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.

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.

Why is Employee Engagement Tied to Your Employment Brand?

By Jessica Miller-Merrell 

Every company wants a strong employment brand. It can be the difference between the best candidates desiring to be a part of your organization and those same candidates passing right by you without a second glance. After all, there are plenty of companies that are knocking it out of the park when it comes to their employment brand. In order to be competitive, you’ve got to have a fresh, transparent employment brand to set your company apart, but how exactly do you get there?

A common answer would be to have a social presence, relevant branding and expressive job and company descriptions, but the real key to an employment brand that’s going to attract candidates lies with your current workforce. In our day and age, people can go online and find out significantly more about your company than you’ve chosen to make public and much more than you’d probably like for them to see. You can thank your brand ambassadors, or your current employees, for that. But it’s the reality of employment brands today. To candidates, potential employers are the sum total of their online identity.

Companies do not own their employment brand but they do have the opportunity to help shape it while still remaining authentic. Employment branding is less about choosing what your image will be and more about the strategy and actions behind influencing internal and external perceptions. It is not a single decision but rather a long-term strategy that can be tied to applicant quality and employee retention.

It all starts at home

Your employment brand isn’t established online. It’s established in the day-to-day interactions between co-workers, the amount of value employees believe your company places on them, the motivation techniques of managers and the things your CEO values. This is where employees develop an image of the company they work for, and that image is reflected to the world. If you want your employees to be positive brand ambassadors and share with the world how great the organization is, they have to feel it and believe it. Employees who are not engaged may do their job, but they will not recommend the company to their friends and family or defend you in a debate. Engaged employees will go great lengths to boost your employment brand, but it all starts inside your organization’s four walls. 

Guiding the conversations

You will never be able to control your employment brand and remain transparent, but you can encourage your brand ambassadors and establish where the majority of conversations are taking place. By guiding where your employment brand is built, you’ll actually have a stronger brand. In order to do this, your HR and recruiting teams can develop messaging that will be seen by employees, candidates and customers about why your company is a great place to work. Secondly, you can direct employees and candidates to a central location, such as your company’s Talent Circles platform, to have these conversations, ask questions, share stories and network. Depending on what platform, technology or network you use, you could potentially decide how parties gain access, who sees what and the format of conversations.

While there is no way to own your employment brand, you can greatly influence it and maintain authenticity. But no matter how much you control or shape an employment brand, remember that your employment brand is formed from within your workforce.

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