Social What?
Social recruiting is the act of finding desirable candidates via social media and building quality connections through the digital realm.
Social recruiting is an easy way to associate a face with a name while learning about potential candidates. For most people, social media serves as a means of expression, allowing users to post uninhibited and for recruiters to gain valuable insights into the candidate’s personality. For example, a candidate whose LinkedIn profile shows a promising lead could upon further investigation via other social networks, turn out to be a dead end. Regardless, this type of research is cost efficient, i.e. free, and takes less time than traditional methods.
Social media’s low time commitment provides ample opportunity to reach candidates who otherwise may get overlooked. LinkedIn is a great first step to finding passive candidates because it allows users to search for members via industry and job title. By nature, LinkedIn is less personal than other platforms like Facebook, allowing recruiters to cut through the clutter and learn about a candidate’s professional background. In fact, LinkedIn serves as a digital resume by displaying a candidate’s current and past job history, while allowing room for further explanation of their skills and responsibilities.
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Social How?
Just because scrolling through social media is less time consuming than traditional search methods doesn’t mean strategies can be abandoned. If your company is completely unfamiliar with digital recruiting, make the switch slowly and create a reliable plan that will help ease the transition.
Rather than doing a nosedive directly into LinkedIn’s pool of potential applicants and panicking by the sheer amount of choices, we recommend taking the following steps:
- Start with You
Culture matters. Appearances matter. Making sure your company is reflected as lovingly as you see it is important!
Top brands like Zappos have moved away entirely from job posting and instead have built up a multi–platform social presence with their “Inside Zappos” pages. Potential hires are known as “Zappos Insiders” are given direct access to recruiters to ask questions and get to know real members of the Zappos teams. The methodology behind this is a two-way street; potential hires learn more about the company, while recruiters learn more about the candidates.
Zappos’ approach is a great example of uniquely engaging hires, but for something more immediate we suggest starting small. Update your brand’s social channels to reflect your culture. Write about group outings and team building events. At Personify, making Personians our brand ambassadors has been one of the most successful (and least expensive) ways to increase our visibility — for both our recruitment and commercial marketing efforts. By having our employees share our social posts daily on LinkedIn and use our company hashtags (#whyiPFY, #howiPFY, and #pfynation) on Facebook and Instagram, we regularly engage with potential Personify candidates, while boosting our account-based marketing initiatives.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Culture matters. Appearances matter. Making sure your company is reflected as lovingly as you see it is important!” quote=”Culture matters. Appearances matter. Making sure your company is reflected as lovingly as you see it is important!”]
- Check Yourself (Before You Wreck Yourself)
Do you monitor your brand or your clients’ brands on social media? No?You should.
According to the community management software, Sprout Social, brand monitoring keeps you informed on what’s said about your brand, helps you find new people to engage with and even tracks your competitors’ moves.
Plenty of tools exist to monitor what is being said about your brand and how. Monitoring your brand can be as simple as searching for relevant hashtags on Twitter and using Facebook’s graph search to see who is mentioning your name.
Sprout Social suggests going even deeper with Social Mention, a free, real-time tool that searches corners of the internet and gives you a general sentiment analysis. Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. The brand boasts monitoring one hundred plus social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. - Thank You, Next
Social media is a wilderness of sorts, and appearances are not always as they seem. If you’re new to social media recruiting don’t abandon your current strategy. Just because you start a repertoire with a potential candidate, doesn’t mean either of you owes anything. Sure, you and John Doe may have the same alma mater and according to his Facebook profile, you may both love the Great British Bake Off, but that doesn’t mean he’s any more likely to be a great hire without proper vetting. Use your recruitment spidey-sense, and more importantly, stick to a tried and true hiring strategy when deciding how to move forward with a lead.
At Personify, our recruitment solution strategy is fueled by four decades of acquiring an intimate knowledge of the industries we serve. The leaders of our practices have real-world experience in the actual market segments in which they recruit, providing an understanding of both the technical and the cultural fit that’s required.
Our subject matter expertise, coupled with our expansive networks, leads to more informed consultation on finding the best candidate possible for our clients — both online and off. To learn more about the Personify Integrated Talent Platform, which encompasses talent pipelining, on-demand recruitment, process support, and employee engagement, click here.