Today’s installment is courtesy of guest blogger Mariah Gillespie. Mariah is the founder of Social Media Superstar and worked for 2 years as Social Media Manager of JXT Consulting, an agency specializing in online marketing strategies for recruiters (Sydney, Australia). Mariah has helped some of the largest recruitment companies in Australia utilize social media platforms in the recruitment space (Chandler Macleod, Adecco, Drake) and has spoken at dozens of conferences on social media recruitment. Contact her at mariah@socialmediasuperstar.net.
Happy 2014! I’m back with the final installment of my 6 Steps to Social Media Recruitment Success, Parts 5 and 6. Click here to catch up if you missed Steps 1 and 2 and click here to catch up on Steps 3 and 4.
Step 1: Identify Your Objectives and Tactics for Achieving Your Objectives
Step 2: Design and Development of Profiles
Step 3: Create a Content Calendar
Step 4: Staff Training/Internal Launch
Step 5: Social Media Marketing
Now that you have your staff members engaging with you on social media, it’s time to get your candidates, clients and everyone that you’d like to reach out to on board. This process can be gradual, over a few days or even a few weeks. Add social media badges to your website to start, somewhere where they’re visible right away. Consider the top right hand corner, and you might even ask your web designer to create some brand-consistent social icons to match your logo. You might also ask your employees to add social media icons to their email signatures, so that every digital communication is linked to your social media profiles. Again, consider consulting with a web designer and perhaps your IT manager so that everyone’s icons are consistent. Many companies run holiday-specific campaigns or competitions through social media (“With Valentine’s Day around the corner, tell us about the worst date you’ve had. You could win a $50 gift card to 1-800-flowers for that special someone!”), so be sure to advertise these with a button or badge on your website and email signature, too. Your social media icons should always be included in ALL digital communications: emails, interview calendar invitations, newsletters, email blasts, automated responses (“thank you for applying for the position of _______” or “your resume has been received”). When advertising your social media accounts on printed marketing materials such as brochures or flyers, consider typing the URL out (www.facebook.com/NPAWorldwide). A Facebook icon doesn’t do anything for your audience if it’s not clickable—how will they know where to go? You could even promote your social profiles through business cards; as HR professionals, one of the first things you’ll want to do after a great meeting is connect with people on LinkedIn, right? Provide your LinkedIn URL on your card!
Step 6: External Launch
The final step (woo-hoo – you’re almost there!) to your social media recruitment strategy is to email your entire database announcing the launch of your social media profiles. Don’t do this until you have a decent number of fans on Facebook and plenty of articles and content on your timeline. The same goes for twitter and having content on your profile. No one will like/follow a blank page with no fans/followers! It’s like showing up to a party a few hours too early – there’s no one to talk to or engage with and you’re likely to get bored and leave. If you’re using social media to find candidates, you can email existing talent pools with links to your social media profiles, and even insert a paragraph in the automated response sent to all applicants. It might also be worthwhile to put in a paragraph on privacy, to reassure job seekers that you are connecting with them purely on a professional level and that you won’t have access to their personal information or photos.
Now comes the fun part – ongoing management and engagement. Refer back to Step 3: Content Calendar for ideas of what to post and when.
Congratulations! You are now equipped with the (very) basic tools and information needed to embark upon a social media recruitment strategy. Have you started yours? What sort of results have you seen? Join the discussion on the NPA LinkedIn Group; I’ll be checking in to offer and advice and support.