Social Media Recruitment

You can find social media everywhere in today’s digital world. The technology has altered almost every phase of our lives – right from communication and collaboration to marketing and sales to customer engagement and services.
Professional networking and job searches have moved to sites like LinkedIn. Only a presence on social networking site won’t work for any business.
To attract the top talent, businesses should connect with the candidates through social media more often and showcase them the qualities of the company and its mission. This can be done by developing an efficient social media hiring policy. Now the question is what should be done for the recruitment magic to happen?
I have tried listing few social media recruiting strategies that would help us taking the right track.

Convey more to audience than just “Job Postings”:
The target should be to make potential candidates aware that we have opportunities available and also show them what it's like to work for our firm – emphasising on company's qualities and culture.
It's important that social media hiring should be a two-way discussion between the company and the potential candidate. Ergo, we need to create a “human face” for our business for the real-time conversations between the candidate and the company. This would engage the candidates giving a personal touch.

Shortens the hiring process:
Social media allows the company to find candidates and close the positions faster. This as well helps directly connecting to the candidates who may want to work for the organisation, even if they're not actively searching for a new position. This would help to network active and passive candidates. Constant engagement would eventually help to identify the right candidate.

Reaching the right place:

LinkedIn is a powerful tool to incorporate when you want to do the social media hiring. Apart from the basic LinkedIn functions, the recruiter account gives us access to a matching algorithm which helps us reach potential candidates. These suggestions are based on our recent activity and help us monitor job applications activity. Understanding the power and usage of groups is as well very important.

Twitter as well can help us in hiring. Most of us miss on adding #Hashtags correctly. If our chosen hashtag gets lost in the sea of other tweets, it won’t work. For example, we should add city’s abbreviation along, instead of only writing “#jobopening”. We should also ask our employees to spread the word. After all, they are company’s brand ambassadors and their tweet would help us reach the right lot.

Facebook also has a decent searching option. We can type “People who work at <company name>” and even filter the results by location. This is helpful in identifying someone at a company who has friends at the company you’re working for.
We have other sites like Google+ and Github which cannot be ignored at all. A good social media hiring plan should be defined and documented to target the right audience.

Don’t ignore traditional hiring
Finally, let’s not overlook our old traditional hiring method as we may tend to lose on an equally important pool of candidates. We need to make sure that our career page, email signatures, job postings have active links to our social media page to avoid missing on some relevant talent.

Social media cannot be a substitute to traditional hiring rather both can complement each other.