Social Media and Recruitment – where to start?

Posted by Amy White

So, you have decided to introduce social media into your recruitment strategy but have no idea where to start? You are not the only one!  If you don’t have the luxury of calling in the experts or don’t have a handy social media guru on staff then you are probably wondering what to do.

Here are a few things to get the ball rolling:

Get on social media yourself

You simply cannot develop a social media strategy if you are not familiar with the tools you are going to be using. Set up a personal Facebook account, a Twitter Account, LinkedIn, Google+ (and any other avenues you may be considering) and most importantly use them. Participate in conversations, post updates, share photos – basically discover how things work.  There are a ton of resources out there you could read yes, but in my opinion it’s easier just to get on there and do it.

Decide which avenues will work best for your organisation

Although most social media accounts are free, that doesn't mean that there is no cost to set them up. Social Media can be a huge time sink and can easily become a full-time job if you let it. There are literally hundreds of sites out there which could be considered social media. Don’t try and do all of them, instead choose some key ones to focus on. You can always add new ones in later. When deciding which avenues to focus on initially think about:

• Who is your target audience ? Obviously your target audience is people you want to work for your organisation but what is their profile exactly are they? 
• Where do they spend their time online? One way to find this out is to have a chat to your current staff (the ones you wish you could clone) about their online activities. You can also use sites such as http://www.socialbakers.com/ which provide demographic data and stats about key sites

Set your Goals and decide how to measure your success 

Now you are familiar with the tools you will be using, decide what your goals are and set some measurements in place. Remember when you are creating these goals that fans, followers and comments are not the end game. It’s great if you quickly build thousands of engaged fans – but not so great if none of those fans are remotely suitable to work for you.

Set up your account/s and start talking!

Once you have set up your account/s, start talking! Finding what content your audience will engage with can often be a case of trial and error.  Our most popular post to date was not any of the well-crafted advice from industry experts, the offers of free CV reviews or the topical industry news …. but a joke about a job as a ninja.  

That doesn't mean you should just post up random things and hope for the best. Decide on a voice for your communications and stick to it. When creating your content think about what you are trying to achieve. Social media is a great way to promote your employer brand and talk about your company culture. Some suggestions for content …

• Opportunities to work (of course)
• Projects your organisation is working on
• People - try featuring different people who work in the organisation and what their role is
• Charity - If you or any of your teams engaged in charity or events such as fun runs, then talk about it and share pictures

(Tip: Content creation can be incredibly time consuming. One way to easily generate content is to share content from other avenues such as news stories, industry reports or articles relevant to your audience)

 Keep measuring and refining

Like anything you spend your time and money on in business, it’s important that you keep measuring the success of your efforts and the cost of them (never forget that your time equals a cost). You can do this manually or there are a range of free or low cost tools out there to help.  Regularly track your success (remember step 3), assess how your strategy is working and make changes accordingly.

Got more questions or want to talk about your social media strategy? You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, or email me here