THE RISE OF SOCIAL RECRUITING
The way in which we communicate on a day to day level is changing, with a huge push towards social media interaction, which now plays a key role in attracting and engaging future talent to your organisation. Social media is becoming a must have tool to deliver a clear focused strategy which ensures your visibility to the right talent pool, not just for right now but for future talent acquisitions within your company. They say a candidate will investigate your brand 18 times before engaging with you, so visibility in the market place is essential.
At present, information is a valuable resource that is readily available, and this information for the most part is found on social media. If you are not producing valuable and relevant content online then you will lose out. Candidates are now sophisticated and savvy, meaning they want to understand your organisation inside out before committing. Transparency is key here as candidates want to feel they understand your organisation, ensuring they can align to the objectives your organisation can offer them for their next career move before they attend an interview.
Every member of your organisation is an attractor, or sometimes a detractor, of talent so it is important to ensure you have a clear roadmap of your social recruiting strategy to attract new talent into the business.
Social recruiting gives you the opportunity to get visible to the “non” job seeker and nearly by osmosis ensconce yourself in their psyche before they decide on their next career choice.
So what does your talent pool want to hear about you on social media?
Identifying your open vacancies is not the way to engage with your future talent pool, they need to know your company from inside the business so they feel they know your business from a cultural perspective – What people say about your company, are they attracting talent by what they say about your company? What is the company’s overall ethos, what is the CSR Programme like and do your current employees buy into it? What are the key projects that might engage a prospective candidate? This needs to be out in the open so your social media efforts are creating your talent pipeline for you.
Social recruiting – Where do you start?
The key objective is to understand the communities that you want to hire and get an in-depth knowledge of their interests and engage with them in their environment. This doesn’t mean putting up job adverts; it means giving them something of value and interest to them. Ensuring this added value aligns your brand to their overarching goals.
This engagement needs to be consistent, fresh and current all of the time.
Excite them with your key initiatives from all aspects of your business from the culture side to the project side, open your business to talent and they will choose to walk in.
Use influencers in their communities to be brand ambassadors for your brand. Engage with the people that they listen to.
Openness and authenticity is essential when engaging your potential talent pool, keep the message simple and don’t over complicate it – be you.
Talent buys into Leaders and they need to see the real leader in you. Remember you are trying to attract likeminded individuals that will buy into the business, as well as the real version of you.
Make your starting point simple, don’t try to do everything with all of the tools available to you, start by using two or three tools and measure what return you are getting from them. This won’t happen overnight so be patient but if you are not seeing any return in a sixteen week period then perhaps this isn’t the tool for you. If you see a positive reaction, make sure to keep going and constantly learn and evolve your strategy.
The key is to be patient – You are building more intimate one to one relationships and these don’t build overnight, trust and relations take time so work on your strategy.
