Dig Deeper: 6 Social Networking Faux Pas to Avoid
How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business: Social Network Recruiting
Social recruiting is an effective way to utilize social networks to find the best candidate for any open positions at your company. While the past few years saw the rise of job boards like Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com, the growing prominence of social networks have transformed the way businesses build their best team. Instead of relying on the 'come one, come all' approach, the detailed personal information contained in profiles, such as interests and job history, allows businesses to employ social networking sites to target the specific audience or skill set they want to pull from.
According to an annual social recruitment survey published by Jobvite, an online service that helps businesses consolidate the resources of social media sites, 80 percent of companies used or planned to use social networking to find and attract candidates in 2009, with LinkedIn being used by 95 percent of the respondents and Facebook usage growing from 36 percent in 2008 to 59 percent in 2009.
'It's like what's happened to the ad industry,' says Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite and former general manager of Yahoo! HotJobs. 'It used to be that you would buy a big ad to get the consumer's attention, but more and more companies are relying on online advertising software that puts that ad right in front of them based on data, like the other ads they click on. Social recruiting is analogous to that.'
The Benefits of Social Network Recruiting
Here are some of the primary advantages that social recruiting affords small businesses:
1. Empowers your employees to distribute job information. These days, most, if not all of your employees probably have a profile on a social networking site. By enabling them to post information about open positions, you multiply your searching reach by the thousands.
2. Helps you put the passive job candidate in your crosshairs. Job boards are mostly used by people who are proactively looking for positions. But what about the perfect potential employee who may not be scouring Careerbuilder.com every day?
3. A low-cost method of finding high-quality candidates. When looking for job candidates, it takes time to sift through resumes of unqualified applicants, and many job boards charge fees to post openings. Social recruiting helps you zone in on the best candidates, for free.
Tools to Help You Socially Recruit
1. Custom searches. Searching only by name and location doesn't cut it when looking for the perfect employee. LinkedIn has one of the most thorough searches of all the sites, allowing you to sift through profiles by company, industry, college, and even how many 'degrees' you are from the person.
3. Updating your status message. When you or your employees update your statuses, it pops up on your friends' home page, and sits atop the profile until it's changed. 'My company is looking for … ,' is sure to snag replies.
4. Linking to stories and external content. Both Facebook and LinkedIn enable users to post external content to their profiles. By linking to articles and blogs that contain positive news about your business, you show potential candidates that it's not just your social network connections that adore your company.
Dig Deeper: Small Business "Success Studies" Using LinkedIn
How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business: Privacy and Legal Issues
Though social networking can certainly be a fun way to help you expand your company, there are plenty of issues surrounding privacy and legalities that you should always be aware of when searching for employees, and even after you've hired them. 'The laws [regarding online privacy and or hiring online] generally apply the same [as existing state laws],' says Megan Erickson, an associate at Des Moines, Iowa-based Dickinson, Mackaman, Tyler & Hagan law firm and author of Erickson's Blog on Social Networking and the Law. 'But now that there are all these different kinds of social media, they combine to make it a very unique environment.'
Here are some of the most important things to keep in mind to help you steer clear of legal trouble when dealing with potential or current employees and social networking sites:
1. Don't use fake profiles. Using a fake profile when adding employees to monitor their activity can constitute as an invasion of privacy, Erickson says. 'That's just asking for lots of trouble,' she says.
2. Add a social media section to your handbook. Including language about social media in your personnel policy is paramount, especially if you plan on integrating it heavily in your company's operations.
3. Beware of existing federal and state laws. It may help to prep yourself on the many federal and state laws regarding anti-discrimination and privacy, Erickson says, so that if you do come across an employee's wayward photo or disparaging status message, you'll be knowlegeable about how to proceed with
disciplinary action.
