Considering our upcoming launch of a new Social Media Marketing service, it seemed a good time to go into a little bit of depth about the flexible applications of social media which go beyond the more obvious and widespread benefits. In this instance- how social media is becoming an essential recruitment tool in our ever more digitised society – and how we’ve demonstrated that it works in a real-life scenario for one of our clients:
Blogging has been with us for many years now and is an exercise which is undertaken by individuals, small businesses, giant corporations and all manner of authors in between. It allows for the blogger to share their thoughts, views and news with interested parties and in doing so make their voice heard – whatever the subject matter. The modern social network takes this personal soapbox to its logical destination: allowing users to share as much or as little information about their daily life as they wish and to do so amongst friends, like-minded individuals or the world at large.
It’s only relatively recently that brands and businesses have started to truly embrace social media as a means of interaction with their customers and clients. Twitter especially allows for a social media profile to double up as a customer service channel – with the ‘@’ symbol serving as a means of direct communication. There’s no doubting the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook for all manner of organisations due to their dual purpose as interaction tool and information sharing tool. Social networks take on a whole new level of functionality however when utilised in online recruitment.
The key to effective recruitment is reaching the right potential applicants for each job role. At Blue Octopus Online Recruitment they’ve always put this at the forefront of their method by posting expertly constructed job descriptions and candidate requirements to the leading job boards and industry specific websites and publications. Embracing social media has allowed us to supplement this activity with job posts direct to Twitter and Facebook (alongside other social networks) which opens new doors of opportunity. By posting job roles directly to the newsfeeds of Facebook and Twitter subscribers, we can keep job hunters informed of brand new positions as and when they are announced. This allows us to reach prospective candidates- even when they’re engaging in social interaction with friends as opposed to actively job hunting. This format also makes it easier for people to share details of these positions with friends who they think may be interested.
In a similar way, active engagement with Linked-In puts relevant roles in front of relevant candidates based on their interests, experience and location. The more business-centric nature of Linked-In also means that whilst online recruitment through Facebook and Twitter reaches people when they’re most likely visiting the site during leisure time: Linked-In interaction is more commonly undertaken whilst actively seeking fresh employment opportunities. Essentially, social media recruitment methods are effective at all times of day.
The advent of Smartphones such as the I-Phone, BlackBerry and Android based handsets has also meant that people don’t only interact with social media platforms when in front of a computer – but whenever and wherever they fancy. This additional reach simply adds to the potential and effectiveness of social media interaction as a tool for online recruitment.
Although Facebook, Twitter and their ilk aren’t yet the most effective means of finding new employees; they are an indispensible tool which will only gain importance over time and we’re proud to have brought them on-board alongside Blue Octopus Online Recruitment’s other more established methods sooner rather than later.
