10 ways to promote your social recruiting campaign in-house

As I wrap up a social recruiting campaign with a client (and yes, links will come once it launches...tomorrow), I thought I'd write about building an in-house promotion campaign you can run to get your social recruiting campaign off the ground and running (a post I've actually never seen anyone else do before surprisingly).

So why promote in-house? The answer is obvious (hopefully): your employees are your greatest resource when building any kind of social media campaign, especially with recruitment.

Everyone loves referrals and your employees are the people who give you the best ones -- so getting them involved in your campaign and having them share your company's Facebook recruitment page, retweet you on Twitter, have your LinkedIn group logo on their profile, etc. is going to open up your reach dramatically.

And best of all, that network will be opened up to all of the right people -- your employees' friends and colleagues who are potentially just as great as them.

So what can you do to help promote the launch of your campaign in-house? Here's what we did on the campaign I'll be launching tomorrow:

1. Announcement at company-wide meetings

We set up giant posters and printed out hundreds of fliers for the company's quarterly meeting, all promoting the new campaign. We also had the VP of HR announce the purpose behind the campaign and the benefits for everyone who is involved during that meeting.

2. Create an extra incentive

Face it -- it's hard to get employees do much for you after hours (unless they're brand evangelists, which is rare). So you better come to the launch of a social media campaign with an incentive. We're giving away two iPods (the iPod Touch to be exact) to randomly selected people from the Facebook fan page. Can't afford iPods? Use the product your company offers and give away the best to the winner (e.g. an airport would give away a flight, a hotel would give away a night's stay plus breakfast, etc.).

3. Fliers and posters in the application center

If your company has an application center where people come to apply in-person, set up fliers next to every computer and put up posters on the walls. We did just that and it's already got some buzz going.

4. Posters/slideshows in cafeteria

I was lucky enough that this client has big screen TVs set up in their cafeterias for company announcements, so we threw some slides onto those TVs, as well as set up posters on bulletin boards. These are the one place you'll catch people actually paying attention.

5. Company newsletters/e-mails

Every company sends out a newsletter or a weekly/monthly e-mail. Find out who manages them and get your campaign all over it (on the front page if you can).

6. Make it part of orientation

We have it set in place where the orientation team will give out fliers and mention the social campaign to all new employees on their first day. It will also require them to become fans of the Facebook page before day two of orientation.

7. Require an announcement from all shift supervisors

This client happens to run almost 24/7, so making sure it gets out to all shifts is important. We made a standard message for all supervisors to announce to their shifts, once again promoting the campaign.

8. Make new business cards promoting these sites

Get your recruiting team some fancy new business cards that lists all of the sites they are on and how they can go about contacting them on those social sites. Think of it like a physical unhub.

9. Make plenty of extra fliers

Give out as many fliers as you can to everyone from dept. heads and shift supervisors to spreading them at your application center or job fairs you host. The more fliers you have in-stock, the better your chances of promoting your social recruiting monster.

10. Make it a class

If your HR dept. still has a budget for learning and development, make a class for how to get involved in the company's social networking efforts. Some of your employees will want to get involved, but won't know what the heck that "Tweeter" thing is, let alone know how to become a fan on Facebook. Help them set up accounts in a one-hour class and become fans to get company updates and new job opening updates. It will be a hard sell, but if you're already this far and have sold your leadership on letting you do a social recruiting campaign, it's really just icing on the cake.

So even with a client with 5,000 employees, I'm pretty confident every one of them will be aware of the social recruiting campaign launching tomorrow. And if you can combine that with a great recruiting team that's well-trained on how to leverage all of these sites, there's no way your campaign can fail.

When doing all of these promotions, however, make sure your message actually explains the benefit of them getting involved in this: 1. They get company and job opening updates from home; 2. Show their company pride on their profiles; 3. Share with their friends and family who also might be interested; 4. Help put out the word so that the company can attract the best talent so that current employees can work alongside great people who will drive the company forward.

If you have any in-house promotion ideas you've put into action at your company, share them below as I'm sure the recruiting community would love to keep this discussion going.

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