Social Recruiting 101: 3 Ways to Get Started

May 15, 2018

 

iCIMS Staff

3 min read

If you were asked to name the most important role within an organization that sets the foundation for your business, what would it be? The CEO? CHRO? CIO? While you’re thinking, I’d like you to keep in mind that recruiters are constantly tasked with finding great people to drive a business forward.

From the sidelines, we might forget to peek behind the curtain to realize that finding top talent is never an easy task. The pressure can be insurmountable, and at times, frustrating after spending hours, weeks and months trying to fill an open position with the right fit. Haven’t figured it out just yet? We’ll help – recruiters deserve a seat at the table and the candidates who they transition into productive new hires will impact an organization’s growth – so needless to say, it all starts there.

This job comes with a great deal of responsibility and to ensure your recruiters are set up for success, they need the right tools to hire top talent, quickly and efficiently. Spreadsheets and cold calls will no longer cut it for recruitment.

With mountains of applications to weed through coupled with angst and anxiety to fill a role quickly, recruiters need to leverage social media to ease their stress and lower their time-to-fill. Since traditional recruiting methods are costly, time-consuming and less efficient, recruiters take twice as long to fill a role and candidates are mistakenly being placed into the space they fear the most – the black hole.

To accelerate the recruitment process and improve the candidate experience, best-in-class companies are now leveraging social media channels to showcase their strong employer brand – making it easier to attract and engage quality candidates.

That said, before you implement a recruitment strategy, here are three steps to help your organization get started:

Build a Strong Employer Brand

It goes without saying, social recruiting goes beyond posting career opportunities via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The social recruitment landscape is about being proactive, present and authentic to cultivate a relationship with job seekers.

A strong employer brand sets the tone for business success and affects the candidate’s perception of your culture, so it’s important to get it right. Put simply, your brand needs to be transparent, authentic and enticing to win the war for talent within your competitive space.

• Figure out what sets your organization apart from the rest
• Keep your brand consistent across every social media channel
• Define your employer brand to ensure it aligns with every department within your organization

Determine Your Target Audience

After strengthening your employer brand, it’s important to identify the type of job seeker your organization wants to attract. Doing so will make it easier for your company to better target culture fits that directly align with your company’s core competencies.  This requires some research to get a view into what they’re interested in, motivations, frustrations, etc.

• Create a candidate persona sheet to understand what your ideal candidate responds to
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure multiple teams have a view of who we’re targeting
• Make sure your findings are folded into your job postings to attract the right candidates

Keep Up With Your Candidates 

Since recruitment is forever changing, keep in mind that levering social media goes beyond posting a job ad to multiple social media platform. That said, it’s your organization’s responsibility to invest in a talent platform that takes recruitment seriously and invests in the right tools that complement the expectations of the modern candidate.

• Google for Jobs: Google is pairing up with iCIMS to deliver open positions at the top of their search results, directing them right to the source for a straight forward candidate experience
• iCIMS and TextRecruit: iCIMS’ recent acquisition of TextRecruit will extend the capabilities of the iCIMS Talent Acquisition Suite with deeper integrations and solutions to simplify your recruiting process, improve the experience and boost modern candidate communication to increase recruitment ROI

Similar to the complex world of recruitment, a recruiter’s role is forever changing and to combat those hurdles a dedicated talent platform needs to be put in place to win the war for talent, alleviate a recruiter’s workload and place time back into their work day

With social media at your fingertips, kickstart a social recruiting strategy that can strengthen your company’s brand and positively impact the experience for your consumer-minded candidates.