Social recruiting is actually quite a tough term to define, with a number of different variations currently doing the rounds. However just to add our own to the mix we like to think of social recruiting as, “Harnessing the power of online communities to strengthen your recruitment armour”.
By building a community of potential candidates or clients and engaging and developing some form of relationship this will help you achieve the benefits of social recruiting. Remember though that the social media sites themselves are just the vehicles to allow these connections to be built. Being seen to be on them isn’t enough. Being active on them also isn’t even enough if all you’re doing is shouting out about your latest offers, vacancies or company news.
Social recruiting tools
Social media sites aren’t the only social recruiting tools though. There’s now a number of others available which help take a great deal of admin out of the process (especially if you have multiple accounts). Sites such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck allow you to view each of your accounts at the same time and schedule your tweets; making it easier for you to update each channel with minimum effort. The use of web recruitment software such as Firefish for social recruiting and Teamly for team productivity will also reduce the amount of admin and help you reap the rewards of social networks.
Benefits of social recruiting
You’ll have an expert pool of candidates on hand for when you do have those roles you need filled; allowing you to be first to the best candidates. By actually engaging with your candidates and developing trust throughout the market those who you took the time to provide with helpful information or helped find a new job won’t forget you when they are the one’s doing the hiring. Don’t forget, ‘Today’s candidates are tomorrow’s contacts’. And it also means relying and spending less on the job boards.
Mistakes being made
As mentioned above, too many organisations are using these new channels to push out sales messages and vacancies, which quite clearly is not social recruitment. It’s the actual interacting with your candidates and clients through these mediums which makes it ‘social’ so make sure you’re doing just that if you want to continue to increase or even just retain your followers. They also don’t like to be bombarded with lots of information at once so try and prioritise and stagger the release of your material if you’re lucky enough to have a great deal to get out.
