Social media, in particular, has added a layer of transparency to your company – allowing candidates to form an impression about your company based on what they can learn outside of their own personal experiences. For this reason, your company’s social media presence feeds into your employment brand and can make or break you when it comes to hiring top talent.
According to LinkedIn’s 2015 global recruiting trends, 75% of global talent acquisition leaders say talent brand has a significant impact on their ability to hire great talent. A great social media presence and employment brand will help you attract great quality applicants, while also making your outbound sourcing efforts more successful – including those of your direct hire agencies.
A negative social media presence, on the other hand, will hurt your ability to recruit top talent. 69% of candidates wouldn’t accept an offer at a company with a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed. Candidates will research your company when an agency first tells them about your opportunity, while they’re preparing for the interview and before they accept an offer – and what they see could affect their decision to move forward.
Getting Started with Social Media
Being proactive with your social media presence is the best way to ensure that it reflects a positive image of your company.
Start off by running a quick audit of your existing social presence. What channels does your company use? Is your company actively posting content and engaging with your community? Who are the people in your social community? What is your community’s sentiment toward your company? How does your company’s social media presence compare to that of your competitors?
From there, think about what you’d like your social presence to look like.
- Do you want to use any additional channels, such as Instagram, to show off your employment brand?
- Do you want to beef up your existing channels, perhaps by adding a LinkedIn or Facebook Career tab to your existing company pages?
- Do you need to overcome negative feedback?
- Do you want to amplify positive feedback? Are you engaging with your community?
If your company is already active on social media, work with the department that’s currently handling your social accounts to come up with a game plan. If you decide to share the corporate profiles between marketing, customer service, and HR, you will want to make sure that the content is relevant to the entire community.
For instance, clients, leads and candidates alike will be interested to see company news, product reviews, and employee profiles. However, you may also decide it makes more sense to have dedicated recruitment accounts, rather than sharing the main account with marketing. This is particularly useful if your product target market is significantly different than your career target market.
Tips to Make a Great Impression on Candidates
Once you have a game plan, it’s time to implement. Set up your profiles, and make sure to provide consistent content and engagement. Here are a few tips to get started:
- Share information that shows candidates why they should want to work at your company. This could include company news and positive product reviews as well as anything that shows what it’s like to work at your company, such as employee profiles and a video tour of your office.
- Encourage your employees to share content. Some employers ban social media in the workplace, and others actively encourage their employees to use it because they know it helps extend their brand. Combined, your employees can reach a far larger audience than you can, and their first-hand experiences are more credible than anything your brand could say about itself.
Leverage this power by encouraging your employees to share their experiences, pictures of events, company news, and anything else that they feel compelled to share.
- Engage with your audience. A very important thing to remember is that social media is intended to be social. While it’s great to post content that provides great information to your candidates, you also need to engage with your community. This includes answering questions, thanking your employees for sharing your content, re-posting your employees’ content, and joining in discussions about your brand.
Also be sure that you’re not neglecting your customers and prospects on social media – your corporate brand plays into your employment brand, and candidates want to work somewhere that treats both current and prospective customers and employees with respect.
Top talent has a choice in where they work, and you can use social media to influence their decision to consider your company. Whether your candidates are coming through inbound applications, referrals or a direct hire agency, they will be looking for information about your company to help them decide where they want to apply, interview and, ultimately, work.
If you want them to choose your company, you have to take social media and your employment brand seriously.
