Effective Tips for Social Recruiting

You have already heard this many times before: social media websites are great tools for recruiting and sourcing potential job candidates. Identified, which is a well-known social scoring analytics firm, adds fuel to the fire by estimating that companies that have put social media into use for recruiting have 25% lower hiring costs per year. This estimation sounds too good for you to neglect it.

What happens if your company still hasn’t established its presence in the social media? How can you start recruiting and sourcing effectively? These simple tips will get you started in no time:

1. You already have existing contacts. Import them!
Launching social tools and getting connected to the contacts you already have is the easiest thing. Twitter and Facebook enable you to import your list of contacts, which will help you find people you know on these social tools. These imported contacts will be your foundation that will help you build your recruiting campaign – they will guide you towards people you would like to know and hire.

2. Use the employees that are well-connected on social media
Among your current employees, there are social media “stars” whose contacts you can use to manage and build your network. Make them advocates for your company and you will notice how they attract potential job candidates easily. However, you need to be careful with your approach; you cannot just ask your employees to connect you with every single contact they have. Instead of imposing that demand, you should learn from the way they use social networks. If they managed to create a successful social media presence, you can use their techniques for your own approach.

3. Promote your company through your employees
Most of your employees are already active members of social media communities, so they can help you enhance your recruiting efforts. If the company culture you have established is great, it won’t be a problem for them to promote you. Although the participation of all your employees is welcomed, you should first focus on the “best” ones (the ones who are well-accepted on social media websites and use them actively).

4. Pay attention to the public profile
Your company’s public profile will represent its values and success. Make sure to provide contact information and create a well-written profile with usage of keywords relevant to your business. If you make it easy for potential candidates to reach you, social recruiting will become much easier.

5. Don’t focus your social media presence on sales
If the main purpose of your social media presence is recruiting, you should promote your company as a great place to work. Your presence should be focused on building that brand perception instead of sales.

6. Add a personal approach to your profile
The profile of your company should definitely look professional, but you still need to add a touch of human presence in it without compromising the image of professionalism. Your profile is the first thing potential candidates will look at, so it has to create a strong impression if you want to get their interest.

7. Listen and learn!
Even if creating a social media presence seems easy and you think you know everything, you should still pay attention to the social media monitoring applications and learn from them. This information will give you knowledge about where you can find potential candidates, what topics interest them, and who else is trying to attract them.

8. Stay connected and contribute to the community
If you managed to connect with people from your industry, well done! Now you need to work on building and maintaining your reputation. The key to that is staying connected and hanging out where these people can be found. In order to find the niche network where people from your industry hang out online, you should ask and listen to the social media stars in your company.

9. Focus on one social media website at a time
If you want this campaign to be successful, you should choose one social media site and stick to it until you achieve strong presence. If you try to be successful on all of these websites at once, you will find them overwhelming and you won’t be able to devote your time to all profiles.

10. Share content that will be helpful to others
The right approach towards social recruiting is all about helping people. If you have a genuine wish to help more people with the content you share, your visibility will be improved and you will build your network more easily. You don’t have to develop unique content, although that’s advisable from time to time. Take your time to find and share useful videos and articles that are relevant to your industry and helpful for your followers, and you will soon attract many people that are worth recruiting.