Make Social Recruiting a Time Saver with These Productivity Tools

In the latest installment of our Social Recruiting Pro Tips series, we explore productivity with Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent. Lars breaks down the processes and tools that can make leveraging social recruiting and employer branding a time saver instead of a time demand.

When contemplating moving forward with social recruiting, you may feel jittery about adding onto your already full plate. However, social recruiting can save both you and your company time in recruiting. Lars Schmidt suggests that the combination of a well-defined strategy and a set of productivity tools can make social recruiting a seamless part of your overall recruiting efforts. “Social recruiting can be to recruiting a lot like exercise is to health,” says Lars. “Do it right for 30 minutes a day and you can do everything else in your day a little more efficiently.” Once you’ve documented your social recruiting strategy, you’ll want to consider tools to help you with these discrete tasks. Lars breaks down social recruiting tasks into five categories.

Top Tools to Help with Social Recruiting

1. Listen for Audience Needs

True community engagement begins with consistent and active listening. In social, you need to know the right keywords and hashtags to monitor. Start with a brainstorming session with your team to define the skills and passions that are most closely aligned with your target audience. You’ll then need a tool to filter through the noise. A couple of tools to consider include:

• SocialMention – This free tool scans across all the major social networks and rates mentions based on reach and sentiment. After looking through the mentions with the highest rating, you can make decisions about what content to produce for your company’s social sites and your personal social networking handles.
• Sysomos – Check with your marketing or social media team to see if your company has a subscription to Sysomos or a tool like it. Sysomos is a paid tool that reveals insights about where your target audience spends their time on social channels and what topics resonate with them.

No matter what tool you use, you should carve out some time to determine what topics are trending with your audiences. This up-front investment in time will save you time down the road when you are developing programs to engage candidates.

2. Develop Valuable and Visual Content

After you listen, you need to create content and give back to your audiences. By giving back, you build trust with tech professionals and make your initial outreach efforts a bit easier. Whether you are focused on sourcing or recruiting, you should contribute to the content creation efforts for your company. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a social media maven or a graphic designer. Leverage these tools:

• Hootsuite – With this social media management platform, you can curate content from other sources, add your commentary and publish to multiple social networks.
• Canva – Social is a visual medium by nature. You’re scrolling through feeds on your mobile device and you’re attention is caught by compelling photos, illustrations and memes. Canva can help you find visuals and size them for specific social networks.

3. Manage an Editorial Calendar

Employer branding is not new. However, in a social media world, employer branding requires more consistent nurturing. With that in mind, you or your colleagues should manage a calendar with your planned social media posts. You can schedule ahead with the aforementioned tool Hootsuite. You can also use a simple Google Document to share notes on what is planned and who is developing each post.

4. Source for Opportunities and Pipeline

Lars likes to call out the difference between listening and social sourcing, a distinction he believes is lost on too many recruiters. Social sourcing is a function that specifically finds unique candidates active in social networking sites and identifies what makes them tick. Listening, by contrast, helps you to understand what tech pros, in general, are talking about at a given time. You don’t have to go to each of those sites individually. And you don’t have to spend time deciphering what the posts of candidates tells you about their passions and skills. In all, social sourcing helps you quickly identify candidates for present opportunities and for future ones. In doing so, you won’t have to reach out to as many new tech pros in the future. They will already be on your radar.

5. Engage Consistently

Social recruiting requires more than broadcasting your employer branding messages and keeping your antennae high for new candidates. Social recruiting requires engagement with candidates on social channels. Yes, it takes a little time to respond to candidates. But this time conversing with candidates in social media can reduce the time it takes to persuade them to consider an opportunity on the phone. Once again, a tool like Hootsuite is great for flagging posts that you should respond to. The other tool you should use is your Outlook or Google Calendar. Take 15 minutes a day to respond to your audience on social channels. Time is money and in short supply. So make the most of the time you spend sourcing and recruiting with strategic, time-saving processes that enable you to leverage social media.