Andy Headworth – Making your day more effective with social media

This is part of a series of blog posts written for UK Recruiter by the team at BlueSky PR. If you didn’t make the event (or this particular session) it’s a nice summary of the key points and shares some must use sites.  Andy also posted his slides and some thoughts from the session on his own blog; How To Make Your Recruitment Day More Effective Using Social Media Technologies.

With the amount of constantly updating technology available to recruiters today, it is important to know which specific parts can help you and how to use them to make your business work more effectively. This was the basis of the afternoons lecture by Andy Headworth, an in-depth demonstration of how social media can save you valuable time when recruiting.

Firstly Andy stressed the importance of not being completely reliant on social media (a thought echoed in almost all of the talks at the conference.) Regardless of the technology you have at your disposal, you still have to do the work. Contrary to some popular belief it is possible to build a relationship with a client using social media, but social media itself cannot build the relationship for you.

Although social media is there to make your job easier, you must use it to suit how your clients and candidates want to work, not how you want to work. If a candidate is willing to engage during the week but expects an immediate response, then this is what you need to provide.

With this in mind, Andy then gave us a list of helpful pieces of technology.

1) Yesware. This tracks all of your sent email and sends you an alert immediately when someone opens it. It also notifies you when a link from an email is clicked. This will help you to avoid following up emails which people have already read.

2) IFTTT. (If this then that.) This allows you to program a conditional reaction to something happening online. For example, if a job opening appears with a company that you are following on LinkedIn, you can program a reaction to add it to your LinkedIn favourites.

3) Mention. Mention can tell you when you (or any part of your blog or article) have been mentioned on any site, so you can keep track of your activity. It can also be used for any competitor that you may want to keep track of.

4) Feedly. This piece of technology allows you to manage multiple accounts on different websites, all with the same window, improving efficiency and giving you time.

5) LikeAlyzer. This is a tool for rating how effective your company Facebook page is in terms of attracting, and engaging with candidates, in order to help you improve.

Clearly if you plan carefully which pieces of technology will improve your social media, as well as making sure you train your employees regularly in how to use them, you can make your recruitment tasks easier and more effective.