3 Strategies for Your Social Recruiting Efforts

With nearly 95% of people aged 18-35 belonging to at least one social network, HR professionals have turned to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to find job seekers.  If done well, social recruiting can be a powerful way to find the right candidates.  Nearly 80% of companies are using social networks as part of their hiring process.  But are they using them effectively?  Consider these three levels of the Social Recruiting Spectrum.

 1. Putting It Out There

The simplest form of social recruiting is using Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter to announce a job opening, or to broadcast that you’re looking for work.  While these tools will help get the word out, you can’t be sure that right people have heard your message.  And let’s face it — sifting through wall posts or blanketing a generic message to your entire network has not proven to be very successful in most cases.  

 2. Making the Right Connections

Taking it a step further, social recruiting is about leveraging the right connections at the right time.  Job seekers will reach out their network (friends and friend-of-friends) to see which of their connections work for a particular hiring company.  They’ll ask about culture, job availability, and fit.  And hiring managers will do the same within their network.  They’ll ask for employees to refer candidates to help alleviate risk.  This method insures the message is getting to a targeted connection that might be able to help.  But it can be quite time consuming.  

 3. Curating an Active Talent Community

The most effective level of social recruiting leverages a platform like Ascendify, for talent communities to thrive.  Within talent communities, meaningful connections are established by leveraging connections within all social networks.  Employers, job seekers, recruiters, college counselors, mentors, and advisors, all play a role in matching job seekers with job openings.  The interactions within the community are relevant because all members have a common interest in the topics.  So, they share applicable news, post job openings, offer advice, make introductions, and build credible relationships. Once these relationships are established, job seekers have the knowhow to make better choices when applying, and hiring managers are able to source candidates that are a better fit.

Job seekers have always looked to their friends and family to help find work, and social media has made it easier to take networking a step further. As recruiting becomes more social, the old saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, will ring true even louder.

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Ascendify is a new social recruiting platform that’s transforming the candidate’s experience by improving the way job seekers connect with hiring managers. Ascendify dramatically reduces the time and effort involved in hiring by helping organizations build communities that leverage Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social networks to help people connect. 

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Comment by Jamie Horton on April 2, 2012 at 1:45pm

Hey Lauren, 

Some great tips here. Social recruiting is a mixed bag at this point, so it's great advice to use every available channel to post jobs and to source. Job seekers are on all the social networks--especially Facebook--often accessing company pages rather than their websites. So, getting jobs out on brand pages is an important step in filling all open positions. 

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