Are You Using Social Media Effectively In Your Recruiting?
According to the 2015 Jobvite Recruiting Survey, 96% of recruiters are now using social recruiting to find candidates, but the question remains: Are you using it well?
Recruiting across social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is now so ubiquitous that social hiring is considered an essential recruiting practice. And no wonder- social media channels increase your candidate reach, build your recruitment brand, offer insight into the candidates, and—if utilised properly—source high quality candidates who will also feed referrals into your talent pipeline.
Sounds perfect, right? However, there are some serious pitfalls to social recruiting if it’s not done correctly…and a lot of recruiters, unfortunately, aren’t doing it right.
How Social Recruiting Can Go Wrong
Failure to connect: The biggest danger of relying too heavily on posting jobs on social media is that the process is so quick and distant that the proper relationships aren’t built.
Recruiting is all about relationships, and by posting only a constant stream of job ads on your social media channel you give the perception that you are only ‘selling’ something, and not creating human relationships. Without relationships, you’ve given the candidate no reason to return to you for their next role, or to refer you to their company or friends.
Failure to build your brand: Some recruiters are posting relentless streams of job postings…and nothing else. Take Twitter alone: 60,000 jobs are posted on the platform each day- what makes yours stand out? Is anybody even listening?
Recruitment is a crowded, competitive landscape so you need to stand out by creating brilliant social media accounts that people want to, not only find their jobs through, but stay signed up because they find your posts interesting, valuable and possibly even funny.
As a recruiter, if your facebook or Twitter page is regularly updated with interesting articles, great images and even quotes or jokes, then the person has no reason to discontinue their account. You stay in their mind and they will return to you and recommend their friends, colleagues and hiring managers to you. Jobs can definitely be a part of your posting strategy, but they have to be interspersed with real content.
Failure to properly target: The potential candidate pool is vast- but if you don’t target your audience right you’ll end up with a vast pile of under-qualified CVs to wade through. Inexpensive Facebook and Twitter ads allow you to target your audience within very specific age, location and keywords, while the LinkedIn Recruiter tool is designed to make your life easier.
Also, some recruiters are making the error of blanket-posting across all channels without pausing to consider whether the channel is particularly appropriate for the audience, such as using Instagram or Snapchat for posting senior roles. Inappropriate targeting on social media can actually damage your brand.
Failure to capitalise: The best quality candidates are found through referrals, yet perhaps you didn’t properly trawl the candidate’s social and professional connections to discover new talent for your pipeline. Perhaps you’ve not kept in touch with the candidate after you placed them- thereby squandering your social capital with them and missing out on valuable referrals or job openings at their company. Perhaps your Facebook or Twitter account doesn’t have enough engaging material so they deleted your page as soon as they got a job. So many missed opportunities that a good social media strategy could have prevented!
Failure to use each social channel wisely. Each social media platform has its benefits for both the recruiter and the candidate. Linked in is still overwhelmingly the best place to vet candidates on a professional level and post jobs, while facebook and twitter are a great vehicle to build the company brand, post jobs intermittently, and get a more personal glimpse into candidates’ values and networks. The range of social media channels used by recruiters is ever-expanding, with YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and even Vimeo and Tumblr used by some recruiters. The language, format and target market for each social channel is distinctly different, so you’ll need to craft each post for each channel differently.
When done properly, a social media strategy both invites the candidates into your world and sells you as a recruiter, while also giving you an insight into the candidate’s professional and personal world. Ultimately, via a good social recruiting strategy, both sides get a window into the culture and competency of the other.
Until next time
Cheryl