Leveraging the Power of Social Recruiting for Your Organization
In the second installment of my observations and insights from the recent HR Alliance DC forum event in Tysons Corner, VA, on the topic of “Social Recruiting: Create a Winning Social Media Strategy to Attract and Acquire Top Talent” featuring Katie McNerney, founder of LeaderFit, an executive search, leadership development, and career coaching firm in Washington, DC, I share some actionable steps to help your organization harness the power of Social Recruiting through incorporating it in your larger Social Media Strategy.
Related: 6 Steps for Attracting and Retaining Top Talent in 2018
In her presentation, Ms. McNerney listed these 6 critical steps for development and implementation of an effective Social Recruiting Program.
- Know Your Brand and ensure that every image, video and messages correlates directly to this.
- Set Clear Goals and Metrics. Each organization may have different critical success factors, based on their goals as a company. Example goals could include an increase in “Likes” for your company’s Facebook page, the number of quality connections made by a recruiter on LinkedIn, or posting a minimum of 10 times per month to Twitter.
- Start Small and Experiment. When just starting out, it is okay start out with just a few sites. After evaluating your program, you may need to adjust course to ensure that you are reaching your intended audience.
- Be Creative! Including pictures, infographics, videos and other multimedia is a proven method for increasing the number of views, likes, clicks, retweets. Also, use content that makes a personal connection with your audience, such as news, employee successes, testimonials, and interesting facts or tidbits.
- Know the Rules. As mentioned above, each social media site is very different, and content and tone should vary for each. While LinkedIn is fine for high amounts of formal text, Twitter is more casual, with abbreviations being acceptable. Utilizing questions (e.g., “Are you a Java Developer…?” and “Do you have a passion for Graphic Design?”) and call-to-action statements (e.g., “Click Here to Apply” and “Learn More About Our Company”) are also helpful in driving traffic to your job board, blog, etc.
- Keep Your Workflow Streamlined. With so many sites out there, how can professionals possibly have enough time to manage everything, in addition to their existing job responsibilities? Fortunately, there are a plethora of tools (both subscription-based and free) available to assist with this.
At Sparks Group for example, we utilize HootSuite to help manage our profiles, schedule posts, and track audience engagement. Other attendees at the forum listed Buffer, SproutSocial and Sprinklr as platforms that they utilize to achieve their social recruiting goals.
For an example of a plan in action, please visit Sparks Group’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages and see all the ways that we are communicating our brand of “Great Talent + Great Companies”!
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