Recruit using social networks

Harvey Nash offers the following quick-fire tips on how employers can incorporate social networking into their overall recruitment strategies:

•    Once you have created a profile for your company on Facebook and Twitter, assign a team or an individual to act as main administrator to post jobs, search for and follow potential candidates expressing interest.

•    Invite influential contacts with an online presence to link to your profile page. Also advertise your profile via mail shots, links on email signatures

•    Link the company’s profile page to the company website, plus any other sites to which you have involvement.

•    Engage in conversations with promising friends, followers, or members, even if there isn’t a job for them at the time, so that when a vacancy appears, you have already established a rapport.

•    Regularly update your profile to keep it fresh and ensure that people come back to check for job opportunities.

•    Encourage existing employees to use the profile as their space to promote your company and circulate vacancies.

•    Offer incentives to staff who source successful candidates through the social network profile.

•    As well as job vacancies, post other interesting items on industry-related topics. Proactively build a network of potential contacts in LinkedIn and Facebook.

Get familiar with searching for candidates using LinkedIn – it can be a rich (and free) source of excellent talent.

•    Don’t give up. Building a social network presence takes an investment of time.

These tips are based on research conducted last month by Harvey Nash. The research turned up the following stats:

•    A third of employers use social networking sites to identify new hires

•    Almost one quarter (24%) use the sites routinely as a part of their recruitment

•    15% of employers say they would miss key hires if they didn’t use social networking sites to identify new recruits while almost two thirds (65%) see social networking sites as a valuable source of recruitment.

•    Almost a third of employers (31%) plan to use social networking sites in the future as part of their general recruitment strategies.

•    73% of employers believe social networking will become more important as a source of identifying new hires over the next two years.

•    Over a third (35%) of employers already have a Facebook  page/group established with a further 39% planning to establish a Facebook presence in the future

•    Two thirds are already established on LinkedIn while almost half (48%) plan to establish a presence in the future.

•    Almost a quarter of employers (23%) already have a Twitter feed. This figure is expected to rise to half in the future with a further 26% of employers planning to establish a Twitter feed.

•    Almost half of employers (49%) believe people who invest time in developing a strong online brand using social networks are more likely to be hired.

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By LaunchLab.co.uk  on   Jun 30,2009

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Keywords

social networks    online recruitment    recruit    twitter    facebook    myspace   

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