Recently, I showed you how Jobvite’s latest survey revealed that recruiting via social media is increasing. 10% of respondents said they found their “favorite or best” job through Facebook; 6% found it through LinkedIn and 5% through Twitter. As for recruiters, 94% of them are on LinkedIn and 65% are active on Facebook — and, most importantly, 78% say they’ve made a hire through a social network.
In addition, social media is a great way for recruiters to engage passive candidates. So where do you start? There are some great new tools that integrate social media into your talent acquisition efforts. This isn’t an exhaustive list meant to exclude; it’s merely some of my favorite examples.
Zartis and OpenHire – Use Your Employees’ Social Connections
Several online tools allow recruiters to leverage the social networks of their employees. SilkRoad’s OpenHire works in both directions: it lets job-seekers see who they know within your organization and lets employees easily share open positions on their own social pages. Zartis goes a few steps further and lets employees actually add their social connections to your candidate pool. You can then see how many views, clicks, and candidates each employee generates, supercharging your employee referral program.
TalentBin – Score Candidates’ Social Footprint
TalentBin aggregates information from more than 100 websites, offering what it claims is the world’s largest passive candidate database. For each job-seeker, TalentBin creates “a full picture of a candidate’s professional and personal interests,” and gives a score based on criteria you provide. You can then reach out to the job-seeker through one of their own social channels. I think that’s a great way to stand out from other recruiters, who will likely contact the job-seeker through conventional email.
PathMotion – Let Job-Seekers Speak to Employees
PathMotion lets employers create branded Facebook pages. It displays current vacancies next to employees who actually have that job. Even better, job-seekers can directly engage these “employee ambassadors” and ask them questions. This is a fantastic opportunity to let job-seekers peek behind the curtain and learn what the company culture is like from a worker’s point of view. Recruiting Blogs calls it “Quora for careers.”
BranchOut and BeKnown – Turn Facebook into LinkedIn
It’s hard to believe, but being just a few years old makes an online tool a “classic” in the social space! Two recruiting apps launched in 2011 that integrate with Facebook, allowing both recruiters and job-seekers to use it more like LinkedIn. The first, BranchOut, overlays employer information on top of users’ Facebook interface. This lets recruiters search by company, job title, or even an individual’s name. BranchOut then displays relevant candidates based on your search criteria and your connections to those candidates. Because of its use of Facebook’s API, BranchOut can claim it allows access to 800 million searchable profiles.
Monster offers a similar Facebook app, BeKnown. Employers can create company pages so they “showcase your recruitment brand and your open positions” that are already on Monster. Job-seekers can use their own BeKnown accounts to follow your company, search jobs, and connect with your employees. If you’re already using Monster for job posting, integrating BeKnown is a great way to expand into social with little effort.
Automatic Posting and Putting it All Together
Many other social recruiting tools, including BullHorn Reach and Jobvite, let recruiters automatically push job postings to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites where your organization has an account. TribeHR has this feature and lets job-seekers apply directly from LinkedIn, storing their profiles for future use.
I hope you can see how social recruiting can transform and improve your talent acquisition efforts. Many of these tools I mentioned have free versions or free trials, allowing you to pick the one that’s right for you. But once you’ve made your choice started recruiting with social, how do you measure success? What’s the ROI of all these fun tools? I’ll take a deeper dive into tracking social recruiting metrics next week.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
