The Recruiting Blog | People First Recruiting

Social Recruiting

Posted by Karin Pooley on Wed, Oct 03, 2012

I am still very surprised to come across people tasked with hiring and recruiting who have not caught on to how beneficial the social media world is to recruit talent from and to promote a company brand through.  We have been using LinkedIn for the last 6 years and have been more active in other social media platforms for about a year and a half now and I can comfortably say we are realizing our return on investment.

This next comment will come as no surprise to many of the companies that I have had the opportunity to work with – traditional recruitment methods no longer work.  On their own. 

Yes, paper advertising still has its place, as do online job boards, but if you are not using tools liked LinkedIn then you are missing out on a very affordable and highly effective method of social recruitment.

How do I define social recruitment?  It is many things.  It’s candidate attraction, it’s brand awareness and it’s listening.  Social recruiting isn’t just about reaching out to candidates and recruiting them.  It’s where you can literally spend about an hour a day promoting why your organization is a great place to work or to promote the new job opportunities you have.  The reality is social recruiting takes patience and effort and is not an immediate result type investment.  It takes time to build awareness in the online social world but eventually you will start to see more people visiting your web or career site, or reaching out to you and asking questions.

Another fabulous tool in our social recruiting arsenal, (of which there really is an art to) is the position job profiles – the ones you write up and publish to the world.  When we create a job profile for our clients, we tell them that this is our attraction tool.  It is the marketing piece we use to excite candidates about that amazing career opportunity. It’s not enough to get them to stop for just a second to click open that document and read it.  They need to understand what’s in it for them, they need to get excited about the role and so if you can get as clear and creative as possible in your job profiles, then you will have a better chance at attracting the right type of candidates. 

The job profile serves another purpose though. Think of how you may go about purchasing a new appliance or finding that four star hotel for your next vacation.  Many of us will go right to the internet and enter a string of words, perhaps like this:  ’I want a four star hotel in Barbados’.  What comes up?  A set of fine tuned results.  Now translate that to a candidate searching for a new job.  They will do the same thing when it comes to job hunting online. ’HR Manager jobs in Winnipeg’ might be the words they use.  The more relevant keywords you have in your job profile and the more places online that you have it posted, the more likely that profile will show up in their search results.  A well written job profile is absolutely essential to a well executed recruitment.  Again, it isn’t enough to post a job to a job board with a paragraph that simply says, ‘Looking for a new HR Manager’ and then follow it up with terminology that is only specific to your business.  If someone isn’t familiar with your business, they certainly won’t be familiar with your terminology.  Think about the candidate and put yourself in their shoes.

Social Recruiting is more than just using social media to find candidates, it is about showing why a candidate should work for you in the first place.  Why you are different.  I am not claiming for a second that social media in itself is the end all and be all of recruiting nor have we, ourselves mastered the techniques of recruiting or the art of job profiles.  It is a learning process every moment.  But a couple years ago, after much consideration and discussion, we took the leap into putting our time into social media and thought it was either going to be successful or not.  The results are paying off. 

Now I will finish with some shameless self promotion. On October 23rd and 24th we will be at Connect 2012, The Degree of Difference conference held by the Human Resource Management Association of Manitoba (HRMAM).  It is a two day conference where we have been invited to discuss and share with the members and guests our experience with social recruiting; the ups, the downs and the how to’s.  If you are going to be attending, we would love to share more with you so stop by The Social Recruiting Lounge (booth 36) in the exhibit hall and let’s talk!

And if you can’t be there then talk to us through Twitter with the hashtag #HRConnect2012.

 social recruiting

Topics: social media, twitter, linkedin, social recruiting, facebook, recruiting blog, HRMAM, position profiles, blogs, Recruiting