How to Optimize Recruitment Through Social Media
At one of MaRS’ Entrepreneurship 101 lectures, Margo Crawford, president and CEO of Business Sherpa Group, discussed why social media matters in the recruitment process.
Her lecture focused on job boards, aggregators and social media sites, and how you can optimize their use for your recruitment needs.
JOB BOARDS
If you’re considering posting job opportunities on job boards remember that there is a lot of noise out there. Today you can find a job board specific to just about anything. If you’re looking for a clockmaker job board, you’ll find one—but don’t be seduced by all of these boards.
Margo’s advice is to research job sites as you would if you were a job seeker. You should research the types of job boards that your colleagues and employees use when looking for jobs so you can gauge where other candidates may also be searching.
One way to determine if you’re using the right job boards is to monitor the metrics of the boards you’ve posted to. For example, look at the number of hires you’ve made from each job board, as well as at the quality and quantity of submissions you receive from particular postings. Paying attention to the metrics forces you to look past working only from job boards that you’ve previously hired from.
Check out the Techvibes Job Board here.
JOB AGGREGATORS
Aggregators are a great way to increase the visibility of your job postings and your website’s career page. Aggregators pull job postings from your company’s website into a searchable location for job seekers.
LinkedIn and Indeed are two sites that Margo uses at her company. When using LinkedIn, you should build a relationship with specific target groups before you start posting your jobs. Indeed has excellent search engine optimization and is free to use.
When you’re using aggregators it’s important that your job postings have titles that are easy to search for and that sum up what the position is all about. For instance, if you’re looking to hire a business analyst, do not create a fancy or creative title for the position because aggregators will not be looking for it.
NETWORKS AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a great way to tap into the networks you’re connected to. Have your colleagues post any job openings on their LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as any other social media sites they use, so that you’re able to reach their networks. Most employees should be willing to share job postings with their networks because it shows they’re committed to your company. If an employee is unwilling to share a job posting with their network you may want to question why they’re unwilling to do this.
When you tweet about a job posting make sure to add an image along with a short message. Many programs—like Bitly, for example—are available to shorten URLs for you.
Finally, remember to track your metrics. You want to know how the strongest candidates find the positions you post.
To learn more, watch the full lecture video.
This content first appeared on MaRS.
