Hard to Measure but Easy to Observe

Don’t confuse social recruiting with the Higgs Boson, the sub-atomic particle that was all over the news last year.  This tiny little particle with a huge mass is just one of an array of different kinds of bosons to be confirmed as existing.  Up until last year, when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider were able to, with a lot of energy and force,  “slam some bosons out of the Higgs field into a state humans can measure.”  That’s right, measure, but not observe.  These things are so tiny that so far no method exists to enable the human eye or robotics or computers to actually observe one.

Many talent leaders find the opposite problem when working with social media and recruiting.  It’s much, much easier to observe social recruiting in motion (or at rest) than to measure it.  In an interview, a job candidate will tell you they noticed your presence on Facebook and found the vacancy.  At a networking function, a colleague will casually mention a job your organization tweeted to her.  You may see a spike in career site hits after a new campaign on YouTube.

One can measure the transactional activities that make up social media and recruiting.  But is that valuable?  Ivory Madison, CEO of Red Room, a social media, marketing and book-sales platform for authors, addressed this question in a blog in HBR last year, Why Your Social Media Metrics Are a Waste of Time.  

“If you think page views, unique visitors, registered members, conversion rates, email newsletter open rates, number of Twitter followers, or Facebook likes are important by themselves, you probably have no idea what you’re doing.  Those metrics are the most common false idols of analytics.”

Social recruiting is hard to measure but easy to observe.  Later this month, Kara Yarnot, Vice President of the Talent Acquisition Center of Expertise at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) will share how she measures her team’s social media recruitment strategy and initiatives, which enable approximately 7500 external hires per year in a new webcast, How Do You Measure Social Media?