Social media recruitment is no longer a novelty, it is the new necessity of the recruiting world. Social Media has become an expedient tool for HR professionals to source and recruit talent. Leveraging social media to enhance the recruitment effectiveness is gaining tremendous popularity.
A study from the Aberdeen group reveals that a significant majority of young people – 73% in the age group of 18-34 years found their last position through a social media platform. As per Business West employers who have successfully used social media recruitment have noted a near 50% increase in the candidate quality. According to Capterra, approximately 95% of companies are using social media for recruiting purposes. These significant social media recruiting statistics very evidently affirm that social media is increasingly becoming a powerful platform for effective recruitment.
Social media can help you discover top talent for your company. Let’s talk about the top 8 ways you can leverage social media as a hiring tool.
When it comes to recruiting for roles that demand specialized skills it becomes crucial to segment potential employees not only on the basis of their expertise but also their personality traits. Having contrasting opinions and characters is the key to build an innovative team that produces original and integral concepts. You can easily evaluate a candidate’s personality traits such as communication skills, behavior towards others, the influence of their cultural backgrounds on their personalities and conscientiousness. Social media recruitment helps you to tap different archetypes for a more comprehensive recruiting process.
A number of studies suggest that a significant number of candidates decide to join a company based on its social media presence. A distinct social media brand results in attracting the best active and passive candidates. The people from today’s era are stuck to their mobiles and are social media fanatics. Here comes the need to create an appropriate image and impression of your brand, business, mission and your company’s core values in the minds of potential candidates through various social media platforms. It is important to sell your workplace cultures to the high-quality right candidates and highlight the value proposition for potential employees.
Are you wondering how you can use social media to advertise open positions? Well it is as simple as creating a career’s page on your company’s official website, publish a job opening there or create a blog post and share the link on different social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram with a catchy caption such as “Do you love beer, your dream job is here” or simply cast out the job description as a status update, a tweet or a creative image and ask the interested candidates to forward their resumes at a specified mail address and call on a specific contact number. Recruitment through social media has become very easy and helps you reach a mass volume of potential candidates to select from.
People usually want to work at a place that other people love. If your happy customers and staff share their good experiences through social media then their testimonials literally become your calling card instead of a basic job listing. Good ratings and reviews on social media platforms built you a reputation that attracts the attention of quality candidates towards your job postings. Faster referral traffic is an advantage that human resource space can leverage from social media recruitment. The apt networking, engagement, and connections can lead to the portrayal of your job alerts in a more targeted manner.
Another way of effective social media recruitment is by exploring and pursuing niche networks and forums. For example on networks like Stack Overflow and GitHub developers share knowledge, Moz and Warrior Forum are the new online hangout places for marketers and their ideas. Another popular forum to look out for is Quora.
Popular social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook offer a number of ways to advertise. Facebook gives advertiser’s options like sponsored stories, promoted posts, page post ads and external website (standard) ads. On Twitter advertising options include promoted accounts, promoted tweets, and trends that show up on user’s newsfeed. For advertising on YouTube, you can opt for promoted video on branded channels. As an HR Professional indulging ineffective social media recruitment and looking for potential candidates in a targeted manner you can look at options like promoted posts, promoted tweets and promoted videos at the simplest. It is a very budget friendly investment and costs much lower than traditional recruitment methods.
Social media recruitment allows the recruiters to connect with the potential candidates in a more engaging and informal manner. Social media gives the recruiters a chance to do informal interviews without the hassle of fixing a physical appointment. For a recruiter who has a large pool of potential candidates to interview, social media interviews through text or video chats frees up a lot of time and energy and hence the process of initial introductions and prescreening becomes as easy as a breeze.
You must be wondering why it is important to attract passive job seekers. Well, the answer is simple, it is important because a number of times it’s more than likely that the right candidate has not actively applied for your job post. Hence they can be much tougher to identify,
However, if they come across your job post or ad they are likely to apply for your job. This results in a larger pool of appropriate talent.
Social media recruitment has revolutionized in the last couple of years. As per the latest survey conducted by CareerBuilder, a massive 70 % of recruiters have used the social media platforms to screen candidates before hiring. This number was 60% last year and only 11% in 2006. So if you still have not started social media recruiting and have not tasted its advantages then it’s high time you leverage the social media and improve your hiring practices.
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