70% of potential hires are passive candidates, meaning they aren’t actively seeking a job but are still online and absorbing information about your company, culture, and brand. They may be open to a new position if the right opportunity presents itself, but only if they feel aligned to your company’s messages and values.
Outsourced recruiting services and social media recruiting can help you reach these passive candidates if you consider the following:
Commit to the Process
First, your organization needs a strategy designed to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. For example:
- Goals—What hiring goals do you want to accomplish with your social media messages? Do you have roles you need to fill quickly? Or, do you want to network with passive candidates for future opportunities? Do you need to make sure you display your company culture? Make a list of the goals you want to accomplish with social media before you start posting.
- Key Messages—Think about what you need to convey about your company. Most often, it’s key to communicate your company’s great culture. But, make sure your culture can live up to what you portray. Your culture must actually be great if you want to recruit successfully. Social recruiting gives followers a sneak peek into what it’s really like to work at your company. If you don’t have a great culture, work on that first.
- Time—Social media requires dedicated time and consistency. Building your audience, creating a content calendar, analyzing results, and adjusting your approach all take focused time. Ensure your department has the resources to do this effectively or consider outsourcing to an expert
- Experimentation—If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something new. There is no guideline for will work for every business, all the time. By experimenting with different kinds of content, posting days and times, and trying different engagement strategies, you’ll find what works.
Hit the Ground Running: Plan Your Strategy
Companies that recruit effectively on social media have put in the time and effort to plan a strategy that achieves their goals. Here’s what to consider:
- Know who you’re trying to reach. Identify what your ideal candidate looks like. Candidate personas can accomplish this by including demographics, preferences, job skills, goals, interests, and even hobbies of your ideal candidates. These things will help you select the appropriate social channels and content your personas are most likely to engage with.
- Decide where you want to send traffic. Whether it’s separate landing pages for each open position or sending to a general careers page, you need to know where to send your potential candidates? RPO leaders and hiring experts recommend sending candidates to a targeted landing page that will draw them in and invite further interaction whenever possible.
- Build a posting strategy. Analyze the best times of day to post for each platform by looking at your engagement metrics. When are your followers online? When do you see the majority of likes, comments, and shares? What kinds of content do you see the most engagement with? Is it static images that your users like best, or videos, for example? Determine an initial posting strategy to start, but remember you can always adjust it later.
- Get current employees onboard. Current employees will most often be your best brand ambassadors. Encourage them to like and share your company’s posts, interact with comments, and tag people who may be interested. Find your star employees who love working for you and they’ll be glad to help promote your company to their network. It’s a plus if they also get a referral bonus for candidates from their network who get hired.
- Analyze and adjust. Analyze metrics such as traffic, number of comments or mentions, number of new followers, frequency of likes, shares, and retweets, and number of paid advertising leads. Learn from the data and adjust your strategy as needed. You can always test something and go back to what was working before. But, you may be surprised and find something new that works even better.
Learn and Grow Across Channels
After some time, you’ll find that you’ve had success in one or more of your social channels as activity and engagement grow. Take what you’ve learned and apply it to other social media channels to reach a wider audience. Learn how different platform followers engage differently on different platforms and adjust what works well in one platform with your new platform behavior in mind.
And one final caveat: Use the information you find on social media carefully. Don’t open yourself up to discrimination lawsuits by allowing a candidate’s age, marital status, or other private information to affect a hiring decision.
Social media recruiting is a powerful tool that can help you reach otherwise unreachable candidates. Use it wisely to showcase your culture and build your employer brand intentionally—and have fun!
