HR’s specialty is to hire the best talent. But what will you do when you’re losing more people due to incompetence than you can hire? Have you tried social media hiring?
Leo ran across this problem when he reviewed the HR quarterly performance. He works for a BPO company, and his team needs to find the right people based on the clients’ specifications. It’s not that they can’t get anyone. On the contrary, their informal social media recruitment drive sends a continuous stream of applicants their way. It’s just that most of these people turn out to be the wrong fit for the job.
Leo understands that their social media process needs some serious fixing, lest they lose the company’s clients.
Why Social Media Hiring?
Social media is the frontier of the new generation. In fact, social media is used by more than 2 billion people across the world. In the Philippines alone, there’s around 48 million people on social media. This is a massive pool of talent that, if you can tap into correctly, should send the right people coming your way. This is especially true since Filipinos spend the most time in social media than any other country in the world.
Many HR departments understand this, so more than 90% of all recruiters use social media as a recruitment platform. Another figure states that more than 60% of hires cite these efforts as the reason they chose the company. The more a presence your company has in the web, the more attractive it becomes for applicants. This is particularly true for the Philippines, where social media plays an important role in daily life.
Another consideration is the fact that millennials — the current generation of the talent pool — rely on social media and the Internet greatly. They want to know the benefits that the company can offer them. They also want to hear about what other people say about the company they are eyeing.
How To Use Social Media To Hire the Best Talent
However, social media isn’t necessarily the hiring Nirvana. Because everyone attempts to tap into it, it has become a very noisy place. What you need is to create a recruitment strategy that will see you through the myriad noise, and will present you attractively to the right people who can make a difference in your company.
Here are the most important things you could do:
1. Create a cohesive brand
For any product to be perceived well, you need to package it accordingly. In your recruitment strategy, this means presenting yourself well through a cohesive brand. This projects who you are as a company — your culture, your attitude, and how you treat your people.
This brand, as it translates to social media, manifests in the way you word your posts. Are you professional? Loud and fun? Aggressive and disruptive? It even shows on the colors you choose, the pictures and clips you post, and the general layout of your messages.
2. Know the strengths of each social network
While it’s important to make your campaign consistent through all platforms, it’s still important to know how to maximize each according to their strengths.
Facebook is best tapped through regular, consistent posts that incorporate visuals (photos and videos) as much as possible. You can also invest in Facebook advertisements. Twitter is best used through regular posts that build up on specific, brand-related hashtags. LinkedIn, being the network for professionals, can also use things such as reports and whitepapers. This will make your company more credible among your peers, as well as among applicants.
3. Link up with influencers
While it is most important to link up with the potential applicants, it is also important to link up with influencers: people who can amplify your reach. This can vary per niche, but the principle is the same — build a relationship with people or institutions known as authorities, and let them spread your brand and message.
Another thing you shouldn’t ignore is your own workforce. Potential candidates would like to know what’s in store for them, and they want to know the stories from the inside. This can easily be spread by the real employees of the account.
4. Target your social media efforts
If you do nothing but post recruitment notices, it makes you look desperate. This makes it harder for people to be loyal to your brand, and will therefore affect your ability to hire the best talent. Only desperate job seekers respond to what appear to be desperate hiring calls.
If you can, pay to have your campaigns specifically shown only to a targeted set of people. Social media platforms have paid services that allow you to choose the demographics that will see your posts. This will allow you to insert specific messages and invitations that will cater to the specific individual.
5. Go straight to the person
There’s nothing more powerful than a direct invitation. To the candidate’s point of view, he is being “chosen” among all his competitors — hence he will be more likely to respond. Because of social media, recruiters can now isolate and research the backgrounds of specific people, checking to see if they are really good fits for the job. Their virtual resumes can be filed for future reference, with the help of data organization software.
Once found, you can use social media to approach the candidates. It will be best if a good part of the hiring process can be done through social media as well, since it makes it easier for your potential hire to respond (and harder to say no). By improving the candidate experience through social media, you make it easier for the best talents to join your company.
These are the steps Leo and his team undertook to improve their social media hiring platform. It paid off pretty quickly, too. By the next quarter, they have regained stability in most of their accounts. A few are even expanding, knowing HR can provide them the manpower they need. Leo and the team had taken an important step to conquering the digital frontier of social media.
When will you take yours?
