With significant amounts of millennials in the job seekers market nowadays, it’s not surprising that social media has become a cornerstone of the recruitment process. Obtaining a better understanding of social media recruiting makes this generation of employees easily stay connected with popular platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, which means companies should also keep up with this digital transformation.
The way companies hire and recruit employees has changed in the past few years. As we all have recognized, as the alternative approach to employee recruitment besides traditional methods, social media recruiting emerges as a powerful hiring method for many organizations.
The 2018 Career Builder’s survey revealed that around 70% of recruiters did a screening process through the candidate’s profile with 54% of them ending with sending the applicant’s rejection letter due to what recruiters have found.
Do you use social media recruiting as a tool to hire in your company? However, social media recruiting combines two basic elements, employer branding, and recruitment marketing in order to create a talent acquisition strategy. By using platforms that companies habitually use, they try to attract and connect with candidates, both active and passive ones.
We can simply think that recruiting through social media is like merely posting a job vacancy to the career page then waiting for candidates to roll in, but it can be far more complicated. There are still a number of HR professionals who experience unrewarding results due to taking this option.
How Social Media Changes The Way Companies Recruit
Before the pandemic, the majority of companies still run complex practices and processes. But when COVID-19 came and changed the world and economy, companies discovered new benefits as they quickly shifted and adapted to social media recruitment. Forbes called this latest approach the ‘New Normal’ of recruitment.
Then how does the ‘New Normal’ of recruitment as Forbes look like? What AI and machine learning have brought gives companies help in optimizing their recruitment capabilities by providing captured data from online applications and background checks.
Forbes furthermore predicted that companies will potentially find more qualified candidates as they’re advertising new roles like remote positions and sourcing talent at virtual job fairs through social media. What makes online recruitment the preferred approach is because it’s closely related to the availability of technology such as cloud platforms, AI-powered analytics, and automation.
It’s getting obvious while Jobvite’s study shows a similar fact. Around 73% of organizations decide to rely on social media to conduct recruiting. In addition, about 93% of companies use this approach to boost talent acquisition strategies. The numbers are detailed into two major platforms, 93% come to the LinkedIn network and 66% of companies use Facebook to find employees.
Then what does it mean especially for companies and organizations? We can conclude that ‘hiring’ and ‘social media’ are related to one another, especially in recruitment or talent acquisition. Both are taking a critical role in the case of job search connectivity. Furthermore, what companies need to emphasize is the demand to master the effective ways of finding both qualified and skilled candidates.
In point of fact, then would it be the future of recruitment operations? As we’ve seen how recruitment today is changing differently than how it looked a few months earlier, Forbes gives an answer to this question “without a doubt”, which means it can be possible. With a security framework and candidate-centric processes established, and the next-gen technology with all systems supported by the company’s best human resources, the business will be more prepared no matter what happens in the future.
Furthermore, they said it can be an evolution of the way of access which looks promising and advantageous for business in the future by giving companies new pools of top talent.
Why Social-media Still Fail Recruiting?
Even though social media helps recruiters spread job openings that can afford both active and passive candidates, yet not all Human Resource professionals experience good results. As the article “Social media: A recruitment help or hindrance?” published by the Human Resource Executive has reported, the survey showed that nearly 24% of Human Resource Professionals put social media as their least favorite recruiting strategy, followed by passive recruiting and university career fairs. So, where do the problems come from?
The issue is not far off how HR professionals don’t have a comprehensive marketing strategy, which is vital for social-media components any company can’t lose sight of. HR leaders may have no time to master primary social-media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram for recruiting. That being the case, a strong collaboration between HR and marketing is the thing companies have to take heed of.
When the Human Resource Executive covered the issues that come from the recruiter’s side, Agilitypr by the article “4 in 5 businesses have rejected a job candidate based on social media content” sees from a different point of view. Covering the research of TheManifest –the business news website– the survey attempted to find out the reason behind the failure of social-media recruitments from the profile of the candidates.
