15 Social Recruiting Tips Proven to Attract the Best Talent - CareerEnlightenment.com

Tip 5: Optimize your LinkedIn Company Page for SearchOk, now you’ve got a LinkedIn company page.How do you make it stand out from the many, many company pages out there?Start with the text. LinkedIn uses the text you write when you create your account to help people find you, and Google uses text from LinkedIn pages to decide where they’ll show in search results.Step 1: Write a brief main message. LinkedIn will only show the first 200 characters of your description above “See More,” and when your company page shows up in search, Google only shows the first 154 characters. Focus on what you want your message to be, and get it down to 154 characters.Step 2: Be sure to use the remaining 1,846 characters LinkedIn gives you for the description. All of this is searchable text for Google, so you’ll want to include keywords people would use to find your company in search, and you may need to balance it out with marketing needs not just recruiting.Step 3: Fill out the “Company Sp ecialties” section. Once again, this area is indexed by Google, so you’ll want to have search keywords in here, while keeping in mind that its main purpose is to tell people on LinkedIn what your company does. So, if you’re looking to hire software engineers, don’t fill one of the boxes with “software engineers” as a specialty, unless you somehow manufacture them. Instead try “Software Engineering.”Tip 6: Create Custom Images for More Social EngagementDid you know that just having images on LinkedIn makes your company page 14x more likely to be viewed?On social media in general, content with images is 650% more likely to be viewed.Furthermore, when text is paired with a relevant image, people are about  8 times more likely to remember the message. And the good news is, you can create a good custom image on your own for nothing, as we’ll show you.Step 1: Go to Snappa and click “Design a Graphic Now” and register.Step 2: Click on the type of image you need to cre ate. Snappa helps you by automatically sizing the images for most types of social media images.Step 3: Now create your image. Snappa provides some cool templates to help you get started, or you can click “Create from Scratch” to create custom images.Note: Snappa does not include a template for LinkedIn company pages. The current ideal dimension for a Linkedin company page image is 646 x 220. You can enter that in the Custom Size area.Tip 7: Get Employees to Help Share Your CultureThe people who form your company are in the best place to share company culture authentically on social media.In a case study on Sodexo’s successful social recruiting efforts, Marion Muller notes that “employees are the face of your brand as an employer.”To help them get comfortable talking about the brand, create a social media policy. Knowing the boundaries for using social media at your company allows employees to creatively promote your brand because they’re not constantly worried about maki ng mistakes.You can find some great tips for creating a social media policy here.Once you’ve got a company social media policy in place, it’s time to use the most authentic social recruiting resource tool you have your team.Encourage them to share honestly on social media about what your workplace culture is like. Be sure to have them use the company culture hashtags you created in tip 2. Finally, follow them with your company accounts, and share their content.Tip 8: Prepare for Social Media Mistakes to Avoid DisastersSo you’ve encouraged your employees to start talking about your company on social media with branded hashtags. What could possibly go wrong?Rather than fearing what could possibly happen, be prepared. As Rebekah Radice notes on her website, if there’s no plan, we just react, and “reaction leads to overreaction, which can quickly spiral from bad to worse to all-out catastrophe in a matter of moments.”Having a slip up on social media that is quickly correcte d is one thing. A drawn out social media crisis is another. If you prepare for problems, you’ll handle them better and won’t live in fear of hitting the “Tweet” button. Here are 3 steps for handling a social disaster.Step 1: Acknowledge the problem. When an issue appears, the first thing you should do is let people know you’re aware of it (following tip 9 should help you become aware quickly). Acknowledgment isn’t an admission, it’s just letting people know that you’re paying attention to their concerns, and that they can expect answers. When you don’t acknowledge a problem, expect the call for a resolution to get louder and louder.Step 2: If a mistake was made, own up. