Originally posted on the SmashFly Intern Blog.

As we all know, a significant portion of candidates viewing your available jobs will not fully commit to applying – even if they are at least somewhat interested. It could just be that some people aren’t in a
position to make a major career decision whether it’s because they don’t feel qualified yet or that they simply aren’t willing to leave the safety of their current job. There are countless reasons for being a
passive candidate, but these people can certainly use a little encouragement and nudging. Sure, there will always be passive candidates, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t take certain measures
to produce more applications while establishing a relationship with these types of candidates. Several factors come into play when dealing with passive candidates including your employer brand, CRM, and candidate engagement strategy, but I’d like to focus particularly on how social media can be
utilized to create a dialogue around your employment opportunities and messaging. What makes the social media aspect of your recruitment marketing efforts so unique is that you can simultaneously engage candidates who have varying levels of interest in your company, including the passive
candidates.

Social media allows for lasting and accessible relationships

In many cases, a passive candidate will perhaps glance at your job post or click apply and never finish the application. After this occurs, it’s likely that the candidate will forget about this experience
and move on, hoping that maybe later there will be another open position from the same company. For this reason, whenever you are able to catch a candidate’s attention, a link or image should be provided directing the candidate to the company social media page or pages (which
I would hope the company has). Being a college student, I hear from job seeking seniors all the time who follow various company pages that they are interested in. Social media is already an integral aspect of millions of people lives. The fact that social media is used everyday means that candidates can easily and consistently view up-to-date information about your company’s opportunities and work culture. The idea here is that you keep candidates interested where it is most easy for them to maintain interest, instead of them having to remember and seek you out.

Don’t limit your most informative employment content to the career website

When utilizing social recruiting strategies, make sure your social media pages function as relationship builders not job boards. Candidates don’t and won’t follow your pages if all they contain is the same information seen in your job posts. Also, assume that passive candidates won’t check you career site often, if ever. With this in mind, try to pass on interesting and helpful information regarding employment opportunities through your social media pages even if it’s already included on the career site. This can be done by posting short facts about the company, employment, and current employees – or you can post short title descriptions and post links to different pages of the career site.

Involve employees in social media

Only very rarely have I seen social media recruiting strategies incorporate employee stories, posts, or other content. Candidates love to see how current employees perceive their company and describe their jobs. In my opinion, the communication of employee satisfaction is the most crucial and genuinely believable aspect of employment branding. Why not include, for instance, employee posts on your company or recruitment Twitter page? Use your social media pages to create several different modes of communication, don’t limit its function and breadth.

Passive candidates are often passive because they don’t know enough and aren’t active enough to find out more by continuously and periodically checking on the companies opportunities and employment
information. Social media makes it easier and less time consuming for candidates to learn about the company, while incrementally building and incubating the passive candidate relationship. What do recruiters think about this? How do you think employees could get involved with social media for recruiting purposes?