There are always plenty of Social Media seminars on offer and I attended one recently on ‘ Recruiting via Social Media’.  The presenters talked not only about advertising current vacancies, but also using it as a longer term tool to provide prospective candidates and a wider audience with an in-depth insight into your organisation.

We often get asked by clients about the use of social media and although we have held the odd event ourselves on the topic, things are constantly changing and you need to keep up to date with the latest trends. So I thought I’d share some the latest and greatest tips. Some obvious and hopefully some others insightful:

You firstly need to think through and decide the strategy of using social media. Typical questions that need answering would be: what do we want to communicate? how quickly can we respond? what’s the impression we make or impact if we don’t respond? who is responsible? At this point you may also want to speak to your own employees, especially the more recently joined – did they use social media when they were seeking a new role and what did they gain from it?

Once you’ve set up your organisation profile,  make sure that the careers page portrays an accurate image of your organisation and the information is correct and updated – there’s no point directing people to a careers page if the last status is from months ago and it’s full of old positions that are no longer available. 

There’s also strong suggestion to avoid being too serious – make sure the organisation’s ethos and personality comes out. Video content is very popular and you’ve also got a higher chance of potential employee’s feeling they can relate to those already in the team. This can be done but having staff talking about their experiences within the organisation, or photos of company days for example.

Finally, to make sure that you are attracting the right audience, make sure you are measuring the traffic (Google analytics!)  through the sites on a regular basis and also provide a link to your actual company website.

Kerry White is a Consultant in Manchester and has just asked for our own Google analytics report!