Candidates: Are you interviewing and need support?
Make Social Media Work for Your Hiring Process
July 18th, 2014
Tips & Tricks
Just how effective a recruiting tool is social media? The Hard Rock Cafe used Facebook to hire 120 people in just 30 days. Yes, 120 people in 30 days. That's not a typo. Results like this make it easy to see why you need to log on and start putting social media to work for you.
Because it was designed for professional networking, LinkedIn is the first stop for many recruiters. Group discussions provide opportunities to be seen, network and foster your company brand and image. For some extra punch, consider purchasing a premiumsubscription to their LinkedIn Talent Solution service, which lets you search all of LinkedIn to find talent beyond your network and helps you manage those recruitment leads.
Hashtags are the secret to recruiting with Twitter, so learn to use them well. Any word or phrase can be a hashtag, but not all of them are effective. To fill a position, use a specific hashtag like #ITspecialist rather than the generic #jobopening. If you tweet about a #jobopportunity, make sure you add your location to the hashtag. Expand your reach by asking employees to tweet job openings as well.
Many people don't know it, but Facebook search is a powerful tool capable of doing much more than looking up someone you dated in college. You can use it to find job candidates, narrowing the results to people who hold certain degrees or who previously worked for a specific company. Facebook also sells targeted advertisements through which you can advertise a job opening with much better results than an old fashioned help wanted ad in the local paper.
Legal Social Hiring
Be aware that social media profiles often reveal information about job prospects that is illegal to use in the hiring process, such as age or sexual orientation. Recruiting on social media puts you at risk for being accused of misusing this information, so work with an attorney to develop social media hiring procedures and guidelines that can help protect you. Social media outlets are excellent recruitment resources because they have huge volumes of web traffic, provide a searchable talent pool and are adept at laser targeting advertisements. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are currently the big three in social media, but remember up and coming outlets such as Google+ and Sulia when planning your social hiring process. Photo by Jason Howie/CC BY