In order to understand how best to recruit staff, you have to understand how candidates go about finding new jobs. The big job sites are long gone – Peter, social media consultant, will tell you that most companies feel they are spammed by large job sites, so except in a very few situations they tend to steer clear.
Specialty job sites are a different matter entirely. A speciality job site provides candidates with very specific skills and employment histories. Generally speaking a company with specific detailed requirements can find good candidates on small, focused job boards.
Social media marketing is of course the other fruitful online avenue to employing good people. A social media consultant can help you expand your hit rate by ensuring you focus your attentions in the right places.
Every social media marketing campaign represents a spend on your part of course. So in order to keep your spending under control, and make sure your ROI for your recruitment spend is good, it is necessary to identify the most fruitful areas for you to advertise in.
Not all social media recruitment is direct advertising. An international social media consultant can help you identify networks you need to be in, where a whole collective of potential future candidates may be waiting for you to come knocking.
Ideally, you want to start associating yourself with industry players and influencers – people or companies whose opinion and actions carry more weight than the average. Because the people working with and in businesses are the ones you want to come to you when they are looking for work – or when they have a promising contact who is in need of a job.
In a stricter marketing sense, you can direct your recruitment campaigns with key terms in much the same way as you optimise your web page. Target key employer names, for example, in the social media graph of candidates for people with the right experience.
An international social media marketing consultant should emphasise the importance of routine in social media marketing and recruitment. You can’t simply hop onto the network when you want to fill a position, and expect everything to be ready and waiting for you. In reality, your social media recruitment campaign must be as proactive and intensive as your social media branding campaigns.
Indeed, as any international social media consultant will tell you, there is very little difference between branding using social media and recruiting using social media. Ultimately in both instances you are trying to create and maintain a presence for your brand – a presence that excites people and makes them want to be part of what you do. That means plugging away every day, building up and maintaining your visibility on the right networks.
Put in the time and you will reap the rewards.
Peter Wilkinson, Social media consultant,