Talent Lives on Social Media, but You're Doing It Wrong

It’s been said that today’s job candidates live on social media. It should come as no surprise that over 14 million job-seekers across the nation have turned to social media to search for new opportunities, and a whopping 29 percent (and rising) of job-seekers are using social media as their primary tool for job searching.

With all this talent living on social media, it’s important that companies are utilizing the multiple platforms to attract and engage active and passive candidates. Though a lot of companies are doing it right, many are just plain doing it wrong.

Your company isn’t on social media It’s hard to believe, but many companies still fail to view social media as a viable platform to invest time and money into. I’ve actually worked for companies in the past that didn’t think there was true value in creating and maintaining company social media pages.

In today’s market, one of the first things a candidate will do when they are researching your company is check out your social media pages. On Facebook, they should be able to see a glimpse into your company culture. On Twitter, they should get short bursts of information to help form an opinion on your company. On LinkedIn, they should be able to see opportunities for employment, company information, and other people who work for you.

Without this information present, it’s hard for candidates to take you seriously.

Your company is just a social media participant Maybe your company is on social media, but isn’t using it correctly. Many companies look at the fact that their competitors are on social media, and think they can gain an edge by creating company profiles on multiple platforms.

Social media is only going to work if you put the time and energy into crafting messages that are tailored to your target audience on each platform. You can’t just post the same content in the same way across every platform, and expect to build a following.

Being a participant without a strategy in place can actually make your talent brand boring, and that can be worse than not being on social media at all.

Your company isn’t creating an internal following If you can’t get your existing employees to follow your social media pages or share your content, then it’s going to be even harder to build an external following. Your employers can be your strongest advocates, and talent wants to hear about your company and career opportunities from them – not as much from you.

It’s important that companies enable their employees to be advocates on social media. This will increase credibility, and help spread the word when there are opportunities to join the team.

Your company isn’t leveraging social media to post opportunities It can eat into the budget when you post job opportunities on LinkedIn, but there are many free ways to share on multiple platforms. Companies who are targeting part-time or hourly workers aren’t utilizing the right platforms for posting opportunities, and LinkedIn isn’t necessarily the right place to post these kinds of jobs.

More specifically, Facebook recently launched a job posting feature for companies to utilize as part of their company profile page. Of course, companies can pay to turn their job postings into advertisements – mirroring the process of paying to boost a social media update. Through re-shares, some opportunities could even go viral, helping to spread the word about your company.

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How does your company use social media to recruit talent?