I love the saying "if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there".
Since founding Social-Hire this phrase has taken on a new significance - and gets to the very heart of why teams often struggle to get positive ROI from their investment in social recruiting. So many of the businesses who come to us for help with figuring out their social media strategy are guilty of this most basic of failings: they don't know - in concrete terms - what it is that they want their social media presence to deliver for the business.
Indulge me while I paraphrase the typical conversation we have with businesses:
Caller: We're conscious we're not doing enough as a business to exploit social media. I mean, all the candidates are on there nowadays so we've got to make sure we're there too.
Social-Hire: So what would constitute success for you, what would you like to see happening once you've figured out how to build a better recruiting presence on social media?
Caller: Well we'd like to have more followers on our accounts, targeted followers from our industry. A good mixture of clients and candidates, so that more and more people know our business.
Social-Hire: So how would you see that converting into more placement fees for your business / more candidate applications / more conversations with prospective recruiter clients?
Caller: Good question. I hadn't thought that far ahead to be honest - I just know we can't afford to be left behind...
So allow me to share with you an Aha moment that should help you to get better ROI from your social recruiting efforts than pretty much any of your competitors.
You have to think of your social media presence like a sales funnel:
Figure 1: The Social Media Sales Funnel
This funnel starts with defining the people your business needs to win over. And it finishes with the desired action you'd want these people to take so that they actually become valuable to your business. You see a follower has limited business value. A prospective client who's requested a call with your recruitment agency, well that's a totally different proposition.
So we start with the target audience that our business wants to reach with social media. Define them thoroughly. What are their job titles, what publications do they read, what tools and services are they likely to use, what industry events are they likely to attend, who do they look up to and seek advice from already?
The next step is to ensure that we've created our social media profiles - and the content strategy for what we'll share on those profiles - with that defined target audience in mind. What would make those people want to follow us? What type of insights are they most likely to find valuable? If we can get these things right, our social media pages will become high-converting "landing pages" - meaning that for any given number of our target audience who visit our profiles, there'll be a high proportion (30-40% is possible) who will choose to follow us and receive our updates on an ongoing basis.
Once we have built a strong audience of followers from our target demographic, we need to experiment with the types of content shares and updates that are most likely to spark interactions with them, or have them decide to reshare our posts with their followers. It's these actions on our updates that really provide the spark for a business relationship to be formed. So being on top of the data and knowing what types of updates produce the desired interactions is key.
If you achieve this much, that's great. It's already a lot more than many recruiting teams and recruitment businesses are achieving with their social media presence. But on its own, even this is not enough....
As a business, you need to have offers you can put to this target audience that causes them to take the course of action that you want them to take. That could be submitting a resume for a free critique from your team; it could be booking in a time for a call to gain your insights about the state of the hiring market; it could be signing up to an alert service to be notified as new jobs go live on your careers pages.
Each business will be different. But the key thing is that you have a variety of "offers" you can put to prospects as you interact on social media. So that instead of saying "Thanks so much for the RT" you're instead saying "Really appreciate the RT, perhaps we could repay you by reviewing your Resume?"
It's these messages that elevate simple followers of your company accounts into potential clients or candidates that your team can actually act upon to generate real business results.
Much has been written about recruitment converging with marketing. In the sphere of social media this is absolutely true. An effective recruiter has to be thinking of the team's social media recruiting presence as a sales funnel. Consider the following:
Are you working through each of these points in your business and constantly optimising your social media presence to get better and better results? I thought not!
The truth is, these activities resemble a racing car team trying to tweak every element to squeeze yet more performance out of the whole package. Social recruiting is no different - and if you want ROI from your efforts then thinking of it as a sales funnel - and then refining each element of the funnel - is the route to go down to get results.
If this sounds daunting and you'd like to pick our brains some more about what your business should be doing to leverage social media, we'd be very happy to help. We can provide an outsourced service to build your social media recruitment presence or just schedule a call to brainstorm what your next steps should be. You're welcome to book in a call time below to get started - speak soon!
Tony Restell is the Founder of Social-Hire.com and helps candidates and recruiters leverage social media. A published author and Cambridge graduate, you’re welcome to reach out to Tony on @tonyrestell
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