Some people are still skeptical about social media recruiting, though I can’t figure out why. The success stories on both companies and individuals finding their dream match through a social media recruitment campaign keep rolling in. Stacy Lambe got hired by BuzzFeed because of a meme he created of Hillary Clinton. Dawn Stiff was hired thanks to her Vine video by The Economist.
The question is, what should you be doing for the recruitment magic to happen? Here are 6 social media recruiting strategies to get you going in the right direction with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
1. Become Best Friends with #Hashtags
Twitter uses Twitter for social media recruiting so it must be a good platform. The one thing that many recruiters don’t take the time to understand from the beginning are hashtags. It’s all too easy to put a “#” in front of a word and expect it to work. But if you don’t know the reach of that particular tag in terms of numbers and geography then you’re not using it right. If your chosen hashtag is getting lost in a sea of other tweets, it also won’t work. For example don’t use #jobopening but try adding your city’s abbreviation as well. Use tools like Hashtracking or TweetBinder to help you out.
2. Ask Employees to Tweet Job Openings
Lean into your existing network to spread the word. But before doing so, make sure that you have a solid Social Media Policy for your employees and that they understand what’s expected of them. They are your brand ambassadors after all, especially if you’re going to ask them to tweet job openings. It wouldn’t do to have someone post a job in one tweet and then crib about their boss in the next.
3.Use LinkedIn’s Recruiter Homepage
LinkedIn is probably the first choice for social media recruiting by recruiters so it only makes sense that they provide a solid tool for the job. This is done through their paid product, LinkedIn Recruiter. Other than the basic LinkedIn functions you’ll get access to a matching algorithm which provides potential employee suggestions based on your recent activity and lets you monitor job application activity. It’s definitely a powerful tool to incorporate into your social media recruiting strategy.
4. Don’t Ignore the Power of LinkedIn Groups
There’s very little chance that you’ll read an article on social media without the word networking coming up. It’s just that important and that’s exactly what LinkedIn Groups will provide you. Be careful about the content you post because some groups provide limitations for recruiters. Make sure you know the basics about Company Branding on LinkedIn because it will determine how your organization is viewed.
5. Use Facebook’s Search Feature the Right Way
Did you know, in Facebook’s Search you can type “People Who Work at Microsoft” and even filter the results by city? In fact, you can even search for “People who work at Microsoft and have friends who work at Oracle”. Very helpful if you’re trying to find someone at a company who has friends at the company you’re working for. Talk about powerful searching.
6. Engage in Paid Advertising
In 2013, Mashable revealed a 29% increase for Facebook ads every year, reaching 4.3 billion social engagements last year alone. Instead of investing in a recruitment agency, you can take the power of targeted Facebook advertising into your own hands and create a simple yet effect job opening ad and share it with an extremely targeted audience. This strategy is also far more effective than posting an ad in a newspaper which we all know often results in more bad than good CV’s.
There’s no end to this list and of course there are other tools including Google+ and Pinterest which shouldn’t be forgotten. A solid social media recruiting strategy should be well planned and documented to include the target audience, where they spend time online, guidelines for establishing relationships and which social channels to used. To be truly effective you’ll also want to include measurable KPI’s. I hope that this was enough to get you started and look forward to any additions you can make in the comments below.
(About the Author: Paul Keijzer is the CEO and Managing Partner of Engage Consulting in Malaysia, Pakistan and U.A.E. He focuses on transforming top teams and managing talent across Asia’s emerging and frontier markets. Paul has a firm belief that outstanding results can only be achieved through people, by engaging teams and building commitment by creating a new paradigm between company and employee. Paul has delivered transformational interventions for more than 50 blue chip organizations in countries across Asia including Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Egypt, Korea, U.A.E. and India.)
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