THeManifest reported that around 90% of recruiters will look at potential candidates’ social media profiles at the first level. But the following data showed a surprising fact, that the vast majority of (79%) decided to reject a candidate based on what they found on the candidate’s social media.
Candidates may only focus on building a professional look over their LinkedIn account, but they forget that recruiters also check on other personal social-media profiles like Instagram or Facebook. Around 98% of hiring managers do background research with 43% of them using Google to research applicants. It may be a nightmare for those who have made a sort of inappropriate content on their social media page like hate speech, drug use, images of heavy partying, illegal content, or even confidential content about former jobs or companies. Those contents can potentially lead recruiters to reject and get candidates denied.
How to Create a Robust Social Recruiting?
What makes social recruiting essential so you need to make a powerful strategy before beginning the process? These few statistics may enlighten you:
- It’s more competitive with 84% of companies nowadays using social media for the recruiting process, as reported by SHRM.
- According to Aberdeen Group, 73% of millennials found their last job through social media.
- 79% of job seekers use social media when conducting their job search, as Glassdoor mentioned.
- To accurately evaluate the organization’s employer brand, 68% of millennials visit the social media of the organization.
- More than 50 million companies have a presence on LinkedIn and 90% of them search for candidates to fill company job openings.
From what you have heard about the failure and success of social recruiting, making a robust social recruiting strategy is key. Here are two related tips that can help you win over other organizations in competing for talent:
1. Start to build company reputation
It’s not your company that attracts candidates, but potential employees need to be attracted by your company too. Becoming well known in your industry seems easy as you have focused on two main things, business personality and culture to life. Bring those two elements to the company’s social platforms. The Wall Street Journal from what they have covered, “The Three Best Ways to Improve Your Online Reputation” suggest you do definite ways, including:
- Don’t let any negative comments from dissatisfied reviewers end with no feedback. Instead, try to reach out to what they have commented on your social platform immediately.
- As it goes in digital media, take it as an advantage to optimize your company exposure. Make content like “publication” on your company’s site page or publish press releases through publication websites or media.
- Let influential bloggers review your product or brand to help expose your company profile. It’s like an easy step to elevate credibility indeed,
2. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s feature
With more than 100 million members joining LinkedIn, it is still the site of choice for companies hiring. Moreover, LinkedIn also has a dozen powerful features companies can use to find the top candidates. Samantha McLaren in the LinkedIn Talent Blog article “How to Avoid Common Recruiter Fails, According to Stacy Zapar”, reveals the useful tips:
Narrow the search and be targeted
Most recruiters may rush candidates without diving deep into their profile first once they match a keyword. Rather than follow up 500 people matched with a single keyword, just narrow the search and be targeted.
Read and test the message before hitting the send
To avoid mistakes while starting to publish the recruitment, try to cut out distractions. Do all of your sourcing and outreaches at one time. Close anything like email, social media, or phone notification that causes the recruiter to get distracted. To avoid recruiters from mistakes, steer clear of doing many things at once.
Do not charge candidates with too much information
Do not ever send a candidate the first message with so much information written there. The longer message you send, the more it doesn’t look like an authentic one. Candidates may see the message as a ‘copy and paste’. Don’t let them be overwhelmed, make it shorter and sound conversational.
Never mess up outreaches with complicated terminology
Any recruiting terminology like ATS, perm or c2h may look off-putting for candidates. So, before hitting send, make sure it’s easy to understand and avoid “recruiter speak” if you want to get a response.
Avoid ghosting candidates
Ghosting candidates can be the biggest failure as Stacy’s said. Make sure you find no candidates feel ignored. For instance, giving ‘Friday Feedback Blitz’ will give both recruiter and candidates peace of mind. Recruiters just need to give a slot on the calendar every Friday afternoon to send an update for every interviewee.
Now we know the effectiveness of social media recruitment. It can ease companies build and showcase their brand, as well as accurately help recruiters find potential candidates. While any social recruiting platforms seem far from perfection, employers who try to attract talent through social media shouldn’t only be more aware of cultivating their brand and gauging the rightest strategies for recruitment.
