October 24, 2016

Social Media Recruiting Tools

When simply “sharing” a job on Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter isn’t enough, there are a number of emerging technology tools available to help you capitalize on the social channel to create awareness for your employer brand, and attract more quality candidates.

Most importantly, you need to consider what you are hoping to achieve through your social media recruiting efforts.  Here are a few ideas to help jump start you down this path:

1.  Partner with Marketing

As the term “recruitment marketing” continues to grow in popularity, do too does the relationship between the Recruiting/HR and Marketing departments.  Both can equally benefit from each other’s support in the following ways:

  • Marketing produces great content which could likely be repurposed for your recruitment efforts.  Sharing jobs on social media is one thing, sharing compelling thought-leadership on why prospective candidates should join your game changing company is quite another.
  • If you are implementing a social media recruiting technology that lets employees share jobs and employer branded content with their networks, marketing will likely be interested to know the out come of those sharing campaigns in terms of impressions, clicks, and conversions.
  • Marketing likely has dedicated creative content producer resources available to help you build graphics, landing pages, and micro-sites that pop.

2.  Analytics – you don’t know what you don’t measure

A good social media recruiting platform should allow you to build campaigns to target your audience, but almost more importantly, provide you sound metrics that you can share with your recruiters and executives.  Things to consider measuring:

  • Where are we generating the highest number of candidates from?
  • Where are we generating the highest quality candidates?
  • What channels convert best, in terms of clicks->applies, and applies->hires?
  • Who is seeing our content?  Are they re-sharing it?

3.  Content creation and management

Whether you are outsourcing your employer brand content creation to your marketing team, or building it on your own, you’ll want to implement a system that allows you to easily create, catalog, and distribute your content to your team and employees for sharing.  A few ideas to make this tangible:

  • Content should be set up in channels, relevant to specific audiences.  Your sales employees should be able to access content that other salespeople might find interesting.  Same goes for every other department in your organization that you are hiring for.
  • Allow employees to submit content ideas.  Some of the best ideas come from the field, so ensure that employees have an easy way to share their ideas for employer branded content that they might be able to create on their own.
  • Measure what works!  A good tool will give you the ability to see what content your employees are responding to most, in terms of impressions and shares.

A good social media recruiting tool should also provide for seamless integration with your core technologies, including your ATS and perhaps your internal collaboration system, like Slack.  Rather then try to on-board employees to yet another SaaS application, your engagement levels should be much higher if you can “go where they already are”.

Whatever tools you choose to pilot and ultimately integrate into your technology stack, social media recruiting is here to stay, so the sooner you can get something in the mix, the greater advantage you will have in the war for talent in the long run.