5 Ways to Use Social Media to Recruit Employees

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are much more than just hubs for hanging out and chatting with virtual friends. These days, commercial entities are making use of the web’s largest gathering sites for things like marketing, brand development, research, and more. One great business use for social media is recruitment. As a matter of fact, a recent poll by Jobvite found that 92 percent of today’s employee recruiters have already hired – or plan on hiring – employees through social networking sites. Want to know how? Here are five ways to use social media to recruit employees:

Post your job listing on LinkedIn. This social media giant is specifically designed to help professionals connect and has a number of job-related functions built in to the interface, one being the opportunity to post job listings. For a small fee, you can place your job ad on LinkedIn and have it automatically delivered to job seekers who may be qualified and interested.

Facebook ads. Facebook offers some of the most highly targeted marketing available on the web. For a fee, you can place your job ad directly in front of an audience of your choosing, based on qualifiers like age, education, activities, interests, and relationship status. This type of targeting offers endless possibilities when it comes to hiring for a niche position.

Make an announcement. The simplest and easiest thing you can do is to announce your job opening by way of a status update. Use a tool like Hootsuite to post a single status on all of your social networks simultaneously. Be sure to include instructions for those who are genuinely interested to contact you and/or learn more about the job, as you won’t want to post the entire job description in a status update.

Use hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags enable people who are searching for a specific topic to find tweets about that topic. Therefore, if you include hashtags like #jobopening and #employmentopportunity, along with the city and state of your listing, you should be able to attract interested applicants. Don’t forget to include a link to your lob listing in the tweet.

Join LinkedIn groups. Through LinkedIn, you can search for groups (basically virtual clubs) that are centered on your specific market niche, and then advertise your job listing through those groups. For example, if you represent a telemarketing firm, then you can join clubs like “Telemarketers of America” to find qualified job applicants.

When you consider the massive worldwide community of people social networking sites put right at your fingertips (nearly 600 million and counting!), it’s no wonder employers are tapping in to find their next great talent. You can do the same for your business. Just follow these tips.

About the Author: Moises Engesser is an HR manager in charge of recruitment and he’s always looking for new ways to drive potential candidates to his recruiter software system so that he can start the interview process.

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