An Untapped Social Recruiting Market: Passive Candidates

By Erica Bell

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Sometimes the perfect candidate escapes your HR manager's reach. Whether you post a job online or use traditional media such as newspapers, finding the perfect new hire isn’t always easy. Sometimes, the best candidate for a position already has a job – a passive candidate.  Passive candidates are those who are currently employed and might not be looking to change jobs today. Social recruiting can help you reach passive candidates to inform them about new opportunities and create a connection that could translate into a filled role within your company. Here are three steps your business can take to use social media to recruit passive candidates.
 

Be Outgoing and Engaging

When it comes to social media, it’s all about being social and engaging with potential hires. As you begin developing your social recruiting strategy, consider how you’re engaging top talent and building a community to reach out to - both now and in the future as positions become available. Even if you aren’t filling any specific positions at the moment, connecting with talented people on social media could benefit your business and your hiring team later on. If you notice someone has a passion for a particular topic due to their tweet frequency, or you read their updates with innovative ideas that can benefit your business, your initial engagement efforts will come into play as you reach the point where you do have an appropriate role to discuss with them.


Upcycle Your Current Database

Integrating your social recruiting efforts with your current database is one way you can use social media to connect with passive candidates. Perhaps in the past someone expressed interest in a position, but they weren’t the best fit. By upcycling your current database, you can bring your past efforts into your current social recruiting strategy. You can use your database to pull that person’s information and use it to find their presence on social networks to discover how their career has progressed. While they may have not been the best candidate in the past, they might be now. Use LinkedIn or Twitter to reach out and let them know about the open position they are perfect for. You could renew their interest in your company and begin the employment conversation with this passive candidate.


Keep in Touch

Much like consumers, passive job seekers often already have an idea of what they want when it comes to their next job move. As a recruiter, you can use social media to share information with passive candidates about new positions, hiring trends in their industry and employee insight that could influence their decision to work for your company. Use social media to connect the passive candidate with someone within your company that would work with them if hired. Show the candidates that behind the business, brand and recruiters, there are real people that enjoy what they do. Social media provides you with the opportunity to showcase employees and company culture in an effort to build brand awareness and attract passive job seekers you want to reach out to.

Social recruiting is becoming more common place as more hiring managers and talent management teams are seeing the impact of social media on their recruiting efforts. This type of engaging and interactive recruiting involves a more personal touch, but that doesn’t mean it should be an inefficient process. Making the most of past efforts and keeping in touch with top talent through engaging conversation is how your business can be more successful with its passive candidate social recruiting strategy.


Author Bio: Erica Bell is the Social Media Specialist at Business.com, a lead generation and small business resource company. She writes on a number of topics including marketing, social media and recruiting. Connect with Business.com on Twitter!

 

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The team at Social Hire won't just do social media management. Our team work closely with your team to ensure your business sees great value from the service and that your team gets tangible results.

Our digital marketing managers are the wizards that can give you the insight you need to develop your business. Have you had enough of making complex personnel choices that don't work well for your digital presence?

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