How to use social media to hire talent for your company?

courtesy :: www.aegisglobal.com

Social media like facebook, twitter, linkedin and few more, are playing important role in our life now a day. You can see your employees busy with their smart phone and surfing social media web sites. These websites are now part of our life. Many companies are using social media websites for various purposes. 

Using social media websites for hiring is one of them. Recruiters have started using these websites to fill their open positions. 

I have personally experienced that using linkedin is great idea, especially when you are looking for a candidate for a senior position in your company. Many senior professionals do not post their resume on job portals like naukri.com, monster.com, timesjob.com etc. You can find them on linkedin or any other social media websites. Recruiter should have ability to search and connect with these professionals through their existing connections and approach them with a job offer.

Sharing couple of points, which can make hiring through social media more effective.

Simply publish open positions of your company on Social media and relevant groups

This is the simplest way to advertise open positions in your company to masses. 

You can post various open positions on these social media websites. Some tips are:

• Do not post all the open positions in one go: Some social media websites have restriction on number of words in your post. It also look messy when you post details of all open positions in one post and some time people do not look at it due to lengthiness of post. Post one job opening at one time so that people can go through those openings which suits to their profile.
• Give link of detailed information in the post: You may not be able to write complete detail of position during posting, hence it will be good, if you provide link of webpage (especially from your own company’s website) which describe the position in more detail. This way potential candidate will also have a look at your company website and will learn about your company as well. If you don’t have such link then put required information in the post only but descriptive.
• Articulation of job opening should be very clear : While articulating a job opening, ensure that it clearly mention what is required from the applicant to avoid not useful applications.
• Ask your friend/connections to like the post : This will help you to spread it across the connections of your connections or friends of your friends. When a connection of yours likes your post it becomes visible to his connections also. This way it gets spread across more people.
• Ensure to provide contact details : Do not miss to provide email id or contact number where candidate can approach you for application or clarifications.

You must be aware that post published by you can only be views by your friends or connections. Hence one of the ways which is also mentioned above is to ask your connections to like or share the post to relevant person. 

Another way is to post your job opening on various relevant groups. There are general groups to post job openings and specific group on the kind of skill set you are looking for. Eg. If you are looking for Head HR then you should post your job opening in a group which is meant for Head HR or Senior HR professionals. 

This way you will get better response. You can also ask your colleagues to post job openings in a relevant group where he/she is a member, if required. 

Making connections with people who can be your future candidates

It is a consistent but very effective way. You need to keep connecting with people who can be your potential candidates on regular basis. This may not give you immediate result but when you have people from your domain in your connection list, you can approach them whenever you need to. Also keep interacting with those connections by one or other way so that you are familiar to them. Senior professionals do not express their willingness to change due to many reasons, especially with someone who is not familiar, hence interaction with them will increase chance of openness. 

Also more connections means spread of your general job post will be huge. Hence give some time to networking on web.

Branding your organization image on social media to attract talent 

Candidates (especially experience) are very cautioned about the kind of company they are joining. They inquire about the company and its culture from existing employees or someone who have already worked in the company earlier. In fact, now some of the job portals have started providing option to candidates to link with employees of company where they are applying through social media like shine.com.


This means that employer needs to work on their brand image to attract talent and social media can play very important role in this. If you have a corporate communication team, I believe they must be working on it else you can contribute in branding your company image.

shine.com has come up with their social media integrated version. This tool is inegrated with a tool/ app called myparichay. If you are on facebook ,you can go to app centre and register on this app.

Here is the link to the app directly : https://apps.facebook.com/myparichay/

Once you register to this app, you  can provide your information so that when a recruiter using myparichay can view your profile. Infact, you can search various jobs through this app like you do in other job portals. Good part is that you can see your links who are working in the company where you wish to apply and you can apply through them which in turn increase chances of reviewing your CV by recruiter.

Using paid version of social media for hiring

Now, some of the social media websites have come up with hiring solutions which are paid but worth paying. I have realized that most of job portal database is exhausted now and as recruiter we need to look into alternate solutions and social media is one of them. Recently, I have used linkedin hiring solution for one month to fill a senior position which we were not able to do through job portals. We closed the positions faster. I would also suggest that before you go for a long term contract for any such services you should better try the demo or short period arrangement to test the usefulness for you.

Job portals are still major source of hiring but social media is also registering its presence in hiring field and been rewarding in senior level hiring.

Please share your experience or any other way by which social media can be leveraged for hiring in an organization. I would really appreciate your contribution.

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