3 (Counterintuitive) Social Recruiting Best Practices You Should Know

There are several logical and widely-held beliefs that have supported social media measurement and management through the years. However, what may seem a common-sense rule in one context does not necessarily translate in another—especially in the context of using social networks as channels for distributing jobs and sourcing great hires.
As a hiring tool, social recruitment turns some beliefs upside down.
Here are 3 Counterintuitive Social Recruiting Best Practices You Should Know:

• Blanket Belief: The more followers, the bigger the reach.

Exception: Why Twitter followers on your Job Channel aren’t as important.
This one is a head scratcher at first because since the dawn of social media we’ve been trained to equate a higher follower count with bigger influence, greater reach, and wider popularity.
However, when it comes to your job channel—the Twitter channel designated to generate only job and recruitment related tweets—follower size does not matter as much
Below are screenshots of two Twitter channels belonging to Allstate, a TweetMyJobs Client. Notice the difference in follower count and type of tweets from the first channel–@AllstateCareers, the engagement channel; and the second channel–@AllstateJobs, the job channel.


This exception teaches several crucial lessons about Twitter’s unique architecture.  Unlike other networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter allows anyone to search all public tweets. You need not even be a registered Twitter user to access the millions of tweets posted daily.
Job seekers harness Twitter’s flexible search capabilities by filtering and funneling job tweets directly onto a search feed they watch like a news ticker—receiving the most relevant job tweets in real-time.
Brands that distribute a significant amount of jobs on Twitter a day establish a separate job channel so that their engagement channels can focus on building conversation, customer service, and brand loyalty.
Brands care, as they should, about their follower count for these engagement channels; however, brands understand job channel tweets are searched for and found differently—via Twitter search.
Best Practice: Separate your job channel from your engagement channel to optimize user experience, and continue delivering relevant opportunities as well as lively conversation.

• Blanket Belief: The longer your tweets live on, the better.

Exception: Why you DON’T want your job tweets to live forever
Instead of living on your feed for eternity, job tweets should perish and reincarnate frequently.
Reading two identical job tweets on a feed posted even a few days apart make the opportunity look stale, the tweet channel look unmanaged, and the brand look unprepared to deliver the real-time data the social web demands.
Perhaps worse, if a job has already been filled and scheduled auto-tweets are still firing for that opportunity, job seekers can be redirected to an error page on your career site, potentially turning off and turning away a great candidate for other openings—future and current.
Keeping track of your tweets, scheduling auto-tweets to populate your feed at the right pace, as well as deleting tweets to keep your feed clean and current, sounds like a lot of work—because it is.
To do all this manually—especially if you have dozens of requisitions to fill each month—would be an exhausting, if not impossible, task.
TweetMyJobs does all this automatically and systematically. We also go a step beyond and tie these actions directly with the client’s ATS. For example, when you’ve marked a position as “filled” on your ATS, all tweets associated with that opportunity are deleted and no further job tweets will be posted.
Best Practice: Implement a schedule to keep job posts fresh and delete job tweets for already-filled positions as soon as they happen. Without a social recruiting solution like TweetMyJobs, it’s a real juggling act, but one that will protect your employer brand.

• Blanket Belief: You need a branded company page or channel to start recruiting through social media.

The Truth: You can always begin before you’re “ready”
Failure to launch is often rooted in the failure to reimagine the rocket you’re building. Unlike a NASA space shuttle, your social recruiting ship need not be airtight; in fact it need not be a “ship” at all. Sometimes small exploratory solo missions can be a historic first step into the unknown.
Here are a few tips on how to launch without the “ship” on the three most used networks for social recruitment:
LinkedIn

1. 1. – Begin your social recruitment outreach with a more personal touch by leveraging the existing networks of your recruiters and hiring managers. Test conversion for job posts to their feed and direct email outreach through their account without anything more than writing copy and tracking responses.

Facebook – Recruiting on Facebook without a company page looks a lot like leveraging networks on LinkedIn. Many recruiters use their personal network to source referrals, especially in reaching passive candidates in circles that may fall outside their professional contact list.
Twitter – We serve some clients that opt out of establishing and managing a Twitter channel altogether but still distribute jobs through TweetMyJobs’ 11,000+ job channels. It’s easy for job seekers to find and subscribe to job channels specific to their career interest and location through Twitter and the engagement and reach is extremely powerful.
The Caveat: Unbranded approaches, of course, do not utilize these social platforms for what they may be doing best—building a powerful employer brand. Nevertheless, if you find yourself waiting to start, baby steps into social recruiting are better than none at all.
Best Practice: Don’t let the lack of official infrastructure prevent you from testing social networks as a hiring tool. Your independent successes may just validate the need for a more formal investment in social recruiting.
For more Best Practices, get our whitepaper on the 10 Best Practices To Get Your Facebook Page Delivering Recruiting Results.
Do you have any Counterintuitive Social Recruiting Best Practices to share? Leave a comment below to add to our list.