How to Use Social Media To Promote Your Job Opportunities
Recruiting appears simple, but it isn’t.
Businesses all over the world struggle to find and retain talent. Agreed that we have web-based recruiting software and job boards to make it easier for employers but hiring is still tough.
We also have businesses using social media networks for finding talent, riding on the new wave of social recruiting.
Social recruiting is the new order of the day. A Huffington Post article claims that businesses now use online venues and social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to promote career opportunities.
An infographic from Career Enlightenment extracted from the book Job Searching With Social Media For Dummies, reveals that businesses conducted a whopping 89% of all hiring using social media in the year 2011 (an increase by 6% from 2010).
About 14.4 million candidates used social media to find their last job in 2011. Roughly 24% HR managers picked on respective candidates’ social profiles to zero down on personality, character, and other nuances that are not found on resumes. At least 79% of employers review applicants’ online information.
Need proof? About 65% of companies successfully found talent using social media channels.
Joshua from Career Enlightenment, points out that 45% of companies plan to invest in social recruiting and 29% of them plan to use social media as their primary recruiting tool.
Social media makes for a compelling case to recruit candidates. For one, almost everyone worth hiring has some sort of a social presence. Second, social networks make for the best “passive candidates lounge”. Third, a lot more about candidates is know through social profiles even before interviewing starts.
If you are looking to hire talent off the social web, here are a few tips for you:
Knowing where to show up is half the battle won
A bridge connects your business blog and social accounts. The bridge ought to help you find talent but it’s not going to happen until traffic flows on the bridge: from website/blog to social networks and back.
Which social networks work best for your business? That depends on your business and the candidates you are looking to hire. Further, the social account setup process isn’t a “one-off” process. Setup your social accounts and then keep making changes to make your social web work for you.
An infographic from Jobvite notes that LinkedIn is the best social network for hiring followed by Facebook and Twitter.
Produce social content with a purpose
Your content marketing strategy takes a different line of approach for recruiting. Your usual content strategy helps you develop brand stories, engage with your audience, and invoke trust.
However, content produced for social networks and other forms of content specifically for recruiting and finding talent will be geared to “sell” the benefits of working at your company. That fine line of difference in approach takes your content creation into two different routes. Do you see that fine line? Can you walk those parallel paths?
It’s all about small talk and relationships
Just like people buy from whom they like and trust, think of the “choice of working” with your business as a “sale”. That said, about 80% of potentially awesome hires are passive (meaning that they aren’t looking for jobs actively).
That’s why it’s important to build a pipeline of potential recruits. LinkedIn Recruiter, for instance, has a dedicated feature just to populate your potential hires based on various criteria such as industry, location, experience, etc.
Develop those relationships on social media, keep dedicated notes on each of those potential hires, maintain lists on Twitter and build a pipeline on LinkedIn.
When the time comes, hiring your best candidates will just be a tweet, an update or a message away.
Social web gives you insights
Did you know that you gain a vast amount of information and insights on potential hires just based on a candidates’ social activity alone?
Your potential candidates have a continuous stream of social activity which will let you know what they like, how they share their experience, and much more. You’ll know about possible candidates’ personality, style, and interests that are otherwise hard to find through a resume.
Use tools and apps
How big is social recruiting? Good question. Social recruiting is valued at $140 billion in the U.S, according to Josh Bersin of forbes.com.
An HR Magazine feature notes that, the present trends demand that employers use collaboration tools, and mobile recruiting apps to seek talent from a humongous pool of candidates.
There’s no dearth of tools available for recruiters today. Deploy professional assessments to gauge employees using Smarterer [http://smarterer.com/], TalentBin [http://www.talentbin.com/] allows you to tap into intelligence derived from each candidate’s respective social graph and Softgarden, web based recruiting software enables recruiters to manage applicants effectively.
Use GotoMeeting, Taketheinterview, HireVue, and InterviewStream to setup virtual interviews.
Today, social media is a huge database of job seekers humming with life. Look for your candidates on social sites, manage your hiring process and plug social recruiting into your recruitment process.
Are you tapping into social recruiting?
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