…HR ideas from Jeffery Giesener – CEO – SourceMob
Does your Talent Acquisition organization have a plan for bringing on social media recruiters?
Are you wondering how to work with experts outside the company while maintaining a consistent brand HR social experience?
Before you jump in headfirst or turn over the social recruiting reins, check out the following eight tips to make sure your recruiters or contractors correctly represent your company.
#1: Create a Social Style Guide
Agreeing on a style for outward-facing content helps solidify your company’s HR identity and character, and is the starting point of good social recruiting training, because it puts all of your team on the same page. Perhaps the biggest hurdle in creating a social recruiting styling guide is to define your company’s HR voice.
If you’re working to recruit in, say, the medical field, you’ll likely want to employ a professional medical voice. But if you’re working with freelance web developers who spend a good chunk of time every day on WordPress, you can relax and crack some jokes. The point is to know your audience and have recruiters, employees and your hiring managers create the content and your videos to attract candidates. Remember also to focus on what is in it for the candidate to join your organization. So create content with your audience in mind.
#2: Define Social Goals
When creating your style guide, keep your goals in mind. What are you looking for from your presence on the key social channels you want to work on? Focus also on who is your target audience and get very specific.
- Do you want to get users talking?
- Do you want their feedback so you can build a better candidate experience?
- Do you want them to advertise your jobs to their social networks by sharing your content?
Once you establish your goals, you can amend your style guide accordingly.
If your goal is to increase and grown your followers, have your recruiters create wall posts that are interesting to the community and ask engaging questions. If your goal is to seed and grow you candidate email list, create an incentive (like a giveaway) for signing up, and have your recruiters regularly announce the prizes and winners on the wall. Make sure all of your emails have the appropriate call to action and both an email capture for new subscribers and the ability to easily forward your email content to their social networks.
#3: Set Parameters and Grant Freedom
No two people are the same, meaning that no two social recruiters will write the same way. Having a style guide that defines voice doesn’t mean that you need to build a bank of terms and phrases for your employees to copy and paste, effectively turning them into bland robot parrots.
With your company’s overall voice outlined in your style guide, encourage your agents to be creative and be themselves. Social is all about people talking to people. To add depth to your company’s presence, have recruiters sign off on wall posts with their first names and their recruiting specialty.
#4: Have a Probationary Period
Practice makes perfect, and that truth certainly holds in the world of social recruiting. A probationary period in which new recruiters respond to wall posts but first submit their responses to a superior prior to posting is a great way to get recruiters aligned and up to speed. With direction and edits from the higher-ups, new social recruiters will become accustomed to your brand’s style and voice quickly.
#5: Mandate Social Frequency
You wouldn’t leave a phone ringing indefinitely in your office. It’s poor customer service. For the same reason, don’t leave wall posts on your timeline pages unanswered. Unanswered wall posts are far worse than an unanswered phone call, because the customer’s request or question is out there for the world to see—with a time stamp on it. Don’t let your career page’s visitors and more specifically your preferred candidates get the impression you don’t care about them.
Make it policy for your social recruiters to engage on the preferred social channel timelines frequently –addressing all questions and concerns posted. The great thing is that this works both ways. Because your timelines are public, you’ll experience increased candidate loyalty when they see that your recruiters respond to all requests promptly.
#6: Team Up
Once your social recruiters pass through the initial probationary period, it still isn’t a good idea to have just one person responsible for your social media presence. Teams with two or more can moderate, edit and sharpen each other, giving you a refined, robust presence. Often it’s a good idea to have one person who’s more social media–savvy and another with a traditional recruiting background work together.
The social recruiting expert can keep the more traditional recruiting professional get in line with social recruiting practices, while the traditional professional can make sure your HR brand and reputation and message are upheld. If content hasn’t had at least two sets of eyes on it, don’t let it go public.
#7: Take Cues From the Pros
If your company is making its first foray into social recruiting, take a look at a dozen or so of your top competitors and a few HR brands that do things right, like Starbucks and Coca-Cola. Take the good, leave the bad and add in your company’s unique voice. Formulating your approach as a team will take care of the training process for everyone, all at once.
#8: Prepare to Answer Anything
Whether you like it or not, your timelines are a catch-all for praise, requests, demands, complaints, threats and everything in between. Make sure your social recruiters are ready to answer every post, even the disparaging ones, and are able to do so with respect and kindness. Also don’t fear, you can set admin rights to have posts cleared before they are posted on most social channels.
Outline a procedure for agents dealing with disruptive candidates. But don’t just prepare for the negative; be ready to capitalize on positive feedback by incorporating it in marketing materials or a “reviews” section on your page or website.
What do you think? What do you do to prepare social recruiting employees to represent your brand on social media? Leave your questions and comments below.
By the way, how much does it cost your organization to recruit and hire one candidate? Do you even know your metrics? I guarantee that the cost of the SourceMob.com #RecruitingRocket BootCamp will provide you a 10 times+ Return On Investment. In fact, I guarantee it.
Click Here to learn more www.sourcemob.com/events
ABOUT SOURCEMOB: SourceMob integrates Internet, social, talent community, HR Analytics, social listening solutions, HR Marketing Services and mobile recruiting solutions to help talent acquisition professionals recruit the very best candidates for tough-to-fill positions. SourceMob’s solutions seamlessly integrate and distribute conversations, engagement and job content, all done on autopilot, providing a job posting springboard to over 3.5 million candidate profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, plus all of the major search engines. We help you engage with your candidates and capture niche passive candidates. Our solutions also enable Mobile Quick Apply and candidate application management services to create more efficiency and lower recruiting costs. You won’t need your IT Team or HR Department to implement them. That is the beauty and ease of the SourceMob platform.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Jeffery
Jeffery Giesener
CEO/Founder
SourceMob.com
jeff@sourcemob.com
952-417-6955
Twitter: @thegies
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyjeffgiesener
Post By Jim Belosik appended for the HCM market by Jeffery Giesener