5 Social Hiring Tips for 2018 That Will Boost Your Recruitment Strategy

By Laura Slingo

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Social recruiting isn’t a new form of hiring, and around 92% of staffing specialists advertise roles and find top talent this way.

However, over the last year or so, social media platforms have made significant advances in the way they support vacancy promotion. For example, Facebook has pushed its involvement in the online recruitment market, partnering with more aggregators like Zip Recruiter, to take on LinkedIn, which dominates the landscape.

Whether you’re looking to post jobs on social media or would prefer to source talent through the online channels, the following social hiring tips will help you fill your vacancies throughout 2018.

1. Review your own LinkedIn profile

There is plenty of career advice available detailing tips and tricks to help candidates create a slick LinkedIn account. After all, if you’re hiring via LinkedIn, you’re looking for the candidates with a professional, accurate profile.

However, this set of standards works both ways. Candidates assess your profile in return, and so you must enhance your LinkedIn profile too.

It’s worth thinking about the buzzwords that you’re using. Recent research suggests that talent professionals are less likely to highlight personal strengths and prefer to list skills and abilities that can be specifically categorized. For example, “specialize” is this year’s number one LinkedIn buzzword used by talent professionals.

Transparency and honesty is a key trend in all digital markets this year. It seems that job hunters value the openness of true experts, rather than those filling profiles with empty buzzwords, such as “motivated” and “skilled,” so be sure to update your profile for 2018.

2. Boost your brand

As the modern world is an advocate of transparency and honesty this year, social media is no longer the place to post your sales brand updates. Instead, it’s the place to lift the curtain on your organization, showing candidates what it’s like to work with you during their job search (if you’re a staffing agency), or what it’s like to work for you (if you’re an employer).

Instagram is the best place to open up this connection. But instead of posting heavily-designed images of your latest job adverts or garish stock photos with motivational quotes slapped over the top, take pictures of your office, your dedicated team and any events you’re attending, for example. Candidates will relate to you on a personal level, and you’re more likely to see hiring success with them as a result.

3. Consider the ways you’re contacting candidates

Phone and email are the workhorses of the recruiting world and continue to be the favored method of communicating with candidates. While texting is deemed to be the fastest-growing communication channel for recruiting, with 69% of staffing specialists expecting their usage to increase in 2018, social media is thought to become more dominant too.

18% of recruiters say they are using Facebook Messenger more often to communicate with candidates, and 13% have seen an increase in the use of Twitter too. LinkedIn messaging is the most effective means of contact though, with 59% of staffing agents believing its already wide-spread use will rise over the next year.

It seems the younger generations are turning to texting and social as their preferred outreach channel, while the older generations prefer a phone call, so keep your audience in mind to stay at the top of your recruitment game.

4. Test and refine your conversion funnel

If you’re promoting a post on social media, you must create a strategy for your conversion funnel in order to see the results you want. But too many businesses, recruitment or otherwise, fail to test and refine their strategy, assuming that if they post an on-trend image, people will flock to their site. If you’re looking to win over passive candidates, you need to develop a funnel strategy that works.

Any basic funnel campaign has three main layers: awareness, consideration, and conversion. If you’re the employer, start by advertising your brand so that people are aware of your name. Then engage those you have attracted in a way that’s relevant to them. You may like to promote a blog post or whitepaper, for example. After that, you’re ready to proceed to the final phase and send your target audience that all-important job advert. They are more likely to convert as they have seen your brand and you’ve offered them something that’s of interest to them.

As you can see, a strategy and refined targeting are important on social as it’s such a saturated market. You’ll need to consider it carefully to find social hiring success in 2018.

5. Remember social may not be your best source

If you’re particularly savvy with social, you may be keen to utilize every channel to assist with your recruitment efforts. However, while the use of social for staffing is expected to increase, remember that it may not be the best source of talent for you.

Research suggests that the best candidate source is referrals (29%), followed by existing candidates from your ATS or CRM (18%), and social media (18%). Therefore, use a blend of recruitment techniques to aid your hiring efforts and maximize your chances of identifying the best candidates in 2018.

About the author: Laura Slingo is Content Executive for Resume-Library, the fastest-growing job board in the U.S.

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