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen, and don’t pretend you got hacked either, that will just make it worse. Either way, you’re inviting the controversy to get bigger. The only way to help things wind down is to give people resolution. Acknowledge the mistake, let them know what steps you’re tak ing to correct it, and move on.Step 3: Learn from the mistake. Once things have quieted down, go back and do a post-mortem. How did this happen? Was something not communicated in your social media policy? If you do this, you’ll only improve. If you don’t, your mistakes will start to look like an embarrassing pattern.Tip 9: Monitor Social Media for Brand Issues and OpportunitiesThere are several tools out there that can help you monitor social media for opportunities to connect with employees and potential employees, look for relevant content to share, and look out for problems.Chris Makara gives a great rundown of  tools to help you monitor social media  based on advice  100 experts.We think one of the easiest to use is Hootsuite. Heres how to get started.Step 1: Create a Hootsuite account, and add all your company social accounts to it.Step 2: Create basic streams to monitor. In Hootsuite, click “AddStream.” For each account, you’ll see a list of instant options. For the Twitter account in the screenshot below, for example, you can monitor mentions (when people directly mention your Twitter account using the @ symbol), retweets, likes and more.Step 3: Create custom streams. This is where Hootsuite and other social monitoring tools get powerful, especially with Twitter.In Hootsuite click “AddStream” then “Search.”Create searches for all your branded hashtags, your brand name, industry influencers, and topics that will be interesting for your audience.Click “Show Examples” to see other ways this can be used.Tip 10: How to Find Great Candidates on LinkedInOne of LinkedIn’s great features is its powerful search tool for prospecting recruits. Use it to really home in on potential employees, and automatically keep an eye out for new candidates.Step 1: Start by typing in a broad description of the candidate you’re searching for, such as “VP Marketing.”Step 2: Narrow it down by using advanced search options. Just searching for VP Marketi ng returns almost a half million results. But if you click “Advanced” next to the search button, you’ll be able to filter results by current company, location, industry, school, past companies and more.Step 3: Search on! Have LinkedIn send you a weekly or monthly update of your search. After you’ve narrowed down the search with filters, click “Save Search.” It’s a little hard to find see the screenshot below. After you click, you’ll have a few options.Tip 11: Stay on Message with Career Specific Facebook and Twitter PagesThere’s a good chance your customers and your employees are two totally different groups of people, with different interests.While you may want to occasionally share hiring information on your customer facing social media and product information on your employee facing social media, it’s best to keep them separate most of the time with separate pages.It’s what the big companies do, it doesn’t cost anything extra, and it’s really easy, so t here’s no reason you can’t do it as well.Step 1: Login to Facebook and go through the process of setting up a new page. If you’re logged into Twitter, log out and create a new account.Step 2: Name the accounts. Make them easy to find by giving Facebook, Twitter and any other social accounts focused on recruiting the same user names. UPS, for example, uses UPSJobs on Twitter and Facebook. “Your company name” + “jobs,” or “careers” are good possibilities.Step 3: Make these accounts the focus of your social recruiting efforts with content that specifically relates to employment at your company.Tip 12: Create Easy Employer Branding Videos to ShareIf you spend any time checking out social media branding for big companies, you’ll notice they have a lot of video.This probably sounds like something you need to hire a professional to do, right?Turns out the powerful little cameras on our phones, combined with the right light and sound, can produce surprising results. Watc h the video below, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish with just a phone and the right techniques.Here are 6 steps toward creating your first recruiting video with your phone, a few employees, and no budget.Step 1: Find a quiet space.Step 2: Find something to brace the phone on so the recording isn’t shaky.Step 3: Record horizontally, never vertical. Just about every screen you look at except your phone is always positioned horizontally.Step 4: Have subjects face a window that gives plenty of natural light.Step 5: For an easy first video, introduce a few employees, and ask them why they like working at your company.Step 6: Try multiple takes until you get one ready to go, without need for editing, and upload to YouTube directly from your phone.Find some more great tips in this short video from Wistia.Tip 13: Make Passive Candidates and Social Recruiting Work for YouIf