The Role of Social Media in Talent Acquisition

In today’s digital age, screening résumés and conducting interviews is not enough to recruit quality candidates. Also, the traditional method of putting out job vacancies and waiting for candidates to contact you is a fading trend in most industries.
As recruiters compete to hire top talent, it has become increasingly necessary to leverage the popularity and versatility of social media platforms.

Read More: The 6 challenges facing talent acquisition

Here’s why social networks have become important and must be included in your recruitment strategies to garner quality talent for your organization.

1. Connect with next generation professionals

The youth today invests a lot of time in surfing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They spend so much time on these portals that it has become the best way to connect with them. Since they are adept at using digital platforms, the potential employees found here are already trained in digital skills. They are well-versed with computers, search engines, social selling, visual content, email and smartphone applications. Such resources are versatile and can easily adapt to new technologies implemented by your organization. Slipping your job vacancy ads between their posts and articles is the ideal way to reach out to them and prompt them to apply.

Read More: 7 Trends in Recruitment Technology That Are Changing Talent Acquisition

2. Advertise vacancies to a wide audience

It is important for recruiters to narrow down their candidate search to find highly specific capabilities. Social media recruiting allows you to easily do so. Platforms like Facebook let you target advertisements towards profiles categorized under specified demographics, interests and location. It also lets you run the ads at a timing identified to ensure maximum reach. Based on the criteria, schedule and frequency of your ad, you can gain access to a huge number of candidates and promote the position you seek to fill.

3. Tap passive candidates

Tapping passive candidates requires extra effort and convincing as these people are not actively looking for a change of job. They may, however, be an excellent fit for the position you’re seeking to fill. It is possible that these candidates are comfortable with their current jobs and aren’t searching for new opportunities. So unless a worthy role comes their way, they won’t think about switching jobs. This makes makes it challenging for the recruiter to a build a perfect pitch that has the ability to lure such passive candidates. Social networking websites is where the guard is down so you, as a recruiter, can start building relationships with them even before they decide to search for a new job. Social media can help you expand your talent pool by presenting your company and its jobs to potential resources.

4. Curated company pages

Setting up company profiles or pages on social media platforms can offer ample benefits in recruitment. You can optimize the platform to share testimonials, company news and interesting content about your existing workforce in order to gain the trust of potential recruits. Initiatives like these help you establish your brand, create relationships and build trust. And people want to be associated with brands they recognize and relate to. When your recruitment process begins, you can easily draw a huge number of applications from the group of people following your company’s page. It also helps spread the word and bring in more referrals.

In addition to the reasons mentioned above, the low cost, quick results and high efficacy of social media recruiting are highly instrumental in shaping the talent acquisition strategies of organizations. If you are a recruiter, make sure you build your company’s social presence and extract maximum value from it.

Varun Sachdeva

SVP and APAC Head, NLB Services