Since social media has diversified and professionals have spread through different channels (from Behance and Instagram for creative talent to LinkedIn and Facebook Groups for communication among other guilds), job-posting websites are no longer the only option for people recruitment.
The days in which social platforms were exclusively for personal usage, and therefore almost completely limited to communication with friends and family, are far in the past. Conversely, the birth of several professional-focused networks, such as some of those above, led digital interaction to reach occupational dimensions, that is to say, it also has generated an opportunity for HR’s evolution.
In this regard, nowadays, around 84% of companies have included social networks in their plans for talent acquisition, but the rest is likely still stuck in finding the ideal way to embed digital media into recruiting practices. For such reason, we’ve created a clear description of the most important options that social media can offer to recruiters.
As expected, Facebook is the most popular social network in the world. It’s currently used by 2 billion people from almost all countries. It was also predictable that such a big social platform couldn’t have focused only on friend-to-friend interaction. On the contrary, it has evolved, and it has allowed institutions, companies and other kinds of entities to get in touch with single users through alternatives such as fan pages and groups.
No matter how many profiles you have in your database, you will always find more potential candidates on Facebook, spread throughout groups and pages, but probably the most adequate option is Facebook Marketplace. This section of Zuckerberg’s company is an e-commerce extension that allows brands to post services, products, and opportunities for everyone on the social media platform.
This marketplace, alongside Facebook Pages, has revolutionized Facebook for companies and has helped them to connect with their target audiences. However, the key input regarding these two sub-products of Facebook is the importance of paid advertising. The advantage of these ad features is that, compared to others, Facebook Ads provides an amazing targeting experience that allows recruiters to reach very specific profiles according to age, gender, location, and keywords.
Ads let businesses post job opportunities profitably, working with bypass options to target and filter applicants. This possibility, hand in hand with direct searchings on Facebook’s directory, could be an amazing way to find passive talent and to explore the personal background of priorly targeted profiles.
Twitter is rarely seen as a recruitment platform due to its microblogging characteristics. Regarding the broadcast of opportunities, businesses can use it like any other social media, posting job vacancies as tweets. However, the recruiter must keep in mind one of the key differentiators of this network: Hashtags.
In fact, Twitter stands out for how easy is to position among the discussion of a specific topic, helping brands to assess people from their interests through tags. As an example, you can easily place a #marketing tag in a CMO opportunity to get close to people interested in advertising and digital marketing. In that spirit, this platform is especially recommended to interact with your target talent population.
Although not as convenient as Behance or Flickr, two portfolio and showcasing online boards, Instagram has quickly become a common place for the creative industry. Thousands of photographers, painters, video producers, makeup artists, tattoo artists, architects, publicists and graphic, fashion and interior designers use this social media to share their work with the world and, therefore, to offer their services. So that, it is an amazing pool of creative talent.
Recruiters can use the Twitter-like feature of hashtags, which allows them to post information based on a certain search query. These hashtags also let companies explore market segments. They can look at the followers of other brands to undercover a population that is interested in specific kind of information. This tactic is very productive even for targets that are unlinked to the creative industry. For example, if a profile focused on attorneys and law posts about some related information, the people who interact might share interests with the subject.
LinkedIn is likely the most obvious example of a social network that can be useful for talent acquisition. In fact, according to LinkedIn’s 2015 own research, the usage of professional-focused social media (that LinkedIn is itself) increased 73% regarding people recruitment.
There’s nothing we can tell about LinkedIn more than a big suggestion to use it. This social network was conceived to link companies with professionals so that its main purpose, and all the alternatives that it offers, is oriented to generate a communication channel for business and talents. Some of the possibilities of this media are:
- Developing a network of professionals: One of the main subjects of corporations with their target inside LinkedIn is, in fact, job vacancies. Posting opportunities is an amazing way to interrelate with an audience that is expecting to gain labor opportunities. So, a company can easily build referral chains for their job posts to connect with different people.
- Searching for candidates: The profile search engine of LinkedIn is not a bit inferior to the different job boards’ ones. The complex search box of the media allows anyone to look for people with very specific professional backgrounds, locations, and experiences. So that, it makes work a lot easier for recruiters.
- Advertising solutions: As in Facebook, it is recommended to use LinkedIn advertising options, which are specially designed for the promotion of job opportunities. This feature is perhaps one of the most highlightable options of the platform because it connects corporate pages with vacancies.
- Joining and building groups: brands can participate in specialized groups of professional to link with colleagues.
- Looking for new employees based on references: you can look for people that are referred by other interesting talent profiles in LinkedIn and also look inside the pages of other brands to find people that be part of those companies’ teams.
LinkedIn might feel like the most optimal social media for people recruitment. It provides lots of features for HR teams in their quest to find new and capable talent. However, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are also amazing channels to communicate with professional audiences that might not be expecting job opportunities.
In that sense, recruiters must take into consideration all these alternatives and include them into their talent acquisition plans for a professional population that is moving in a digitalized and more interconnected world.
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