Today’s recruitment campaigns have demonstrated you don’t need to be a big company to create buzz around your brand. With more and more businesses recognising and leveraging social media to communicate their hiring messages, we’ve seen that recruitment advertising can take many forms.

It’s no longer about the spray and pray approach; rather, today’s online recruitment activity is focused on long-term delivery, building and adding to talent pools, and identifying how to maximise their brand when hiring.

If you are a hiring manager considering how to use social media to complement your online recruitment hiring campaigns knowing where to start can be tricky.

Here are a few tips aimed at helping you to combine the reach of social media with the power of your brand to find great recruits.

Why are you doing it?

Some hiring managers make the mistake of dismissing social media, stating it doesn’t deliver the return on investment they need to build their talent pipeline. As a recruiter, however, we find it provides a key complementary tool that supports existing recruitment activity, such as using the job boards or your own careers site.

If you are clear with your objectives from the start, you can accurately measure its activity and value. Do you want to increase the number of enquiries or reach of your message? Or weigh up social media’s value against more traditional and often more expensive routes? Set realistic objectives to help inform and improve your strategy.

Blogs

People are inquisitive by nature, and social media is a great tool to feed that need for knowledge.

A blog can provide a great platform to collect enquiries from potential candidates. In fact, it’s a great way to connect with those who are actively seeking out information about you and are attracted to your brand.

Asking employees from different departments to write a blog will provide great insight into your company’s culture. This first-hand information will speak to current and potential candidates, and could provide a powerful marketing tool, especially if you ensure relevant call to actions or links to your careers pages are included.

It’s not just large companies that can benefit from this. Smaller companies could ask their latest recruit to share their first week experiences in the form of a monthly blog, or you could even write a monthly update and shoe horn your latest vacancies.

Join the conversation and engage

An increasing number of businesses are now using micro-blogging tools such as Twitter to share their latest news, competitions and updates. They are also successfully using them to promote their latest vacancies or share insights into their culture.

Have you tried:

– Asking your HR department to set up a jobs-specific account to share the latest jobs?
– Customising your bio – ensuring it includes links to your careers page?
– Planning when and what you will tweet?
– Asking your followers to RT recruitment messages for you?

Media sharing

Recruitment advertising doesn’t need to be just copy-based. A handful of companies are realising that their ideal candidates do not congregate on one or two platforms – or visit the same job boards every week – so they have begun to experiment with using different platforms to target a different audience.

As part of your online recruitment efforts, you could:

– Set up a branded Youtube channel and create recruitment videos. Try a mixture of formats – for example – insights into your company culture – to start engaging with potential recruits.
– Tell your company story using Flickr, using images to create an affinity with your brand.
– Ask candidates to submit visual CVs on Pinterest (great if you’re looking to hire designers)

A commitment to using the latest social media channels and technologies would make your brand stand out to job hunters.

Experiment & research

When deciding which social media recruitment channel you wish to explore, it’s important to remember one thing: where will your ideal candidate spend most of their time online?

There’s no point in investing all your time and effort using a platform that jobseekers you want to engage with don’t use. This is where research and experimentation comes in.

Once you’ve identified a handful of platforms (you can find this out by sending a poll to your user base, or asking your customers), the next step is to use your brand’s values and selling points, and translate these onto social networking platforms.

You don’t have to be the biggest brand; however, if you are savvy enough to do the research beforehand, you will save an incredible amount of time (thus giving you a head start over the big boys!)