What are advantages and drawbacks of using social media in the recruiting process for a company

Social media has become a tool that recruiters must use these days. It allows you to get an incredible amount of information, which is why it is considered a must-use source. Social media can make the life of a recruiter much easier, but, on the other side, it also comes with its drawbacks. While there is an extensive list of things to love with social recruiting, there are also rules and regulations to follow. The goal of this article is to discuss all those things. We will try to see how you can make the maximum use of social media while making sure to follow all regulations and avoid all traps that can lead to trouble. Let’s start with the positive stuff.

Advantages of Using Social Recruiting

The most important advantage of social recruiting is that it provides the recruiters unrestricted access into the lives of prospective candidates. If you are looking to hire a potential applicant, it’s only natural to go through his social media profiles and get useful insights into his/her life. It can help you determine whether the candidate is applying for the job position or not. The job of gathering information is made much easier by the various scraping tools available. These include Entelo, Prophet, Rapportive, and 360social. Although these are the four tools we recommend, you can also search for other available software that allows you to pull all the information from the applicant’s online social profiles through just a single click.

Social media profile pages have indeed become a presentation of your personal brand. Aside from being a powerful tool to provide an insight into a candidate’s brand, recruiters can also use it to build a brand of their own. By establishing a recognizable brand on social media, you will be able to attract much better talents.

Another advantage of social recruiting is that it makes establishing and cultivating a relationship with prospective candidates easier. If you’re looking for ways to get a competitive advantage by offering a great candidate experience, social media might be just the tool you need.

Disadvantages of Using Social Recruiting

Experts advise great caution if using prospective candidates’ social profile pages during the screening process. The reason is that recruiters may open their company to a lawsuit when looking at photos or reading potential applicants’ posts. When you check out their Facebook or LinkedIn profile pages, you may indirectly make assertions into the race, national origin, age, sexual orientations, and other things subjected to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This is why it is extremely important to properly navigate when sourcing odd social media. It might be the favorite channel for recruitment, but there are misdoings you can commit that can lead to potential lawsuits. They are the reason why some companies have abandoned using social media in their screening process.

The Importance of Social Media

Even if we put all the good and bad things aside, it is important to be present on social media in order to stay relevant across different recruiting platforms. Prospective candidates use social media to find information about job openings. They may use Twitter to send you questions about organizational culture. They want to be able to talk to recruiters at the click of a button.

Social media is a great way to cultivate a relationship with the candidate. On social media platforms, you can always be online and prospective candidates can drop you a message at 11 p.m. or 5 am. It is vital to answer all the messages you get in order to form a relationship. After all, you’d want to start on the right foot as he/she might be a future employee of your company.

Social recruiting used to be an important competitive advantage. Today, it is somewhat of a burden as all companies and recruiters need to use it. It’s not easy to become an excellent social recruiter. You will need to learn a proper way to check out a candidate’s profile in order to make the right decision on whether the potential employee is an appropriate fit for your company.

The necessity to be active and (almost) always online is why many recruiters don’t like social media. These platforms offer access to an incredibly extensive pool of talents and provide valuable information about prospective candidates. On the other hand, it comes with the cost of getting numerous messages from inadequate candidates, and even some inappropriate messages, such as the ones from applicants that didn’t get a particular job.

Another important thing to know about social media is that you can’t ignore a candidate. Each message you don’t answer and each answer you give influence candidate experience. Leaving a good impression with the prospective applicant is extremely important for you and your company’s reputation.

Recruiters that want to excel at their job must use social media nowadays. While online social platforms provide a lot of advantages, they also require great effort and caution because they can easily damage your reputation.

As more and more candidates turn to social media for job research, companies are now taking advantage of these platforms to find their next hire.

Social recruiting is the practice of using social media channels to recruit top talent, and it is one of the top recruitment trends of 2019. In fact, 92% of companies use social media for recruitment, according to a report by Adweek.

There’s a reason why social recruiting has become increasingly popular in recent years. According to GlobalWebIndex, the average internet user has over five social media accounts. As of this year, Facebook has over 2 billion active users, Instagram has over 1 billion and Twitter has over 300 million, and those numbers only continue to grow. In 2019, social media is where people go to interact with friends, express their passions, shop the latest trends and, yes, find their next job.

It’s time to use these numbers to your advantage. By adding social media to your recruitment strategy, you can attract active and passive candidates, target your specific and ideal talent pool, boost your employer brand and company culture, and save on recruiting costs. 

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Attract passive candidates

According to a survey by CareerBuilder, 73% of candidates are passive job seekers. This means that it is now your responsibility to source top talent and encourage them to join your company, rather than the other way around.

