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Social media is most often used by organizations to promote their products, show-off company culture, and/or present themselves and their brand, in the best light. But did you know that 92% of recruiters also use social media as a part of their recruitment sourcing strategies (according to a study by Jobvite)?
And not just for advertisement. It’s like if you’re not building social media into your recruiting efforts at this point, you’re not really recruiting on par with the industry standards.
What is Social Media Recruiting?
Social recruiting, also known as social media hiring, and social hiring, is a trend that has widely gained popularity and is still growing and refers to the process of recruiting candidates through social media platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other websites, including online forums, job portals, and blogs.
It involves identifying, attracting, engaging and hiring active and passive candidates, by checking out their social media profiles to understand who they are and what they’re looking for.
While organizations have, thus far, generally used social recruiting as a way to augment more traditional recruiting methods, that may be changing these days as social media recruiting as a strategy gains popularity.
For example, according to one study, nearly three-quarters of workers between the ages of 18-34 found their most recent job via social media. Moreover, nearly 90% of recruiters report that they have hired someone off of LinkedIn.
When done right, social recruiting enables organizations to reach candidates, gather more referrals, target desired candidates, showcase your organizational culture, and save money. After all, it's the mobile-first generation that’s now at the forefront of being hired.
Ultimately, this recruitment sourcing strategy works because it brings your organization into the orbit of where workers spend a considerable amount of their time on social media.
In this blog, I will be talking about why you should use social media for recruitment in your organization asap!
Top 8 reasons to start social recruiting
1. It’s Convenient!
So convenient that 25% of all job seekers admit using social media to do more than just find and connect with friends—they use it to seek their next career opportunities as well. It’s the best way to reach job seekers.
Due to the shift in the market, more and more job seekers are on social media. Whether or not you still think it’s ethical to hire through social media, accepting the status quo is forward-thinking in this case.
2. It is Quick and Efficient
The speed at which information travels online is amazing. A job description can be published on the company’s website in minutes and employees can circulate the link on various websites, and before you know it, the news has already reached a couple thousand potential candidates.
Job candidates and recruiters can interact with each other in a quicker, easier and less formal way, which works wonders if you want to hire more culturally fit employees.
Vacancies can be filled faster and that helps to lower the time-to-hire considerably. It is an option that seems beneficial for both parties as it also saves a lot of resources of the company. And as the old saying goes, time is money!
3. It’s a Cultural Shift
The success of a good hire isn’t just measured by jobs filled, but by who fills them. And what drives top employees now is more than just a paycheck, because if not one job, they will get another one that pays them well. Purpose and career growth is a critical driver of talent today.
For example, LinkedIn has grown exponentially over the years, and now looks for employees driven by purpose. Its staff includes 41% who cite self-fulfillment and a desire to serve others as key, according to the 2015 Workforce Purpose index.
4. It is Transparent!
The fact that 48% of job applicants in a recent survey are active in social media is more than a “don’t get left out” for recruiting. It also means there’s access to a full-circle view of the candidate, whether or not that’s the intention, and one more way to take some potentially nasty surprises (and hiring fails) out of the equation.
Recruiters are learning to follow a different kind of gut reaction than the old days of handshakes: 61% of hiring managers found something they didn’t like on a candidate’s social media account, and 55% of hiring managers reconsidered the hire based on what they found.
5. It Creates Brand Awareness
With a million people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+, the visibility of your company as well as the transparency mentioned in the previous point shoots up for social recruiting along with the jobs, which will be noticed by a big number of qualified candidates.
This wasn’t a thing until a few years ago. It will also show to the potential candidates and the market that the company is keeping up with latest trends and shifts in the market, in turn, improving employer branding in recruitment.
6. It is Cost-Efficient
In comparison to traditional job advertisements, the social recruiting costs are lower. An organization can put the money and resources that would have been spent on using traditional recruitment sources towards social media recruitment strategies to attract talent and receive a much better ROI, avoiding the cost of a bad hire.
A 2013 Jobvite survey showed that 60 percent of companies estimate the annual return on investment for recruiting a single hire via social media to be $20,000 per year while 20 percent report an ROI of $90,000.
7. It Helps You Reach Passive Candidates
Traditional recruiting involves posting a job listing and waiting for candidates to apply. If you follow traditional methods, chances are you’re missing out on great candidates who are not even aware of the opportunity you can provide them.
There are times when candidates who are not actively looking for a job (passive candidates) might consider changing their jobs when and if they come across an interesting job vacancy online.
This is where social recruitment comes in the picture. You could reach out to these candidates whom you might have never found and who may never have found you using any other traditional recruitment method.
8. It Leads to Better Candidate Screening
More and more organizations, now more than ever, are using social media websites to check their candidates’ backgrounds. A survey conducted in 2009 by CareerBuilder showed that 45% of hiring managers did so. This can be crucial information that allows you to shortlist your candidates in a more effective way.
Social recruitment is a growing field, allowing companies to gain access to wider audiences for their job vacancies, often from a single screen or application.
Creative recruitment strategies can be used both in-house and by recruiters. Some people criticize the term “social recruiting” when used to mean using social media to source job candidates, and say that recruitment that’s truly social needs to be conducted within a structured social network aimed for the same rather than what are essentially public forums.
I hope these recruitment tips help make your recruitment process faster and more efficient.
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