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6 Social Recruiting Mistakes to Avoid

December 15, 2016
 
iCIMS Staff
3 min read

Today’s progressive recruiters are quite familiar with the importance of social recruiting technology and the impact it can have on talent flow. Look no further than our archives for best-practices, but also be mindful of the common social recruiting mistakes many businesses make. Considering that 92 percent of companies are using social media as a hiring tool, we decided to dig deeper and take an extended look at the biggest flaws which plague their efforts and hamper employment branding.

1.     Lacking a Social Strategy

You have decided the time has come for a well thought-out, organized social media strategy to spark more interest in your job postings and nurture your talent pool. On top of your existing daily responsibilities, you can manually post open jobs to all of your social media profiles, but let’s be honest, it’s an inefficient and repetitive process. With social recruiting software in place, you can apply a “set it and forget it” approach to job publishing, which allows for advanced and automated job postings and allows current employees to post through their personal profiles as well.

2.     No Established Identity

It’s a no-brainer that the content you plan to share and publish via social networks should align with your brands personality. If you haven’t already, establish what your company’s employment brand looks and sounds like, then showcase that across all of your social sharing. Go all-in and commit to a brand persona, there’s nothing worse than a company publically undergoing an identity crisis that lacks an established tone; this isn’t high school so you don’t have ample time to discover who you are and grow into it.

3.     Refusing to Target Your Audience

A defined social recruiting strategy calls for a target audience with every move you make. This will have a cascading effect on your brands entire social persona, starting with the look and feel of your profile layout (picture, banner, bio etc.). If you’re aiming to appeal to millennials fresh out of school or managers with years of industry experience, the targeted messaging you’re going to share will likely differ. With a clear audience in mind, you can align with their values and become a more attractive option for employment.

4.     Sharing Irrelevant Content

In the interest of efficiency and protection against a tacky reputation, it’s a much wiser investment to focus on the quality of content you share and worry less about the frequency in which you share it. Tons of metrics support the notion that the more active your social profiles are; the more followers you’ll attain. But unless you have the resources to support a social-focused content staff, this is an opportunity to step back from the madness and breath. Set the bar high and use social networks as a platform to disperse curated content that is sure to drive traffic to your job postings, without a daily quota attached to them. You’ll find in the long run, it’s a much more sustainable strategy.

5.      Turning Away from Passive Candidates

It’s sensible to assume that active candidates are your primary target within this medium, but did you know that over 75 percent of professionals are passive candidates? With social recruiting software to cultivate a stronger networking presence, your brand will be exposed to a larger, more diverse audience, many of whom will be active job seekers and many more who are currently employed but could be interested in applying in the future. Fortifying your reputation and staying top-of mind for tomorrows job seekers will pay dividends in the end.

6.      Failure to Monitor Appearances

Job seekers are going to do their research when vetting out your company, which offers the opportunity to flood your profiles and accounts with visual content speaking to your amazing office space, company outings or events and hashtag challenges amongst employees. Additionally, you can feature a company ‘teaser trailer’ that showcases your environment and culture. If you can capture the essence of your corporate persona in a picture or video, considering how much faster we process visual content over written copy, that alone speaks a thousand words.

 

 

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