Over the last few years, social recruiting grew wildly, not only in terms of popularity but also as an effective way to find valuable candidates. Social recruiting isn’t a passing craze: a recent infographic from Staff.com reports that 92 percent of the companies researched use social media for recruiting purposes.
Social recruiting flourished as a result of social media giving recruiters access to more robust candidate profiles. Recruiters reference social platforms during each step of the recruiting process, from screening candidates to relaying the brand and culture. Social recruiting quickly became the Swiss army knife of tools in the recruiting process, but many recruiters still wonder where to start to effectively implement social recruiting.
Rest assured: no matter the size of the business, implementing social recruiting into the strategy with the tips outlined below can launch recruiting efforts to new heights.
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Take advantage of an ATS
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) grew along with social recruiting. These programs continue to become more sophisticated and can easily fold into current processes to help streamline and organize recruiting efforts. An ideal ATS can automatically post job listings to a company’s social media outlets, track candidates and their sources, and list job openings on niche and large job boards. ATS tools often give custom microsites as a free added value, as well, so whether a company posts five or 50 jobs per week, an ATS takes the redundant manual steps out of the process.
Since ATS tools make it so easy to broaden the reach of social recruiting initiatives, the sheer number of applicants can seem overwhelming, but the ATS tools maintain the ability to go beyond posting the jobs to dissect and organize applications into searchable fields and forms. Plus, ATS systems store all of this information, making for a larger, functioning talent pool and refining social recruiting efforts.
Post it to the Website, make it mobile-friendly
Create a job posting and put it on the company website on a dedicated career page. This benefits job hunters who visit the company’s site, but it also allows customers and employees to see that the company is hiring. These brand ambassadors already like your company and may feel inclined to become more involved. Posting the opening to the company website makes it easy for them to share the posting on their social media sites, taking social recruiting to new heights and reaching new candidates.
Keep in mind that a large portion of visits to the company site may come from mobile users. A mobile-friendly company site ensures that visitors stay on the site and navigate it with ease. Furthermore, the career page should be no more than two clicks away, and the application process should take no more than 10 minutes, because 70 percent of job seekers use a mobile device in their job search; if the process must go longer, send an automated reminder email after applicants fill in crucial fields to ensure that they return.
Promote the Post
While employees and customers promote the job opening, the company should, as well. Simply share the job posting link from the company website on social media sites where the company maintains profiles including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
To ensure that the posting stands out from the rest, customize the content of the post to the network. Think of topics that correlate with the job posting, such as information about the company, helpful job tips, fun facts regarding the industry or what to expect during the application process. Combine these unique posts with the job link; some ATS systems allow users to create a custom job page and then provide a link to more easily share the post across any network. Moreover, each social media connection represents a new pool of contacts and potential candidates, expanding the reach of the opportunity.
When implementing social recruiting, start small and slowly begin the reach out. Social recruiting has become more than a trend: it encompasses an entirely new way of finding candidates, but it doesn’t require a mind-bending experience. Incorporate social recruiting into your recruiting efforts to expand a business and take advantage of a new technology with an audience of billions.
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