Recruitment industry veteran Greg Savage has written a great post on his personal blog The Savage Truth called Social Media - a tool, not a strategy!

Greg talks about the use of social media tools being part of a integrated multi-channeled sourcing strategy, this is a view that I completely agree with. I made similar comments on  Geoff Jennings blog post about the Future of Job boards in Feb this year.

To state the obvious social media is just another form of media and my advice is that before recruiters jump in and start using social media for recruiting there needs to be some thought put into following questions:

1. what is your business is trying to achieve through the use of social media? Brand, Candidate Sourcing, Customer Service (Candidate/Employer), Increase in referral placements etc
2. do the clients and candidates you engage with use social media?
3. has appropriate thought been put into allocating the resources to execute a social media for recruiting strategy? Project Lead, Content producers and Community Managers.
4. is your business ready & willing to be transparent and enter into real  conversations with candidates and employers?
5. do you really understand the implications that executing a social media strategy will have on your people?
6. is your social media strategy underpinned by a highly scalable, reliable, and robust technology platform.

My point is that you have a business strategy (hopefully!), then your social media strategy needs to integrate with your business strategy > this strategy should support your on & off-line candidate sourcing and sales/business development strategy > this should be underpinned by a technology platform that is scalable and robust >  and you must have the right people in place to execute!