8 Advantages Of Social Media Recruiting

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As recruitment agencies compete for top talent, it has become increasingly necessary to use social media in talent acquisition. Indeed, over 90% of all recruiters now use social networking sites in their recruitment process. The following are eight benefits of using social media as part of your recruitment advertising strategy:

Key Takeaways:

• Social media makes your advertisement available to a wider audience of candidates, which helps you find the strongest applicants available.

• Even when it doesn’t directly result in a new hire, advertising on social media gets your company’s name out there and helps your brand.

• Advertising on social media allows you to focus more on hiring for specific positions, and can ultimately result in a quicker hiring process.

• Social media recruiting must take into account unintentional discrimination to avoid legal action.

• Keep your strategy targeted so that you are not lost in the white noise of social media.

What Is Social Media Recruiting?

Social media recruiting is the use of social media in the hiring process to recruit candidates through job postings, research, and networking. This provides an alternative path from traditional recruiting methods.

Broadly speaking, social media recruiting works in three ways:

• Promotion. Whether it is a job positing or some kind of advertisement, recruitment content on social media allows you to promote your needs and reach a wide audience.

• Research. You can use social media sites to observe what other companies are doing in their strategies. You can also use social media to better understand the pool of potential candidates.

• Connection. Social media provides a way for you to reach out with candidates and business partners. This begins the conversation process of your recruiting strategy.

As the digital economy plays an increasingly important role in society, social media is an important resource all recruitment strategies must consider.

The Benefits Of Social Media Recruiting

1. Increases job visibility.

   Today, practically every ideal candidate you could consider for any position at your company is on social media. Facebook enjoys an active user base of over 2.19 billion. Twitter is popular for the ability to host job search chats and many millennials and Generation X demographic are active users of LinkedIn as a job hunting platform.

   Wherever you look, you see social networks serving as incredible platforms for identifying and recruiting talented individuals to work for your clients. Certainly, few other platforms can reach as many people as social media, meaning that you are likely to get the caliber of talent other platforms can hardly match.

2. Higher quality candidates.

   Self-reported statistics from many companies show that they get high quality candidates whenever they recruit via social networking sites. One big reason why this is the case is because most people you will find on social media are tech-savvy, a fundamental requirement to land any job in today’s marketplace.

   Additionally, they are likely to already be in the know regarding emerging business trends, adding to the skills they bring to the table. What’s more, if you choose to use your employees to announce new openings at your company via social media, chances are that the people you will hire will not only stay longer at your company, they will also be more productive than those you would hire through other platforms.

3. Better employer brand awareness.

   Social recruiting is effective, not just in finding you the ideal candidate, but also in increasing the visibility of your brand. By advertising new positions on social media, you strengthen your brand and create some level of trust among potential employees.

   People view brands that have a strong social media presence as more trustworthy. Therefore, it would serve your business well to establish a robust social media presence, not just because you want to find good employees, but also because doing so will build trust among potential customers as well as make it a coveted place to work.

4. Reduce cost of hire.

   Recruiting can be a very expensive undertaking. Social recruiting is cheaper, but can still cost you significant amounts of money. All the same, the value you get from the hires you find via social networking platforms makes this approach extremely cheap.

   Without a doubt, recruitment costs via social media are almost always, lower than those of other methods. A simple Facebook ad can for instance get you over two times more visibility than the traditional recruitment methods like classified ads in the dailies and job boards.

5. Opens the door to engagement.

   Imagine a brand that has taken its time to grow its audience, even using tools like Growr to organically grow on social media, but finds itself struggling to engage with the followers it has gathered. Such a brand can benefit from a social media post of a job opening.

   As interested individuals seek out more information regarding the job opportunity, your social media page gets more engagement. Some interested parties will post on the comments section, others will share with their friends and followers, while others will send you a direct message to your inbox.

   These conversations keep your page active and give you the opportunity to engage with potential employees. Some of these are people who would never have applied for a job at your company had you used any other recruitment platform.

   Recruiters who know how to make the most of the recruitment opportunities available on social media will tell you that some of these social conversations are better than one-on-one interviews.

   In any case, you can have several chats with several potential candidates on social networking websites, and only call a few of them to further the conversation in person at your business premises later. Furthermore, there are several social recruitment tools you can use that will help you do it fast and stress free. These include Jobcast, Work4 Labs, Jobvite, Bullhorn Reach, and LinkUp.

6. Allows you to target your vacancies more.

   Social recruitment comes with incredible ability to laser-target certain groups of people for the available vacancies. On LinkedIn for instance, you can try to share the job postings in certain industry-specific LinkedIn groups.

