Hospitality and tourism sector employees taking the initiative and appointing dedicated ‘Social Media Managers’ will have a definite advantage as the ‘war for talent’ continues to intensify.

(TRAVPR.COM) SINGAPORE - May 9th, 2011 - TMS Asia-Pacific CEO Andrew Chan had suggested those savvy hospitality and tourism sector employees taking the initiative and appointing dedicated ‘Social Media Managers’ will have a definite advantage as the ‘war for talent’ continues to intensify.

Social media, he said, is definitely playing an ever-increasing role in the recruitment process and more and more employers have come to realise the benefits it offers above and beyond traditional recruitment channels, particularly with the Gen Y demographic.

“Savvy organisations understand that they need to adopt similar strategies in marketing to potential employees as they would their customers,” Mr Chan said.

“Those taking the next step and ensuring they have a ‘Social Media Manager’ on the HR team stand to place themselves well ahead of the game.

“Gen Y candidates are attracted by organisations that empower them to be individuals, are socially responsible and promote work life balance.

“I've seen some very clever campaigns from hotel companies ensuring these types of messages are clearly carried across to potential candidates and we are starting to see a huge increase in the number of job advertisements appearing through the likes of Facebook and Twitter.”

Mr Chan said the key advantage of using social media as a recruitment channel was that it was instantaneous, was extremely cost effective and importantly, gave employers the opportunity to interact with potential candidates via far richer and more highly targeted media than traditional channels.

“The advantage of Facebook is that the brand becomes far more personal to a candidate - they get to see who they might be potentially working with whereas a corporate website can come across as being far more sterile.

“Judging by the speed with which this ubiquitous social media phenomenon has taken a grip on the recruitment process, I think it’s highly likely – and timely too – that very soon many employers within our sector will be creating dedicated ‘Social Media Manager’ roles in order to ensure they are keeping abreast of their competition as the ‘war for talent’ continues to intensify.

Mr Chan pointed towards his company’s utilisation of the social media phenomena which recently saw the company launch a dedicated i-Phone application, subscription for which has now passed the 40,000 mark.

“The i-Phone app is continuing to achieve good market cut through for the company – more to the point it’s given us a competitively larger slice of the hospitality sector’s mobile browser market share.

“Additionally it’s given us the opportunity to provide our candidates with an alternative and very clear path to the job market in their respective regions which they can access whenever and wherever they happen to be.

“One thing for sure, our employment of the technology is definitely proving to play a key role in ensuring we stay ahead of the competition across all of our markets.”

TMS is a top-tier specialist travel, tourism and hospitality recruitment and HR services company headquartered in Sydney and Singapore. The company’s global operation includes offices in Auckland, Bangkok, Dubai, Hong Kong and Shanghai and affiliates in the UK/Europe, the Middle East and North America. The company officially entered into the executive training arena in July 2009 with the launch of its first ‘TMS Academy’ concept in Singapore.

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