Social Media Best Practices
It’s been roughly a decade since social media hit the recruiting industry, surpassing the popularity of blogs in the last seven years. As social media started morphing into social recruiting, the industry — from sourcing to HR and talent management — has wrestled with both the ways social can make individual tasks easier and the constant growing burden of staying up to date.
A special thank you goes out to this month’s Leadership Sponsor, Zoho Recruit . Please visit their site to understand how their quality services can elevate your recruitment practices.
Using social media networks as an all-encompassing recruitment platform may seem ideal in this social-savvy age; however, this vast distribution channel is not as easy to manage as one may think. The three main social networks used in recruiting and hiring are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. While some may believe recruiting via these social networks is “common-sense,” the truth of the matter is that each network does not always work the
same way as the others. Recruiting in a certain way on LinkedIn will not bring in the same results as it would on Twitter or Facebook, and vice versa. Therefore, each social network needs to be strategically considered for the various opportunities it provides.
1. Automation: Automation is the practice of ensuring that recruiters and HR professionals don’t find their social media usage overburdening to their already busy schedules. In the beginning, there were fewer automation tools than there are today, which made it difficult to manage the many-headed hydra that social appeared to be. Recruiters were tasked with engagement, marketing, consistency, and communications, seemingly overnight. Today, there are tools that make all these things simpler and decrease the time needed to hold an effective social presence.
2. Candidate Behavior/Listening: Simply put, if a sourcer or recruiting professional does not know his or her audience, the task of being effective on social media is much more difficult. Again, the advent of sentiment measuring tools makes this much simpler than it was in social media’s infancy. Creating a target profile and measuring all new profiles, while traditionally a marketing activity, has found its place in the social media sphere of talent acquisition.
3. Targeting: As the world of social media has expanded to include hundreds of social, professional, and niche networks, it’s become more important than ever to pay attention to tools and networks that do some or all of the work for social recruiting professionals. For instance, many job boards offer automatic social job posting, and many professional networks have expanded to selling niche job postings. Sourcing engines have popped up to predict when prospects may change jobs and be more susceptible to a recruiting pitch.
With these firmly in mind, let’s look at social media tools through the lens of making each one work with minimum investment, little time and maximum efficiency.
Tool: LinkedIn
How to use it: as a publishing tool, as a listening tool and as a business prospecting tool.
Publishing on LinkedIn
Publish on LinkedIn whenever you have recycled content that this audience may not have seen. Use an image on every post and publish a maximum of twice per week. The views alone make this a simple and effective tool, unless you have more email subscribers on your blog than you have followers on your LinkedIn. Some best practice tips:
1. Do NOT publish job openings as blogs posts.
2. Do NOT publish memes or quotes as blog posts. This can make you look unprofessional, and many are concerned that the publishing feature is creating a Facebook-like vibe on LinkedIn.
3. Post useful and informative posts using the LinkedIn author post. Everything smaller than 250 words should be a status.
4. Keep in mind that posts of any kind should be proofread and at least tangentially related to your profession.
Listening on LinkedIn
For recruiters and marketers alike, listening on LinkedIn is as simple as paying attention to other companies (your competitors and companies you admire) to see who is posting what, what jobs are open what is happening in your chosen industries. With LinkedIn’s acquisition and integration of Slideshare, you can also see what people are thinking about or investigate new ideas.
Even more granular analysis will show which types of ideas are gaining traction among the people you want to hire/sell-to or with executives in a space you would like to know more about. Even LinkedIn’s so-called pitfalls allow insight into user behavior. For example, many people complain about getting “congratulations” when they change their profiles, even though they haven’t changed jobs. An astute recruiter will find out what they changed on their profile — and why.
Candidate Prospecting
Candidate Prospecting is as simple as seeing who is checking out your profile and why. I often send messages to people who have popped up as having viewed my profile and ask what I can help them with. It’s a remarkably easy way to start a conversation. The inverse is true as well: if I am interested in someone professionally, viewing their profile more than twice in a week can be the LinkedIn equivalent of a poke. Some recruiters also use Slideshare to post presentations to display expertise on a pain point they’ve noticed target markets or candidates struggling with (see “listening” above).
Added Benefit Tool: SproutSocial
What it is: a place to manage ALL your social media accounts easily.
Use it for: making sure your message is varied but consistent, keeping track of followers, answering questions, scheduling posts, and managing multiple administrators.
DON’T: forget to actually interact. Automated feeds eventually lose all credibility.
Tool: Facebook
Facebook Use Tips:
1. Spend money, but wisely. Some use paid ads to promote “premium content” like ebooks, white papers, executive job openings, and large events. Best practices promote one blog post per week and free giveaways. Our FB budgets rarely go over 5 percent of total ad spend.
