As a potential social recruiter, we decided to fill out all 5 pages of the recruitment form so that we can receive more information and learn about foster care parent. Yet, after one day, we received a forwarded email with attachment of 3 brochures from an ACS recruitment staff. The subject line looked like a spam. And the pdf was in the tri-fold format, not suitable for reading online. Most of the info there was the same as what was available online. We felt quite disappointed because we got thru the hurdle of the lengthy recruitment form and didn’t get supported. We felt more disappointed about the system.
After nearly a month, we received a phone call from the agency serving Manhattan. She confirmed with our interest in attending info session. She asked a few questions. 1) Do you have stable income? 2) Are you over 21 years old? 3) Do you have an apartment or house? These questions have been asked during the previous form. It made us question whether prior detailed info that had been filled out was passed from ACS to agencies completely. Also, we asked for an e-mail as a confirmation of the info session dates. However, we have not heard anything from her after the call. 
For the potential social recruiters, the one month lag, redundant questions and no follow-up would be interpreted as “low working efficiency”.

Solutions
  • Outreach strategy that addresses 3 groups, highly-interested prospective foster parents, somewhat interested prospective foster parents and social recruiters
    • The website should include the benefit of becoming foster parents, motivating somewhat interested prospective to move along, providing people who only look for more information with thorough and intriguing information which can turn them into potential social recruiters.Once these people recruit their friends, they are more persuasive than recruiters from agencies and the recruitments would be more successful.
    • It can be achieved by creating a benefit section, providing external links or utilizing cross-site targeting tool (ex: facebook pixel, google doubleclick ID), retargeting people visiting related websites.
  • Recurring newsletters as a complementary tool to follow-up phone calls
    • Instead of phone calls, using newsletters to inform prospective parents about info session dates can increase agency’s working efficiency, potentially shorten the lag between the initial and second contact and more efficiently engage the targeted population.  For those do not have e-mail address, phone calls are still needed.
  • A cross-agency social media execution program