How to Use Social Recruiting in Your Team's Hiring Process

Due to the rise in the remote workforce, distance is no longer a factor in hiring top talent; therefore, the traditional in-person interview is becoming harder to carry out. As another way to filter through talent, companies are utilizing social media to secure potential new hires. This trend has gained so much steam that 92% of recruiters said social media has become part of their hiring process. Though companies are frequenting these platforms to find candidates, there are more ways to use these platforms to find top talent that are under-utilized. So what information are organizations missing to be able to search and successfully hire candidates on social media? Let’s breakdown how to search for hires on the three most popular platforms for recruiting: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

LinkedIn is the most professional social network and therefore the most obvious platform to start the scouting process. The first step to recruiting on this professional platform is to change your professional status to state that you are hiring. For example, “Now Hiring At …(Insert name of Your Company).”

When searching through profiles on LinkedIn, note those that have attached a resume. An attached resume not only makes it easier to review an individual’s skill set, but it also displays the individual’s initiative and desire to maintain a great LinkedIn profile. Now, this isn’t to say that profiles without resumes should be overlooked, but simply that profiles with resumes should be highlighted. Thanks to LinkedIn’s advanced search settings (which can be found beside the search toolbar), you are able to search profiles through demographic filters like education, job position, LinkedIn group, location, etc.

A good rule of thumb when utilizing advanced search for recruiting is to search for competing companies through filters like the type of business, company size, etc. Find your top competitors’ business pages and search through their current list of employees. Choose employees that have the skill set that you’re looking for and click through to see that person’s recent activity, as well as his or her personal contact list. Through this research, you should come across people with similar skill sets that might be looking for new work. If collecting information on hopefuls through advanced searches seems too complex, you can have candidates come to you by regularly posting updates about available positions from your company page as well as your personal page. A little cheat to give these posts an even greater reach is to ask some of your LinkedIn contacts who work in fields related to the position to ‘like’ the update so that it appears on their feeds as well. Though, when utilizing this method of posting regular updates, know that posting “regularly” signifies once or twice a week. Don’t make the mistake of posting multiple times in one week as this will make you look spammy. A third and very popular option for recruiting on LinkedIn is to post about the position on a LinkedIn job board. This option is best for those looking for a flood of submissions as it will be read by many who are actively looking for work. Keep in mind, this option generally comes with a price tag of about $200 per posting per month.

Facebook

The beauty of Facebook is the audience of 1.09 billion daily active users. With such an enormous user base, knowing how to scout and target the right potential employees can wield formidable results. To reach the audience you desire, we recommend utilizing targeted Facebook ads. You can make ads using Facebook’s power editor, which is the platform’s bulk ad creation tool. You can make an ad that is customized exactly to your desired specifications, by specifying the reach (5,000, 10,000, or 25,000 people), the demographics (country, language, age group, personal interests), as well as the length of time that the ad will be live (days, weeks, months). It all depends on how much your organization is willing to spend. Add a call-to-action button somewhere in the ad to direct those interested in the position to your company Facebook page, where they can apply.

Finally, don’t forget to add a conversion tracking pixel to not only document those that click on your ad but to also document their actions spent on your website or company Facebook page after clicking the call-to-action button. The analytics this conversion pixel will collect will help your company accurately measure the success of your ads and improve your Facebook ad strategy for the future. For a complete tutorial on how to create successful Facebook ads, check out this piece from the Social Media Examiner. After you’ve published your Facebook ads, set up a Jobs tab on your company Facebook page through Workable, an online recruiting software. Simply open a Workable account and connect it to your company Facebook account to set up a Jobs tab. Every time you list a job on Workable’s site, it will then automatically update your Facebook page listing those new positions as well. An added bonus to this software is that you can organize job openings based on location or department to avoid accidentally targeting the wrong Facebook audiences. Interested candidates will then only need to click “Apply for this Job” beside your position listing to send in their application. Once resumes have been received, Workable can also help companies organize the actual interview process: communicating with candidates, moving them through all the rest of the hiring process (pre-qualification, phone screen, in-person interview, etc.)

link In general, Facebook’s full potential as a hiring tool seems to have gone untapped thus far. While 55% of recruiters are using the platform to scout for potential hires, only 26% complete the hiring process through the platform. These stats could potentially change with Facebook’s latest addition of AI chatbots. Job Pal, is a chatbot for Facebook Messenger that helps users find jobs by asking them a series of questions through Messenger about what type of job the user is looking for and what experience they have. The service is free for users, while companies pay $4 per lead.

Currently, chatbot functionality is in its infancy, and as a result, the full usefulness of bots like Job Pal in the job hunt is still unknown. With this in mind, it’s still advisable for companies to utilize this tool for hires. This is because potential hires – simply due to the act of using a chatbot – display extremely impressive characteristics, such as, quickly learning new methods of communication, being knowledgeable about technological advances, as well as displaying an initiative with new technology. Undoubtedly, these are all qualities that any company looking to fill a tech-savvy position, or any position for that matter, would be eager to acquire.

Twitter

Twitter is the platform for concise messaging and more direct one-on-one contact. Regardless of its universal popularity, as a recruitment tool it is currently under-utilized with only 15% of recruiters actually hiring through Twitter, making it the the least used platform compared to Facebook (26%) and LinkedIn (89%). It seems that this platform is the least understood in the job recruitment arena and this might simply be due to the vastly different lingo and concise messaging that is used. But while the platform can’t offer a lengthy character count, it can give you a more intimate introduction of a potential candidate in a way that LinkedIn and Facebook cannot. Twitter profiles are a constant stream of candidates’ consciousness, providing their opinions, tastes, and knowledge about any and all topics.

Though the communication is concise, it is packed full of personality and it’s a great platform for understanding a potential candidate on a more intimate level. So how can your organization improve your social recruitment process by using Twitter? Firstly, people are more likely to respond to a relevant personal profile, rather than a company Twitter profile. Thus, you can tweet about the available position from your personal account and tag your company in the tweet, rather than tweeting as the company. The use of a proper hashtag goes a long way to target hopeful job seekers. Hashtags like #Jobhunt and #Joblisting are key, but it’s also important to hashtag keywords in your tweet so that might proper candidates might find your post more easily, even if that means you have to break the hashtag rule of three or less, per tweet. Example:

#Programming #Jobs in #London – http://(website) #Joblisting #jobsearch #opportunity

You should also include hashtags to advertise job or company perks, i.e. #competitive salary, #parttime, etc. Another option is to tweet at recruitment Twitter accounts, or make one for your company that is separate from your main company account. A good example of recruitment accounts are @Irishjobfairy or @jobs4nyc. As the formality of the workforce paradigm continues to fade away and the remote workforce continues to grow, knowing how to use social media as a tool in the hiring process is clearly an asset. These digital arenas are places where candidates regularly present themselves and engage with others. Communicating with candidates on social media eliminates some of the rigidness of the hiring process and offers a better impression of who they are as a worker and what kind of addition they could be to your company.