This is a guest post from Caroline Vooght Business Unit Director at Expion Search & Selection, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Caroline shares her thoughts on Social recruitment.
Just what is Social Recruiting? Well, you may think of this as something we do all day in fact. Attracting candidates through activity on social media, whether it’s placing an advert, market mapping to identify potential candidates, or simply building a network, these all fall under the guise of ‘Social Recruiting’.
As recruiters, it’s very easy to spend long periods of time on LinkedIn identifying and sourcing candidates for roles and we do this alongside hiring managers, company owners, and anyone else who has a role, or possible role, to fill. And not leaving out Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram, there is a perceived never-ending stream of possible suitors for the roles we’re trying to fill.
Sounds simple? Well, yes and no. In principle, it’s straightforward. Post a role on your company page, have your followers and colleagues like, comment and share it, and your reach grows quickly as more and more people see the post in their feed. Which in turn makes it more likely that the advert is seen by someone who may be both interested and suitable, or may know someone who is.
There are a few ‘ifs and buts’ though. There needs to be some proactivity. Gone are the days when we could simply post an advert, and the candidates will come. I believe it was around 2005 when we were paying £10k for a Daily Telegraph ad and Royal Mail profited greatly from the several hundred paper CVs that were delivered. Those days are long gone of course. Nowadays, properly using your network is key, highlighting the role to specific people who might be interested or have a referral, and then repeat.
Social recruiting is very popular. According to Career Arc, 92% of employers stated they use social networks to find talent. That’s greater usage than job boards, more traditional ads and direct colleague referrals.
But which platforms work best? Well, LinkedIn is where nearly everyone starts, with 55 job applications submitted every second to a whopping 20 million vacancies listed (according to PostBeyond.com), who also states that there are 50 million businesses listed on LinkedIn. But depending on your audience and candidate pool, don’t dismiss Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
There’s also a lot more to social recruiting than just sharing job details, which, if overdone, can also start to be detrimental. If you consider that 70% of candidates are passive, the bombardment of job after job on social media is a turn-off. What recruiters need to do to be effective at social recruiting is add to the mix quite a bit of brand building and added value through content marketing.
This is where the time investment becomes greater but can also be so much more rewarding. Brand building is time-consuming and long-term, but with passive candidates much more likely to apply to businesses they are familiar with, the appeal of rising application rates makes this investment worthwhile. In fact, Career Arc state that 82% of employees consider employer brand and reputation before sending an application.
And embrace the value your team can add. It’s said that a personal reach on LinkedIn is 10x that of a brand or business, so ensure your colleagues are part of the brand-building programme. I’ve already mentioned that part of the awareness builds for a role is for your team to share the role on social networks, couple this with them having great personal brands and the multiplier effect goes into overdrive.
Marketers work to an 8-touch point approach in order to win a sale. Whether that’s seeing an ad, a social post, receiving a message, call or even a direct mail, each touchpoint has an impact, even if the individual doesn’t realise it at the time. Using this principle, in the recruitment world, an individual needs to have had 8 interactions or awareness with a brand before they are likely to buy, i.e. ‘apply’ for a role.
So, thinking about using your team, you might need to exercise some control. You should have some social media guidelines for the business. Do’s and Don’t’s of what to post, what not to post and a steer on tone if you are going to encourage your team to get involved. Make sure there’s some consistency of branding, but also let them be themselves!
Social recruiting isn’t without its pitfalls. We rely entirely on the information an individual puts on the platform. A poorly populated profile, or one that’s out of date, is hardly reliable and many recruiters can spend hours reaching out to people whose information is obsolete. And of course, there are many people who have limited use of social media, so a message sent can languish in an inbox for some time before its received and read. Always look for ‘clues’ to see if someone’s socially active – have they recently posted anything on the platform, liked or shared something or are they ‘Open to Work’? If they are, they should respond quickly to an approach.
Bias is also hard to avoid on a social platform. However open-minded you are, social platforms are a perfect environment for favouritism or partiality. Comments or posts can influence a recruiter’s perception of a potential candidate, and any posts which relate to political or religious views can really sway the likelihood of an approach from a future employer.
Social recruiting is here to stay without any shadow of doubt. And it’s also likely to grow in sophistication as algorithms adapt in response to growing trends, content marketing becomes more focused towards video, and platforms switch to generate user interaction more than ever. What’s clear is to manage the time and resources that go into social recruiting and make the transition between purely digital touchpoints to the real reason we’re all here. The human touch.
Caroline Vooght, Unit Director at Expion Search & Selection:
I’m a recruiter with 20+ years of experience. I’ve built and led recruitment teams and developed my own skills to include digital marketing and employer branding. I’m a mentor, and I also volunteer in schools to support students with interviews skills and CV writing.
