Online recruiting can be one of the easiest ways to connect and find new candidates. It can also be one of the most challenging ways to find new candidates due to its nature. Social media is a tricky place because today, it often combines both personal and professional life accomplishments and can ride that line of ambiguity for certain relationships.
People typically have many different social media accounts to use, and according to GlobalWebIndex, the average internet user has more than 5 social media accounts. People will often use these places and platforms for different reasons, and to communicate with colleagues or like minded people.
Aside from the messenger-based applications and websites, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can be home to great opportunities for recruiters to connect with potential candidates. Many recruiters have learned to use social media for its connections, but not all take advantage.
How to Recruit on Social Media
Promote Your Culture
One of the best things you can do is to just be yourself and promote what you are all about. Don’t try to be anyone else. Hiding behind a screen can make it easy to fabricate a different personality and take on new attractive characteristics, however, as a recruiter you’re going to want to stay as genuine as possible. This will help you gain trust when actually connecting with clients and keep a consistent image when you are talking with them.
Participate in Public Conversation
On any of the major platforms, especially LinkedIn, it is all about engagement. If you want to interact with people, you should aim for the right conversations in the right space that you are looking to recruit. Cutting through the rest of the buzzfeed articles and political turmoil is the name of the game. PRO TIP: Use hashtags to easily find the ways to the topics of your interest.
Try to Find Niche Networks
Oftentimes to be successful, you have to go for the niches that you wouldn’t often expect. Communities can discuss events and certain topics within their closed loop. If you have the chance to, try to find these groups. Typically housed on Facebook and Twitter, these groups can reap great benefits and allow for more personal interactions within your network. In the same light, these network opportunities can also allow for more industry specific placement opportunities.
Get your fellow recruiters involved
If you are in a recruiting agency or HR setting, and you have teammates who would shout from the rooftops for you, you can find great success asking them to promote you or your candidates. Getting them involved over social media is made really simple and can be as easy as them sharing a post or piece of content that you’ve made. This can also help boost your credibility when other people see this content, making you that much more qualified.
LinkedIn Recruiting Tips
For working professionals, LinkedIn is regarded as one of the more business-type media platforms. Using this can greatly benefit your recruiting however, in that it has endless potential or networking opportunities.
Here are some tips to keep in mind to fully utilize LinkedIn as a recruitment tool:
- Complete your profile: Having a fully finished profile, complete with your skills, experience and qualifications is important to build credibility and trust with the people you are connecting to. One of the first things new or potential connections do is look at your profile to see if you are relevant to their network.
- Use Filters: No, not those image filters that bring back your youth, but search filters. When you need to track down candidates in LinkedIn’s search bar up top, you can narrow down the listings by location, current and past company, education level and a number of other factors. This will help you find the candidates that you want to try and connect with first.
- Add a Personal Touch: For many people trying to connect with as many people at once, copy and paste becomes their best friend. Instead of using this though, adding a personal touch to your messages comes off a lot more genuine. LinkedIn has something called their premium InMail service, which allows you to connect to people outside of your immediate network. In the case of using this service to connect to someone completely random, coming off sincere is key.
The Benefits of Using Social Media
- Reaching passive candidates: These candidates are the ones who are somewhere on the fence about job decisions, maybe feeling like a career change and just need the right information put in front of them. WIth LinkedIn’s directories of organizations, you can basically find whoever you want to place (if they are on LinkedIn of course)
- Get to know people: The longer you spend on LinkedIn, the more you really get to know who people are. You get to know them by what they post, what they share and interact with, and what kinds of fields inspire them. This also can help you realize if someone would be a good culture fit for the desired company.
- Add Candidates seamlessly to an ATS or Recruiting Software: At the end of the day, it is all about making sure you can get great candidates in your recruiting funnel. So using some form of recruiting software for agency recruiters is your best bet to keep all your candidates managed in one place.
- Save Money: Using free social media tools is a great way to save money. Instead of using third-party resources and wasting time doing so, you can use something that is a little more user friendly. Ditch the paid campaigns and promoting of job posts, social media campaigns are free!
Conclusion
Every recruitment campaign begins with a plan, one that has specific and measurable goals in mind. So starting with a plan of action and using these tips and tricks can make your recruitment efforts that much more effective. Use these tools, leverage connections and most of all – have fun with your campaign!