5 ADVANTAGES OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITING
As recruitment agencies compete for top talent, it has become increasingly necessary to use social media in talent acquisition. Indeed, over 90% of all recruiters now use social networking sites in their recruitment process. The following are five benefits of using social media as part of your recruitment advertising strategy:
WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITING?
Social media recruiting is the use of social media in the hiring process to recruit candidates through job postings, research, and networking. This provides an alternative path from traditional recruiting methods.
Broadly speaking, social media recruiting works in three ways:
- Promotion. Whether it is a job positing or some kind of advertisement, recruitment content on social media allows you to promote your needs and reach a wide audience.
- Research. You can use social media sites to observe what other companies are doing in their strategies. You can also use social media to better understand the pool of potential candidates.
- Connection. Social media provides a way for you to reach out with candidates and business partners. This begins the conversation process of your recruiting strategy.
As the digital economy plays an increasingly important role in society, social media is an important resource all recruitment strategies must consider.
THE BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITING
Increases job visibility.
Today, practically every ideal candidate you could consider for any position at your company is on social media. Facebook enjoys an active user base of over 2.19 billion. Twitter is popular for the ability to host job search chats and many millennials and Generation X demographic are active users of LinkedIn as a job hunting platform.
Wherever you look, you see social networks serving as incredible platforms for identifying and recruiting talented individuals to work for your clients. Certainly, few other platforms can reach as many people as social media, meaning that you are likely to get the caliber of talent other platforms can hardly match.
Allows you to target your vacancies more.
Social recruitment comes with incredible ability to laser-target certain groups of people for the available vacancies. On LinkedIn for instance, you can try to share the job postings in certain industry-specific LinkedIn groups.
On this platform alone, there are thousands of groups for professionals in practically every industry you can imagine: from engineers to HR workers, to writers, to finance experts. That said, remember to post your recruitment messages in a way that would not be deemed annoying.
The idea is to attract potential candidates, not overwhelm them with promises of bliss if they get a job at your company. Though such promises might be true, potential employees could start to view you and your company as con artists or spammers, ultimately undermining your credibility and ruining your chances of getting top talent via the social platform.
Twitter hashtags also make for clever recruitment methods. You can also consider asking your employees to share the available vacancies within their social circles.
Reduce the cost of hire.
Recruiting can be a very expensive undertaking. Social recruiting is cheaper, but can still cost you significant amounts of money. All the same, the value you get from the hires you find via social networking platforms makes this approach extremely cheap.
Without a doubt, recruitment costs via social media are almost always, lower than those of other methods. A simple Facebook ad can for instance get you over two times more visibility than traditional recruitment methods like classified ads in the dailies and job boards.
Better employer brand awareness.
Social recruiting is effective, not just in finding you the ideal candidate, but also in increasing the visibility of your brand. By advertising new positions on social media, you strengthen your brand and create some level of trust among potential employees.
People view brands that have a strong social media presence as more trustworthy. Therefore, it would serve your business well to establish a robust social media presence, not just because you want to find good employees, but also because doing so will build trust among potential customers as well as make it a coveted place to work.
Shortens hiring time.
The traditional methods of recruitment generally take longer than social media recruitment methods. This means that when you have an open position that you need filled in the shortest time possible, social media is the platform to consider. Social networking sites not only make it easy and fast to communicate with candidates, it also allows them to respond faster. As a result, excellent work relationships often emerge.
What’s more, recruiting in a talent pool that has people who share common values, interest and work styles with the hiring manager or company often accelerates the speed with which you will find the ideal person for the job. This is great news for both the hiring party and the candidates hoping to get an opportunity to work at your organization.
