A Social Recruiting Guide

Sitting there at the latest HR conference, one recruiter asks the other - “how do you use social media for recruiting?”The other responds sheepishly, “I don’t…”and the whole ball room immediately goes quiet in awkward silence in the realization that someone admitted they weren’t an expert in "social recruiting." If this is you, have no fear. You’re not alone and I’m here to help. Still figuring social media out? The Human Capital Institute recently found that 72% of HR organizations were using social media for recruiting but only 55% thought they were getting all of the value out of it. But think about it further - that means one in four isn’t using social media. Let’s run the numbers

• LinkedIn started in 2003
• Facebook started in 2004
• Twitter started in 2006

So if you are still figuring this out - no worries - we all are. There are constantly new features, uses and best practices being figured out and retired. A few social media basics If you have a recruiter seat on LinkedIn, you can search over 200 million individual profiles. The other place to look is at Facebook. In the search bar, type in “programmers who are not my friends”and you should see lots of people (on the right hand side, it should say more than 1,000. Now on the right hand side, click on “See More Filters”. Now in the likes put the programming language you need (lets say - Java) - and I still have more than 1,000. Now lets pretend they need to speak Spanish. Now I am showing a reasonable amount (e.g. 100+). You can also try Twitter. Visit Twitter and search for #Jobs and see how many there are - it is massive. You may get lost in that noise. To do this right, I like to use Twitter to reinforce our employer brand in ways that potential employees would like. For instance @Lego_careers does a good job of mixing fun lego facts and stories with announcements about key job openings (Like this one about a hamster on a lego train). Another great example is when the NSA did some tweets completely in code. There were three tweets all coded in different methods - and at the end of them was a link to a job fair. What a great way to find people who match your brand! Probably the best tip for social media is to begin by trying to figure out where your targets will be spending time and conversing on line! Sometimes it is the standard social sites and sometimes it may take some imagination. But this sure beats post and pray! What fun social recruiting tips do you have for everyone?