Hiring Through Social: What You Need to Know

With almost 173 million in the U.S. on social media sites, if you’re not recruiting and sourcing via social media, you’re losing out on a potential gold mine.

But just like mining for gold, you need to know where the good nuggets are and how to best use your mining tools to find them.

First, just as with any recruiting strategy you decide to use, you should make a plan of execution, one that includes your goals for social media recruiting as well as the steps you’ll take to reach them.

Here are some up-to-the-minute ways you can use social media to source potential candidates.

  • Facebook has a relatively new tool called Open Graph Search. This allows you to go beyond your own Facebook connections to find potential candidates. With Open Graph Search you can run searches such as “warehouse manager who lives in Rancho Cucamonga,” etc. to find Facebook members with profiles that match. You can go as detailed or as wide as you want and can search via gender, interests, company, school and so on.
  • Why not make a short (very short) recruitment video? The new Vine app allows you to post videos to such sites as YouTube. The secret is that these videos can be no more than seven (7) seconds long. Vine is a mobile service that lets you take video (on your phone) and share these über-short looping videos. This allows you to give people – potential candidates especially – the chance to get a quick look at the goings on at your company. Why not tape and post entros to a department’s team, the company president, offices, etc.?
  • Remember to recruit where your target audience hangs out. That may be Facebook and not LinkedIn. Or LinkedIn and Twitter but not Facebook. Or forget about Facebook and spend time on Google+.
  • On LinkedIn, decide on the keywords that describe the critical and/or core skills you seek and perform a search using those keywords. You can then take a look at what LinkedIn finds for you.
  • LinkedIn’s Talent Finder can be a game changer for you, if you know how to use it well. This (paid) service lets you look at every profile on LinkedIn, whether you’re a 2nd or a 3rd degree connection. The service also offers you premium search filters that let you further delineate your search, providing you such filters as number of years of experience, company, industry and much more. You’ll then be able to send a direct message to a promising candidate via the site’s InMail function.
  • You may think that LinkedIn is the place to go for managerial candidates. And it definitely is a great place to look. But don’t forget Facebook. A recent research study on social media as a job-search tool found that 17 percent of job candidates said that Facebook was the place to look for work. Compare that to the four percent who said that LinkedIn was the place to find a job.

What about your firm? Are you finding that more of your better candidates are found on LinkedIn or Facebook (or vice versa)? What strategies are your company using to find candidates?

If your are looking for staffing agencies in Riverside CA, come to the recruiters at Arrow Staffing. We look forward to hearing from you.

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