With social media, you are meeting your candidates, both active and passive, where they already spend most of their online time. Instead of posting a description on a job board and waiting for your ideal candidate to find you, social recruiting allows you to interact with talent naturally and organically by engaging with their social pages. This will give you the chance to start two-way conversations with candidates that may not have reached out on their own.

While passive candidates may not be actively seeking a new job, many still utilise their social media pages to keep up to date on industry trends & news and stay informed about companies they are interested in. According to a 2015 LinkedIn Talent Trends report, 4 in 10 professionals consistently network and research new jobs, but only 30% of them are active candidates. Because of this, many passive candidates put professional details on their social profiles, so you can easily review their industry experience and reach out. Additionally, creating a positive social media presence for your company will inspire both active and passive candidates to follow your page and, hopefully, join your team.

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Target specific talent pools

According to a Jobvite survey, 49% of recruiting professionals who use social media for recruitment reported that these platforms brought in higher quality candidates. Part of this is thanks to social media’s diverse range of specific groups, filters and hashtags.

Facebook gives you the ability to set advanced search filters that align with your ideal candidate persona. You can set this criteria based on location, industry or specific keywords, and Facebook will immediately calculate how many of its members fit your search. Similarly, Facebook ads can be designed to target candidates that are within your parameters, rather than all of the platform’s 2 million members. This helps you find the right talent pool and receive better applications. In fact, the average Facebook ad has a click through rate of 0.9% according to Adweek, which is higher than most other recruitment marketing techniques.

While Twitter and Instagram also offer targeted advertising, they have the additional benefit of hashtags, which can be used to narrow down your talent pool. A multitude of well thought-out hashtags for different industries and job sectors already exist, giving you access to communities with an established following. These hashtags can be as specific as #secretarialjobDublin or as general as #hiring, depending on the criteria of your candidate persona. However, you can also create hashtags that are unique to your company, which will help you boost engagement and form your own talent community.

Boost your employer brand

An appealing employer brand is invaluable for attracting and retaining top talent, making it another of the top recruitment trends in 2019 alongside social recruiting. According to research by LinkedIn, 75% of candidates research a company’s reputation and brand before applying.

Creating an engaging presence on social media can notably boost your employer brand by promoting your visibility, credibility and company culture. By posting updates about your industry, as well as content about your individual company, you can begin to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Not only will this motivate candidates to follow and interact with you, but it will also help you make connections with other authorities in the industry, which will strengthen your brand exposure.

You should also consider enlisting your current employees as brand ambassadors for your company. According to Social Media Today, content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. This is because candidates trust current employees more than employers to give them accurate information about a company--three times more in fact, according to a LinkedIn Employer Brand Statistics report. Additionally, having current employees create their own posts will showcase your company culture while also giving candidates an open door to engage with someone at your company.

Promote an employer brand and company culture that candidates will want to be a part of immediately by creating posts about your:

• Office and working environment
• Employees
• Well-being strategy
• Perks and benefits
• Unique, interesting or successful projects
• Corporate and team events

Save on recruiting costs

Recruitment marketing can be extremely expensive, especially when you’re advertising on multiple channels. However, creating a social media page is completely free, and social ads are available for any budget.

According to RecruitLoop, one Facebook ad can receive over twice the visibility of a classified ad on a job board. In fact, the average Facebook ad costs $0.64 per click, making it affordable for businesses of any size. These ad campaigns are also easily modified; if you aren’t getting the results you want, you can change your criteria, message and budget at any time. As a result, 75% of brands on Facebook promote their pages with these targeted ads, according to Adweek.

Social recruiting can also save you money because of its efficiency and low time to hire. On social media, you can talk to potential candidates in real time, resulting in faster responses and easier communication. This will help you secure excellent work relationships and hire the right candidate sooner.

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Social media is such a valuable recruitment marketing strategy because of the way it allows you to connect with candidates in a natural and genuine way. However, balancing multiple social platforms, along with your LinkedIn page, your careers page and posting on job boards, can be a challenge for an already busy hiring team. This is where Occupop can help!

With our recruitment software, you can automatically post to multiple job boards at once, including your LinkedIn and social media channels. Our easy-to-use platform will also ensure that all of your communication with candidates is consistent and seamless, and our AI technology can even help you send emails, source CVs and schedule interviews. This will save you time and energy on the administrative part of recruiting, so you can spend longer connecting with your future candidates.

Learn more about how Occupop can help you with your hiring process at www.occupop.com, and subscribe below to get all of our recruitment tips and tricks sent straight to your inbox!