This is a guest post by Edward Page.
Social media has impacted many areas of business, including recruitment. Read on to learn more about the best practices for social hiring to accelerate and expand your recruitment efforts.
Social media has impacted many areas of business, including recruitment. This doesn’t come as a surprise; after all, recruitment has always been a social activity. Think about it: for every search, an HR professional or recruiter needs to conduct a series of social interactions with candidates—over the phone, via email or texts, or face-to-face for interviews.
Read on to learn more about the best practices for social hiring to accelerate and expand your recruitment efforts.
Promote your talent brand
You’re likely already aware that your social media presence should keep sales, marketing, and customers in mind. The same rule applies to recruitment. Your talent brand, or how your company’s corporate culture is perceived, on social media is created with every status update you post, every photo you share, and every article you publish.
To attract candidates, use social media to present the benefits of working at your organization, and promote your company in a positive (and authentic) light. Share awards or stories about workplace events. Post videos of products in action or pictures of employees with a quote on what they love the most about the company.
Having a strong talent brand presence on social media gives you a boost on every other recruiting activity. From reception to phone calls, responses to job listings, to replies to LinkedIn messages, the more candidates have seen and interacted with your talent brand on social networks, the more likely they are to respond positively.
Participate in social conversations
A key advantage of social recruiting is that it gives employers and jobseekers a chance to have a conversation. While recruiters once had to depend on online resume submissions via job ads posted on third-party job sites, they can now target candidates on social networks and send them direct messages to start real conversations.
Another way to reach potential candidates using existing social conversations is the use of hashtags. For example, if you’re looking for a writer in the UK, you may want to use #writingjobs and #UKjobs together with your job posting tweet.
Don’t forget niche social networks
While it’s important to build a strong recruitment presence on big platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, effective social recruiters also tap into more niche social networks and forums if you’re looking for specific talent.
A lot of developers and other tech talent are active on sites like GitHub and StackOverflow. Many marketers are sharing ideas on the Warrior Forum and the Moz Community Q&A. Meanwhile, there is a number of thought leaders and managers answering questions on Quora.
These industry-specific social networks and forums facilitate high-level conversations between professionals that can make it easy for recruiters to discover new talent.
Involve current employees in social recruiting efforts
Just as customer testimonials can help you sell more products, what your existing staff says about you is the most convincing opinion when it comes to branding your company as a great employer.
Encourage your current employees to be an evangelist for your talent brand on social media by sharing positive experiences such as work milestones and company events. Most importantly, when there’s a vacancy, ask them to share the job posting on their timelines or via private message to friends who may be interested. When candidates receive an invitation to consider a job opening from someone they personally know, they warm up better to the company and the chances of them responding is higher.
Increase engagement with visual content
Recruitment-related posts don’t have to be boring. According to Mitchell Kim, CEO of Cosmos Clinic, you can make your recruiting efforts more interesting by creating visual content.
A current best practice is the production of recruitment videos. Your video can be anything that promotes you as an attractive employer. It may be highlights of your workplace, the office culture, and the best bits about your physical space, or a number of quick video testimonials from current staff on what their day-to-day life at your company looks like.
Another idea is to create and publish infographics. You could use it to tell your company story in a visual manner or how your products and services came to be.
Take advantage of social advertising
Finally, use social media ads to reach your ideal candidates. With highly targeted ad options available on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can ensure that your advertising money are being spent only on your target audience. Define the job titles, industries, and experience levels you want your ads to be visible to.
When it comes to social hiring, it’s less about the tools and more about the connections. Present your company as the great employer it truly is with interesting posts, participate in social conversations that matter, tap into niche networks, and empower your current workforce to become your talent brand evangelists to attract and connect to the right candidates. Whichever of these practices you choose to do, develop your social recruitment strategy that makes sense for your organization and the positions you are hiring for.
About the Guest Post Author:
With an eye for detail and attitude towards excellence, Edward Page has proven himself to be ThisWay Global’s guide in recruitment technology. As a Business Development head, he leads a team to keep on pushing the envelope when it comes to using technology for recruitment—a hiring process that focuses on diversity and less on the bias. With a full grasp of ThisWay Global’s Match-ic technology, he’s willing to set foot in opportunities for the organization’s growth and development.
