Use Social Media to Win Clients and Influence the Hiring Process

By: Matt Charney, Monster Social Media Engagement Manager

What is the top driver for worker engagement, satisfaction and employee retention? Numerous studies show that an employee’s relationship with their immediate supervisor or manager is key, a correlation that’s even more pronounced in the burgeoning ranks of the Gen Y workforce. 

In fact, a recent Monster poll revealed that even in today’s tight job market, fully 60% of responders would leave their companies because of a bad boss, while 21% cite “great boss and coworkers” as the single most important element of their loyalty to their current employer (only 6% less than those driven primarily by employee compensation).

A Shift in Recruiting Analytics 
Ascertaining a candidate’s organizational fit has traditionally fallen into the realm of pre-employment screenings and behavioral-based interviewing. But today’s highly selective, employer-driven job market often favors pipeline-building and profile-based recruiting over traditional just-in-time hiring methods. 

Couple these trends with an increased emphasis on long-term, throughput metrics (such as quality of hire) over the more traditional, short-term analytics (such as days-to-fill and cost-per-hire.)

The result puts the onus of matching the right candidate with the right manager increasingly on the recruiter. This remains one of the most subjective, and therefore complex, components of successfully placing a candidate during the search process.

Your Social Media Recruiting Toolbox
The good news?  The methods that recruiters use to source, develop and engage with candidates and customers are only one piece of the Recruiting 3.0 tool box. Recruiting using social media also offers a competitive advantage, both in how to present a qualified candidate to a hiring manager, and in how to prepare a candidate for an interview. Both are critical components of the job recruitment process:

Create a Job-Specific Blog: Successful job searches start with successful job descriptions, but creating a comprehensive, targeting job posting strategy should involve more than simply repurposing the same position over and over again.

Using a free service like Google’s blogger or Wordpress, you can set up a basic blog for each of your searches in minutes.  It doesn’t have to be visually complex; just enough to create a hub for your other job posting efforts and social recruiting activities.  By setting up a simple blog for each job, you’ll organically boost SEO to your careers site as well as other platforms, like Monster, where your job is posted.  Most importantly, it provides a format where recruiters (and hiring managers) can provide perspective on a job while engaging candidates.

Film your Hiring Manager: While a good job description is often an important starting point, one of the most important (but often neglected) step in the hiring process is a three-way “kick off” meeting with the hiring manager, recruiter and HR partner to discuss the current employment situation. This will allow you to build a profile of what a successful candidate might look like and review the anticipated challenges and opportunities for the job search.

Critical to this meeting is the opportunity for both the HR Business Partner and the hiring manager to provide perspective on the hiring manager’s professional history, leadership style and management philosophy. 

Rather than simply use these notes as background material, however, streaming video technologies make it easy to record this information and possibly use it as recruitment advertising collateral during the search process.

For example, at a relatively low cost, talent organizations can purchase a shared FlipCam to bring to these ‘kick off meetings,’ capturing the hiring manager in their office, conference room or other meeting space where the interview is likely to take place, sending important visual clues about things like company culture and managerial style that can’t be conveyed in a typical job description. 

First, be sure to have the hiring manager’s consent to do film. If everyone agrees, you can record a few quick clips of them discussing their philosophy and the job position.  A few questions to get you started:

1. Describe what it takes to be successful in this role.
2. Discuss your management style and philosophy.
3. What do you look for in a candidate during an interview?
4. What’s the most interesting thing about you that’s not on your resume?

Once approved, you can post these videos on a company careers site, job blog or YouTube channel, along with a link to the written job posting.

This content can provide great insight (and differentiation) for potential candidates while augmenting your current online employer brand presence, giving greater transparency to the company’s culture. 

It’ll also give candidates a better idea of what to expect when they come to an interview and allow them to assess how their values stack up against a potential managers. Naturally, such information is also invaluable data to screen candidates against when assessing corporate and departmental culture fit.  

At minimum, you can have this footage readily accessible when executing a candidate search, creating a digital record that’s easily shared among recruiters or for reference on future searches. It also can come in handy to help recalibrate and refocus priorities in the event the search takes longer than expected or requires a change in approach. 

Source for Similarities and Connections: Creating a match between your hiring manager and prospective candidates starts with looking at your hiring managers’ online footprint. This can easily be done using a ‘people search’ site like pipl.com or 123people.com. These sites aggregate such things as social network profiles, available videos, pictures, blogs, etc. and provide a quick glimpse into things that might not make it into a job description or the initial meeting when opening a position. 

Look for things like volunteer work, interests, hobbies and non-professional networks in which the hiring manager might be involved. While you’re probably already searching for candidates who worked in the same companies or went to the same school as the hiring manager, these can also provide powerful ammunition in focusing your sourcing efforts on job search engines like Monster and within social networks. 

A shared philanthropy or membership in the same professional organization can often help turn an applicant into a candidate and create an instant connection that often provides the foundation for a successful interview.  Not to mention, a happy hiring manager.  And that’s what it’s all about.