2. Stay out of politics. If you’re using FB for business at all, it’s wise to avoid political discussions or volatile converstions of any kind. If you don’t want to do this, then avoid using FB for your business.
3. Avoid spammy games, contests, and apps that post on your behalf. If you are using FB professionally, these activities undermine your intelligence and professionalism.
4. Our social media team posts only once per day to company pages. In the past, I’ve urged them to do more, but it’s proven ineffective. Once per day works to get the message across. Surprisingly, weekends are also great times to post.
Company Facebook pages have long been a best practice, especially in promoting services and products to consumers worldwide. With more than 1 billion monthly active Facebook users, Facebook has become the largest social network on this planet. This does not make Facebook the most viable recruiting tool, however. Over the past decade, companies have bifurcated their Facebook page targeting: the consumer audience and the applicant audience. Now, more and more companies maintain separate Facebook career pages, while other businesses are still working to convert consumers into employees on their regular company pages.
Either way, company pages and company career pages both have the same goal when it comes to finding new talent, and both face the same challenge of motivating consumers to “buy” into the concept of working for the company.
“Employers may think they’re doing a great job using Facebook and Twitter to communicate their brand, but if they’re only giving people an opportunity to follow them or ‘like’ them, that’s not going to turn them into job candidates,” – Barbara Marder
Facebook is a great place to interact with people and direct them to your website:
1. Individual directives, rather than general “like this page” or “we’re hiring” notices, are useful.
2. Show people the more human side of your business by interacting with individuals. If you remember nothing else about FB, remember that the rules are always changing, so the ultimate goal for Facebook is to get people to your site, where you can hopefully get them to sign up for a newsletter or some less volatile form of communication.
3. Recruiting on Facebook can be seen as an invasion of privacy. Being Facebook friends typically means your relationship is something more personal, like being classmates, relatives, colleagues, neighbors, or perhaps just residing in the same city. This doesn’t leave room for recruiter-candidate relationships like LinkedIn provides, so Facebook recruitment needs to take a different approach.
Facebook can be an employee referral mine. Employee referrals are known to be a company’s best source of quality candidates, and Facebook is known to be a person’s best source of contacts. It just makes sense for recruiters to utilize Facebook as an employee referral vault. Social job purveyor TweetMyJobs states:
“Use Facebook to increase the quantity of referral candidates by giving your employees easy ways to share jobs within their network, as well as providing jobseekers with a way to find people that they know who are currently working for your company. Encourage your employees to share the jobs you post on your wall or through your Facebook Careers Application to pass through quality candidates to your recruiters.”
Added Benefit Tool: Buffer
What it is: a simple way to share content across networks without spurting links out 15 at a time.
Use it for: sharing interesting content you find at 3 AM at a decidedly better time than that; seeing which content does the best on which networks and making it SEEM like you are sharing brilliant things from Brain Pickings at 7:30 AM when actually you are sleeping; grabbing quotes from within an article and sharing easily (this makes it look like you know what you are talking about in industries you may not be totally well versed in).
DON’T: Share on the hour. Be creative with your buffers.
Tool: Twitter
Twitter has gone through its own growing pains. What started as a great equalizer and a place for short-form conversations has, to some extent, devolved into a more transaction-based distribution channel. But that’s not all bad for recruiting or marketing. Using Twitter effectively without spending your whole life on it requires participation in chats, crafting a conversational tone, and learning how to search properly using hashtags.
Twitter Tips
1. Twitter allows anyone to search all public tweets. You need not be a registered Twitter user to access the millions of tweets posted daily. So make your tweets legible without too much shorthand.
2. Job seekers use these search capabilities by filtering and funneling job tweets in real-time, so use a hashtag to reach them!
3. Brands that distribute a significant amount of jobs on Twitter a day establish a separate job channel because the objectives are different.
4. Job channel tweets are searched for and found differently: via Twitter search or a third party tool.
Added Benefit Tool: FollowerWonk
What it is: a search engine for Twitter bios.
Use it for: finding the people you want, especially those with professional designations or those who work for competitors. Also useful for PR or earned media, as you can find a ton of media resources with this tool.
DON’T: be super obvious about it and follow only people you want to hire. If you’re going to be on Twitter, don’t just be the jerk standing there with a megaphone. Cultivate!
Ensure your social media practices are sustainable, scalable, and efficient. Otherwise, social media can become a black hole for your profession. Distributing your jobs across all the social networks and on mobile will increase the likelihood of your jobs finding the right candidates. However, engagement, learning, and listening must be at least partially automated to make them viable for long-term, social-recruiting success.
A special thank you goes out to this month’s Leadership Sponsor, Zoho Recruit . Please visit their site to understand how their quality services can elevate your recruitment practices.