These days teens don’t judge each other’s popularity by the number of letters on their varsity jacket. Now they’re judged by the number of MySpace friends they have stamped on their profile, or the number of Facebook photos they’re tagged on. And if you don’t know what either of those things mean, you’re missing out on a tremendous hourly recruitment opportunity.

Online social clubs are more than mere teen hangouts. According to eMarketer.com, nearly $1 billion was spent advertising on social networking sites last year – a number that’s predicted to balloon to $2.7 billion in the next three years.

Leveraging these growing online communities is no light undertaking. If you do it right, you could develop a cheap recruitment pipeline ripe with honest dialogue that’s a great window into your culture. That’s because it’s estimated that more than 50 million ‘Net denizens are registered on these sites. But if you do it wrong – and many have – you could do irreparable damage to all of your recruitment channels, online and offline.

Here are some best practices to heed when starting your own social networking recruitment experiment:

1. Search: Perform searches on sites like MySpace and Facebook to see if your employees have already started a grassroots presence following your company. These company profiles and pages can include everything from message boards and photo strings to blogs and real-time chats. It’s a good idea to know what’s going on before you interject yourself into the conversation. Heck, you might even find you’re not needed.

2. Plan: Decide what filters, if any, you’ll place on content. Does user-generated content need to be reviewed before it’s published? If so, how long should users expect wait to see their content live after submitting? And who’s reviewing this content? Will be profanity be filtered? These are just a few of the questions to ask yourself before getting started.

3. Recruit: Select a few responsible employees to make postings regularly about the benefits of working there, as well as the latest company news. All company employees should be honest in always identifying themselves as such to encourage open and honest dialogue. You don’t want to get busted posing as someone you’re not.

4. Promote: Make sure your potential candidates, new hires and existing workers know they have an online community to collaborate within.

5. Engage: Ask your workers questions. Answer employee and candidate comments. And counter misinformation about company matters as candidly - and professionally – as possible.

Social networking is a fast-growing hourly recruitment strategy that, if executed and maintained responsibly, can really help you establish credibility with the online audience, especially teens and 20-somethings. Follow the tips, and it could become a windfall of top-notch hourly workers.

Learn more at https://employer.snagajob.com/