5 Key Social Recruiting Takeaways

By Tony Restell

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How can Recruiters get results from social media? What time investment is needed for those results to start flowing? Is it realistic for recruitment businesses to do this themselves? Are in-house recruiters missing a trick by focusing so heavily on LinkedIn? And what does success look like?

I recently decided to ramp up the frequency of our social recruiting webinars, as in call after call I've found myself addressing these types of questions - and there are only so many of these calls I can squeeze into a week!
 

Recruiting with Social Media


In pulling together the slides for this webinar, I found myself addressing all the above questions and more. Hopefully you'll be able to join me on one of the next sessions to hear in-depth insights on these topics and more. But to whet your appetite, I thought it'd be helpful to share some headlines with you:

 

How can Recruiters get results from social media?

In my mind there are two really distinct areas of Social Recruiting. First up we have sourcing candidates by using social sites (most notably LinkedIn) as one massive public resume database. Then there's the second angle, which is attracting candidates (or recruiting clients) by having a compelling social media presence and tapping into the pool of passive candidates that recruiters are so anxious to woo. Depending on the type of recruiting assignments your team undertakes, you'll need to have one or both of these angles covered.

Our focus is principally the candidate attraction side of social recruiting and so that's what I cover during the webinar session. To be successful you'll need to turn your social media presence into a sales funnel for your recruiting team, the end outcome of which being whatever you want your social media strategy to deliver for the team (applicants, referrals, client leads, etc.). There are 4 key steps to achieving this and I run through them in some depth during the webinar.

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What time investment is needed for those results to start flowing?

In what timescales should you promise the business that the fruits of this social media presence will be felt? Clearly this is a function of how much resource you invest in building your social media presence. But you shouldn't be thinking about this as producing overnight results. Initial business results achieved within 3 months is achievable if you have an expert working on this. 6 months if not. Then you're looking at 12-24 months to really build an unassailable lead in your market and be the recruiting brand that everyone knows and wants to interact with.

 

Is it realistic for recruitment businesses to do this themselves?

The answer here is yes and no. Success requires you to have a consistent presence on social media - and to be doing a multitude of things that are all needed to generate success. Within a recruitment business (or in-house recruiting team), it's inconceivable that existing team members could do this.

Recruiters making placements find it impossible to continue spending time developing a social media presence, when that's invariably at the expense of the candidates and clients they would otherwise be talking to. To this day I've never seen this type of social recruiting be successfully undertaken in-house, unless the business has gone all out and hired a social media marketing manager with responsibility for making this happen.
 

Are in-house recruiters missing a trick by focusing so heavily on LinkedIn?

Without question! Consider for a moment that a significant portion of all LinkedIn users only return to the site once a month. Now consider that many of those same users are logging into Facebook multiple times per week, or are active on Twitter several times a day. If you are entirely focused on sourcing candidates then LinkedIn has a lot to offer. But if you're also wanting to build your recruiting brand and attract candidates to your business then it's the other social sites that will give you the frequent touch points and immediacy of interaction necessary to generate results.
 

What does success look like?

Just as with the question of the timescales necessary for results to be achieved, clearly the results you will see in your business are going to be a function of the time and resource you invest into your social media presence. But to help you quantify what could be achieved in your business, I do share insights into the types of results we see our recruiting clients achieve - be that candidates attracted to your careers page, signups to a careers event or resume database, inbound client leads generated.... What's key, though, is that by turning your social media presence into a sales funnel, you get to the point where there's a clear end result being achieved for any given level of investment in social recruiting.

Hopefully you can join me on one of the next webinar dates and I can expand on these topics and give you some other pointers on how Recruiters are getting results from social media.

 

Learn more about Social Hire

We won't just do social media strategies. Social Hire will work collaboratively with your team to ensure your business gets genuine value from us and that your team gets the most out of the service. Our experienced social media managers are motivated to make a enhancements to your social media marketing and reaching targets in a way that realistically makes a difference to your business goals.

We create and implement original social media marketing plans that help our customers accomplish their organisational objectives and build up their online footprint.

We're an organisation that helps our clients boost their social media presence by providing social media marketing on a monthly basis.

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