Using Social Media to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Job Posting
Last week, we published a blog called “4 Ways to Make Your Online Recruiting More Effective.” One of the tips from that post which we haven’t yet covered in detail was to spread your job posting, primarily using social media.
But what are the most effective ways to use social media to help boost your online recruiting?
Today, we’ll cover the two main social media networks around today—Facebook and Twitter—and tell you how to use them effectively as a business. Combined with a presence (and postings) on AIM Careerlink, these tips will help you form a rock-solid online recruiting strategy.
Here’s how your business should be using these two social media networks to make your recruiting that much more effective:
- Facebook: Facebook is far and away the most popular social media network in the world, and your business is missing out if you aren’t using it correctly. There are two main things that you should be worried about doing on Facebook (for recruiting purposes):
- Being cool. Facebook is the place where potential employees will come to learn about the more emotional aspects of your company. What’s your culture like? What are you interested in? Even if you’re not a traditionally ‘cool’ company, Facebook is your best bet for trying to convey what it is about your business that makes you special. Potential employees can only learn so much about your business from your company website, and the more you make an effort to complete that story on Facebook, the more likely it is that good employees will be interested in working for you.
- Posting about your jobs. Unlike Twitter, Facebook is actually a pretty good place to share your job postings. Once you’ve made a posting on AIM Careerlink, it won’t hurt to talk about your posting on Facebook. Link to it, and tell more about why people should work for you. Again, Facebook is a place to draw in employees and show them why you’re relevant, so keep that in mind when writing about the posting you’re linking to. But be careful—too many links per day (over two, really), and you’ll find that you may alienate your followers.
- Twitter: Twitter is a little bit different than Facebook—on Twitter, you should be less concerned with trying to be cool and more concerned with establishing your business as an authority on whatever it is that you’re trying to sell. Here’s what that means:
- Establishing yourself as an expert. If Facebook is the place to tell people that your business is cool, Twitter is the place to convince them that you’re the best at what you do. That means tweeting links from around the industry (what news would your clients and employees care about?) and showing that yes, you know what you’re talking about. Posting a lot (ten times a day) is much more welcome here. But again, if you can show potential employees that your business has value on Twitter by making yourselves thought leaders, you’ll earn a lot of points towards attracting good employees.
- Helping tell a story. Because frequent posting happens so often on Twitter, you can think of it as one continuous conversation or story. That story should always help advance the story you want to tell about your business (think about what kinds of things you say on your main website), and should also keep your followers up on what’s going on.
We’re very proud of AIM Careerlink and the many unique capabilities that we offer to employers looking to find talented employees. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t spend some time rounding out your online presence by using social media.
And though Twitter and Facebook may not traditionally be seen as strong recruiting platforms, they can be good places to scout talent. Even more than that, however, they are absolutely a way for people to find out more about your company, and your job posting can be made all the more appealing to potential employees if you have your act together on social media.
Just like anything else in the business world, recruiting takes a good bit of time and effort. But if you put the effort in, we can guarantee that the results you’ll see will be worth it.
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If you have any questions about how to use AIM Careerlink to effectively recruit new employees, let us know. Alternatively, if you have a topic that you’d like to see covered in more detail on the blog, connect with us on Facebook or Twitter and tell us—we can probably write about it!