How to Drive Candidates to Your Job Postings with Social Media

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Your career site remains the number one candidate resource for job seekers to learn about job openings, but with social media, mobile and other technologies these times are changing. Learn how to drive candidates to your job postings and talent community using social media 24/7 365 days a year. Driving traffic to your career portal is easy with these suggested steps:

Start Basic. When you first start using social media to recruit, have a plan in place to listen and be ready to adapt based on what seems to work best for your company. Some companies will finder larger successes on Facebook as opposed to Twitter or other social networking sites. If you’re looking for a C-level executive it might behoove you to focus all of your energy on LinkedIn instead of splitting it between networks that aren’t designed for high-leveled recruiting.

Engage. The best way to attract the applicants you want is to engage with them. Most applicants who are looking for a job will become active throughout your various social media sites and if you’re a part of the real conversation it’ll show them a small piece of your company culture. Encourage discussion amongst the fans of your networks. If all your social media posts are dry and boring potential applicants will treat that as your company culture.

Schedule Shares to Maximize Audience. Let’s face it; recruiters aren’t able to sit in front of a desk during their entire shift to repost job listings across multiple platforms. Scheduling your shares of job postings is the perfect way to maximize the audience you’re trying to reach. You will want to make sure that there is a good mix of job postings, status updates, and interacting with those on your page. Using social media as a feed will get you blocked and ruin all your efforts in trying to effectively recruit in the space.

Boost Applications with Facebook. When Facebook launched their career portal last year it became an instant phenomenon for those trying to recruit within the hourly-job sector. Many bigger brands have millions of followers and even smaller brands have quite a few. Looking for an hourly position? Go to Facebook! Recruiters are searching everywhere to fill vacant positions in the most cost efficient way possible. Leveraging an already established network will allow you to drive traffic to your job postings easier than ever.

In order to have an effective recruitment strategy it’s important to understand that social media is just a small piece of the puzzle. Creating specific job listings that attract the right candidates is important as well as continually engaging them through multiple channels such as social media, your talent community, and other in-person recruiting events.

What are some of the ways your company drives traffic to your career site through

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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