Using Social Media As A Recruitment Tool

I’m not going to be popular among recruitment consultants and agencies after writing this post but lets just say it is payback for the millions of emails and phone calls they have bombarded me with over the past couple of years. You may have noticed that we are currently recruiting here ourselves and being true to the nature of our company we practice what we preach and do all our recruiting through social media. I wanted to share some of the key learning’s that we have found and how you can reduce those expensive recruitment costs and have your job vacancies seen by a much bigger audience. Social media is changing the way in which many industries work and although the vast majority of recruitment is still done through very traditional channels there are more and more ways to find the ideal candidate online off your own back…

Use Your Existing Channels

What you are paying for when you use online ad job placements is exposure to a large amount of people who might be interested in your job but the chances are that you already have some channels open to you where you can post your job. It is the perfect content to be posted on a blog and once there you could link to it from your Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts and give some friends to pass the link on to their friends who are looking for work. With so many people out of work at the moment you will be surprised at how many people pass your job ad on trying to help out their friends. A quick calculation on our own job advert had us figuring out that it was exposed to over 25,000 people online within a 48 hour period. Not all of those people will have bothered to click through the advert or even found it relevant but you are reaching a far bigger audience than you ever would than by using an advert.

Use Niche Sites

Although the bigger sites like Facebook and Twitter will get you out to a bigger audience it is the smaller sites where there is real value to be had. Potential candidates are scouring the web trying to find jobs at the moment and the smart ones are posting their CVs to all sorts of sites including Worky and some of the 100s of job boards out there on the market. The key is to think niche and try and find a smaller pool of more targeted employees on a smaller site rather than trying to hit the masses on big sites. Doing this step properly will mean that you get more targeted potential candidates and will go some way to combating the one advantage that agencies and consultants do have which is their ability to sort through all the noise and find you the right candidate.

Eyeing Up The Competition

Chances are you are working in a sector where you have plenty of competitors doing something similar to what you do and needing the same sort of staff. Make it your business to follow staff from other companies through their social presence and see what they are up to day to day. Not only will you be getting great insight in to what they do but if they do leave their jobs or show signs of unhappiness you will be able to offer them a new job before anybody else even knows that they are available to hire. Not that we would ever advocate it here but if you did spot somebody working for another company that you felt was worth enticing to your company then social media might be the right channel to start an informal conversation with that person.

Vet Your Candidates Online

We live in a world where nearly all of our lives are shared online. This won’t apply to everybody but it won’t take you long to have a snoop around and find out what your potential employees are up to online. You might not find out if they are good at filling out spreadsheets by looking at their online presence but you might see photos of them or read something about their personal preferences that put you off or raise a red flag. On the flip side I have noticed that it is not unusual now for candidates to come to interviews knowing everything about the company but also knowing a lot about me personally by following me on Twitter or other social media channels, the potential employees are also doing their homework these days.

Think Big With PR Opp

If you really want to try something different why not try and do something completely different like hold a contest to see who wants the job most. There have been some great examples of this including a winery offering 10k a month to find their social media expert and asking for video submissions. Not only did they find somebody very passionate about social media and likely to be able to promote their winery but they also got worldwide publicity for themselves by asking for video applications for a job they pitched as “using social media while sipping wine and getting paid 10k per month”.  Using this sort of publicity is not going to work for every company but it shows that there are ways in which you can manipulate social media not only to find the most active online candidates but also to drum up a little extra PR for your company.

Is Social Media Recruitment Effective

For us it certainly is. Having said that it is important to know that we are a social media agency so we know how to use these tools and use them heavily on a daily basis. I wouldn’t say that every company is going to be able to recruit in the same way as we do but there are some great alternatives out there now to the more expensive recruitment options that we all had to use over the years. Smart companies are at least bringing social media in to a portion of the recruitment process and candidates are all wising up to the potential of social media to present themselves in a more positive light. Social media might not be the best tool for discretely hiring top execs but it certainly is a great alternative for small business owners and SMEs to cut their recruitment costs in these tough times.