As business competition for new talent increases, recruiters are turning more and more to new technologies to find and cultivate skilled employees. Social media is, by far, the most powerful new phenomenon in recruiting, as it allows recruiters to narrow their searches and quickly review potential candidates. Here are four of the top ways you can use the power of social media to attract high-quality employees into your business.

Put Out Recruiting Ads

As simple as it may seem, social media ads can work just as well for recruiting as they do for marketing your product or service. If you target your Facebook ads, for example, to an audience that is most likely to include good potential candidates, you can get several recruitment leads for a low price and with relatively little work. If you use this method, you should also encourage people who see the ad to share it with friends who they think have the necessary skills and qualifications, thus extending the reach of your ad even further. The more people who see your advertisement, the more likely you are to find a pool of suitable candidates.

Search College Social Media Pages

When you're looking for up-and-coming talent, where better to go than to colleges and universities? At one time, recruiters had to physically attend college career days and other such events, but social media has made it much easier to search for students at particular colleges. Simply view a college's social media profile, see who likes or follows it, and then search through those people to find students with skill sets relevant to your business. This method will give you a fairly large pool of people to sort through, but the upshot is that practically all of those people will have some kind of relevant professional skill.

Join Professional Social Media Groups

An often-overlooked way to recruit on social media is by joining social media groups that are dedicated to professionals in your field. Like any other group of people, top professionals like to come together in communities and share ideas with one another on social media. Such groups, however, can also give you access to hundreds or even thousands of potential new employees. In many ways, modern social media groups geared toward field-specific professionals are the digital age's equivalent of physical conferences.

If you want to be successful with this recruiting strategy, it's important that you become an active participant in those social media groups. By doing so, you'll establish a rapport with some of the members in those groups, who can then be cultivated as leads for recruitment. You can start to make yourself more active in the group by asking and answering questions in posts or creating polls to see what group members think about particular professional matters. Doing these things will allow you to engage with and get to know group members.

Use LinkedIn

For all of the value that any social media platform can have when it comes to recruiting, it's hard to beat a platform like LinkedIn that was created specifically for professionals, businesses and recruiters. LinkedIn will let you generate recruitment leads easily by searching for professionals with the skills your business needs to grow and improve. Most professionals who are on LinkedIn are also open to new offers and opportunities on some level, making it that much easier to recruit people who fit your needs.

Back to the idea above about about checking out individual college’s social media profiles, the same goes with LinkedIn. For example, you could look at Independence University and search through their alumni. You could do the same with pretty much every other educational institution.

Using social media is almost a necessity when it comes to recruiting in 2017 and beyond. Without it, your business will be at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring talent. Use these tips to begin connecting with the professionals you need via social media, and you'll find that your recruiting efforts will become much easier.