Yesterday, I posed the question on Twitter “What would some social media best practices that recruiting organizations should live by?” and I got a few responses.  The one I liked the best and will be the subject of this post is from Chris Cruz (@Chris_SDD):

While this isn’t anything groundbreaking for recruiters that use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook regularly, I believe this is a great lesson for recruiters and recruitment marketing organizations that are just starting to get their feet wet on these channels.

So let’s take a quick look at some general rules of what you can and should include in your social media feeds so you can get started.

The 50-35-15 Rule

While the subject heading may give the impression that this is an official rule, this is more of a guideline that I’ve come up with that can help you start thinking about what your social presence will look like.

So what makes up the 50-35-15 in your social feed?  Let’s take a look:

50% of your social feed should be ENGAGEMENT.  While content can be a way of engaging with candidates, this refers to one on one engagement with candidates from responding to mentions, reaching out to potential candidates, asking questions and basically acting like a human being.  This is important for ensuring open communication with candidates.

35% of your social feed should be CONTENT.  This includes both your own content (micro-sites, blogs, news, etc.) and 3rd party content.  And this content can span a number of media content types from video, blogs, images, etc.  It’s important to measure all the content you share with recruitment metrics or your through your social posting tool, so you can try to replicate the content that is the most popular.

15% of your social feed should be JOBS.  Posting jobs to your social feeds is not a bad thing and needs to be done.  However, a social feed that is a majority of jobs is one that will not be successful.  Candidates that follow your social profiles don’t want just jobs (they can sign up for email alerts if they want this) but want to be educated on your company and be able to find good information quickly.  Also, make sure to include jobs so they are indexed on social and make sure to use hashtags like #jobs (here are others) so it can be found by more people.

Now this is just a guideline.  As you get more comfortable with social and determine your social persona, this breakdown will most likely change toward your tendencies.  You may increase the percentage of your tweets where you engage with candidates directly or find that content leads to more candidate conversions and increase this aspect.  But in general I’d try and keep your job ads as a smaller percentage of your overall social stream (just make sure it comes organically).

On top of that, you need to make sure that your link on Twitter and other social profiles points to your Career Site and your jobs page.  This enables all of your updates to provide candidates with direct access to the jobs on your Career Site.  Measuring the click-through rates for the direct link to jobs you post on social profiles is a great way to track ROI but it’s also important to track candidates that visit your Career Site and apply that come directly from these social profiles as well.

Create Relationships First, Convert Later

By focusing on engagement and content with your social profiles first and jobs later, you and your recruiters will be able to build better relationships with the candidates that decide to follow and engage with your recruiting organization.

Remember social recruiting is not a job board where you post a job and receive applicants.  Instead it’s a longer term recruiting initiative that needs to be continually cultivated to build relationships with candidates so when the right job comes along you have contacts you can instantly reach out to in order to source for a position.

The only way to cultivate these relationships is to provide value to the candidates you are interested in and you can do this through direct engagement and relevant content.

For questions and comments on this blog, connect with me on Twitter @smashfly