Did your company finally decide to implement social recruiting? Congrats! You have made the first important step in order to take your recruiting efforts to the next level and improve your hiring results. With social media there come tremendous benefits that can help recruiters to find more qualified employees and save money and time simultaneously. However, many do not know where to start and how to design and implement a social recruiting strategy successfully. This guide will help you at getting started in the social recruiting world.

Define your objectives

When designing any sort of strategy, you should always begin with setting up specific objectives and goals that you want to reach. Start by determining and gathering the company’s wishes and overall strategies and assessing the resources. This will help you in defining goals that will guide your social media journey. During this process you should keep the acronym SMART in mind – objectives should always be specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable and time bound. Having good objectives will facilitate your work and you will always have a clear goal in sight.

Create accounts for specific platforms

Setting up an account might seem the most trivial step in the whole process, but it is actually one of the most important activities. Before signing up, you have to decide on which platforms your company should be active on. This involves thorough research about the platforms’ users who should coincide with your target group. Your strategy cannot be successful if your company has a great presence on the wrong platform because your intended audience will never see your activities. Once you have established a few accounts you should develop a distinct strategy for each platform according to their users and purpose. Posts that work on one platform might not work on another. In general, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube can all help you in your recruiting activities, but only if you develop different strategies for each platform.

Set up a schedule

You might have the best content of all your competitors – but if no one sees your content, this advantage is of no use. That is why timing is key. Different platforms have different times when most people are active and when you can reach the broadest audience. You can easily find out when these times are by using google. Of course, most of the times are just suggestions and not an exact science, but they can give you a good idea of when to post content. To keep track of your planned activities on various channels, you should set up a time plan. There are several free sites that help you plan posts on different social media platforms. You can even set up a timer, so that the site sends out planned posts all by itself!

Get users to see your content

Companies that only recently started their social recruiting activities usually do not have a lot of followers and therefore not a big reach. To combat that, you should fill your time plan with posts of high quality. Timing is still key, but you cannot engage your followers, develop your employer brand and broaden your audience if you do not provide interesting content. It does not always have to be original content, a combination of original content and content from all over the web is the best way to go. The only important thing is to choose content that is of interest to your audience. Engagement is the best way to attract potential employees to your company!