Social Recruiting: The 4 Key Steps Explained

By Tony Restell

This coming month I'll be a keynote speaker at a 2 day Social Recruiting conference in Lisbon. I’m particularly looking forward to the workshop on how to generate fantastic social media recruiting results by implementing 4 key steps.
 

As a taster I thought I’d share with you here the 4 steps we consistently see clients need to have implemented to become successful recruiting brands on social media.

Start With The End Goal in Mind

The first step sounds very obvious but a great many businesses we speak with actually haven't had this conversation. The first key step is being very clear within your team about the audience you want to reach with your social media presence - and linked to that, what your business objectives are for building your presence on social media. Put another way, what do you want your growing social media audience to have done several weeks or months down the line that will have made your investment in social media worthwhile?

The answer here will be different for different recruiting teams. Some will be focused on generating recruiting client leads. Others will want to drive an increase in candidate applications. Others will want to boost the search engine rankings of their careers site through stronger social sharing activity. The key thing is to have actually defined this at the outset so that all your social media activities are undertaken with this end goal in mind.

Become a Candidate Magnet in Your Industry

The second step is to think about what will make your profiles exceedingly valuable, entertaining and insightful to this target audience. Often recruitment businesses and recruiting teams are guilty of their social streams being nothing more than a parade of their latest job openings, plus maybe the occasional team photo or update about what the team is up to.

If you want to become a magnet in your industry that attracts your desired target audience, this simply will not do. You need to become an invaluable resource in your niche market, one that people will come to view as indispensable and whose updates they will want to share with others in their network. This is where the huge value on social media can be derived. For example, several of the accounts we manage have twitter followings of 35,000 to 50,000 followers. But when we look at the reach those profiles enjoy each month, their messages are actually seen by between 500,000 and a million twitter followers. Even with smaller accounts, a similar multiplier effect can be achieved if the right things are being done. It’s this network effect that gives your business and your recruiting team visibility amongst - and access to - the huge candidate audience that you want to reach. But this is only achieved when the updates you post are consistently valuable and share-worthy.

Attract and Convert Candidate Interest

The 3rd step is equally key. If all you do is Steps 1 and 2, you will have a social media presence that looks professional when people click to your profiles from your website. But you will not be growing an ever larger audience of candidates or clients who go on to do the things needed to fulfil your corporate objectives on social media.

That’s where Step 3 is key. Step 3 involves understanding each of the social platforms where you have built a presence and figuring out the steps that are needed to get your profiles seen by more and more of your target audience. This requires consistent and informed activity across your social networks in order that your follower and fan base grows month on month.

Last but not least, Step 4 involves engaging with your target audience on social media. This may mean reviewing the profiles of everyone who has interacted with your company on social media and following up accordingly. Or it may mean discovering conversations taking place in your industry and jumping in and participating in those conversations. But essentially it revolves around taking that awareness that your recruiting brand now has on social media and turning it into meaningful conversations taking place with either prospective candidates or potential recruiting clients (or indeed both). For most recruiting teams, it’s this engagement that drives the overwhelming business value of having a strong social media recruiting presence. But you can't ever fulfil Step 4 effectively if you haven't already done a great job implementing Steps 1-3.

And Finally...

I'll be covering off this process - and the factors that ensure your success - during the two day event taking place in Lisbon this May. I'll be joined there by several other social recruiting experts including a speaker from LinkedIn. Do check out the event programme and I look forward to seeing you there and helping you in person in the next weeks.

 

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