Social recruiting keeps maturing every day.
We see blogs preaching its use and best practices (including our own), but too often we see suggestions that don’t have enough context or, frankly, sense behind them. Here’s our attempt to right some Internet wrongs.
Absolutely partake in social recruiting, just avoid these errors.
1. Starting the drive without a route or destination
It’s easy to start recruiting on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn without any real direction. Your friends are there, people are talking, most of the work looks finished already!
Make sure to create a clear and measurable plan for your social recruiting efforts. Keep track of your:
- Content;
- Posting schedule;
- Response rate.
Measuring these aspects will help you calculate the ROI of your efforts. Also, you’ll get a better feel for what pieces of content/messaging themes work best.
Does a particular Tweet at 7 pm attract the most responses? You now know your sweet spot.
2. Spamming everyone you know all the time
We’ve seen some “social media gurus” suggesting that employers need to have a high frequency of sending out their recruitment messages. No. You should only post similar messages very often if people are interacting and listening.
Determine your audience and the kind of messages/content they like seeing. People don’t mind getting frequent posts about stuff that’s important to them. Almost everyone minds dealing with updates every 10 minutes that stink of spam.
3. Not creating a brand-specific presence
Default settings aren’t good enough. Your effectiveness in recruiting will have a lot to do with your aesthetic presence and the frequency of your postings.
Think of it from the applicant’s perspective: Applicants visit your social page only to find default backgrounds and profile pictures. \
Legit? Not compared to your competitors, who will be checked out by those same talented applicants. Or, what if they see your picture, but no posts for the last eight months? They won’t feel a great vibe.
4. Thinking “just being” on social media works without engagement
Friending and following take just a single click. So does unfriending and unfollowing.
A million followers don’t mean a thing if none of them pay attention to you. Create engagement and relationships between your brand and your followers so your posts don’t fall on deaf ears.
Get social the right way
By all means, get out there and spread your good word around. We just suggest that you bring just as much business sense to it as you would any other important business practice.
You aim, measure and invest in marketing or recruiting campaigns don’t you? The same should go for social recruiting.
This article originally appeared on The Resumator Blog.