Recently, I showed you how Jobvite’s latest survey revealed that recruiting via social media is increasing. Ten percent of respondents said they found their “favorite or best” job through Facebook; 6 percent found it through LinkedIn and 5 percent through Twitter. As for recruiters, 94 percent of them are on LinkedIn and 65 percent are active on Facebook — and, most importantly, 78 percent say they’ve made a hire through a social network.
In addition, social media is a great way for recruiters to engage passive candidates. There are some great new tools that integrate social media into your talent acquisition efforts. Here are my favorites. Before I start, let me say that this isn’t an exhaustive list meant to exclude; it’s merely meant as some good examples!
Zartis and OpenHire – Use Your Employees’ Social Connections
Several online tools allow recruiters to use the social networks of their employees. A couple examples: SilkRoad’s OpenHire works in both directions: it lets job-seekers see who they know within your organization and lets employees easily share open positions on their own social pages. Zartis goes a few steps further and lets employees actually add their social connections to your candidate pool. You can then see how many views, clicks, and candidates each employee generates, supercharging your employee referral program.
TalentBin – Score Candidates’ Social Footprint
TalentBin, to take one example in this category, aggregates information from more than 100 websites, offering what it claims is the world’s largest passive candidate database. For each job-seeker, TalentBin creates “a full picture of a candidate’s professional and personal interests,” and gives a score based on criteria you provide. You can then reach out to the job-seeker through one of their own social channels. That’s a great way to stand out from other recruiters, who will likely contact the job-seeker through conventional email.
PathMotion — Let Job-Seekers Speak to Employees
PathMotion lets employers create branded Facebook pages. It displays current vacancies next to employees who actually have that job. Even better, job-seekers can directly engage these “employee ambassadors” and ask them questions. This is a fantastic opportunity to let job-seekers peek behind the curtain and learn what the company culture is like from a worker’s point of view. It has been called “Quora for careers.”
BranchOut and BeKnown — Turn Facebook into LinkedIn
It’s hard to believe, but being just a few years old makes an online tool a “classic” in the social space! Two recruiting apps launched in 2011 that integrate with Facebook, allowing both recruiters and job-seekers to use it more like LinkedIn. The first, BranchOut, overlays employer information on top of users’ Facebook interface. This lets recruiters search by company, job title, or even an individual’s name. BranchOut then displays relevant candidates based on your search criteria and your connections to those candidates. Because of its use of Facebook’s API, BranchOut can claim it allows access to 800 million searchable profiles.
Monster offers a similar Facebook app, BeKnown. Employers can create company pages so they “showcase your recruitment brand and your open positions” that are already on Monster. Job-seekers can use their own BeKnown accounts to follow your company, search jobs, and connect with your employees. If you’re already using Monster for job posting, integrating BeKnown is a great way to expand into social with little effort.
Of course, this category is also full of others, Work4, to name just one.
Automatic Posting and Putting it All Together
Many other social recruiting tools, including but not limited to BullHorn Reach and Jobvite, let recruiters automatically push job postings to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites where your organization has an account. TribeHR has this feature and lets job-seekers apply directly from LinkedIn, storing their profiles for future use.
I hope you can see how social recruiting can transform and improve your talent acquisition efforts. Many of these tools I mentioned have free versions or free trials, allowing you to pick the one that’s right for you. But once you’ve made your choice started recruiting with social, how do you measure success? What’s the ROI of all these fun tools? I’ll take a deeper dive into tracking social recruiting metrics in my next post.