Social Recruiting: from Postings to Results
To deliver true value, social recruiting is about more than just having a Facebook page or tweeting job postings. Social recruiting should increase your reach, improve the quality of your hires, and reduce your sourcing costs. Below are five tips that will make the most of your social recruiting efforts and improve your results.
1. Take Ownership of Your Company’s Social Media
Too many companies make the mistake of allowing recruiters to own the company’s social media relationships by posting jobs using their own social media accounts. Not only is this manual process labor-intensive, but since recruiters often have overlapping social networks, potential hires may be getting multiple messages from multiple people. Worse, when recruiters leave your company, they take their social networks with them, and you need to start building communities all over again.
Instead, your company should own its social recruiting networks. Recruiters can then leverage these networks to post jobs and communicate with candidates. As a result, your company has a single go-to destination for every social media network, and even if recruiters leave, you keep your network.
2. Automate Social Media Marketing
Once you set up your company social networks, you can automate posting jobs to those networks via RSS, XML, or applications that can post dozens or thousands of jobs every day. This frees recruiters from time-consuming manual posting to give them time to add value by providing more details about individual postings or forwarding them to targeted members of their own networks.
Candidates who respond to postings are automatically directed to your career site and applicant tracking system, so you can easily track visitors, applicants, and hires.
3. Create Your Own Private Talent Community
Once you can automatically feed jobs and job information to your social networks and draw candidates to your career site, it’s time to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Being connected to potential hires through LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook means those companies — not you — own the relationship. There’s little opportunity to differentiate, since you don’t own the application and your competitors can see what you’re doing.
Creating your own talent community is the next step. If you’ve done a good job providing enticing information through standard social media channels, getting your contacts to join your private talent community should be easy. Engage new or existing contacts with value-added services, such as matching new jobs to their LinkedIn profiles and sending them a private message. It’s better to proactively push relevant jobs to qualified members than have them troll your career site or job boards.
Social referral tools that let members easily refer friends for particular opportunities extend your company’s reach by letting postings go viral. Offer members a referral fee when you hire their friends to further grow your network. And because most candidates sign up with their personal email addresses, you can continue to market jobs to them over time, growing your brand and nurturing their interest in your company.
4. Track and Analyze Your Social Media Engagement
By aggregating and analyzing all your social media interactions, you get valuable feedback that helps improve the social recruiting process. Knowing the exact number of visitors, subscribers, applicants, and hires helps you decide how to spend your social recruiting time and budget. For example, if an analysis finds that you fill 80 percent of your entry-level jobs through Facebook, but almost none through LinkedIn, you’ll know to promote jobs for new graduates more heavily on Facebook.
But analysis should go beyond social media marketing. Automated analysis tools should be able to correlate data from your social media pages, your private talent community, job boards, and your career site and applicant tracking system. For example, your analysis tools may reveal that engineering hiring is increasing through referrals, but shrinking from more traditional job boards.
Ideally, you should be able to analyze social recruiting data together with other types of recruiting data and other HR applications, such as data from performance applications. For example, you may find more of your top-performing marketing employees are coming through Twitter. Analysis will help you place more emphasis on channels that are producing better results (that is hires, not traffic!), while giving you the opportunity to tweak or eliminate channels that are not performing as well.
5. Regularly Review Your Strategy
With social media’s fast pace of change, you can’t afford to rest on your laurels. What worked last year may not work today. New channels regularly open up, and candidates shift their loyalties. Only by collecting sourcing data from all your channels with a consolidated platform and adding data from hiring statistics and performance reviews can you make good decisions about where you spend your recruiting dollars – social or otherwise. By also tracking recruiting trends over time and adjusting your strategy appropriately, you can make sure you don’t waste advertising dollars on efforts that aren’t working.
When it comes to social recruiting, professionals need to take an active attitude towards the tools and strategies they’re using to be effective as possible. Having an active presence on social media to reach qualified candidates is an important aspect of a well-rounded recruiting strategy in today’s competitive market. By taking ownership, using automation, creating communities, and tracking strategy, companies will be able to create a successful program to recruit top talent as efficiently as possible.