As you kick off a new year, your social recruiting strategy – like all the most important aspects of your business plan – may need a refresh. Your team should be scrutinizing last year’s results, determining what worked and what didn’t, and revising accordingly for 2024.
Even if you’re not actively filling jobs, effective social recruiting requires a thoughtfully crafted strategy that encompasses the right digital platforms, building communities among current and potential employees, and staying relevant with all the right audiences.
Here are some tips.
Social recruiting differs from other types of hiring as it allows you to connect directly with both active and passive job seekers and to target those efforts to meet your specific needs. Here are some tips to get you started:
- Reassess. As you update for 2024, your new objectives may include boosting your number of quality candidates, streamlining your recruitment process, lowering your cost of recruitments per hire, and/or building engagement with prospective applicants.
- Select the right platforms. Different social sites attract different demographics. They also fluctuate in popularity, so it’s important to stay current. In addition to age and education levels, geography and personal and professional interests are among the factors that may influence where you place your recruiting messages. This will likely include niche sites as well as LinkedIn, Facebook, and other major players.
- Highlight your culture and value proposition. Convey the unique advantages of each job and of working for your company. You know what they are – or if you don’t, dig deeper until you can uncover and clearly define them.
- Make it personal. In addition to customizing job postings, craft personalized responses to individual candidate submissions. Address each person by name and ask questions specific to their interests and experience. This is how you build rapport and generate a positive buzz that will spread and resonate well with online communities.
- Involve your current employees. Your best brand ambassadors are right there under your roof. If you don’t have an employee referral program, start one. Support and encourage employees to post jobs and other recruitment content. Their networks are potential gold mines – and their credibility among their peers both on and offline is a priceless asset.
- Measure your results. Conventional metrics including time to hire, cost to fill a position, and performance and retention rates, still matter. Also consider metrics specific to social media, such as traffic, number of engagements, referral rates by site, and influence levels.
Successful social recruiting is a tall order. Along with the other mainstays of your hiring plans – including your career site, job advertising and employer branding – 2024 may be the year you partner with an experienced team of experts to help get the job done. Haley Marketing has been a leader in the recruitment marketing industry for nearly 30 years, with a growing client base ranging from solo providers to large regional, national and international companies. We can custom design the plan that will ensure you the best results on all your recruitment marketing efforts. Contact us today to learn more.
