Top 5 Ways to Use Social Media For Recruitment
Social & Mobile Recruiting
Social media has quickly become a vital resource to attract talent to your business. However, there are numerous ways to leverage social media sites and not all will suit every company.
To give you some food for thought, we have listed below the top five ways organisations are getting on the social recruiting bandwagon. We have tried to keep it simple, however, as the use of social media in recruitment matures and results are proven, organisations are becoming more confident and creative in their strategies. Whereas the challenge for many companies still lies in adopting the basic social recruiting principles.
1. Vetting Candidates
This is probably one of the most popular and most common social recruiting activities to take place by a business owner or HR professional. There is an applicant in your recruitment process and you want to know more about them. Perhaps they have just sent in a CV or perhaps you are just about to offer the job. Wherever that applicant is in the process, according to Reppler, a staggering 91% of employers will use social media to screen prospective employees.
Most employers are looking for something positive to find out about their applicant, but some information can put them off. Although vetting potential employees is not unlawful, you do need to be mindful of employment law and in particular; discrimination. The CIPD has produced a guide with a useful set of principles that may help you set some boundaries within your organisation on the vetting of applicants.
2. Advertising
It did not take long for the big 3 social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to latch onto the income earning potential of recruitment and many more social sites will probably follow. You can broadcast your vacancies for free on just about any social media site by simply creating a profile, building a network and then promoting your jobs. You can also do this on a branded company page, in a group or even #hashtag the job. There are millions of jobs being promoted in these ways. A quick word of warning though, if you are going to do this then please make sure that you are only shouting about your jobs 20% of the time, most people on social media are passive applicants and are following or are friends with you because they are interested in the whole picture, not just your jobs.
You can also ramp it up a gear too and pay to advertise your jobs, whether that is pay per click or sponsored links. LinkedIn even has its own take on a job board or you can add a career site to your LinkedIn company page or perhaps promote “work for us” via a link on every single employee with a LinkedIn profile.
3. Attracting Applicants
In addition to direct advertising or broadcasting vacancies on social media, there are increasing numbers of organisations who are using the virility and flexibility of social media to attract and engage potential talent with specific campaigns. There are some great examples and case studies where companies have used competitions, fun tests, quizzes and challenges to appeal to a specific target audience. In some cases, they have also used the response as part of the screening and selection process. (Watch this blog for our next social recruiting post on some of the great campaigns for the last 12 months).
Some of these really creative ways not only create a buzz on social media about the culture of your organisation and target specific skills sets, but it can also have a dramatic and positive impact on the motivation your internal employees and even increase your referral ratio.
4. Headhunting
Headhunting used to be a dark art; you would pay an experienced head-hunter to research, find and approach key individuals for your organisation. Social media has highlighted the good from the bad, but an exceptional head-hunter can still return their weight in gold by finding those key people for you. However, with the amount of personal data now available in the public domain, it does mean that increasing numbers of companies are doing it themselves. Many are honing their skills, investing in training and allocating resource to become adept at head-hunting. This can also be seen in the significant increase in the number of internal recruitment and researcher roles that are being hired directly by organisations.
5. Talent Pools / Engage
So far, LinkedIn is the only site that monetises the creation of talent pools with their “talent solutions” but many hiring organisations create specific lists on Twitter, circles on Google+ and pages on Facebook to ring-fence top talent and keep them engaged. Utilising internal and external brand ambassadors is also a common strategy that companies are employing to help them in the quest to identify the talent and then keeping the conversation going. This social recruiting strategy is a great way to ensure that you have the access to the best candidate, at the right time.
These top five ways of utilising social media for recruitment purposes are just the tip of the iceberg and many successful campaigns combine social media with other attraction techniques too. Why not get in touch and let us know how you are using social media to bolster your recruitment campaign? You can email all your ideas and comments to [email protected] or even ask to speak to the social recruiting specialist in our business.
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