Social recruitment: the next big trend in hiring for your business

Social media, supplemented by news apps is the go-to place to find the latest news happenings, but it is also on these platforms where job seekers are finding out about available positions.

Gone are the days of employers and recruiters advertising a position in print and online and being inundated by quality candidates. Recruiters now use social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in addition to LinkedIn to find and engage with prospects, sometimes starting off with a very small pool of candidates meeting the criteria.

What the water cooler of old was for office gossip, social media networking is for careers in the twenty-first century. Social hiring, also referred to as social sourcing, is an emerging recruitment strategy that delivers results and is here to stay. Every year more digital natives are entering the job seeking fraternity, but the challenge for recruiters is how to reach and engage them.

Social hiring is gaining popularity as it allows recruiters to reach passive candidates. It’s important for recruiters to familiarise themselves with social media, to start using it and build on their connections for now and in the future.

Businesses that want to use social media in their recruitment drives need to allocate a dedicated resource to create a healthy online company profile and authentically build an employer brand. It is important to update prospective employees about available positions, but to also give them a peek at the working environment. Future employees from Generation Y and Z are interested in the company culture, so it is important to think about the employer brand and how it translates in words, images and video across the various platforms.

It takes time to build an active social media following and even more resources to continue engaging with the community and feeding relevant content that it will respond to. Customers of online career portals don’t always grasp the lengths sites go to, to foster their communities and keep the content fresh and relevant. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to make a job portal translate well socially.

Recruiters save time and cost by partnering with a career portal that has a large and active social media community and offers online tools to make it easy for candidates to be notified of and apply for available positions via their device of choice.

Social media hiring is here to stay and recruiters have to determine the amount of time and resources required to find, attract and hire the right talent through social media networking as well as measure its effectiveness.