It’s no secret that strong recruiting is essential when it comes to identifying and attracting high-quality job candidates. But in today’s world, what is the best way to recruit and what kinds of resources are available that will give you top results?
Once you have a solid recruiting and employment branding strategy in place, social media can be extremely beneficial in augmenting your efforts. Consider starting with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogging. The following are some effective methods for strengthening your recruiting strategy and employment branding using these popular social media tools.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most professional of all of the social networking sites and it has more than 100 million users. The median age of LinkedIn users is 41, and the average user has 60 connections. There are several features in LinkedIn that can be used for successful recruiting and employment branding including; Jobs, Groups, Events, Search, LinkedIn Ads and the Recruiting Solutions link at the bottom of the home page.
Twitter
Twitter has more than 150 million users and adds about 6 million new users per month. The median age of a Twitter user is 35 years old and the average user has 70 followers. Many companies are successfully using Twitter to boost their recruiting efforts. Your company can use it to interact with potential recruits, post job openings and provide informational tweets for your followers.
While many people think of Twitter as one site (Twitter.com), there are actually multiple Twitter-related sites and tools available to assist you in your recruiting efforts, such as search.twitter.com and Twellow.com. You can also use hashtags to categorize tweets by typing “#” in front of a category name. For example: #city, such as #Cincinnati, the city where you are recruiting; #skill set such as #sales. In addition, targeted chats for job seekers and recruiters are held every day on a variety of topics in Twitter.
Facebook
Facebook has more than 600 million users, and on any given day, 50 percent of its users log in. Facebook’s median age is 31 and its average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages, groups or events. To help support your recruiting and employment branding strategies, consider creating a Facebook business page. This can be a valuable extension to your website because it gives you the ability to engage and interact with your community and post job openings on your page. To build a Facebook business page, visit www.facebook.com/pages and click the “Create Page” button.
YouTube
YouTube has 2 billion views per day, and 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute. One way that you could consider YouTube in your recruiting efforts is to create a video to entice potential candidates, help them learn about your culture and share mentoring stories about your organization. You don’t need a full video production in order to post a video on YouTube — it is completely acceptable to use a Flip video camera to capture your story. However, be sure that the video length is two minutes or less.
Blog
Don’t forget to post your exciting job opportunity in your company blog. This also allows the reader to share the job posting with others.
One of our clients used these tools to hire more than 40 people last year saving them more than $200,000 in recruiting fees and job board postings. We use them for all of our job opportunities as well and have never posted a job on a career board.
If you haven’t used any of these social media sites for recruiting, you’re missing out on great opportunities to reach millions of people. Along with a social media strategy, these sites should become integral recruiting tools.
Kendra Ramirez is a social media strategist at Accelerated Business Results. Since 2005, she has helped hundreds of organizations successfully leverage social media for business growth. Reach her at [email protected] or (513) 615-3907.
