How To Use Social Media To Attract Talent

By: Together Abroad 19-04-2013

Categories:** HR daily news, Talent Acquisition,


Social media is an important and exciting new recruitment channel which many employers are now incorporating into their hiring process. Reports suggest that up to 90% of employers now use social media to attract talent. The most popular social media hiring channel is Linked-In and Twitter is very popular too. So, what does it take to effectively attract talent through Linked-In or Twitter?

Starting with Linked-In. One of the most effective ways to find talent on Linked-In is to build a following of relevant talent on Linked-In and then to market vacancies to your following. The best way to do this is to develop a Company Page and to link each of your employees to your company page.

In order to encourage industry relevant talent to follow your Company Page, you are able to join industry relevant groups where you can post timely and relevant updates which advertise your employer brand. You can also post: news updates, article links, product news, company news, industry press releases etc... on your Company Page which will also be seen in the Linked-In general news feed for your followers. But, importantly, these updates will also be advertised on the front page of each of your employee's Linked-In profile pages, assuming they are connected to your business. This means your updates will be being communicated to a large, relevant audience, meaning your following will be growing constantly.

Now, each time that you have a vacancy, you can post it to your Company Page and it will be advertised to your company following and employee network of thousands potentially.

Another very good way to attract talent on Linked-In is to turn your employees into talent scout's using an employee referral scheme. Yes, you can encourage your current employees who are Linked-In members to refer their own Linked-In connections to your business by using an employee referral scheme. This would mean that each time an employee recommended a Linked-In candidate to your business, who was hired, they receive a reward, which motivates them to keep referring talent. There are now a range of tools on the market such as Jobvite and BullHorn Reach which allow you to easily manage and track a Linked-In based employer referral scheme.

Twitter has also become a very popular recruiting tool amongst employers. Just liked Linked-In, the marketing and recruiting power of Twitter comes from the size and quality of your company's twitter following. This is why employers on Twitter spend a lot of their time creating a quality following of talent. There are several ways to grow a relevant and quality following of talent, and one of the best ways to achieve this is to tweet a lot on industry and relevant skill related topics. For maximum effect, research shows you need to tweet around 4 times a day and the tweets should be less than 100 characters. Also, if you use hash tags in your tweets, readers will be more responsive and if you ask followers to 'retweet' you'll get a 23X higher response rate. Another way to build your twitter following is to advertise your Twitter address on all your corporate marketing content. Having built your quality and relevant talent following on twitter, you can tweet them job vacancies and wait for the applications to come in.

You don't have to wait for talent to come to you in twitter; you can also headhunt talent on Twitter by using the key word search feature. You can do the most powerful twitter candidate searches by using more complicated search expressions for, example, say you were looking for a Java developer near Amsterdam, you would write, 'java developer near: Amsterdam' or if you were looking for a tweet sent within 5 Miles of Amsterdam, you would write, 'near Amsterdam within: 15 miles' or if you wanted to find tweets containing the word 'resume' and which also link to URLS, then type 'resume filter: links'.

Good luck with finding talent on social media.

Copywrite Together Abroad