One of the most time-effective and powerful tools to aid recruiting is now social media. If you want to stay competitive you can no longer overlook this avenue, and leveraging it to your advantage needn’t be as time-consuming as you may think.
You will need to have active profiles on sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You can be selected depending on how relevant each platform is to your industry, investing some time into maintaining relevance will help narrow down your audience.
Your aim should be to make your social media presence stand out from the crowd a little and engage users while remaining relevant and conveying your message across. Here are a few suggestions to help achieve this:
- Have a clear and recognizable brand image – We all spot well-known brands within a bunch of others. What is it that makes them stand out? Is it the colors and design of the branding, the trust in the product?
Obviously, brand recognition takes time, but within a niche such as recruitment, it doesn’t take long to start being noticed. Use professional graphic designers to give your profiles a professional look.
- Don’t be afraid to be personable – This is a modern era of personal connections. Use social media to share pictures of your staff, the offices your work in, and feature some happy clients. It has been proven to increase trust-flow when people see real faces behind the company.
- Explain your services – When recruiting new staff you should be making your business services and requirements as transparent as possible. Avoid causing confusion at all costs, this will cause the user to ignore your post. ‘About’ pages often get read when someone is contemplating using your services, so build a detailed page explaining what services you provide in detail.
- Give out free advice – Tweeting and posting genuinely helpful tips for people in your industry takes a small amount of time, but offers a great deal of value to the user. Giving free advice over social media gives a good impression of the culture in your company, and a tweet or post can often go viral if it contains a genuine value.
- Why people should choose you – Don’t be ashamed to tell the world why you think people should be contacting you as a recruitment agency, and representing them on their job seeking efforts. Post testimonials, positive feedback from clients, and share success stories.
The Value of Engaging With People on Social Media
It’s common place for large corporations to have social media teams in-house. This is because they recognize the benefit of replying to tweets or answering questions in a timely fashion. Social media users now expect a quick response, and more so expect there to be a real person on the other end.
A company’s reputation is always on the line. The nature of social media means that you can either go up in popularity or down just as quickly. So making the choice to actively use social media as a recruitment tool means you are entering a long-term commitment.
Keep a Professional Code of Conduct
It’s worth mentioning that although the aim is to engage with social media users on a personal level, a professional tone needs to be kept at all times. Slipping into a mode of chatting like you would to friends come back to haunt the company in the future, and damage its reputation.
Receiving negative press over social media can be very damaging. Not only is it hard to challenge it over this form of medium, it becomes part of an everlasting footprint.
In Summary
From the above information, it should be very clear how powerful a tool social media can be for recruitment. You have the ability to reach millions of people when used correctly, and the chance to show what your business can do for others.
The real strength comes in the ‘collective effect,’ having more people in your organization involved in putting themselves out on social media increases your presence. So if your HR staff are not yet fully utilizing social media, or you are in need of a new strategy – start today and increase your presence in the online social media space.
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- How to Establish a Social Recruiting Strategy - June 21, 2018
