An article published by global news portal, Business News Daily in March this year highlighted the findings from a 2018 study by Career Builder that revealed 70 per cent of employers used social media in the hiring process and up to 43 per cent used some form of social media to screen employees before hiring them.
A lot has been written about the negatives that social media brings to the workplace, to relationships and how it has essentially changed social interaction as we know it. However, its benefits, if used correctly are being keenly felt by corporates during this decade as well, as findings from the Career Builder study revealed.
We highlight a few key strategies that can be adapted by employers to search and find the best employees while easing the hiring process.
Establish your brand, and its reputation
Millennials form the new workforce and they come with a set of demands that cannot be thwarted simply because it is essentially the world will think 20 years on. Millennials prefer working for organisations that have strong corporate values and ethics and do not compromise on either. Be sure therefore that your corporate values don’t just come through strongly in the literature that you publish online on your corporate website but that you stick to these values when your prospective millennial hire comes through for the interview process. Be sure you use the right channels to promote these values as well, channels like Twitter and Facebook are popular among millennials, so having a brand presence on these channels is critical if it’s the millennials you are after.
Make the right connections
A curated approach is the best approach in these times. The one size fits all move does not hold anymore. Keep your profile industry specific, contacting the best in the business, from top level management representatives to mid-rung workers who are making all the right noises and getting noticed for their achievements. Each and every one of these prospective hires needs to be approached on a case to case basis, for their needs will be very different from each other, as opposed to what used to be done a couple of decades back when a single generic post or a newspaper advertisement in the local newspaper sufficed to bring in job responses. Learn to connect with the right resources through social media, then woo them with the benefits your company has to offer, more often than not you will net the best employees for your firm.
Don’t make a hash of your hashtag
Hashtags are powerful tools that increase the scope of your searches to find the right candidate through social media channels. As a first step, search and find the hashtags that employees are most likely to follow on channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. Be sure that you also identify the difference between generic hashtags and those that are industry-specific, narrowing down the options that fall in the latter category to fine tune your search for the right candidates.
Make the Link
With studies showing up to 87 per cent of recruiters using LinkedIn in the hiring process, the social media channel has what it takes to boost your hiring process up several notches, if used right. And besides posting your company’s hiring recruitments, it’s also important that your corporate engages in industry-specific LinkedIn groups. Get your top management to post articles or features that are relevant to your industry in terms of new research findings that your company may have possibly fronted, new campaigns that it may have launched or new MoUs signed and new partnerships forged. Getting these messages across through a social media channel that fronts the best networking opportunities for professionals, is critical to how your company will be perceived by prospective employees who view your company on the channel.
With more than 400,000 registered users, getthat.com is a repository for excellent candidates and prospective hires looking out for great placements across sectors and professions here in the UAE. Log on to getthat.com now and recruit your candidate of choice for your firm.
