Using social media for recruitingThe biggest challenge that recruiters face is to reach out, engage and hire top talent. You ask any

recruiter and they want to be where the most qualified and talented pool of candidates is. Social

media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. have made it easier for the recruiters to reach out and

create such a pool of talent for filling up their most critical positions.

This use of social media for recruiting needs is called social recruiting. However, there is more to

social recruiting than just hiring the right talent for open positions. It gives the recruiters, job seekers

and organizations multiple advantages. At the same time, one has to be wary of using a powerful

tool as LinkedIn for hiring as any activity on such platforms instantly gets broadcasted to a large

network of professionals. Through this blog, I’d like to touch upon some of these advantages. I’ll also

try to touch upon some potential areas where users of social recruiting might need to maintain

caution.

Employer Brand: Social recruiting gives an opportunity to communicate directly with the prospective

candidates. It is an opportunity for recruiters to showcase the candidates and potential employees

the culture that exists in the organization. They can showcase what it is like to work for the

organization. The catch, however, is that if your organization culture is not great then you can do

very little about it. Employer branding will do little to build your employer brand. Rather having a

presence on social media channels can be a very precarious situation to be in.

Talent Pipeline: Social media provides platform to build pipeline of talent that is genuinely

interested in working for your organization. Having a pipeline of candidates ready for your critical

hiring needs saves a lot of time, effort and money for the organization. It is efficient and gives you

direct access to top talent. However, it is a different thing to build a talent pipeline and to use it

effectively. Sending out a wrong message regarding your hiring needs can result in a situation where

your network becomes unresponsive. This can be more harmful than being helpful.

Access to passive candidates: One of the things where social media outscores other hiring channels

is the access that it provides to passive candidates. Passive candidates are essentially not looking for

opportunities actively but might be open to connect with recruiters or business leaders from your

organization. LinkedIn alone has a global member base of more than 380 million users. Not all of

them would be looking for a job at the same time. Therefore, passive candidates can become part of

your talent pipeline, can give you access to the right candidates from their own networks and can

even become interested in your company if the right job comes up. Recruiters, however, have to be

very cautious about the kind of messaging that is being sent out to such candidates because it takes

a lot of effort to convert passive candidates into serious candidates while it is very easy to lose them

out with a single wrong message.

Network: Social media literally gives unrestricted access to recruiters to global talent and an

opportunity to create their own network. It is a place to build their personal brand. In some ways,

this is equivalent to taking traditional route to recruiting top talent but with the aid of digital

channels. The recruiters need to be sure to divide the line between personal branding and

networking for the sake of building pipeline for the organization. Many organizations do this by using

professional licenses for some of the digital channels but it is not practised universally and all digital

channels do not provide professional licenses.

Analytics: Social media channels can give access to data and insights that recruiters have long sought

for but have not been able to get. Recently a social media organization showed us with a click of a

button where we have gained talent from and to which companies we have lost talent to. Not only

that, it gave us absolute numbers in terms of how we stack up vis-à-vis other companies. Such

powerful data points and other analytics can help our recruiters gain insights and work on them

proactively to reduce outflow of talent and also know about the right places to hire from. The

organizations will, of course, have to invest in building the right analytics team to take advantage of

such data. Without such a team in place, we might just see the tip of the iceberg.

These are, of course, just some of the benefits of social recruiting. Ultimately, social media is another

tool in recruiters’ repertoire to help select the right candidate for the job. It might help in getting the

right candidates more efficiently but using social media requires time and effort. Social recruiting

takes many cues from traditional ways of recruiting but provides a digital edge to it.