How to get started with social recruiting

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Social media is an incredibly potent tool for recruitment, but it is also more complex than other recruiting tools, requiring extra strategy and skills to master.

Introducing social media as a new tool in the corporate recruitment strategy requires proper funding and support. Companies also need to conduct some upfront work to make sure campaigns will fit the bigger HR strategy, be well received, and feed into existing platforms. Without proper planning and preparation, social recruiting campaigns can fizzle out after some initial excitement, or entirely fail to launch – not exactly the fireworks imagined… 

 Before setting up a social media profile, corporate HR recruiters need to get some key building blocks in place to ensure success. 

Top 10 tips for a good kick-off
 
1 Begin by doing an audit of the different types of skills the company needs and determine which skills are the scarce ones. While job boards and corporate career websites are fine to source high-churn, non-specialist candidates, social recruiting can help you reach the scarce skills you’re not connecting with right now.

2 Conduct market research into the different job search platforms (like Indeed.co.za) and social networks (LinkedIn.com), identifying the right fit to engage with your scarce talent requirements.

3 Decide on your content strategy to engaging these candidates – what are you going to tell them and how are you going to tell them - aligning this to your employer brand

4 Determine whether the existing HR team has the social media skills to execute the identified strategy, and skill up accordingly if required.

5 Analyse your careers website to see whether it carries all the right content – is your Employer Brand positioned strongly enough to convince people to work for you? Rich media placement like video with staff testimonials and different landing pages for different skills can greatly improve the likelihood of specialist candidate registration and application.

6 Plan for maintaining ongoing communication with candidates and building your own talent community. For example, establish a blog on your career site to share interesting information, answer questions and facilitate communication within the community.

7 Make sure your careers website is optimised for search engines, specifically for the kinds of keyword skills the company is looking to attract – does your careers website even show up in online searches? A quick look at your web analytics will help you gauge trends on your website traffic.

8 Make sure you have a good Applicant Tracking System in place to capture and track your talent pipeline so no one falls through the cracks.

9 Ensure you have the measurement tools in place to monitor the outcomes and see what worked and what needs adjustment. Establishing some introductory measures will greatly help fine-tune the process over time. For example, tracking and reporting on the referring website of each and every candidate application is important to where talent is coming from.

10 Lastly, social recruiting is often a fundamental shift in the way an organization recruits, from manual recruitment processes. Buy-in from the top levels of your organisation is key to its end success

The ability to sniper-target top talent through social networks is a game-changer. Social recruiting supports relationship building that can reach far beyond the immediate hiring need, building up connections with interested individuals that can fuel future great hires.
 
Graylink is the leading provider of cloud-based recruitment software to corporate Africa.