linkedin miniguide five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy

Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy

Review and set goals

Introduction

Supercharge your talent brand

Harness the power of your employees

Engage with your talent online

Measure for success4

5

6

3 7

9

Conclusion10

Table of contents

LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 2

A strategic approach to social recruiting The modern talent leader is many things: a matchmaker, marketer, salesperson, talent advisor, data scientist, researcher and technologist. Modern talent leaders embrace the recruiting innovations that have emerged over the past decade – and none of these have been more powerful or transformative than social recruiting.

At the intersection of recruitment and social media, social recruiting is more than just using social networks to communicate with candidates. It’s about actively listening, participating and engaging with targeted groups and communities, with a long-term view towards building candidate engagement and your talent brand.

To be truly social, you need to build a community, facilitate communication within that community, and rely on social connections between community members to recruit. And you’ll need a comprehensive, targeted, agile and measurable strategy based on research and data.

But what makes a killer social recruiting strategy?

Here are five easy steps to developing one.


01 What is your team’s current approach to social recruiting?

02 What platforms are you using?

03 How are you communicating?

04 Who are you talking to?

05 Which tools are working and which aren’t?

06 What results have you achieved?

1. Review and set goalsTalk to your team and even some candidates about their thoughts and experiences.

Next, identify your target audiences. These might include potential candidates for key senior roles or university students, who you want to reach out to as part of your long term recruitment strategy.

Use the data you collected during the research to set goals for your social recruiting strategy. These should follow the SMART approach – specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic and timely.

Here are some sample goals to get you thinking:

• Increase offer acceptance rate by X% in X months.

• Reduce attrition by X% in X months.

• Double the number of employees with an optimised social presence.

• Increase Talent Brand Index1 score by X% in X months relative to key talent competitors or for high priority functions/regions.

Here are some sample goals to get you thinking:

1 Talent Brand Index measures attractiveness of companies as an employer of choice versus peers.


2. Supercharge your talent brandIs your company seen as a great place to work? In today’s competition for top talent, your reputation as an employer is a key factor in whether a candidate will take your job – or leave it. Your talent brand is the highly social and public version of your employer brand that incorporates what talent thinks, feels and shares about your company as a place to work.

Investing in your talent brand can help you:

• Spend less on hiring.

• Boost retention.

• Influence the conversation with candidates.

Talent brand is a crucial consideration for your social recruiting strategy. How can your actions on social media contribute to a strong talent brand?

Five steps to creating a great talent brand

1. Get buy in: Make sure your CEO and senior leadership team are on board. Leverage the expertise of your marketing, communications and IT colleagues.

2. Listen and learn: Audit your current talent brand by talking to employees and candidates, and going through the recruitment process step by step.

3. Craft your strategy: Decide how you will position your company’s talent brand, set some goals and road test your new messaging with current employees.

4. Shout it from the rooftops: Promote your talent brand by engaging with people in meaningful and creative ways across various social media platforms.

5. Review and improve: Measure your progress and adjust your approach as needed.


3. Harness the power of your employees Employees are your unofficial marketers and social talent leaders. In developing your social recruiting strategy, consider how you can turn your employees into champions of your recruiting efforts and talent brand.

This can also be an opportunity to get your human resources managers and hiring managers involved in your social recruiting strategy, and personally invested in seeing it succeed. Train your team to use LinkedIn and other social media to best represent your talent brand. Periodically remind them of the opportunity and call out those doing a really great job.

Five ideas for turning employees into ambassadors

1. Help your team update their profile pages.

2. Get C-suite support to drive widespread participation – for example, by sending out a company-wide email.

3. Share authentic stories, pictures and company events across a variety of media so your employees (and followers) can repost and drive viral discussion.

4. Educate employees on your brand. The more connected they are to the brand, the better ambassadors they’ll be.

5. Measure engagement and create action plans to build your foundation of engaged, enthusiastic brand ambassadors.


4. Engage with your talent onlineInfluence and excite through meaningful content

Online professional networks are the fastest growing source of quality hires globally, and have become the second most important source after internet job boards.2

Gone are the days when you could push your campaign message out and watch relevant job applications fly in. Today’s candidates expect a two-way conversation, with context and personalisation.

2 & 3 LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2015 Global Recruiting Trends: 3 Must-know talent acquisition trends.

Social media is the ideal platform for sharing relevant content. Your social media strategy should incorporate how you will use social media platforms to:

• Tap into passive talent. Social media can be particularly effective for engaging and attracting passive talent – which comprises 75% of the global professional workforce.3

• Build a talent pipeline. Instead of maintaining records manually, you can use tools such as Talent Pipeline in LinkedIn Recruiter to aggregate, track, contact and nurture talent leads.

• Advertise with aplomb. Advertising through social professional networks lets you treat every job posting like a branding opportunity.

75% passive talent

Global professional workforce


Top tips to engage online

01

Target your communications – the more relevant your message is to a particular audience, the greater its impact will be.

02

Spark interesting discussions by asking questions, offering advice and sharing stories rather than just concentrating on jobs.

03

Use images, graphics, charts and videos to bring your brand to life.

04

Partner with your marketing and communications colleagues. They know how to build brand promises and great content, and how to identify and reach target audiences.

05

Create irresistible job descriptions by using standard titles and keywords to help LinkedIn’s algorithm match and deliver your job postings to the most relevant candidates. Link to your Company Page and use Sponsored Jobs to showcase key positions to targeted talent.


Your Talent Brand Index score rises versus your peers and in the segments that you care most about.

Using the Talent Brand Index lets you measure your branding efforts and see how well you’re reaching and engaging professionals with your social recruitment strategy. The index is based on the billions of interactions that take place on our platform each year and uses reach and engagement metrics to calculate your Talent Brand Index score.

You can also measure your social recruitment strategy on LinkedIn by tracking your Talent Brand Index score over time, against competitors, across geographies and across functions.

Talent Brand Index5. Measure for success A modern talent leader lives and dies by the mantra, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. To make better decisions and truly build candidate engagement with your talent brand, the social talent leader must measure what they’re doing so they know what’s working.

There is a variety of tools, research and other metrics you can use to monitor and better understand the impact of your community building and communication initiatives.

Some key indicators of social recruitment strategy success are:In-house metrics • Your offer acceptance rate goes up. • Employee retention increases. • Internal surveys confirm your employees are

excited about your company as a place to work.Online metrics • Traffic to your employee video stories goes up. • You double the number of employees with an

optimised social presence.

A truly social and modern talent leader knows that having numbers and data will not only help them make better decisions, but also earn the trust of others in their organisation. Based on this knowledge you can invest your time in improving your strategy in the segments that matter most.


Conclusion Over the past 10 years, recruitment has undergone more change than in the previous 40 years. Talent leaders no longer rely on business cards and cold calling – now they can immediately engage warm candidates through social media. But to successfully embark on your social recruiting journey, you need a killer social recruiting strategy.

In developing your strategy, audit your current approach and set some measurable goals and targets. Then craft your strategy, taking into account how you can use social media to:

• Supercharge your talent brand.

• Mobilise employees as recruitment and talent brand champions.

• Engage your target audience through meaningful content and conversations.

• Source and advertise through social networks. "To be truly social ... you’ll need a comprehensive, targeted, agile and measurable strategy based on research and data."


linkedin miniguide five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy

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