Recruiters: Make Use of Social Media Now

Social media is a massive part of life these days, with a lot of people finding out breaking news first from their Twitter feeds, and using social networks like Facebook as their primary means of connecting with everyone from their family and closest friends to acquaintances they haven’t seen in years – but who may be useful to know someday.Social media use now transcends age, with millennials being far from the only people checking their social media accounts persistently throughout the day. This makes social media very important for marketing for any kind of business, but for recruitment agencies, it can be an even more useful tool.

Here are some of the reasons why as a recruiter, you should be making the most out of the opportunities social media presents:

Build Better Relationships with Clients and Potential Clients
If you want to strengthen your relationship with your contact at a client business, or you have people you are working towards making new recruitment clients, then social media is a great place to get to know them. Most people don’t mind adding new potential business contacts on at least some of the social networks that they use, and once you’re connected it is possible to engage more, perhaps by sharing things they might find interesting with them or commenting on things they post. LinkedIn is generally the easiest one to connect with people on on a professional basis, though if you can, try and ask people (where appropriate) to add you on the networks they visit more often – usually Facebook and Twitter.

Get to Know Your Candidates Better
Gone are the days when people could get away with completely fabricating the stuff on their CVs, and this is largely thanks to social media. Even if people don’t use LinkedIn, which will of course show you their work history and endorsements from people who they’ve worked with, you can fact check a lot of things using their more ‘social’ social media accounts, and you can also get an idea of the kind of person they are outside of work, which can help you assess which companies would be a good fit.

Placed Somebody? You Could Help Their Friends, Too
Most professionals will know a lot of other people through their work, who will of course at some point be interested in new jobs. If you’ve had a successful experience placing a person and gotten to know them, you can ask them to share your contact information or a vacancy you may be hiring for to their friends on things like Facebook. In some cases, for example where the person you placed was previously made redundant, there may be a whole raft of people they know who would be useful candidates for your hiring database.

Social media is not just a marketing tool, it is a great way to strengthen the personal relationships that are so vital in recruitment, and leverage the networks you have to find more clients, and more candidates.