KARLA PORTER

I have been notic­ing some­thing lately that’s both­er­ing me. That is an elit­ist atti­tude and unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions from many of us versed in social media recruit­ing. One of the most dis­turb­ing com­ments  in this dia­log came from some­one who said, “can­di­dates don’t need cover let­ters, they need to know how to bypass gatekeepers”.

How many job seek­ers even know what gate­keep­ers are and is it rea­son­able to expect they should?

I don’t think so…

Would you expect some­one who focused on the job they had the past 10, 15, 20 years or more to know how to look for a job in the web 2.0 world? I’m talk­ing about nurses, accoun­tants, qual­ity assur­ance ana­lysts, para­le­gals, drafts­men, and even those in HR pro­fes­sions like ben­e­fits spe­cial­ists, coor­di­na­tors, etc. In fact, a lot of peo­ple do not use use the Inter­net, and many not even com­put­ers, in their jobs. Think man­u­fac­tur­ing, trans­porta­tion, con­struc­tion and agri­cul­ture to name a few of the very impor­tant and fun­da­men­tal indus­tries that make the world what it is.

While so many of us are caught up in the “ether” of social media, the fact is, many more are not quite there yet and we don’t have a right to demand they par­tic­i­pate or learn to love it.

I sent a co-worker a Google doc so we could work on it col­lab­o­ra­tively. She sent an email back say­ing she absolutely refused to get cre­ate a gmail account because she does not want to “have an Inter­net pres­ence”. She is a tal­ented pro­fes­sional and spread­sheet whiz who sim­ply refuses to go online. Her job never requires Inter­net use and those times she does use it she surfs anonymously.

One could argue that if she wants to move ahead in the world she should do what a few thou­sand recruiters using social media want. But, is it a rea­son­able expectation?

Another co-worker has flat out told me the Inter­net will be the down­fall of mankind. I went in his office one day to show him the ani­moto photo video I cre­ated of a recent event. His com­puter did not have the required soft­ware installed to view it. His com­ment was that he only uses Microsoft Office prod­ucts on the hard drive and has never used the Inter­net. He does not have a per­sonal com­puter at home. He used to work for IBM.

This isn’t uncom­mon. I man­age a human resources task force made of HR pro­fes­sion­als in the com­mu­nity who, with the excep­tion of one mem­ber, are leery and con­fused about social media. Very few of the com­pa­nies they work for have a social media pres­ence and none of them are involved, even those who are gen­er­al­ists and recruit­ing is a part of their job. The most they do is use major job boards.

I’m assist­ing a grad stu­dent doing her the­sis project. She needed to make a con­tact with some­one at a par­tic­u­lar research com­pany. I sug­gested she search my LinkedIn con­tacts and I would make an intro­duc­tion. She asked what LinkedIn was.

I could go on and on. In real life is a dif­fer­ent demo­graphic than in the social media sphere. Online appli­ca­tions and assess­ments are scary to a lot of people.

This brings me back to cover let­ters and the recent dia­log regard­ing them. Justin Hillier makes a case that the best way is the video inter­view in his Social Recruit­ing 360 blog in response to my post Stand­ing Out in the Crowd, on the art and pur­pose of cover letters.

Two days ago I received a resume and cover let­ter from a down­sized 15 year VP of a bank. I searched him on LinkedIn, he wasn’t there. I searched him on Google and there were some men­tions of him in cor­po­rate newslet­ters. That was it. I doubt sug­gest­ing he ditch his finely con­structed explana­tory cover let­ter in lieu of a video pro­duc­tion is the prac­ti­cal way to go at the moment.

What do you think?