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Sourcing Candidates

How recruiters use social media to source candidates

Resumes and cover letters are passé. Sourcing for candidates has become challenging like never before. It is not all about your degrees and education at today’s time but about your skills, wit and talent along with your qualification.

Recruiters have moved their focus from physical recruiting methods to social media platforms like Twitter, Linked In or Facebook. Or they use in demand recruiters like our Vested platform.

It has become one of the major norms of recruiting nowadays.

A recruiter is in a constant search of most qualified and talented pool of applicants. At present, three of above mentioned social media websites have over 1.2 million of combined users. That sounds like a potential.

As more and more people are joining social media websites, recruiters do need to maintain leverage upon their social media accounts for recruiting purposes. This is an imperative formula to attract talent.

What are the benefits of social recruiting? How to get started?

  • Build your employment brand: Social media is a showcase that showcases the culture of your company to the recruits. Brand your social media platforms by posting content, photos and videos. Try to engage job seekers in conversations and motivate to participate them in discussions. Give them space to prompt some questions and answers. This is a wonderful way to know about your recruit and giving him a chance to understand your company culture.
  • Reach passive candidates: Almost everyone is using social media platform, either they are looking for a job or not. They are passive candidates who might not be interested in changing their jobs but building a relationship with them can give you the opportunity to hire them. This is how social media helps you to enhance your talent pool.
  • Employee referral program: It is considered one of the top most and high;y-effective recruiting tool. It allows you to involve your current employers in the hiring process. You can post recruitment requisitions on their social media platform and it increases your approach base.
  • Learn about the background of the employee: Evaluating the Linked In or Facebook profile of a person helps you access major information about them. A linked In profile includes their resume and, past and present jobs. It includes their recommendations, peers, managers and colleagues. It can help you determine some second or third degree connections allowing you a personal referral. Similarly, facebook and twitter contain information about their interests, hobbies and other personal information.
  • Lower recruitment costs: All this set up is free and that is how you save a lot upon the cost of recruitment.

How to use?

There are different social media platforms and there are different techniques to use them. The first step includes deciding your target audience and tailoring your strategy accordingly. Start from being familiar to one platform and then move to other.

Twitter

Twitter is a popular micro blogging social networking website. There is a limit of 140 characters to messages or tweets. The platform has more than 300 million users yielding more than 300 million tweets per day along with 1.6 million search queries.

The most significant thing about twitter is that it connects business and customer in real time. Businesses use twitter to promote their brand, products, services, share information, gathering feedback from market and connecting to influential people.

Twitter updates what is happening in the current moment. In includes various broadcasts about the vacant positions that need to be filled.

LinkedIn

It is the leading professional networking site. It has more than 155 million users around 200 countries and territories. This site is quite popular among professional recruiters.

The professional recruiters foster networking through LinkedIn and can have access to ready-made resumes.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest pool of talent. Millions of people log in and log out on daily basis and share pictures, videos and posts to become popular among their friends. Although it started as a social utility but, it expanded as a popular network to make connections.

Facebook ads are a great option to target the exact audience. For example, if you are based in California and relocation is not a part of your budget then you can target the audience of the city only.

The overall result will be:

  • The traffic to your career site will be increased.
  • There will be increased Facebook fans engagement.
  • Your twitter follower count will be increased.
  • The traffic to job postings will increase.