How to harness the power of social recruitment

Social media has just about taken over our lives, and is now a huge part of strategic digital marketing for most businesses.

But what other business operations could social media play a part in?

With such big audiences waiting to be reached, could it really revolutionise the way we recruit top talent?

What is social recruitment?

Social recruitment is, essentially, what it says on the tin – it’s the idea of using social networks, channels and forums to attract and source candidates.

The growth in the usage of social recruitment seems to have correlated with that of social media itself – recruiters are seeing this modern form of media as a way to not only hugely expand the reach of job roles, but as a tool for headhunting specific candidates too.

But there’s more to social recruiting than just tweeting a job description every now and then, and waiting for the applications to land. To make the most of social media recruitment, you need to think strategically.

Right roles on the right platforms

The first thing to consider, is which social media platforms you’re going to use, if any.

It’s important to remember that even if your competitors are embracing social media recruitment, you don’t have to. Think about your target audience for candidates, which platforms they use, and how they use them.

If you do decide to start sharing roles via social media, it’s worth thinking about potentially using different platforms for different kinds of roles.

For example, LinkedIn might be more suitable for executive or managerial roles, whereas Facebook might be better for reaching graduates and interns.

The type of content you share on each platform will differ too; again, using LinkedIn and Facebook as examples, where LinkedIn is a professional network and people expect to see careers related content, this might not be so successful on Facebook, and perhaps a promotional video would have more impact.

A digital CV

One of the advantages of social recruiting is that it doesn’t just have to be a one way street, where you share a job and wait for applications; you can be actively using social media as a tool to headhunt the best talent for your business.

LinkedIn is a great one for this, with each person’s profile almost acting as a digitised CV, complete with recommendations and endorsements for you to evaluate. Though traditional CVs are still important, using social media well means you can almost create a shortlist of headhunted candidates before you even get in touch with them.

Boost your employer brand

The best way for any company to have an impact on social media, whether they’re recruiting or not, is to create a sense of community.

Social media shouldn’t just be another passive way for you to push out vacancies, like job boards or on your website; it should be about building a pool of people who are interested and enthusiastic about your company, giving a boost to your employer branding.

Because of the sense of ‘real time’ and interaction that social media has, you can combine your recruitment and marketing efforts to really connect with people about new roles, and share content that makes your company an attractive place to work.

Measure your success

All of the above is pointless if you don’t try to measure how well it worked. Measuring the success of social media is about more than just your number of followers, or how many applications you receive.

Defining success from social can be tricky, especially if you’re pushing out multiple roles over multiple channels, so try and think how you can track each application back to its source.

You should be monitoring all inbound traffic to your careers sites, online job descriptions and any online application software, and using a tool like Google Analytics will tell you how many hits came from social channels. To get even more specific, you can create bespoke pages and links for each role or network.

It’s important to measure things like interaction with posts, and characteristics of your followers too, so you can see what kind of content reaches the most people, and whether your audience is who you want them to be.

Social media can be a powerful recruitment tool, when used to its potential.

Have you started integrating social media into your recruitment strategy yet?