In recent years, social media has been adopted by many companies as a marketing, branding and/or recruitment tool. With the benefits a company can gain from implementing social media sites, a lot of them free, the role they are playing is becoming more difficult for companies to ignore. Initially implemented by our marketing department, as a company offering recruitment services, social media now plays a key part in our hiring process.
Mainly utilising Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, we are regularly attracting high quality candidates through our social media portals, and are regularly placing them in positions all across the UK. Every job that goes live is posted immediately to Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn, as well as our website and relevant job sites. With approximately 400 ‘likes’ on Facebook, over 1100 ‘followers’ on Twitter and over 600 group members on LinkedIn, every vacancy that is posted receives a lot of exposure. Candidates are presented with a short description of the position along with key details such as location, and with one click they are taken directly to our website and given the opportunity to apply.
A big part of our recent growth in recruitment has been through the introduction of our LinkedIn group, which is purely dedicated to candidates looking for jobs. We post the latest news relevant only to our recruitment division, as well as posting each individual job as it goes live in the ‘Jobs’ section. This is the place where all of our candidates looking for work can go to find information relevant only to their job search and our recruitment division.
We have invested significantly in the latest advertising and recruitment tools, and social media is just as important as the other methods we use to recruit. By involving ourselves in relevant recruitment and engineering discussions through our social media channels, this allows us to find out who’s available in the areas we’re recruiting in, meaning we can provide our clients with the best available candidates.
The key to recruiting through social media is to develop and spend time on your social media sites, and make sure they are geared towards recruiting and driving interest in the positions you have available. Encourage candidates looking for work to follow your sites, allow them to take part in discussions and highlight how it can help their job search. Immediate vacancy alerts through social media are a great way to attract new ‘followers’ and ‘likes’. The chances are that candidates will be checking their own personal social media feed on a daily basis, and if vacancy alerts are coming through to that, it means no extra effort is required on their part and that they are kept up to date just by reading their feed. Sending updates through social media ensures we are not unnecessarily harassing or contacting our candidates to make them aware of new vacancies, leaving the ball in their court.
If you are involved in recruitment and are without a social media presence, we strongly suggest you consider dedicating some time towards building one.
We are continuously looking to grow our social media audiences, so if you want to be kept up to date with our latest vacancies as soon as they go live, be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn!
