By: Rebecca Barnes-Hogg, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
YOLO Insights®
The war for talent is real and the competition for skilled people is fierce. Traditional recruiting methods take too much time and are no longer cost effective. The “post and hope” strategy doesn’t work in our social world.
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Recruiters have to be proactive and engage with candidates long before an opening exists. Social recruiting is an essential skill and easier than you may think. Getting started seems overwhelming, but you already have everything you need—you just need to know how to use it in a social context. You don’t have to post on every social channel, only the two or three your potential workforce actively uses.
Using these seven simple strategies will help you become an expert social recruiter.
- Engage through content and motivational messages. Good recruiters are already on top of their industry trends by reading blogs, trade publications, and industry news. Share those articles along with some advice, opinions, or ways your company is participating in current events. Motivational messages fill the news feeds of almost every social channel. Post an occasional motivational message that is relevant to your job openings or industry.
- Bring your employees into the conversation. Spotlight your employees and their contributions to the company, your industry, or the community. This helps attract the right types of people. Great candidates want to know what it’s really like to work for you and whether they will feel comfortable in your company. Making your company feel real and showing your culture encourages candidates to become comfortable with the idea of working for you.
- Create a hiring story that is unique to your company. Ikea is great at this. We’ve all seen the cartoon with the job applicant being asked to take a seat that needs assembly. We all have a unique story to tell. Don’t be afraid to use it to attract candidates.
- Use video. It shows you are real and approachable. Don’t be intimidated by video or fall into the trap that it has to always be professional and expensive. Some great video is done on smartphones. There are lots of free and low cost tools to help you.
- Use blogs. Feature employees who work in positions you wish to fill. Not only is it an avenue for employers to explain daily activities to their prospective candidates, but it also increases employee recognition. This is an excellent way to showcase some of your less sexy. You can show your accounting staff helping the community with taxes or your janitorial staff helping build a Habitat House.
- Respond quickly and effectively to candidate questions. Any information to help candidates get through the hiring process faster and improve their opinions about you as an employer makes the recruiting process easier for you. If someone takes the time to ask a thoughtful question, simple professional courtesy requires you to respond. Sites like Glassdoor® make things in your company transparent and you want to actively manage your company’s reputation.
- Never forget you source PEOPLE. Recruiters want faster, automated processes. Candidates want human The more human you are, the more engaged your candidates will be and they will share their experience on social channels.
Rebecca Barnes-Hogg, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, is the small business hiring expert. She is the founder and lead consultant of YOLO Insights®, and is on a mission to ensure that no business is held back because they cannot hire the right people. She is a hiring mentor, recruiting strategist, and Human Resources expert. Ms. Barnes-Hogg has held a variety of HR leadership roles in corporate and non-profit organizations and is a co-author of “Rethinking Human Resources.” She is a sought-after speaker on a variety of topics related to interviewing and hiring, communication, and teambuilding. Ms. Barnes-Hogg also writes for industry journals and publications on HR topics. She leverages her skills to enable her clients to hire amazing people and grow their business. Ms. Barnes-Hogg’s down-to-earth and fun approach to a frustrating and time-consuming process has allowed her clients to hire the right people. Her programs bring her clients more confidence, less stress, and a bigger profit!
Ms. Barnes-Hogg holds an MA in Human Resources Management from The George Washington University and a BS in Business Management from The National-Louis University. She holds the SPHR certification from HRCI and the SHRM-SCP certification from SHRM.