Recruiting through Social Media
Recruiting through Social MediaMany companies under-utilize their social media presence because they only assume that it’s good for one thing – bringing in prospective clients or attracting buyers of some kind. In reality, your social effort is reflective of your business as a whole, and that includes the people that work for you day in and day out.
You might have the most expansive and incredible “looking” social reach, but allow us to pose the following question – do any of your employees contribute to the action? Are they generating content that proves a commitment to their work, ultimately revealing some level of character? It’s one thing to have a social media team that specializes or focuses on content generation, but it’s a whole new ballgame when you engage all team members to create professional, informational, and even quirky videos and articles.
Your Team is your Recruiting Influencer
Imagine you are a candidate looking for your next gig. The company culture and management team at your last job just didn’t match your personality or working style. Perhaps your expected level of participation was too one dimensional or devoid of anything other than your daily assignments.
One day you stumble upon the Facebook page or RebelMouse of a software development company. Instead of your standard sales pitch or call-to-action link out to some article with no context, you see what appears to be a personality-driven, employee-created video about themselves. That’s right, just plain old fun and games with some edgy content and a window peering into the day-to-day routine of the staff.
Remember, just about any time you appear on the web somewhere, you are selling to people. This includes potential customers as well as potential employees. Social media presents an opportunity to leverage technology and online platforms to reach a wider audience, but you should often think about the kind of audience that you might attract.
Sure, you could sit around all day blogging about why you are the best tech company on the east coast, or why business has been increasing month over month. In reality, you could be hiding the fact that you are a slave-driver that works people to the bone, causing a high turnover rate as you squeeze every bit of juice out of your team. But if your social media campaign is broadcasting clear signals to the contrary – happy employees willing to generate social media content in addition to their everyday tasks – you are setting yourself up as a highly desirable place to work.
This kind of company atmosphere also allows you to learn more about the hobbies, additional skills, and background that a particular worker might have. A quiet developer might also have a tremendous amount of film experience that you wouldn’t know about unless you proposed a collaborative effort. Designers, writers, and marketing professionals might have all kinds of unique experience that can be utilized in some other way. Are you truly taking advantage of all the skills that your employees have to offer?
Getting your Team Involved in Recruiting
Check out this video we created recently, just to have fun and create some buzz about our work. We also feel that it is very important to share our individual stories so that you can get to know the friendly faces on our team.
Taking advantage of social media allows you to easily share vignettes or blog posts that enable someone to peer into the day-to-day activity of your business.
Let’s go back to our fictitious job search for a moment and think about working for any ol’ business that operates near you. Imagine you are getting ready to make the next leap in your career and the job choice comes down to two companies that really impress you.
One is incredibly active on social media, giving you a huge selection of posts and videos to pick through to learn more about the people you would be working with.
The other has little to no presence, with a fancy front-end to their website. But that’s it…
In many situations, the active and human element that comes out of the social media presence will offer a much better picture on what your day to day working life could look like as opposed to simply hoping that you will like the team you’d be working with.
As the world changes and technology evolves, the people that adapt the most and figure out ways to bring out the best in their team will succeed. Others that refuse to consider new ways to connect with friends, fans, co-workers, entrepreneurs, managers and clients will ultimately be left in the dust.
Consider adding a social media element to attract talent to your business, in any capacity.
And when times get tough, you know there is beer at the end of the tunnel.
