(Newswire.net — January 17, 2023) —
According to Glassdoor, 79% of job hunters use social networks to find new job opportunities, while 73% of millennials found their last positions using one of these channels (CareerProfiles). Moreover, 70% of hiring managers say that recruitment via LinkedIn allowed them to discover more high-scoring prospects and hire more successfully.
These numbers speak louder than any words. With more than half of the world’s population using at least one social network, companies with their HR Departments must go where the people are.
Let’s explore how social recruiting has shaped the hiring game for the better.
What is Social Recruiting?
Social recruiting is the term that refers to searching for, nurturing, and finding job candidates using popular social networks that include but are not limited to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Forums, blogs, and online job boards are also a part of social recruiting.
Additionally, an alumni community can facilitate social recruitment by providing current employees with the opportunity to refer qualified candidates from their professional networks. Also, activating an alumni community can provide a diverse pool of talent for recruitment and help organizations tap into the professional networks of their past employees.
The primary advantages of social recruiting are as follows:
- Ability to increase the visibility of your job postings
- Improved quality of the hiring process and your leads
- Leveraging referrals for your recruiting process
- Building awareness of your brand
- Higher engagement and retention rates
- Ability to reduce the cost of the hire
- Saving on human resources thanks to the availability of automation tools
The benefits behind social recruiting for your company are likely to go beyond the ones we’ve shared above. Nonetheless, these pros can serve as a starting point for the evaluation of your future results.
Principles Behind Social Recruiting
No matter what social network you’ve chosen to run social recruiting activities, the following three pillars remain unshaken:
Content
As you are dealing with professionals, posting mediocre content for beginners will hardly get you started.
In-depth research of your ideal candidates and their expectations must precede the content you share and templates you prepare at each stage of the candidate nurturing process.
Consider focusing on the following content types:
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Long reads
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Educational webinars
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Research
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Statistics
All this will let you showcase your brand as an expert in the field that is interested in their employees’ growth and development — and creates multiple opportunities for that.
Business presence
Building employer branding on social networks is a continuous process, which won’t happen over one night.
What activities can help you build outstanding employer branding?
Here’s some food for thought for you:
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Highlight employee success stories and feedback on how they are doing in your company
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Build dedicated career pages
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Showcase top employees or congratulate your staff on their achievements, special events
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Use specific employee hashtags and tag people in your content
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Organize events to demonstrate your corporate culture
It will help build a reputation of the place someone should love joining and being a part of.
Traffic
Keep it growing. You’ll need to focus on attracting more users to your social media pages, sharing links, and encouraging referrals and current employees to distribute specific links via their profiles.
Tips to Get the Most of this Recruiting Channel
Social recruiting is certainly an ongoing process that can zap much of your employees’ time and efforts. To avoid that, we’ve compiled three pieces of advice for you:
Use Automation Tools
Preparation and sourcing are the first yet vital stages of any recruitment process. Social media automation tools help facilitate the process and connect with potential candidates following complex rules and conditions.
For example, Linked Helper, an automation tool for LinkedIn, enables recruiters to:
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Search potential candidates by keywords
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Invite up to 700 prospects per week
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Download suitable profiles
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Group prospective recruits by tags
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Send a chain of personalized outreach messages using custom variables and more
So, with such software at hand, you can automate your daily (yet indispensable) routine activities while focusing on other things.
Involve Employee Advocates
If you want a wider reach for your content, consider having your employee advocates involved.
Besides making your profile and content visible to a broader audience, employee advocates help spread the word about your business organically.
Measure Your Efficiency
As with any strategy, measuring your activities’ effectiveness is vital. To evaluate your social recruiting strategy’s effect, you’ll need to establish KPIs. Good word of mouth can bring your social recruiting efforts to a hike with minimum cost.
What can these KPIs be?
Much depends on the activities you choose to perform. Nonetheless, the following metrics are most to monitor and measure no matter which strategy you focus on:
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Traffic. Analyze how many users who land on your job application pages come from social media networks. You may want to keep these numbers growing.
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Engagement. This metric helps analyze how well the content you share resonates with the target audience. To do so, you will also need to experiment with content types and writing styles.
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Conversions. What number of job applications have you received from social networks? What number of visitors did convert into your company employees? These metrics help see what ROI your social recruiting activities have.
Conclusion
Social recruiting opens new avenues if you are desperately searching for the means to retain top talent. It creates an environment that goes outside salaries and bonuses but demonstrates a respectful attitude, brings room for growth, and improves productivity.
This article has shared insights that will be enough to get you started.
Is there any piece of advice you plan to employ first in your recruiting strategy? Please share your insights in the comments fields below.