How recruiters use social media to recruit

Social media has seeped into many facets of modern life. It is used to break the news and make the news, form brand identities and build fan bases, communicate and entertain. A study commissioned by DLA Piper discovered that a majority of businesses see harnessing social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as essential for continued success in the modern market.

Social media in recruitment is all about facilitating interaction between a company and an individual in ways that were previously impossible. While traditional recruitment via your website or a job board is still the most common way to pick up new employees who are actively seeking positions, social media tools can be harnessed to interact with the 80% of the UK population that spend an average of 4.6 hours on networking sites and services each month.

Recruiters who are keen to get in touch with talented individuals who might be content in their current position but willing to make a change if confronted with an excellent offer, social media gives you a much greater reach.

Recruiting via social media is beneficial because you can get a lot of interest in a position based on third party referrals. Sharing links is second nature to network users and so if a friend or a follower sees a posting they think is interesting, it can be passed on to someone who may consider applying.

While Facebook is still useful for this kind of referral, Twitter is increasingly becoming the platform to watch because it can target a highly specific audience interested in one particular industry with a single tweet.

Good old fashioned job posting is still possible via social media sites, with LinkedIn joining Facebook and Twitter in enabling recruiters to easily promote any new positions as soon as they are made available. This kind of posting will help your message to filter through to those passive users who might not otherwise hear about an opening.

The final way in which social media sites can aid you during the recruitment process is through direct sourcing of talent. In other words, you can search the popular networks and actively find potential applicants, whether you are looking for software engineers or marketing experts. Most talented people know all about promoting themselves via social media, so the companies that shun developing networks could lose out to competitors who are ‘savvier’ in the ways of the web.

One thing that is worth remembering about social media recruitment is that you need to retain a degree of specificity in your online campaigns, just as you would when choosing a job board on which to post advertisements for positions.

A blanket approach can be effective but actually taking the time to research which network is most suitable for your particular campaign or even discovering the niche sites which are far more likely to be populated by relevant candidates than more general mainstream services will be a sensible strategy in the long run.

Social media is clearly an important tool in modern recruitment, although experts are keen to emphasise the point that traditional means of engaging with applications are still as valid and powerful as they ever were. The key factor that makes social media recruitment worthy of your time is the ability to reach out to a passive audience rather than rely on the initiative of an active job seeker.

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