4 key components of social recruiting

Successful social recruiting is much more than bombarding potential candidates with job descriptions. Successful social recruiting builds a following of passive and active candidates, it helps sell what you do but more importantly why you do it. (Checkout Simon Sinek Ted Talk: Start with why?, if you haven’t before).

Using social tools in recruitment can help differentiate you from the competition, increase credibility and maximise the likelihood of placements by getting the right information in front of the right people.

In this blog I highlight some of the core components of successful social recruitment- by no means a complete guide; but a good starting point if you are looking to utilise social in your recruiting efforts.

Get everyone on board

Get everyone on the same page. Setting your stall and getting buy-in from staff is vital to the success of social recruitment. Start by creating a relevant Brand Guideline Document and a Social Media Usage Policy, it is important employees know what is acceptable and what isn’t when referencing your organisation online.

Use the documentation as a base to form training sessions, educate recruiters by going through example strategies, message templates and social recruitment workflows. Set time aside within your recruiter’s daily workload to utilise social media.

Useful links:

Create great content

Relevant, useful content is a key component of successful social marketing and recruiting, particularly when engaging the passive candidate.

Social recruiting is much more than posting every open job advert out one after the other. Imagine the equivalent at a networking event; a recruiter spending the entire event repeatedly stating the open positions he/she is recruiting for, no questions or conversations initiated, just job, after job, after job… it wouldn’t take long for everyone in the room to start avoiding said recruiter.

The clue is in the title, social media is designed to be social. A large number of recruitment professionals forget normal social constructs when engaging in social media.

Mix job related content (example CVs, profiles etc.) with industry news, opinions, useful downloads and tips. Ask questions, share and respond to potential candidate social content. Be Social.

Take the time to plan and create relevant content with your target sectors in mind. If you work for a creative recruitment agency you should create content to engage, creative types. Why not collate and create:

  • Blogs
  • Info-graphics
  • Video content
  • Testimonials

Great web content will provide a base for social outreach and could even help with your search engine ranking (SEO).

Social profiles (look beyond the top 4)

Research your target audience and where they hang out online. The major social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc.) have a broad spectrum of users from almost all industries but there are niche communities that could be far more relevant.

Recruit for designers and art workers? Check out Tavern, Behance and Dribbble, three social networks dedicated to the creative sector.

Useful links:

Triggers, schedulers and newsletters

Social media content is of the moment, if you send a tweet or leave a comment you generally expect a response within a relatively short window of time.

When scheduling and distributing social content consider your availability, a quick response increases the chances of further engagement.

If you are driving traffic to a job advert or contact form make sure you have automated responses informing candidates of the next steps. Use automatic responses to manage expectations and inform candidates when you are likely to be in touch.

In addition to automated responses set up web forms so inbound enquiries are segmented by appropriate criteria (job type, interests, salary expectations etc.).

If a candidate applies for an engineering role update them with engineering related content. Keep them interested and connected with your organisation.

Hopefully this blog post provides some food for thought on getting started with social recruitment. If you want to find out how HRS can help you find, engage and place more candidates access your short introduction demonstration online today:
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