4 social media recruitment mistakes to stop today

By now most of us have recruited on LinkedIn, perhaps passed on information about a job to a friend on Facebook, retweeted a job on Twitter, or even looked on more niche networks.  

Recruiting on social media is now mainstream but few are doing it well.

Few have taken into account the change in job seeker behaviour in this candidate driven market, the amount of noise there is on social media, or the general intolerance that has risen to poor social recruiter behaviour.

If you want to get ahead of your competitors and attract the right people to your job opportunities, you need to stop making these 4 mistakes.

1. Stop recruiting on the wrong social media channel

Go where your future employees hangout and not just to the network with the loudest marketers. If you don’t know where that is, ask your business, they know.

If you are recruiting those with skills in short supply, do not expect that they’re hanging around on LinkedIn waiting for yet another message, from yet another recruiter, or hasn’t looked at their profile properly.

They get enough.

They are fed up.

Surprise them and use a quieter channel. Get your hiring managers involved. Ramp up your engagement by entering into value adding conversations.

Remember, you get more bees with honey.

2. Stop broadcasting and start engaging

I know, you have a job vacancy. You need to fill it. You’re under pressure. You need people. You need them now.

And now that the market is candidate driven, so does everyone else. That means you have a lot more job post noise to contend with.

If you are currently broadcasting, you’ll know by the silence. No replies. No engagement. No applications. Nothing.

So start engaging. Use the numerous tools available to you to keep organised and in regular conversation with potential candidates. Look to build trust and become known through the art of paying it forward,

Recruitment is about people, whatever the channel. Use the information you can gather about people on social media in your correspondence, that personal touch will make all the difference.

3. Cease being careless with automation

Is there anything worse than a feed that is just job updates?

It’s pointless too if you’ve not built the right following on the right network. So stop spitting your jobs out from your applicant tracking system onto social channels or you’ll lose the followers you have gained.

Automation is important though. Scheduling tools can be used to share articles of interests, news and insights into your company, which will help you build a following of interested people.

But be careful when you post too. If you have one person posting for several people, be sure that posts are shuffled so it looks more authentic, and you may want to turn it off on important holidays.

And remember, LinkedIn is the only network that doesn’t use hashtags, so ensure you schedule these without them.

4. Stop ignoring mobile job seekers!

If you do one thing before the summer, get your job application process mobile compatible!

60 percent of job seekers already use mobile to look for jobs, are you making it easy for them to search & apply?

Can you apply to your own jobs on your mobile career site without sending them to a desktop to attach a CV to an email/application?

You may be shocked to find that you can’t and if you want to attract great talent you must get this sorted, now.