corporation and the New York Waterway Company.

Jones says Omni spotted a gap in the US market to provide training in social media for corporate recruiters and HR teams.

As he explains, this group “are not always recruitment specialists, and all too often recruitment is handled by generalist HR teams”.

The course covered LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as providing the delegates with a broader perspective, including candidate management and employer branding, says Jones.

“The course followed conversations with companies that we are training in the UK, and we thought maybe there is an international market for this,” Jones tells Recruiter.

Although one or two companies who attended the course had links to Omni’s UK clients, Jones says that “for the rest it was fairly cold calling”.

Omni has been running the course for three years in the UK. Clients have included KPMG, Barclays, RBS, National Grid and the Post Office.

Although Omni’s training division currently only makes up a small percentage of the company’s £14m turnover, Jones says he hopes “to drive this forward” by running another course in the US next year.