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Digital Recruiting

by Karen Fox, University and Recruiting Partnerships, Vanguard

Sometimes an elusive term. What does it really mean?  When did it become such a buzz term? Recruiting is about human beings and making connections to fulfill job needs, right? How can we be talking about digital? Well of course recruiting is about people, but how we meet those people, make meaningful connections and analyze outcomes is where digital comes in.

 
I've been recruiting for almost 25 years. I remember the days when we would scrutinize over a 50 word print column ad, rush to meet a publication deadline, and then wait for the almighty paper resumes to roll in. Can you imagine this practice today?  How inefficient and reactive? Digital is about strategy.  It's about being nimble and proactive in one's practices.  It's a thoughtful way of targeting talent to meet unique job needs.

So…conceptually, you hopefully get the idea behind digital, but what does it mean practically speaking?  This is the fun part. It's really a little bit of everything. If you are in the business of recruiting talent, you are utilizing digital practices. Think about how we post jobs today. We've already established, it's not through print ads.  Instead we post digital descriptions. Sometimes they include video content and other web links to relevant information. And. we don't just post to one site. Instead we work through job sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to serve our jobs to the right candidates. Or we simply post our jobs to our own "mobile optimized" sites and let aggregators like Indeed scrape our postings and serve them up to prospective candidates.  

Is this digital? You better believe it! Now, there is much more sophistication in the talent attraction space. I haven't even gotten to other social platforms like Facebook or Instagram and, oh yeah, what about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how that's going to revolutionize recruiting as we know it today?
 
Hopefully this wets your appetite just enough to want to learn more. I look forward to exploring this topic with you further at the MBA CSEA Global Conference, June 19 - 22 in Miami.  In the meantime, think about what digital recruiting techniques are working for you.  Bring your best practices to the session and let's all learn from each other!

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