How do you find the best talent for your business? Where are the standout candidates hiding? What are the best ways of getting your company noticed amongst job seekers?
These are just some of the questions recruiters and managers should be asking themselves in a bid to fill available positions more efficiently. And it’s not hard to see why— firms need to be aware of the answers, and more, to stand a chance at getting the best men and women for the job. Ignorance breeds inefficiency, and unnecessary expenditure.
60% of employers are concerned about the cost of unfulfilled positions in their business. On average, it takes 27 days to fill a vacancy, and 48% of CEOs have lost money due to poor recruitment processes. Meanwhile, 67% of recruiters expect competition for candidates to increase in the coming years.
Enter social media, a multi-channel tool that can help speed up the process of securing new people for available desks, if used well. More than 80% of employers believe these platforms have helped them find skilled-but-passive staff in the past, which makes sense if 75% of potential hires are not actively searching for a new job.
Want to know how you can tap into this evasive talent pool? Here are our 9 top tips for successfully recruiting through social media. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for ideas on how to secure interviews yourself why not check our post on the most creative CVs and covering letters.
Use Twitter hashtags
This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many people are not using hashtags to help candidates find their message on Twitter. It’s imperative you research the best in advance to ensure you don’t use one that already has another meaning, make sure whatever you come up with has the word ‘jobs’ included, or consider piggybacking on an existing #.
Set up a company LinkedIn Page
LinkedIn is the ultimate social recruitment platform because it’s a network dedicated to professionals. 93% of companies currently use it in their hiring process, and this means if your business doesn’t have its own Page (i.e. profile) it’s missing out. Don’t forget to utilise plenty of industry and sector-specific keywords in the descriptions to optimise as much as possible, making it easier for job seekers to find you.
Create image-based content
Think social media recruitment does not require content creation and marketing? Time to think again— any post on social media is 650% more likely to be viewed when it comes with images. Hiring new staff is a campaign in itself, so you could do a lot worse than develop visually arresting items to share online and prompt people to apply.
Turn current employees into culture ads
The culture of your office is going to play a big part in attracting candidates, and the best adverts for this are current employees posting to their own social accounts. Just prepare for potential mistakes staff might make so they don’t turn into full-blown online disasters, the likes of which are regularly featured in our weekly Blagger’s Blog.
Create career-specific pages
Your customers and employees are not the same, so why should they use the same profile? It’s worth thinking about setting up a Twitter account and Facebook Page solely for job opportunities with your company, which can then act as a central reference point for anyone interested in applying.
Learn (simple) video production
Making your own videos may seem like an overwhelming task best left to the professionals. We say differently. With a smartphone camera, good natural light and willing employees you could be making short but sweet clips conveying what your business is like to work for in no time at all. Don’t forget to record horizontally and use a brace to steady the lens.
Don’t overlook Instagram
It’s easy to forget that recruitment-friendly social channels don’t start and stop with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Facebook is notoriously useless at garnering attention without spending money on the platform first. In comparison, Instagram has the highest user engagement of any major network, with 55% of users under 29. The point being it’s a great place to build an employer brand identity with which to target talent.
Use Facebook Insights properly
The analytics that come with a Facebook business Page are incredibly useful, not least when trying to figure out what content gets people talking the most. Examine the data offered for shares, comments, likes, impressions and clicks, looking for spikes in activity. Now drill down to see what you posted to get that reaction. Finally, adapt and develop to repeat those great results.
Use LinkedIn search to actively find candidates
One of LinkedIn’s strengths is the powerful search tool that allows you to find any of its 450million global members. Start by typing the broad job title you are looking to fill, after actioning this click ‘— next to the search bar— and you can filter by age, location, current and past companies, school, education and industry.