There's a new breed of recruiters out there. They live on LinkedIn, they hate phone calls, and they source 
dozens of candidates a day. With the demand for top talent greater than ever, recruiters have had to adapt to be faster, more effective, and more productive. But at what price?
Each day in the trenches of forums, comment threads, and Q&A back-and-forths, there is considerable distaste towards all-digital recruiters. The veterans claim these are the ones giving recruiters a bad name. They're the ones sending mass emails, providing poor candidate experience, and merely looking to fill reqs rather than learn about candidate ambitions, goals, and wants from a role.
I won't try and defend these practices, yet, they're not terribly hard to understand. The War for Talent rages on, and the best candidates already have jobs. Mass messaging becomes a vicious cycle, if you send out 30 emails and get zero responses, what do you do? One solution is to merely send more emails. Most recruiters have learned that this isn't the optimal way to go about gathering interest in open roles, but for each one that buries this strategy, another one may still receive the handful of responses that validate their efforts.
Young, inexperienced recruiters don't just live on social media at work, they live on it on mornings, nights, and weekends, and it's been their second language for over a decade. There's an increasing amount of rhetoric trumpeting the importance of social media in recruiting, although the numbers suggest it's merely in an assist-capacity. I'm sure you'll remember the findings of CareerXRoads source of hire report, but in case you're spotty:
Survey respondents only attributed a paltry 2.9% of their hires directly to Social Media for example. However, respondents also believe that Social Media influences, drives or combines with 7 out of 11 other sources: Referrals, Company Career Site, Job Boards, Direct Source, College, Temp-to-Hire and Career Fairs. If we understood just how interdependent these sources are we might credit Social Media with a much higher impact for those openings.
Social media is a fantastic tool, but it's utility is mainly in the early stages of a relationship. In fact, I've found that with any social media connection who's become a real-life connection, once we've made our introduction and done the obligatory "creeping" of eachother's profiles, we take our actual business to email or the phone. No one's closing hires on LinkedIn. No one is sending contracts in a Facebook message. Perhaps this is the main criticism of new recruiters, the lack of human element highlighted by their hesitation to take things to a more personal level. In short, poor recruiters don't appreciate the limitations of social media, and cling to their tools.
Before the recruiting vets take aim at millenials, or poor recruiters in general, I'd like to suggest they first remove the beam in their own eye. In many cases, these veteran recruiters are the ones hiring the next generation, and must take responsibility for some of their tactics. It's true, there's a considerable lack of training and certification in the recruiting world, so perhaps here's the opportunity to instill the tried and true methods of recruiting ages past.
Where's this all going? Bear with me. I believe the answer, as with everything, lies in a strange blurred grey area. Clearly, there's value in both camps. The connective and informational opportunies provided by social media lead to means of sourcing and assessment never before possible, but they should not be relied upon solely. The more personal approaches such as hyper-tailored emails, personal phone calls and face-to-face visits prove your humanity and can be enhanced by new age tools, but if over-utilized can be unwittingly creepy.
TL;DR Millenials: Enough with the #hashtag
Veterans: Enough with the 'you kids and your music'
