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Getting Started in Social Recruiting

With over 1.7 billion social media users, it’s no surprise that more and more HR and recruiting professionals are turning to social networks, particularly Twitter and LinkedIn, to discover potential candidates. Unfortunately, with millions upon millions of active users these networks, identifying and vetting candidates is nearly impossible for a single recruiting team.

The truth is, you need an edge in order to compete with the big employers who are using social networks to define their brands as superior employers and attract candidates. Employee advocacy combined with social recruiting is a great alternative solution.

By empowering your employees and leveraging their social network contacts, you’ll be able to reach a deeper pool of well-qualified candidates. However, before you jump into the immense social network pool and begin implementing employee advocacy, here’s a look at a few important guidelines for identifying, following, sharing, and engaging with potential candidates via social media.

1. Identify Potential Candidates

As any recruiter will attest, the most tedious and time-consuming aspect of social recruiting is identifying promising candidates. A terrific way of getting this done is involving your employees in the recruiting process.

According to Undercover Recruiter, the average employee has 150 social network contacts. If your company has 50 employees, this means you’ll be able to reach 7,500 potential candidates. When you also consider the fact that your employees want the best possible people to join the team and help the company grow, combining employee advocacy with social media recruiting really is a no-brainer.

When identifying potential candidates, it’s also a wise idea to begin by looking at strong profiles of your brand’s current followers. Since these people are already fans of your company or brand, it’s a great place to start and see if anyone is a match for an open position.

If you find it difficult or time-consuming compiling lists of potential candidates, there are some excellent social sourcing tools, such as TalentBin and Gild, which compile each and every candidate’s social information in one convenient location and allow you to search for candidates according to their skill sets.

2. Follow Potential Candidates

It may seem obvious, but recruiting socially involves developing social relationships with those you would potentially like to hire. Regardless of whether you send a friend request, shoot an email, follow them, connect with them, or anything else, the key is showing a genuine interest in what they say and encouraging your employees to do the same.

Aside from employee advocacy, a simple way to get started with social recruiting is to open an account for each social network strictly for recruiting purposes. In fact, a number of sizeable employers have social accounts specifically for building their brands as employers, talking about open positions, showcasing achievements & culture, and following great potential candidates.

Most social networks, used strategically, can be a great source of talent, but LinkedIn is the most obvious. Using LinkedIn, you and your employees can join thousands of groups specific to your industry and have direct access to hordes of professionals that could potentially become a new team member.

3. Share with Potential Candidates

Utilising your employees to share engaging content across each of their social network accounts is an excellent way of branding your company as a great employer to work for. To do this, it’s best to assign a socially adept employee or perhaps the entire marketing department as the employee advocacy leader and make it their job to create entertaining and informative content related to the brand. Then, each employee can distribute this content for each social network.

This enables them to share what the company is up to with each of their followers and refer candidates for a particular role. Furthermore, it streamlines the social recruitment process and compounds its effectiveness. Plus, did you know referral hires enjoy higher levels of job satisfaction and remain with companies longer than others?

4. Engage with Potential Candidates

Interaction is without a doubt one of the best ways of getting potential candidates engaged with your brand. People love responses to the content they share, so if a potential candidate tweets something relevant to your brand or industry, it’s important to favourite the post or comment on it.

By doing so, you’ll open the door for conversation, build a relationship with the candidate, and be able to reach out to him or her about a potential position.

For more information regarding social recruitment strategies and to make your next hire a click or two away, get in touch today!