Social media recruiting is of growing importance as more and more candidates position themselves online through social media profiles. During the past few years, social media has crept into our lives and workplaces, and its presence is now as ubiquitous as any other news medium.
It’s important not to overlook the power of social media as a valuable recruiting resource. Where else can you get access to the resumes and identities of top professionals in their fields with a few easy keystrokes? The trick, of course, is knowing what those keystrokes are and how to use them.
Using social media as a recruiting tool
“Every single social media site and social networking site is different, and almost none of them have requirements.” Kelly Dingee explained in a recent BLR webinar. “That’s why I’m a little bit behind the curve as far as saying certain sites are already job boards, because job boards require specific information from you in order for you to go through and be profiled as a candidate. Social media and social networking sites typically don’t.” They each have their own pros and cons, and the best way to find what works for you is to get started exploring them.
Your time will be your biggest investment when you get started learning about social media recruiting sources. “If you invest the time to get to know these sites that could be fruitful to you from a candidate sourcing perspective, it’s really absolutely worth it.” Dingee told us.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are the primary players when it comes to sourcing on social media. The cost is low (it’s primarily time) and there are millions of users on these sites.
However, “from a recruiting perspective, you need to protect yourself.” Have your recruiting team create a company account instead of using their own personal social media account. This not only allows more ease of control over the message, but allows for multiple people to access the account for backup purposes. It also keeps individuals from gathering competitive intelligence – which would then go with them if they stopped working for the company.
HR strategy for social media recruiting
To get started recruiting in social media, you have to use all of the tools you’ve got: posting, interacting, searching, etc. “I think you have to go with a multi-faceted strategy. So, you’ve got to post, you’ve got to search, you’ve got to figure out how to extract information, you’ve got to figure out how to engage with people.” Dingee advised.
“Always remember when you’re posting that one site is not the answer. So, if all you do is post your job on Twitter, well, you’re only getting the people that use Twitter, so you can’t just do that. You’ve got to go after your Facebook people, maybe you do pay-per-click ads, maybe you post on LinkedIn, maybe you post on some of these smaller social media sites . . . but you need to definitely use more than one option.”
When doing a search as part of your recruiting process, you may be surprised that algebra comes into play. A Boolean search typically looks like a + (b OR c) = candidate. In this case, a, b, and c are your keywords. The keywords may be skills, acronyms, education, or even phrases. This can be combined with search commands. For example, you can use the word “site:” followed by the site you’re wishing to search to narrow your results.
The above information was excerpted from the webinar “Social Media Sourcing: How to Use LinkedIn, Twitter, and More as Valuable Recruitment Tools.” To register for a future webinar, visit CER webinars.
Kelly Dingee is a strategic recruiting manager and leads the research team at Staffing Advisors. She is also a regularly featured writer on the talent management blog “Fistful of Talent.”