Article: What you need to know about social recruitment today

Talent Acquisition

What you need to know about social recruitment today

A look at the key aspects of social talent acquisition in 2016
What you need to know about social recruitment today
 

A company's recruiting department must coordinate closely with its brand marketing and IT support to keep the ball of Social rolling.

 

 

Social hiring has become an integral part of recruitment today, especially as more and more millennials are joining the workforce. Jobvite’s annual recruiting nation survey in July 2015 showed that at least 92% recruiters were leveraging social media, casting their nets wider than ever before. 

In India, utilization of social professional networks (at 40%) is almost at par with employee referrals (41%) as a top source of quality hiring, according to the LinkedIn Talent Solutions report on India Recruiting Trends 2016.Social media recruitment continues to grow, with a new set of priorities and hacks as new online platforms, networks and technologies gain traction. Let us comprehensively look at some of the major trends in Social recruitment.

Creative social repo matters:

Social feeds that post purely promotional messages or automated vacancy alerts are on their way out. Job seekers now actively research their companies of interest across social media sites. According to the LinkedIn Talent Solutions report on Global Recruiting Trends 2016, in the last two years companies have been spending significantly more on their employer brand and coming up with proactive strategies for outbound channels like online professional networks and social media sites. 

The best talent expects to see quality and substance in an employer. A well nurtured and actively maintained employer brand is likely to attract 9 out of 10 candidates to apply. The best results are when employers use their social channels to curate content that is genuinely useful and interesting to the candidate pool they wish to target.

The Culture of a company is another major differentiator when it comes to attracting top talent. Recruiters are therefore highlighting company culture by giving the candidates a view into an employee’s regular day at work or by having short videos featuring company leaders who talk about the opportunity in an advertised open position. Companies are experimenting with new platforms such as Periscope, a social, live broadcasting app that streams live audio and video from a user’s Smartphone.

Looking beyond the big 3:

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the largest three platforms in the candidate hunt, but new channels are fast encroaching on their territory. Social media savvy recruiters are venturing beyond the top 3 to Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat, with the former leading the pack. 

Passive job seekers in different fields hang out in different places. Recruiters are fast tapping into specialized communities of professionals, for e.g. your new developer may be found on GitHub, the platform where millions of developers collaborate to build personal projects and work together on open source technologies. Similarly, Behance and Cargo Collective are great scouting locations for creative industries as individuals use them to showcase their work. Industry-specific tweet chats are another potential venue for spotting professionals as they are ideating.

Sourcing it smart:

Social networks have become the google of candidates for the recruiters, offering unprecedented access to millions of highly skilled candidates along with professional and personal data. In this large pool, talent identification is the  first critical step which is made possible by controlling candidate variables through writing Boolean strings – a skill that top sourcers or recruiters need to develop in order to get meaningful candidate search results from deep data sources such as resume databases and social media. 

Workable reports that Boolean and x-ray search skills were in high demand in 2015 and this trend is likely to continue as they allow recruiters to hunt for candidates in the most popular and populous networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Social media integration: 

More and more hiring tools and talent acquisition software now work seamlessly with social media sites and professional networks. Job openings can, therefore, be broadcasted easily from the corporate and personal social media profiles to the fans and followers. Recruiters can easily import candidate profiles from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Github, Behance etc. They can also upload and enrich existing, saved resumes with the corresponding social media profiles. It is therefore quite possible to collate all the information about the potential candidates in one place.

Mobile fluidity: 

The use of mobile to search jobs on the go, 24/7 is increasing. About 47% millennials are using mobile devices to look for jobs and the number is on the rise. A bad device experience is a strong discouraging factor. It is therefore to the recruiters’ advantage if their application process is fully mobile-friendly. Young job seekers now expect an application process that works seamlessly across all devices.

Social media recruiting is continuously evolving, with opportunities to innovate multiplying with technological developments and new specialist platforms. A company’s recruiting department must coordinate closely with its brand marketing and IT support to keep the ball of Social rolling. It is important to keep experimenting and keep it fun.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, Recruitment, Technology, #Social Media, #Reimagine HR

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