5 Amazing Benefits All Recruiters Need to Know About Social Media

By Marquis Codjia

Share on: 

If there’s one thing keeping HR managers awake at night, it’s the best way to reduce hiring costs, find the best talent and add value to the corporate bottom line. Everything from recruiting and employee training to performance evaluation is scrutinized, with the ultimate goal of curbing staff attrition—not to mention the various costs that come with talent exodus, low staff morale, skill set incompatibility (wrong people on the wrong jobs) and an unproductive work force. 


Luckily, social media are here to help everyone on the recruitment spectrum—from headhunters and talent coaches to HR managers and corporate recruiters—improve hiring, training and development tasks. According to a recent study by MC&Co., a social media consulting and PR firm, recruiters can reap 5 key benefits from social media, including accessing an expansive talent pool, hiring passive candidates, having real-time background checks, monitoring online behavior permanently, and accessing interactive resumes.


The talent pool is broader on social media

Recruiters are getting savvier with social media, particularly when it comes to crawling the Web for specific talent in target industries or job niches. With social media, headhunters have access to a broader pool of candidates, a cost-effective development that helps them fill open positions and reduce attrition trends. The increased talent supply and the relatively stable work demand result in a slight reduction of hiring costs, including salaries—with a few exceptions, particularly in specialized searches, executive positions and niche roles.


Passive candidates are cheaper to recruit

Passive candidates are professionals who aren’t actively looking for work but nonetheless possess the right mix of experience, skill set and education for a particular role. Finding and cultivating passive candidates are effective ways to improve and quicken talent acquisition, according to MC&Co. research. For recruiters, the best way to establish rapport with promising, passive candidates is to have them in recruiters’ circles on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter—among other social media.


Online background checks are instantaneous—and reliable

Companies still need to perform thorough background checks for incoming workers, but the Web and social media make that exercise easy. State-of-the-art background-verification software makes it astonishingly easy to crawl the web for a specific candidate and identify everything that has ever been produced about the individual on the Internet. Content curation still needs to be done relative to what’s been found on the Web, but at least the pertinence of the applicant’s data retrieved from social media provides an effective analytical tool to start with.


Ongoing staff monitoring is possible

Similar to online background checks, ongoing staff behavior monitoring also is made possible by social media. Within legally permissible limits, HR managers can browse social networks to figure out what’s been said about the company, especially how employees behave and whether such behavior is detrimental to the company’s brand or overall reputation. In a sense, social media become salient tools for competitive intelligence, key platforms that corporate executives can use to boost staff morale and improve hiring, development and promotion practices.


Interactive résumés make your life as a recruiter easy

An interactive résumé is one featuring text along with multimedia content such as video, audio, photo and infographics—think of charts, patterns, sketches, graphs and drawings. It’s even more effective when the CV is embedded on a webpage and linked to the candidate’s social media profiles. Interactive résumés make a recruiter’s life easy because they are easy to index—something Google’s Panda loves—provide a rounded view of an applicant’s professional life, and can be keyword-analyzed, according to MC&Co. research.


Image Source: mkhmarketing


 

About the company...

At Social Hire, we don't just do social.

We're a company that helps our customers further their social media presence by providing social media marketing on a monthly basis.

You might like these blog posts Is Your Social Media Stream One Great Big Turn Off?, How to Use Social Media to Boost Employee Engagement, We All Want Transparency in the Workplace, But is it Possible to Have Too Much?, and Do You Need a Business Degree to Be a Successful Business Owner?.

  Back to Recruitment blogs