Nowadays, social media has a ubiquitous presence in many people’s lives. People use social media to find old friends or make new ones, connect with family, share random interesting stories, connect with brands, and now, it can be used as a tool for finding top talent. It even has a term and is known as social media recruitment. If you’re a recruiter, here’s how you can leverage at least three popular social media networks to find suitable candidates for your company.
What Is Social Media Recruitment?
Social media recruitment is an HR strategy that’s used to attract both active and passive job seekers. It involves creating and maintaining a presence for the recruiting company on social media to boost their brand and pique the interest of people looking for jobs. While your recruitment drive benefits from active candidates who are searching for work, they provide a limited pool of applicants compared to passive candidates.
Passive candidates aren’t looking at job ads, but that doesn’t imply they aren’t open to new job opportunities. Both types of job candidates are active and abundant on social media. As many social media sites also provide recruitment tools, and you can use additional software like a social media recruitment automation tool, social media sites can be harnessed to attract a larger pool of more suitable candidates.
Finding Candidates with Facebook
Yes, you can and should consider using Facebook to find candidates, mainly because it’s the largest social networking site with over 400 million users. Since its inception, Facebook has worked to connect friends, family, and business associates. It has diversified to include connections to businesses, interests, and organizations.
To use Facebook for recruitment, you can use Facebook Ads. This feature lets you choose the exact type of person or audience to target. The system will ask you to fill in characteristics of your target audience, such as age, gender, and keywords related to the position. Facebook will give you the option of paying per click, based on the number of people who clicked on your ad, or paying per impression, or the number of people who viewed your ad. You can set the duration for running the ad.
Finding Candidates on LinkedIn
You could say LinkedIn is “Facebook for professionals”. This social media site offers a network of experienced professionals from all over the world, in 170 industries and 200 countries. Although the membership is tiny compared to Facebook, you have 65 million professionals who have profiles on LinkedIn. If your company has a LinkedIn profile, recruitment here can be as simple as posting the job on the company’s profile, or searching for candidates.
You can post a job for a month, and pay only $195. This cost can be reduced if you buy and use job credits, or sign up for the LinkedIn Talent Advantage feature, which is an exclusive tool for recruiters. If you don’t have the budget for these tools, you can still use the free resources. Tap into people and connections you already know, join groups where the candidates are likely to be members, and post a job on your status box to broadcast that you’re hiring.
Finding Candidates on Twitter
This is the first and largest “microblogging” social networking service. Tweets, or messages on Twitter, are no longer than 140 characters and can offer people a simple tool for businesses or individuals to connect to the right audience at the right time. The easiest way to recruit via Twitter is to tweet your job openings. If your company’s Twitter account doesn’t have a lot of followers, you can quickly expand and build relationships with job candidates by running a quick search for anyone discussing a specific keyword.
You can search for candidates by industry, location, industry, hashtag, and more. Hashtags are also a quick and highly effective way to find suitable candidates. You can use hashtags like #job, #recruiting, or #NAJ, which is Twitterspeak for “Need A Job”? Your company’s tweets can also be used to inform potential hires about your company; your company’s tweets can say a lot about it and give them a glimpse of its character and culture.
Social media sites have inevitably gone beyond sharing personal information and exchanging ideas. Apart from LinkedIn, social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook offer tools for recruiters that can be leveraged and can be very cost-efficient to use when finding suitable hires.
