Talent Circles

Friday, April 3, 2015

What Does Engagement on Social Recruiting Look Like? - Part Two



By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Social recruiting is used by so many, but misunderstood by many as well. It’s become a regular part of most recruiters’ repertoires, but all too often it seems that we measure success by the number of likes or followers we get, when it’s really about the interaction that comes after that initial contact. In part one of this series, I gave five things that your social should be to go beyond the likes and shares, including being interactive, traffic minded and more.

Here in part two, I’ll share my take on a question that’s been around for as long as the social networks we use: how do you measure social success? We know that conversations, engagement and interactivity from candidates is key, but what does that get us in the long run? Rather than measuring success on likes or even engagement with our social networks, it’s all about what those things lead to. A retailer doesn’t measure its social success by shares but instead by purchases made through those shared links. The same is true of social recruiting, so here are five ways to measure your social recruiting success:

Sources of hire
This is the most obvious way to measure social recruiting success. Essentially, you want to know if a social network led a candidate to apply for your job opening. You can do this by looking at how many people are clicking the links you post, using your website’s analytics to determine how people got there and of course asking on your application where the candidate learned of the position.

Talent network growth rates
One attribute of social recruiting success is two-way conversations that lead candidates to your talent networks, where you can actually build relationships. You can measure the success of this aspect by looking at whether or not your talent network is growing. Thinking long term in this way means that you’re building communities for the long term that recruiters can pull and source from first.

Candidates by source
Often times, a candidate won’t use a direct link from your social networking site to apply for a position, or better yet, may connect with you on social long before they ever apply. That’s actually a good thing as one of the best qualities of social recruiting is the fact that it helps build long-term relationships. You can track candidates by source that follow this pattern by using cookies and url trackers, ensuring you get an accurate evaluation of where candidates are connecting with you.

Candidates by recruiter
Since recruiters are the ones connecting with candidates on your social networks, they can provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations of how many candidates they’re connecting with, the quality of those candidates and whether or not they apply.

Influencer relationships
Not all candidates are the same, and not all social followers are the same. Who’s connecting with you that you consider influential, interesting, a leader and someone you want to recruit and engage? If you’re reaching people that fit in these categories, count that as a success.

The truth is, you don’t have to have 300,000 followers on Twitter or 100,000 likes on Facebook to leverage social recruiting. Think quality over quantity and measure your efforts to make sure it’s a sound investment of time and resources.



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.