Social media is useful for more than reconnecting with a high school sweetheart or sharing political memes. It’s also an effective way to hire candidates, particularly in a tight job market.
Consider this: According to a 2018 survey by CareerBuilder, 70% of companies use social media as a tool in the hiring process. And it’s not just to make sure candidates have a clean online presence. It is also becoming a preferred tool for recruiters and hiring managers to find the most qualified, high-caliber candidates possible. At the same time, U.S. workers looking for new jobs are using social media to expand their horizons.
With billions of people on social media, logging on to find candidates can seem overwhelming for small business owners. After all, they typically wear multiple hats and have little time to navigate the Internet to find job candidates.
The good news is that you can do it without too much effort. Follow these six tips to learn how.
How to Use Social Media for Hiring Top Talent
1. Have a Strong Online Presence
In a tight job market, finding suitable candidates is half the battle. Getting them to come on board wins the war. In this digital age, candidates will do as much research on your small business as you’ll do on them. So, it’s essential to have a strong online presence.
How you portray your brand online can have a big impact on your recruitment efforts. Your website, social media pages, job posts, and blog should all be connected. It provides job seekers several different avenues to check your business out.
It’s also important to stay relevant. That means posting on your blog regularly, staying in contact with existing and potential customers on social media, and monitoring your reputation on the Internet. The last thing you want is a negative comment posted on your website or social media accounts that doesn’t get a response from your business. Businesses live and die by the opinions of the Internet community. It’s vital to stay on top of your online presence.
2. Know Your Social Media Platforms
When it comes to using social media to find job candidates, it can either be a fantastic tool or a complete waste of your time. The key is to know which platform is right for your needs. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn may be the first social media companies that come to mind, but others can also be fertile ground for recruitment.
To successfully find top job candidates, you have to go where your target audience is. For instance, if you’re a small business looking for a tax accountant, you’ll probably have a better chance of finding one on LinkedIn than on Snapchat. On the flip side, if you’re a young startup with a cool product, Snapchat and Instagram users may be your target market.
Also, take advantage of each platforms’ strength. Twitter may be best suited to educate job seekers about the brand. You could use Facebook to highlight the people behind the company. And LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing company news. By segmenting your recruiting efforts, you’ll expand your network and avoid any overlap.
For some small business owners, a learning curve comes with using unfamiliar social media platforms. Familiarize yourself with each platform and social media best practices before you begin recruiting people through it.
3. Post Your Job Openings
The old way of searching for job candidates was to post your listing on internal and external jobs boards or hire recruiters to do your bidding for you.
The new way is to spread the word about the job opening on social media, whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. A quick post, tweet, or even an image on Instagram can put you in front of more candidates. By tapping social media channels, you can find more qualified candidates and save on the cost of running job ads at the same time.
4. Be Specific in Your Job Listing
As a small business owner, you understand that time is money. The last thing you want to do is field calls and emails from job candidates who are under-or overqualified. Be as detailed as possible in your online job listing to avoid wasting time.
That means specifying all the job skills, requirements, and education needed for the open position. Lay out how you expect the employee to work, whether it’s remotely or in the office, and the hours. Is the schedule flexible, or is it a rigid working environment? Include all of these details in the ad.
If you don’t want to reveal your hand when it comes to the salary, you may want to provide a range. The idea is to weed out as many candidates as possible with the job listing alone. The more specific you are, the faster you’ll find someone who is a perfect fit for the position.
5. Target Top Candidates
Just as job seekers look for new opportunities online, you can use social media to target sought-after candidates. Social media is full of information you can use to create a list of people you would want to join your enterprise.
You can find candidates via blog posts on LinkedIn, interesting tweets on Twitter, or in groups on Facebook. Through their social media musings, you’ll be able to get an idea of the person and whether or not they will be a good fit for your organization.
Pre-screening can cut the time and money you’d be spending by bringing the wrong candidates in for interviews. Once you have a list of top candidates, you can reach out to them on their preferred social media platforms.
6. Enlist Current Employees to Recruit New Ones
A job listing alone won’t garner as much attention as a dynamic digital ad that includes more than just the job description. In a tight job market, people are choosier about where they work. They want a collaborative environment where people are just as important as the job.
To show off your strengths and workforce, ask current employees to share their experiences working at your company. Videos that run alongside the job listing make the post personal. That can be much more powerful than blanketing all the leading online job boards with ads.
Final Thoughts
Social media has become a daily part of most people’s lives, and that includes those seeking employment. Social media may not be your preferred method of communication or entertainment, but as a small business owner, you can’t afford to ignore it.
These days, most job searchers start their journeys online. For small businesses, social media provides a valuable opportunity. Using social media for hiring and recruiting purposes doesn’t just save you money. It also helps you reach more candidates and weed out the bad ones with a few clicks of a mouse.
Have you used social media for hiring to find great talent? What strategies have worked for you?
