Get More Social with Your Recruiting

When it comes to recruiting, taking the social route has never been more important. In an industry where acquiring and retaining quality talent is a constant challenge, it’s crucial that HR professionals strive to take recruitment processes to the next level by getting more social and more automated. It’s no longer simply about posting on a job board, sending job invitations or tweeting about an opportunity. The next phase of social recruiting will focus on better leveraging and incentivizing current employees.

With limited resources and personnel available in most HR departments, existing employees are a company’s most valuable asset for recruiting. However, recruiting isn’t a main priority for most employees. It’s challenging, time consuming, and quite frankly, not a part of their job description. Innovative HR departments overcome this issue by implementing technologies that make the process more automated and allow recruiters to access even the most passive candidates. These HR teams can simply check a box within a recruiting module to cascade job postings to their employees’ personal social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), extending their reach far beyond just the company’s social networks. Of course, they can’t do this without an employee’s consent, which is where incentive comes in. Today’s social recruiting technologies let employees track which of their friends, followers or contacts are applying for jobs, which social network they came from and what stage they are in during the recruiting process. This assures employees that their efforts don’t go unnoticed and that they are being seen as a valuable resource within their company. It is also really helpful to have on hand for reference if their employer offers an employee referral bonus program.

Another great characteristic in social recruiting is the ability to let candidates submit their resumes through social channels or leverage their LinkedIn profiles to apply for positions. All of the information in their profiles can then be captured and stored against their candidate record for future reference. This helps to create a seamless experience for those candidates that are sourced through social networking sites.

For companies that are trying to determine whether social recruiting is right for them, it’s important to also make sure that mobile is a key component. This functionality is incredibly valuable with today’s mobile workforce, especially when hiring millennials, a generation that thrives on mobile devices. Recruiters and employees should be able to navigate job opportunities and easily share a job posting to social networks with the click of a button – anywhere, anytime.

Of course, recruiting is just one piece of the puzzle. For HR professionals looking for a more robust and well-rounded approach to recruiting, an important consideration is integration with their HCM applications. By having a tie-in from recruiting to the rest of HCM and even other business applications like finance and CRM, HR teams can easily manage all candidate records in one system along with their job applications and gain visibility into staffing needs, budget and utilization across the business. It also ensures that they have access to valuable metrics associated with sources of candidates, quality of candidates (based on interview rankings), etc. allowing them to visually understand how new hires perform in the organization.

Most importantly, having all of this information in one place helps management better understand where their company’s top talent is coming from. This level of visibility ensures that employees are recognized for their hard work, and that ultimately leads to an increase in employee engagement and performance.