Social Recruiting has become very popular in recent years. Recruiters and employers often find reviewing job candidate applications a waste of time upon interviewing, as sometimes someone can be qualified on paper, but during an interview it is apparent that they do not have the right qualities for the job. Hence many recruiters and employers have now been utilising social recruitment much more, as they can meet and gauge what a candidate is like before reviewing applications. But what exactly is social recruiting and why should recruiters use it?
What Social Recruiting is
Social recruiting is where talent is recruited by leveraging social media tools. Social recruiting is a pretty much must-do for recruiters these days; more than 90% of businesses are using social media to recruit – 94% use LinkedIn, about 66% use Facebook, and more than 50% use Twitter. Like standard job recruiting, social recruiting is also about networking. Social recruiting involves spreading jobs using the power of others’ social networks, searching for candidates via publicly-available information on social networks, and vetting applicants.
Why Should Recruiters Use Social Recruiting?
There are a variety of reasons why recruiters should use social recruiting:
• It’s free!
• Most people are on some sort of casual or professional social media website, so recruiters have access to hundreds of millions of users.
• It can be used to create cheap and exceptionally targeted ads – social media ads allow recruiters to target specified audiences based on age, sex, location, and keywords, and the ads will only appear to those that fit the specification.
• It enables recruiters to get to know their applicants before sending interview invitations; public profiles allow recruiters to get an idea of applicants’ character traits.
• Recruiters can develop a personal network of professionals, which means they can then send requests for referrals of recommended candidates.
• Social media can allow recruiters to build strong, authentic relationships so that people will actually refer others, taking the time to think of potential candidates for recruiters’ vacancies.
• Social recruiting is a future-proof way to research and interact with prospective candidates.
What Can Recruiters do with Social Recruiting?
There are a variety of ways recruiters can use social media to recruit. At the very basic level, recruiters can post vacancies on social media and look through the responders’ profiles to see if any fit. However there is much more recruiters can do with social recruiting, including:
• The company’s social media pages should showcase the employer brand – this should be done by flaunting the achievements of individuals in the company, rather than the company as a whole – this humanises the employees and makes even passive applicants think about what working for the company would be like.
• Start conversations – by simply just posting jobs, it’s all one-sided conversations, but social media can be used to start conversations with potential candidates e.g. asking them questions.
• Maintain an open line of communication – some candidates will have questions, and recruiters should answer them as answering enquiries in real-time will build a rapport with the candidates.
• Using all of LinkedIn features – read more about this in the next paragraph:
There’s Lot More You Can do with LinkedIn than You’d Think!
On LinkedIn, recruiters and employers can:
• Search for potential candidates on LinkedIn using keywords that will match the required experience/skills/qualifications.
• Make their company’s LinkedIn profile complete and key-word rich as prospective candidates can search LinkedIn by keywords too.
• Share their contact information so that they can be easily contacted by others
• Join groups as participants may have the interests/memberships/specialisations/backgrounds/experience the recruiter/employer seeks, or know of someone with this profile.
• Connect with people and form a wide network, as they will have access to secondary connections that may have the right profile for the vacancy.
• Use social recruitment software, as it enables recruiters to access larger audiences for their job vacancies.
Many companies are now launching tools to help recruiters to find candidates, and candidates to find jobs. Here at ICS, we have our own LinkedIn Search Tool that allows recruiters to easily find candidates on LinkedIn with the right skills to fill their vacancies. The tool is very simple to use, and allows recruiters to search via job title, location, keywords and education, and also allows recruiters to exclude keywords. For more information, please email recruitersupport@icsuk.com.
