social-recruiting
Where to begin with your social recruiting strategy
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
From branding to posting jobs, to sourcing candidates, social media is a recruiter's best friend. If you don't already have a social recruiting strategy, it can be difficult to know where to start. Here's our guide to help you on your way.
Well, there’s no point trying to ignore it. 92% of recruiters are on LinkedIn and 57% of recruiters are finding their most successful hires through social media. You might think it's the remit of larger corporations, with much larger staffing requirements and resources. Well, a social recruiting strategy is what you make of it.
Social recruiting is ideal for smaller organisations as it can greatly reduce the time and cost of sourcing. It can be scaled and managed internally, by even the smallest team. You can spend as much or as little as you like, owing to the number of free and enterprise-level options available.
It's really a pretty flexible and effective option for recruiters. The important part is setting out what you want to achieve. Are you actively hiring? Are you trying to build your talent pool? Once you set this out, the fun starts.
The holy trinity for social recruiters are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. With job seekers using some or all of these platforms, the importance of making your presence known is obvious. You may have seen your marketing and business development teams using these platforms extensively. As a recruiter, your tasks are not dissimilar.
Setting up dedicated careers Twitter and Facebook accounts is one sensible step. Use these with other company accounts to improve company branding. If you believe you're an industry leader, with a collaborative and innovative environment, shout it from the social media rooftops!
Focused, relevant and interesting hashtags are essential across a number of platforms for increasing your reach
Getting your colleagues in HR and other employees involved is a great way of letting candidates know what your company is all about, which greatly helps in making a good culture match. A cross-platform social media strategy can bring in YouTube for employee testimonials, or Twitter for employee engagement.
The creation of relevant content is essential for building your brand and getting your job postings out there. Focused, relevant and interesting hashtags are essential across a number of platforms for increasing your reach. Targeting that content is essential in getting seen by the right people.
Posting frequently, using a variety of media, whether it be infographics, images, video, is the key to bringing people to you. By posting informative content, whether it be blogs, webinars or white papers, you're setting your company out as an impressive entity to your potential candidates.
While creating interesting content to publish on social media and networking with candidates in your industry are both Important, social media recruiting is pretty much meaningless if you're not quantifying its results. In the beginning, you can even do this on an ad hoc basis, cross-referencing applications with social media followers.
Should the numbers get a bit too big, we've thankfully got a wealth of resources available, namely Google analytics, which can help you determine where the traffic is coming from and what platforms are worth your time and money. ATS or recruiting software can be another great way of tracking candidates and you can integrate it with your social recruiting strategy (fun fact: HireHive integrates with LinkedIn).
Like we've said already, social recruiting is what you make of it. It is a platform rife for experimentation and connecting with (as well as hopefully hiring) interesting industry experts. Because of the constantly changing social media landscape, you're going to be constantly adapting and changing your strategy - and that's the exciting part! Learning as you go is a given, but with the tools available it's very easy to codify and quantify why and what you're doing.
Photo credit: moyanbrenn.com. Under creative commons.
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