More and more job seekers are using social media and social networking as a tool for their job hunt. They’re networking smarter and building a strong online persona. With so many job seekers flocking to these sites, many recruiters and employers are joining the party. What can you do to get the most out of this audience? Follow these simple tips!
1. Give yourself a home base: The most popular social networking sites makes it easy to establish an online presence. By having an online destination, you can quickly share job openings, employment news and employer branding. What’s better is that if you build this information into quality content, your fans, employees and alumni will share the information for you, passing it along to their job hunting friends and colleagues.
2. Make it easy for your employees to network: Encourage your employees to actively participate on sites such as LinkedIn so that prospective candidates can know what sorts of networking options they have when applying. You can also encourage your employees to post job openings in their status updates
3. Keep your employee’s pages tidy: By now you’ve heard horror stories of prospective employee’s chances dashed when the company saw some incriminating bit of business on the hapless applicant’s Facebook page. Guess what? Your most sought-after prospective hires are doing the same thing to their potential co-workers. I’m not suggesting that you sanitize your employees communications on their off time, but if I wanted to work for your company and I saw half you staff dreading coming into work on Monday, I’d think twice about applying.
4. Expect a conversation, not a lecture: Most social media feature a place for people to comment on what you post. This is something to be encouraged. Give people a place to ask questions and discuss their own experiences and you’ll get a much richer networking experience. Don’t worry about opening yourself up to negativity: delete the obvious spam comments and trust your community to filter out the obviously negative comments.
5. Don’t let the conversation get stale: People expect a much faster flow of information online, and social media is no exception. Be ready to respond to comments and questions in a reasonable amount of time. Only checking your messages and comments once a week is going to lead to a significant drop off in activity.
With these tips in mind, you’ll be prepared to meet a new audience of job seekers head on. This is still new territory, so there is still much to be charted. Good luck out there!
