Using Your Staffing Firm Social Media to Boost Recruiting

Well, the first thing I want to start off with is that posting your jobs on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., does not equal staffing firm social media recruiting. We all know that every recruiter wants to expose every job to every candidate as quickly and efficiently as possible. But, for those of us who are linked to many recruiters like our consultants and candidates, you quickly realize those feeds get lost very, very quickly.

If you are solely focused on sharing jobs, you are burning out your audience quickly and are not garnering much of a response. So, what do we do about it? We need to use all of our resources in our staffing firm social media arsenal in order to have those jobs stand out better as well as de-emphasize our single-mindedness around those jobs.

Blogs, Articles, Internal News, & Events
Making sure to share relevant information and resources with your audience is crucial. Some of those resources include, your blog, articles you find interesting to share, internal news about what is happening at your firm, events that you are all attending, or that your audience might find interesting to attend. The amount of recruiters that consistently share their company’s blog, regular articles, news about the firms, events, etc., are in the 5-10% range. Most of your marketing teams are providing this info and yet recruiters don’t share it. So, why don’t they share it? Everyone is busy, it is not that it’s not important, it’s just they have other things to do. So, how do we make this more important? We need to realize that these efforts lead to candidates in the door in large quantities with the least amount of effort.

Organizations & Sites
This may or may not be new news to our readers, but organizations exist on Facebook, Twitter, and etc. Not just for recruiter’s joining recruiter organizations, but for recruiters joining organizations of the candidates they are trying to reach. Joining that org is the first step. The 2nd step is sharing information that does not appear to be that you’re selling to your candidates. For example a blog, or events, or internal news that would be found interesting. The organizers of these organizations will stop you from posting jobs and from sharing content that appears to be overly selling. Sharing info in these organizations that is focused on the success of the members of the organization always gets approved.

Recruiters in IT that want to reach developers sites like GitHub, where developers are all interacting with each other, should be interacting in those sites. Be sure to take advantage of not sharing a job, but sharing hiring advice, or concepts, or for that matter simply engaging with those people on the sites.

Sharing & Commentary
The number one best advice I can give anyone is: Share, share, share. Whether you are talking about an article that your firm has generated or an article you found that is relevant out in the media, or an internal event, or some type of happy hour; share regularly. If you mix these in with your jobs, you suddenly become someone sharing and utilizing social media recruiting as opposed to someone just popping jobs up.

Additionally, your commentary is important. Engage the audience by adding commentary of your own to what you are sharing. Keep it simple. When you see posts from people about things you find interesting, commenting on theirs gives you additional exposure. Most people refrain from making additional comments and the fact is it’s one of the fastest way to spread across your audience and it doesn’t make you look like you were trying to drive the audience. Take advantage of commentary.

Direct Messaging
Whether we are talking about LinkedIn, Facebook, social media in general; direct messaging is one of the easiest ways to get specific attention on different individuals. Most people use LinkedIn appropriately on that note. Most people do not use Twitter and Facebook. Leverage all of the tools of these different social media in order to drive your staffing firm social media recruiting by direct messaging through all of them. Good luck and lets all be social!

About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations.