Hacking Social Media to Recruit Your Best Employees

According to Entelo’s annual recruiting trends report, 81% of teams will use social media for recruiting and sourcing versus traditional advertising and 88% of respondents plan to invest more of their budget on social media than in previous years. Tied with corporate career websites, social media recruiting is the second most prevalent source of hire, and social networks are the source of “quality hires.”

What Does This Mean for You?

As a recruiter or hiring manager, you can’t ignore the growing social media resources for finding the best candidates. It’s an important piece of recruitment that should be considered before narrowing down the final candidates; in fact, it’s something that recruiters must think about prior to posting an open position. Entelo’s report suggests that recruiters visited, on average, nearly 8 different social media sites to source their candidates.

While posting openings on a job board and on your website is still important, more people are searching for jobs via social media. If your company doesn’t already have social media accounts on the top sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, create them. Social media is no longer something that companies of any size can ignore; it’s part of today’s world and it’s only growing.

Social media provides extended reach because content is easily shareable, which increases visibility and is more trustworthy. Job seekers can search keywords, find positions and then some: with a robust social media presence, potential candidates can view your accounts and gather information about your company, including insight into your culture, which is a growing concern for candidates. Further, using social media gives current employees and recruiting team members an easy avenue for sharing job postings with their networks.

How Does This Work?

Social media is constantly evolving; something that works today might not work two months from now. The important thing is to understand the power of social media recruiting, and find the right tactics for your company at any given time. For example, there is a growing trend on Twitter for recruiters to post jobs and use hashtags, like “#PRjobs,” to make it easy for job seekers to find jobs in the right industry. Other companies are using Facebook advertising to target people looking for jobs.

No matter the specific tactic, the key to social media recruiting is building up an audience and sharing content frequently. The more you promote your job openings, the more likely you’ll reach the largest possible number of people. Finally, it’s helpful to ask your current employees to share openings; for each share, you are exposing your job postings to thousands of people. Do the simple math if 10 employees share a job posting in their social networks that has 200 connections each you are exposing your trusted job posting to over 2,000 people. If you receive a 1% response you have generated 20 candidate leads for free!

Can I Search for a Candidates on Social Media?

As potential employees are in control of their own social media presences, you can search for public profiles to gain insight you likely won’t get from an in-person interview.

It’s critical to remember that not all profiles are public and an individual’s social media account does not necessarily correlate with success as an employee. It does, however, lend insight into a candidate’s dedication to obtaining a job. If a person hasn’t updated their LinkedIn profile or their Facebook account is inappropriate, it shows a lack of attention to detail or a lack of dedication to getting a meaningful job.