5 (simple) ways to get social recruiting right
This post was originally published on the PSC blog on Oct. 21, 2019
Four years ago, I was writing for Social Media Explorer and had posted this piece telling people how their social recruiting strategy is broken. Since it’s not winter (yet!), I am a lot less grumpy, but I will say some of these nuggets hold true still (#job, I am looking at you). And since I am a little more bright and sunny these days, I figured I would turn this around a bit and tell you the five things that make your social recruiting strategy AWESOME! Because, let’s be honest, being awesome is awesome! So, the non-cranky version goes a little like this:
It’s about the mix
If you follow me on social media, you know that I give a lot more than I promote. I feel like the information that I share is as much of a demonstration of my personal brand as any content that I write. Because I share a lot on the future of work, diversity and inclusion, women’s empowerment, efficiency hacks, and so on, you can see that those things are important to me. We have to be giving more than we ask for. We can be doing the same thing for our candidates. And I get it, it is much easier to share little snippets from your career site or share your jobs on social, it really doesn’t tell me much about you. I can learn a lot about a brand by what they are sharing. Please know that I have heard all of the pushback on this issue in the 10+ years I have been doing social media work. I know your company is concerned about “endorsing” content. But let’s get real, helping someone be a better professional by sharing great candidate tips, or efficiency hacks is not going to be a bad look on you. It’s actually a good look. It tells your followers that you value them and here are things that may make them more successful. People like that kind of thing. They really do. So, have the conversation with your legal department to get a list of sites approved to share content from. Trust me Fast Company, The Muse, Wired, Inc. are not really all that controversial.
It’s about value
When you’re about to put something out on your social channels, ask yourself: Is this valuable? It this useful? If it isn’t, don’t post it. The thing that makes social so great is delivers our companies and ourselves an opportunity to learn, grow and be exposed to new ideas and voices. When you open up your content strategy to focus on delivering valuable content that is useful to not only you as the person who is posting it, but more importantly to the people who follow you. Set a goal to deliver valuable content every single time. Look at this as a way to make someone’s day better, more informed, more entertaining, more interesting. Your content should inform people about your brand and what you value, or teach them something. This one seems simple, but it isn’t. Delivering value is hard. It takes time, it takes planning and thought, but once we get in a groove AND you have a good mix (see above) social can be very easy and powerful for your company and yourself as a recruiter or connector of people.
It’s about listening
If you’re going to deliver value and have a good mix, you’re not going to get there without listening to your audience. This one is easy to miss, but it is the most critical to do if you want to excel at social recruiting. You need to listen in order to know what’s valuable to your audience. And if you’re doing it really well, you’re listening outside your brand name. You’ll be listening to the audience you care about to learn about what THEY care about. When you do, it will change the way you create content and share. When you know what is important to THEM, you can start delivering more value and guess what, you will see more engagement and more interactions which is really the point of all of this. Social listening in recruiting is not really common, if it is something you’re interested in exploring, please hit me up in the comments, or click here to get in touch, this is something that we already doing!
It’s about DIALOG!
Hopefully, you’re reading this as a checklist and feeling pretty amazing about yourself. You’re listening, your sharing valuable content in a strong mix of created and curated, and then, people start responding. If you’re delivering the real magic of social, you’re responding to the people who are responding to you. You’re doing that thing that people really like, you’re engaging them in a dialog. The reason social is really so magic for marketers and recruiters is that you can start building a relationship with this channel. It is also the thing that is hard and scary. But it is required. It must be done. And you can do it. Just respond. It is how you will start building a relationship. If you’ve listened to any of our recent podcasts, you’ll know that sending information out to people with no desire to hear back makes you a (say it with me now) a sociopath. Let’s not be sociopaths!
It’s about your team
The last item on this whole “You’re rocking social recruiting if…” list is about widening your reach by including the people who already work for you. If you’re sharing content, the easiest and best way to get more people to see it is to ask your teammates and people you work with to RT, or copy and paste your content into their updates. It will boost your signal to new audiences. If you’re crafting content for your company, simply ask a group of people to share that content as well to help get it out there. You can also ask them to make it their own. When you do this, you get new readers and a new audience exposed to your company’s information. And since we know people believe people before they believe brands, it is also a solid way to get more people reading and believing your content.
Doing these five things will absolutely improve the results of your social recruiting work. Because with anything in marketing, it has to be about the results. I’ve seen customers increase their engagement and the candidate quality by implementing a few of these ideas and I’ve seen the lift be in the triple digits. This stuff works and it works in the best way, better qualified people really understanding what makes your company unique!