As social media popularity is growing, the business opportunities for companies grow also. Social media has become a powerful communication channel for businesses to gain attraction, to educate their target audience, to offer support and service or simply to stay in touch with recent and future customers worldwide.
Companies which use social media as an additional way to communicate and to get seen from their targeted audience are increasingly experiencing positive results for their businesses. Moreover today technologies like HubSpot offer a great way to visualize the development and ROI of social media and further lead generation ways.
In the mean time every serious business should have learned that social media is not a kids or college students thing. Moreover the most growing group on Facebook is in the age of 55+ years.
But students and other potential job candidates are active in social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and several other smaller networks and forums.
Smart companies have discovered that they can attract great employees through social media like they do it to attract new customers. They simply apply their social media marketing and communication tactics to fuel their human resource department with “Job applicant leads”!
To attract potential candidates to your business you need to be credible, authentic and trustworthy.
Most job candidates use social networks to research about potential employers before they submit a job application. The information they discover about a company online decide if they go to submit a job application!
Credible, authentic and trustworthy companies set them self into the position to gain the necessary credit to communicate to their audience of potential job candidates.
What should companies talk about on the web?
Companies should talk about things their audience of potential employees is interested about. But not about them self! You could use tips for applicants what they should take care off when they submit an application and to whom to speak directly to get a more inside view into the company.
How can a company sound more human to attract job candidates?
Being authentic and helpful and not to speak in corporate style is a great way to look more human. Also to introduce yourself in a more personal way, for example use an original picture can be very helpful.
How to showcase the human site of a company?
As above mentioned your business should introduce every person involved in the human resource process. This includes a short bio, a personal picture or even better personal short videos of the humans which work at the company. So they can get a better impression of the humans the maybe goes to work with.
How to use sociel media and blogging?
Social media gains more value for your business when you have something valuable, remarkable and share worthy to say. To start a corporate blog is a great way to publish valuable, remarkable and share worthy content on the web. Also a separate section of the blog can be used to communicate job related information to benefit ad to attract potential job candidates.
You could offer a separate blog to each of your recent employees where they can write about the things they are interested in like IBM does for their employees.
The more valuable, remarkable and share worthy content you companies publishes with the target audiences of potential job seekers in mind the more interested potential candidates you will attract to your job offers.
Your recent employees are great speaking tubes for vacant job positions in your company. You can tell them to communicate job offers through their networks in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and forums. This will spread your reach in an unexpected way.
Build local specialized discussion groups!
Another great way is to build elated discussion groups in social media. For example if you are an IT company and you need IT consultants for server security, you set a local (your city or state) related group about server security. So you would attract interested participants and if you need a server security expert for an open job you could reach out directly to the persons which are active in this group.
With this strategy you learn in advance about the potential candidate and the candidate about you. You have built a trustworthy relationship previously which increases your chances to get their attention when you need it!
How can you measure the success of your social media recruiting efforts?
This is the simplest part of your social media recruiting. You can do this by taking old numbers to by the hand, means what you have paid out to headhunters and job sites like Monster in the past. Then you have your old spending.
Now you take the new numbers by the hand, means what you have invested into your social media recruiting strategy. The head count cost, the corporate blog setup, content creation and so on.
As your applicants apply on special landing pages you can differentiate the various lead sources very easily.
So you can see how many came from your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, special social media groups you maintain and corporate blogging activities. How many application-leads and how many high quality candidates you get to choose from. Last but not leas how many of them you employed for your business.
How to deal with negative comments?
There are no negative comments only chances to step into conversation!
When you have done something wrong than confess it apologize and get back to business. Do not try to hide something. On the web things become public it’s only a question of time
When anybody says something what you don’t like jump into the conversation and explain your point of view.
The only things you do not need to answer to are insults and personal attacks. You can exclude rude people from your discussion and delete their comments. But all other discussion you need to take as a big chance for communication and to get seen from your target audience.
Marketing takeaway tip: Through right done social media recruiting you increase the quality of applicants. Also you should keep in mind that those activities will increase your brand recognition and how potential candidates view your company as an employer. These effects are priceless!
Further import resources about social media recruiting:
- How Businesses Use Social Media for Recruiting [INFOGRAPHIC]
- Job-hunting? Facebook, LinkedIn and You –Six Social Media Tips
- How-To: Using Social Media To Attract Employees
- How Businesses are using Social Media
- Most companies fail to use social media well to attract and motivate talent
- Social media in recruitment
- Recruiting with Social Media – By Raj Anand
