What Does Engagement on Social Recruiting Look Like? – Part One

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Social recruiting is widely misused and misunderstood, but many recruiters may not even know there’s a better way to use it. We all know that the first step to successful social recruiting is to have a strategy in place, but knowledge of social recruiting doesn’t extend very far past that. Many people look at it in terms of quantity, evaluating re-tweets, likes and shares as their measure of success. But it’s really what’s behind all those actions that counts. You can have a slew of social interaction with nothing to show for it. Real social recruiting engagement is about the quality of hire, engaging with candidates and building a talent pipeline for future company growth opportunities.

Overall, we’re misusing the technologies placed in front of us. Social recruitment isn’t solely a candidate-sourcing tool or a job broadcast network. It’s a delicate dance that combines engagement, relationships, sourcing and strategic content placement and builds relationships with the candidates now as well as helps you build a candidate pipeline that supports your long-term growth strategies.

To achieve social recruiting success, there are five qualities things social needs to be:

Interactive

All too often, I see companies using their social networks just to post job openings or find candidates. The problem with these approaches is that while you may be active on them, your candidates are not. You’re not giving them an opportunity to be part of the conversation or at the very least participate in some way.

Resource focused

Believe it or not, your job opening isn’t enough to make candidates want to be part of your social networks. And even if it was, you’re not going to build a candidate pipeline through social recruiting unless people have a reason beyond job openings to visit your social networks and like, follow or re-tweet you. Provide unique resources that will lead people back to your social networks and make them remember you.

Value added

What does a candidate get out of connecting with you on social media? You can add value by providing information, resources, pictures and other content that they can’t get on your careers page. If your social network accounts are an exact mirror of your careers page, what value are you adding by having them?

Unified

Social networks provide an opportunity for you to flex your employment brand. While you should be able to differentiate from one network to the next (see above), you should have a unified look, feel, tone, story and level of interaction across all your platforms.

Traffic minded

The main purpose of social recruiting is to get people to engage in some way and hopefully one day be interested in working for your company. However, your call to action should be directing potential candidates to your talent network rather than just applying for a job opening. This gives you a way to connect with interested parties even when you don’t have an open position and helps to build a long-term candidate pipeline.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She's the Chief Blogger and Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter at @jmillermerell.