you’re using social media to recruit, you’re going to end up with a lot of passive candidates, p eople who weren’t out actively looking for a job.There’s considerable research that says passive candidates don’t fare as well as active ones.According to the research, 51% of businesses say passive candidates fail because of lack of passion or commitment, 40% because they can’t adapt to their new position, and 63% because they were not a good fit/couldn’t adapt to culture (it adds up to more than 100% because there is usually more than one reason).So, if you’re considering a passive candidate, try to find out what is motivating them to consider your position.Are they passionate about the work? To avoid hiring candidates that don’t adapt, present them with an accurate picture of what it’s like. Don’t sugar coat the job.Finally, if you hire a passive candidate make sure you’ve got a great onboarding process to help them fit in with the culture.Tip 14: Attract Candidates to your Employer Brand with InstagramSharing on Facebook isn’t what it used to be.These days, it’s pretty hard to get attention on Facebook without paying for it.Instagram, on the other hand, has the highest user engagement of any of the top social media, with about 10X more than Facebook and 100X more than Twitter.That’s 10 100 times more clicks, likes, shares, etc. per post. It’s a great place for building your employer brand, especially with the future in mind, as 55 percent of its users are under 29.Step 1: Set up an Instagram work account. Instagram is a mobile app you’ll need to have a phone running Android or iOS to use it. Download the app from Google Play or Apple’s App Store, then fill out your profile. If you already have a personal Instagram account, you’ll want to go to Settings, then Add account. Set up the business account with an email address (rather than your phone number), so that you can share it with others from your company. Where it asks for a name, put in your company’s name. Your user name should match the usernames you’ve used for other social media accounts if possible. Instagram recommends using your company logo as your profile photo.Step 2: Get the goods. Take real photos and video of your product and employees, and give people an idea for what it’s really like at your company. The hard work, the play, and everything in between.Step 3: As you did with Twitter in tip 2, create hashtags specific to your company culture and use existing ones to help people discover your account. Check out the image from Zappos’ Instagram account below for an example of company culture related hashtags, existing hashtags, and a great image related to the company’s culture.Step 4: Turn on notifications. You’ll want to know when someone engages with your images or mentions your account so that you can keep up your end of the conversation. Instagram lets you choose notifications for 10 different types of interactions, such as when you get new likes, comments, followers, etc. Try starting off with all of them set to “F rom Everyone.” If it gets annoying, fine tune it a little.Step 5: Engage real people. Follow clients, employees and people whose work you enjoy, accounts important to your industry and National Geographic. Everyone should follow that account. For some inspiration from other brands, check outZappos, UPS, and Yelp.Tip 15: Learn About Your Facebook Audience to ImproveYou can use Facebook’s own, built-in insight tools to learn what content is getting traction on your Facebook page.If you created a Facebook page just for employer branding (tip 6), this will give you data specific to people interested in employment, rather than your company’s general followers.Step 1: Login to your Facebook business page and click “Insights.”Step 2: Click reach. Here you’ll be able to see a graph that shows the daily reach the number of people who saw your content each day.Step 3: Look for the spikes and click on them. When you click, you’ll see the content that appeared on your Facebook pa ge that day and the number of impressions, clicks, comments and shares each piece of content got. Seek out all your top-performing posts and look for patterns.Ready to start hiring effectively on social media?Social media really can help you with recruiting.Did you know it can bring in 30-50 percent more applicants?Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes says it can dramatically cut the time and costs of recruitment, and also believes it plays a part in his company’s amazing employee retention rate they have just 2 percent turnover.Alright, we’ve given you the reasons to start, and the tips you need to recruit on social media.But don’t let all these tips and steps discourage you.If you’re pressed for time, try just getting through Tip 1. Periscope is really easy to setup, and it’s a fun way to meet some potential recruits and learn about them.We hope this helped!