   On this platform alone, there are thousands of groups for professionals in practically every industry you can imagine: from engineers to HR workers, to writers, to finance experts. That said, remember to post your recruitment messages in a way that would not be deemed annoying.

   The idea is to attract potential candidates, not overwhelm them with promises of bliss if they get a job at your company. Though such promises might be true, potential employees could start to view you and your company as con artists or spammers, ultimately undermining your credibility and ruining your chances of getting top talent via the social platform.

   Twitter hashtags also make for clever recruitment methods. You can also consider asking your employees to share the available vacancies within their social circles.

7. Screen your candidates.

   It is now an open secret that employers use social media to get an in-depth understanding of the people they have hired at their companies. Many people see social media platforms as free spaces where they can express their frustrations, talk about their causes and share their experiences as they go through the days of the lives. What you might not know is that potential employers also check out candidates on social media.

   Social networking sites give them a deeper view of who they are about to hire. It gives them insights into the person’s personality even allowing them to figure out what their ambitions are and what they can expect once they hire them to work in their business.

   Other recruitment methods cannot help you do that. Screening potential employees ensures that you work with those people who align with your company values and culture.

   All the same, it is important to note that you should resist the temptation to review someone else’s social media profiles without them consenting to it. That said, most people now include links to their social media profiles in their CVs, a decision that implies that they are comfortable with potential employers reviewing their social media profiles.

8. Shortens hiring time.

   The traditional methods of recruitment generally take longer than social media recruitment methods. This means that when you have an open position that you need filled in the shortest time possible, social media is the platform to consider. Social networking sites not only make it easy and fast to communicate with candidates, it also allows them to respond faster. As a result, excellent work relationships often emerge.

   What’s more, recruiting in a talent pool that has people who share common values, interest and work styles with the hiring manager or company often accelerates the speed with which you will find the ideal person for the job. This is great news for both the hiring party and the candidates hoping to get an opportunity to work at your organization.

Disadvantages Of A Social Media Recruitment Strategy

1. Potential legal issues. You have to be careful not to discriminate during social media recruiting. While you learn about potential clients you may find information that can affect your biases, resulting in unfair discrimination of certain people. This is particularly challenging in regards to race, ethnicity, and gender. Be mindful of these factors when engaging in social media recruiting to avoid discrimination lawsuits.

2. Privacy concerns. Social media can be invasive in a person’s private life. If you are conducting social media recruiting, you may turn off some candidates who do not want their personal and professional lives intersecting.

3. False information. You cannot trust everything you read on the internet. What may appear to be a perfect candidate could turn out to be the opposite in reality. Recruit with a healthy amount of skepticism and keep an eye out for contradictory information or red flags in people’s profiles.

How Do You Do Social Media Recruitment?

1. Be specific in your needs and goals. Before you begin your social media recruitment strategy, you need to understand the purpose behind the strategy. Otherwise you will be unfocused which will waste time and money. Know what role and responsibilities you want to fill and how it meets your needs. Also engage in quantitative goals so you can evaluate the success of your strategy.

2. Define your company brand. Your presence on social media will be greatly impacted by your company’s brand. Make sure you have a brand that has a positive reaction from your target audiences. Otherwise, a poorly defined brand will confuse or even upset potential candidates.

3. Define your ideal candidate.

   Once you know what you are looking for, consider who meets your needs. Use this as a way to gauge candidates. Do not be upset if they don’t meet all your requirements. Your ideal candidate should act as a guide to your actual hire.

4. Be targeted in your social media campaign. If you flood all social media outlets without considering the nature of what you are doing and where you are doing it, then you will get mixed results. You don’t want your campaign to become white noise, therefore, make sure your strategy picks social media sites that are relevant to your needs. Also make sure your content is equally appropriate.

5. Evaluate. Constantly assess your social media recruiting strategy to see what is working and what is not. Develop a strategy that is focused yet flexible so that you can make changes when necessary.

Tips For Advertising A Job On Social Media

1. Be concise. People scroll through social media quickly and spend very little time looking at each individual post, so your advertisement needs to get the point across quickly.

2. Include all the relevant information. Similarly, social media users tend to be reluctant to follow a link to more information, so make sure important details like salary and job requirements are all covered in the post itself.

3. Advertise your company, not just a job. Advertising on social media is a chance to display your company culture, so try to reflect that in your post.

4. Target the right audience. Make sure you post your advertisement where the right candidates will see it, and tailor it to the platform you’re using – an ad on Twitter shouldn’t be exactly the same as an ad on Facebook.

Author

Lilly Chesser