How to Use Social Media to Find the Right Talent 3 Times Faster

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The current job market is filled with millennials and, soon, Generation Z. These demographic groups tend to consume social media as often as they eat food or drink water. If you are still using only old-school recruiting methods like posting on career sites or advertising in newspapers, you have to seriously up your game. 

How do you reach Gen. Z and millennial candidates? You cannot pull them to your career sites, but you can easily find them where they spend an average of three hours per day: social media.

Social media recruiting is very real, and it is time for you to adopt it. 

3.81 billion. That is the number of people using social media right now, which is close to half the world’s population. Social media recruiting will help you reach this audience with ease.

You can use smart tools to post your job on your career site, job boards, and social media at the same time. Check out how you can post your job on multiple platforms with a single click. 

Of course, we cannot ask you to jump into something completely new without stating why it’s beneficial. So let’s talk about the benefits of social media recruiting:

  1. Social media recruiting helps you reach passive candidates, who are already employed but not actively seeking a job.
  2. It’s easier to sort through ideal candidates by targeting specific skills, levels of expertise, or companies they have worked for on social media.
  3. Given the amount of spend in relation to the size of the talent pool you can reach, social media platforms help cut down your hiring costs and build a pool of talent to which you can turn any time you have an opening. 
  4. Social recruiting makes it easier to carry out a talent search that transcends geographical boundaries.
  5. Your candidates can look you up on social media. This means they can learn who you are, what you do, and what it’s like to work with you in a matter of minutes.
  6. Employers can use social recruiting to more easily target groups who may be underrepresented in their organizations, such as women, veterans, and people with disabilities.
  7. Consistent engagement on social media doesn’t just bring you candidates. Over time, it helps you build an online community that trusts and loves your company.
  8. It’s easy to spread the word about your open roles and attract referrals by asking followers to share your news to their own social circles.

Now that you know how beneficial it is to adopt social media recruiting, you don’t need to go frantically Googling how to get started with it. We have an answer for that, too.

Here are the top strategies you can implement to kick-start your social media recruiting:

8 Social Media Recruiting Strategies for Beginners

1. Show Off Your Company’s Identity 

Use your social media profiles to tell your candidates real stories of what it is like to work with your company. Share your beliefs and values, and give people a look at your work environment. Get your employees to join you. Motivate and inspired them to get involved. They can share posts, engage with people, refer candidates, etc. They are your biggest brand ambassadors.

2. Choose the Right Platform 

There are many social media platforms out there, and not all of them will work for your purposes. Ask yourself these questions when you are choosing your social recruitment platforms:

  1. Where would my ideal candidates hang out?
  2. What are the platforms that would resonate with our brand image, job opening, or both?
  3. What platforms are my competitors using?
  4. Do I need to use all platforms, or should I stick to an effective few?

Once you’ve chosen the right platform, you need to get your candidate sourcing techniques right. Here are some easy hacks to get ahead of other recruiters in 2021 if you plan to source on Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr. 

3. Lean In and Engage 

Not everything you do on social media needs to have an agenda. Just follow a few simple guidelines:

  1. Always offer valuable information or content, and use clearly defined and visible calls to action.
  2. Use videos to communicate (they convey information 10 times faster).
  3. Conduct activities that attract potential candidates. For example, you could ask a technical question and sift through answers to find candidates.
  4. Use content to engage followers consistently, not just when you’re actively looking to hire.
  5. Engage in live Q&A sessions and let your prospects ask any questions they might have on their minds.

4. Build Personal Relationships 

When people show interest in your company, take a few minutes to engage with them. Even if they don’t seem like an immediate fit for any of your open roles, it’s worth connecting with them personally. Networking will go a long way in hiring. You can always add promising candidates to your talent pool and get back to them later.

5. Put Mobile First 

Your broader strategy should focus heavily on mobile, because 99 percent of social media users access their profiles or feeds through mobile devices. Your application forms, career website, posts, videos, and interaction opportunities should all be mobile-friendly.

6. Do Paid Promotions

Leverage paid advertisements to catalyze your search. You can target very specific candidate personas based on skills, experience, location, organization, interests, etc. 

7. Set Goals, Measure, and Iterate 

What is your social media recruitment goal? Your answers could look something like this:

  1. Build a thriving community of talent for the long run.
  2. Fill difficult-to-fill roles.
  3. Reduce recruitment costs.
  4. Hire diverse talent.
  5. Improve the visibility of your employer brand.

Track metrics to measure the output of your efforts, according to your specific goals. Metrics are essential to understanding whether your recruitment strategy is successful, but people often overlook this fact. Metrics provide clarity on what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action accordingly.

Some key metrics include time to hire, cost per hire, time to hire by source, cost per hire by source, referral rate, offer acceptance rate, and engagement rate on different platforms. Find out what metrics you should be tracking to succeed in your recruitment efforts. 

8. Leverage the Right Tools

Social media recruiting tools increase efficiency by publishing jobs on all your social media channels from a single interface. Tools like Freshteam also bring all applicant information automatically to a central dashboard, providing ease of access. These tools are capable of reducing up to 80 percent of recruiter workload. 

Investing in social media recruiting might take a lot of time and energy, but you can save time on finding the right social media recruiting tool by giving Freshteam a spin. Freshteam is a smart applicant tracking system that has useful features like interview scheduling, talent pools, powerful automation capabilities, a mobile app, and so much more. It provides everything you need to source and hire great talent. Try out Freshteam for free here.

This article by Freshteam is built on the original article  that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.

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By Freshteam