Social Recruiting Starter Kit
What is social recruiting? A recruiting strategy that consistently incorporates data from social networking sites to source, evaluate, and contact candidates.
What goals should you focus on? Social recruiting is a great approach for improving three key recruiting metrics: TIME-TO-HIRE Canvasing social sites to find unique candidates helps reduce your time-to-hire. HIRE QUALITY It gives you access to both active and passive candidates, increasing your quality of hires. COST-PER-HIRE Knowing what makes your candidates tick makes engaging them easier lowering the cost-per-hire.
Start small Take some time every quarter to meet with your team to discuss emerging social media trends including what the competition is doing. Pinpoint your company s culture and what traits make up your ideal candidate don t forget to include your hiring manager in these discussions. Identify the social sites that are most important to your business. You don t need to know the ins and outs of each one, but you should know the basics of a few key sites.
Let's take a tour of four popular tech hangouts.
Twitter is about sharing news and making personal connections in real-time. Your company s recruiting feed should enable current employees and candidates to connect to each other. People expect consistency. Create and commit to a schedule for your tweets. Need to set up a Twitter account? Check out. http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter
GitHub is a filing system for every version of a programming project, where programmers share advice and critique each other s work. Look for developers that regularly fork projects adding on to them, or making them their own. This allows you to see their process and gauge their interaction with other developers. You should also have your own developers refer candidates they ve interacted with to you. How to start using GitHub? Here s a simple guide: http://lifehacker.com/5983680/ how-the-heck-do-i-use-github
Facebook is a great way to get a more personal view of candidates, build communities, and interact with people. Monitor and maintain your Career Pages daily. Using contests and quizzes can help keep it fresh and interactive. Check out Facebook Groups for the niche tech professions you are focused on. Want a Facebook refresher? Here you go: http://mashable.com/guidebook/facebook
YouTube may be known for its plethora of cat videos, but the site enables tech pros to visually showcase their portfolios. Check out the producers of how-to videos for the types of applications and software your hiring managers prioritize in their business. Maintain a Careers channel or playlist on YouTube that highlights your tech specific culture. Looking for a YouTube beginner s guide? Just click here: http://mashable.com/2013/10/05/ youtube-beginner-guide
Listen more than you talk You should spend as much time learning about candidates as you do sourcing them. Use social media as an opportunity to learn more about your candidates. Find out what motivates them what they love and what they don t. Tweak your recruiting strategies based on what you learn. For example, use keywords that relate to the passions and interests of your top performing hires to strengthen your sourcing and pipelining.
Keep it social Social media is based on a simple concept: people expect to connect with other people. Meet with your team to discuss how you can tell your brand story in 140 characters, pictures and short videos. Remember to converse on social media as well as post original content.
Plan what to say Don t smother potential candidates with heavy-handed messaging. On average, your posts should be: B A A B C 70% helpful, but non-promotional posts 20% promotional posts about open positions 10% fun posts that show the passions of your people C
Take a visual approach Visuals are a great way to capture people s attention as they scroll through an endless sea of social media posts. Meet with your team to identify visuals that support your brand message. For example, @JoinTheFlock retweets images that help paint a positive company culture.
Scaling your approach Moving beyond the basics of social recruiting, think about how to scale your efforts: Will your team engage through company social feeds, personal feeds, or a hybrid feed such as @JohnDoe_Company? How often will you report on insights from the analytics behind your career pages? How you will share social information on candidates with peers and hiring managers?
Keep it simple Apply basic conversational skills to the social media world: Listen first Repeat Be kind and honest Reply when you can add value
Ready to get started with social recruiting? Dice s Open Web makes it easy. Open Web combines information from 180 different social sites with Dice s rich database of over 2 million résumés. You ll spend less time sourcing candidates and more time engaging them. Visit www.dice.com/openweb today for a free demo of Open Web.
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