By using social media, you can find your ideal candidates where they are spending their free timeTraditionally April through to August is a key time for many businesses as budgets are released, next quarter planning takes place and recruitment comes front of mind.
Whether you need to find temporary staff to cover peak recruitment or are looking to expand your in-house team to cover increased demand or to maximize on new business opportunities there are the usual ways to recruit, and there is social media.
There is an unrivalled opportunity to reach multiple potential employees right in your hands, right now.
Traditionally you would put an advert in the paper, post on a job board or put an advert on your own website or social accounts. These methods do still work although you may have noticed that they aren’t working as well and in some cases not at all.
Sometimes you might use a recruitment agency and in return for a fee they will find you a selection of people who are suitable for you to interview. You don’t have much control over the process in between.
Social media marketing will help businesses to find employees. By identifying exactly the people the company would love to employ, understanding who they are, what motivates them, and crucially – where they spend their time on social media.
You can then put adverts that appeal directly to those people, in the hands of those people – and make it incredibly easy for them to learn about the company and apply – usually in just a few clicks.
The reason ‘good people are hard to find’ is that good people aren’t looking for work. They aren’t looking at job boards alerts, signed up to agencies, searching the web or looking at your vacancies page on your website.
What they are doing, your ideal employees, is spending their free time (when they are not working hard) on social media – like the rest of the world, like it or not.
Your ideal employee is also smart – they aren’t going to apply for a job without doing their research – so we make sure when they look at your employer social media (what do you mean you haven’t got separate employer social media channels?) or landing page on your website it is telling them the story of why you are a great employer, and what your current ideal employees have to say about working for you – in a way that appeals to them.
Candidate experience is a crucial part of your ideal employee’s journey to discovering, understanding and engaging with your company as a potential employer.
Treat them with as much care and attention as you would your customer who buy from you. If you do believe that your employees are your greatest asset, and you are a truly great company to work for – why are you representing yourself online in the form of bland job adverts and job specifications, or as an afterthought to your current marketing strategy and operations?
The days of submitting an application and waiting for a call are gone – now you can talk to potential and current applicants in real time, in their own world. You can answer questions, encourage applications and overcome objections even before applications are made. People (especially good people) are enthusiastic and pro-active – and now you can be too, without them even having to leave their favourite social media app.
You can create open days and events in Facebook and market the page (with all the details) directly to where your ideal people live and work, and hang out online. Creating a buzz around an event, maximise awareness and communicate directly with attendees before and after the date, the benefits are endless.
I’m sure your best hires have come from recommendations or referrals – now you can watch ‘word of mouth on steroids’ in real time on your employer social media profiles as friends tag friends and friends of friends tag friends of their friends.
Advert not quite working? No worries. With social campaigns you can change minute details or the whole direction in an instant. When you have raw data on what works and what doesn’t. It makes fine tuning in real time simple and efficient. Makes waiting for the next edition of the local paper seem a million years ago.
Oversubscribed on your applicants? Turn off the adverts and you still have an engaged, interested pool of warm candidates on your social media platforms – and you can communicate with them any time you like.
It’s time for HR and Marketing to work together to tell the story of you as an employer to your ideal future employees.
By Helen Pritchard, a former recruiter and owner of Blue Sky Digital Marketing – a Social Media company with a speciality in Social Recruiting
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