3 Qualities of Highly Successful Social Recruiters

We aim to educate our clients on all-things social recruiting. However, sometimes our clients teach us about the tenacity it takes to push social recruiting campaigns to the next level. Looking over our customer case studies, we’ve identified the three fundamental qualities of our most successful social recruiters.

1. They know what they want

Our most effective social recruiters set themselves up for success. These clients either had a clear goal in mind or knew the true challenges they faced before we launched their campaigns. Not only did they have goals, but they gave them a laser focus by making them specific, realistic, and measurable.

More followers, more brand awareness, and more applicants are great goals to have—and they’re actually enough to start. But when a client specifies a desired increase in quality candidate flow in new markets during a period of rapid expansion, we know to drive attention and results to candidate count, applicant quality, and employee retention in a given locale within a specific period of time—which is exactly what we did for Bar Louie Restaurants.
But don’t get us wrong–we are strong proponents for starting before you’re “ready” because the very nature of social media requires active participation to discover, for example, the baseline engagement level for your Facebook and Twitter job posts. Usually this valuable discovery phase is where we learn the challenges and set goals together. However, knowing what you want from social recruiting from the start puts you at a great advantage and can only help accelerate your social recruiting ROI.
 

1. They know what they need

Setting clear goals—especially quantitative goals—is an ideal starting point because you can then work backwards from that desired end to identify what actions are truly necessary and—perhaps more importantly—which actions are not.
There’s a lot to do when integrating and deploying social recruiting for the first time, and we’ve found that helping clients prioritize and allocate resources has become a defining factor of success. For example, establishing a Twitter presence with highly-targeted job tweets optimized for search must come before building out Twitter cards and inline images which are proven to drive higher engagement. Instead of racing towards the end goal, we pace and build towards it, mindful of our clients’ resources and their most immediate goals first.
>>> Read Related: 3 Counterintuitive Social Recruiting Best Practices You Should Know

1. They work with what they’ve got

Our upcoming customer case study will tell the story of how we worked with a small team—led by an HR pro versed in social media—multiply their applicant count within just three months. One of the secrets to their success was in quickly integrating social recruiting with the existing incentivized employee referral program. Personnel who were active on social naturally began liking and sharing job posts and tweets freely, boosting exposure to each opportunity and driving an unprecedented spike in applicants.
Another example of resourceful social recruiting is tapping into the talents within your organization.  Coaching our clients early on about how to work with their marketing departments is now a necessary step. Some of these talks have led to powerful collaborations with marketing teams that proactively support budding recruiting campaigns to meet shared goals, such as increased brand engagement and awareness through social channels.

Really? That’s all it takes?

We could have added social media fluency and ability to measure ROI as fundamental qualities, and although these skills can only help, our most successful clients did not need these technical abilities to meet their marks. They ended up learning and developing those skills along the way through our partnership.
We think the secret behind these three abilities–knowing how to set realistic goals, determining how to reach those goals, and having the creativity to work around perceived limits—is how they help keep teams focused on the prize and resilient when powering through any obstacles, especially at the beginning. If you adopt and hone these three qualities effectively, you may accomplish just about anything.
What other qualities are essential to successful social hiring programs? Can you add to this list?