How Re­cruiters Can Use So­cial Me­dia To Find The Best Applicants

Re­cruit­ment has evolved and changed sig­nif­i­cantly over the past few years.

The days of news­pa­per ad­verts and a faxed copy of a CV ar­riv­ing on your desk are gone.

Head hunters, re­cruit­ment com­pa­nies and agen­cies are turn­ing to the web to fill open positions.

Many of these re­cruiters will opt touse so­cial me­dia, which is quickly be­com­ing a favoured re­cruit­ment tool. So­cial me­dia can help re­cruit for those niche roles, so why not use some­thing dif­fer­ent than the stan­dard re­cruit­ment methods. 

Dur­ing 2011, for ex­am­ple, 89% of com­pa­nies used so­cial me­dia dur­ing their re­cruit­ment process, 65% of these com­pa­nies found a suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cant. Out of these companies

• 45% used Twitter,
• 80% used LinkedIn and
• 50% used Facebook.

At the same time there are 14.4 mil­lion peo­ple search­ing for new po­si­tions us­ing so­cialn networking.

Many re­cruit­ment agen­cies use so­cial me­dia sites mainly for head hunt­ing, be­cause they can eas­ily read the per­son’s pro­file and de­ter­mine if they are right for the po­si­tion avail­able with­out putting them through a lengthy job in­ter­view process.

But will re­cruiters get the right facts from so­cial me­dia pro­files, or will they mis­in­ter­pret pro­files as so­cial me­dia up­dates are not al­ways as they seem.

If Re­cruiters use so­cial me­dia in the right way then they will not be badly known for ha­rass­ing peo­ple through so­cial streams.

Top Tips for So­cial Me­dia Recruitment

Think about how to in­co­po­rate so­cial me­dia in your strategy.

There are com­pa­nies that ad­ver­tise job posts and ac­cept ap­pli­ca­tions through the stan­dard procedures.

But then they turn to so­cial me­dia and check the ap­pli­can­t’s profiles

• to en­sure the in­for­ma­tion pro­vided is accurate,
• to see how the ap­pli­cant com­mu­ni­cates on­line with friends and colleagues,
• and to de­ter­mine if there is any­thing they should know about the ap­pli­cant in advance.

This has re­sulted in many failed applications.

So what can re­cruit­ment com­pa­nies do better?

As a re­cruiter, you can use so­cial me­dia from be­gin­ning to end to find in­ter­na­tional tal­ent or even ex­ec­u­tive sales man­agers. The ad­van­tage to­day is that many peo­ple work from home thanks to fast in­ter­net con­nec­tions and have the abil­ity to work from any­where due to bet­ter in­ter­na­tional trans­port links. So when look­ing for in­ter­na­tional and ex­ec­u­tive tal­ent, you may want to fol­low these sim­ple tips::

1- Join in­dus­try pages on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great in­ter­na­tional busi­ness net­work­ing tool and the more com­pa­nies you fol­low re­lat­ing to your own in­dus­try, the higher your chance of find­ing a suit­able ap­pli­cant. You can post about the po­si­tion avail­able, spark up topic de­bates and see what re­sponse you get. Through join­ing a sim­ple in­dus­try page on a site like this, will make your rep­u­ta­tion alone seem professional.

2- In­vest in tal­ent scouts. These can be em­ploy­ees in your com­pany that have pro­files on the site or peo­ple that you know. You as a re­cuiter do not have to ac­tively hunt po­ten­tial em­ploy­ees down, you can of­fer a cur­rent em­ployee a re­fer­ral fee for keep­ing their own fol­low­ers up­dated on the po­si­tions avail­able. You’ll be amazed how many in­ter­ested par­ties you will find. A step fur­ther would be to hire some­one to hit the so­cial me­dia scene, fol­low­ing top ex­ec­u­tives and scout­ing their po­ten­tial tal­ent is a dis­creter way of head hunting. 

3- Twit­ter is also a favoured choice. Many peo­ple won­der how they could use a so­cial me­dia site which gives you a max­i­mum of one hun­dred and forty words.

Sta­tis­tics have proved that four Tweets a day with a min­i­mum of one hun­dred words ranks high in the Tweets.

The more peo­ple you have read­ing your Tweets in­ter­na­tion­ally the higher the suc­cess rate will be. 

4- On Face­book you can place a sta­tus up­date on your busi­ness page, you can in­vite peo­ple to ap­ply as you would if you were plan­ning an event and you can keep peo­ple up­dated through reg­u­lar sta­tus re­ports. In­te­grate this fur­ther with In­sta­gram and pro­mote your job roles and po­si­tions avail­able through cre­ative art. So­cial me­dia is not as bad as you think, it is not rep­ti­tive meth­ods for re­cruit­ment, it is us­ing so­cial in a new cre­ative direction. 

5- If you’re look­ing for an artist or pho­tog­ra­pher with dig­i­tal skills, again why not use In­sta­gram to your ad­van­tage. In­sta­gram con­nects peo­ple around the world vi­su­ally. Lo­cat­ing tal­ent has never been eas­ier through this net­work­ing stream and it could de­liver the right em­ployee to your company.

So­cial me­dia is the fu­ture for re­cruit­ment and if you take full ad­van­tage of the main sites you can eas­ily find the right in­ter­na­tional or ex­ec­u­tive can­di­date to join your com­pany by ap­proach­ing them in the right way!