Social Media: the Best Option for Finding the People You Need
What about recruiting ? Are you utilizing social media to recruit talent? You should be.
In fact, you may even wish to make social media the primary channel through which you post job positions, make initial contact with potential employees, and disseminate information about working for your company.
Why? Let’s look at the power and benefits of social recruiting:
Social Media Recruiting Is Amazingly Cost Effective
Once you have established a presence on a social media site, there is no additional cost for writing and publishing job postings. While some sites may charge a fee to promote those postings, you can take advantage of organic (and free) promotion by getting employees, fans, and customers to share the postings to their own networks.
Placing recruiting ads in newspapers, on job boards, or in other, more traditional locations, on the other hand, does cost money. It would be possible to justify the costs of these channels if they offered something social media sites do not – but they don’t. Recruiters can reach the same prospects via social media as they can reach through paid job ads.
According to a 2014 survey conducted by Jobvite, 33 percent of recruiters spend no money on social media recruiting, and another 41 percent spends anywhere from a dollar to $999.
Either way you slice it, social media recruiting turns out to be pretty cheap.
Social Recruiting Takes Less Time
Social media works quickly. The Jobvite survey mentioned above also shows that, for 34 percent of employers, social recruiting reduces the average time-to-hire.
The speed of social media is a bad thing when you post something regrettable on Facebook, but a great thing when you use social media to recruit people.
See, traditional recruiting means creating a job description, writing ads, contacting prospects, asking others for references and referrals, and so on, etc. The whole process can take weeks – if not months. (Keep in mind that this is just the recruiting process. This doesn’t even include the actual interview or negotiation stages!)
When you post a job ad on social media, on the other hand, you immediately set things into motion. Between people sharing your post and users responding to your opening, you could end up with a decent pool of prospects in a mere matter of hours!
Social Media May Help You
Studies have shown that candidates who are hired as the result of social media hiring campaigns often work out better than candidates who are hired through more traditional means. It is possible that this is true because social media users are, generally speaking, forward-thinking, innovative, and very much into technology. All of these traits, are undeniably desirable in today’s job market.
Get Every Member of the Organization Involved in Recruiting!
When a company uses traditional methods to find the workers that it needs, the task of recruiting and hiring falls almost entirely on the shoulders of the human resources department.
When a company decides to use social media to recruit, every employee who is active on social media can help out! They can share posts about jobs, contact friends and encourage them to apply, help interested applicants get into the pipeline, and more. This kind of recruiting “crowdsourcing” could only be possible with the use of social media.
Social Media Appeals to Candidates
Recruiters must focus on making their organizations as attractive as possible to job seekers, especially in today’s highly competitive talent market.
One way to do this is to view candidates in the same way that you would view prospective customers. You want to keep prospective customers interested by engaging them on social media. The same concept applies when it comes to attracting decent job candidates. Social media is cheap, easy, convenient, and fast for you. It is also cheap, easy, convenient, and fast for job seekers.
Passive candidates are often the best candidates – and social media is especially appealing to them. Social media allows you to reach out to these candidates, it it gives them an easy way to entertain your pitch without too much effort on their part. A total win for everyone involved!
–
Social recruiting has a lot of wide-reaching benefits for the employers and recruiters who make use of this strategy. If you’re not availing yourself of social media as a sourcing and hiring tool yet, there’s only one question left to ask: What are you waiting for?