Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire

How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles to Attract Talent

An increase in demand for skilled workers, especially in operations, engineering, IT, and sales has led to a completely different job market, where companies are forced to compete against each other to attract the talent they need. And most recruiters expect that competition will be even greater in 2015, so they are planning to invest more in social and mobile recruiting as well as referrals.

Social recruiting has become the new normal when it comes to attracting talent. It’s also used to vet candidates before the interview ever takes place. But to get to the point where you have candidates to vet, you first need to maximize the use of your social media channels to attract said talent. And the first step in doing that is optimizing your social media profiles.

Showcase Your Company’s Culture

If you’re trying to take advantage of social media networks to recruit talent, then you need to focus on the strengths of your organization and how they can benefit potential new hires. Your profile page isn’t the place to showcase your marketing message. A large number of the people who’ll be visiting your profile are looking for employment, so you need to grab their attention quickly.

So, you need to place more emphasis on the working environment and how your organization inspires and motivates employees to do their best. You have to show them how great it is to work in your organization.

Give Your Employees the Opportunity to Sell Your Organization

A candidate wants to know what it would be like if they came to work for you, and a social media profile is the perfect way for you to show them that. But instead of telling them how great your organization is, allow your employees to show them. You can include testimonials written by your employees, or, even better, get videos made with people explaining what it’s like to work for your company.

Make sure to include a variety of employees too. The more departments and levels are represented, the better as this will give a potential candidate a good overview of your organization.

Connect with Your Employees

Many candidates will check out your company’s social media network and will find it curious if the people working for you don’t connect with you. It might have nothing to do with their enjoyment of working for you, but for an outsider it will look as if they’d rather avoid being linked to the company, or would prefer not to have to deal with your organization in their downtime. In other words, it would look to a candidate as if working for you might not be all you’re making it out to be.

So, make sure you have as many of your employees as possible in your network. And encourage them to fill out their profiles completely. Candidates will likely check out your employees and what they are saying, which will add further credibility to your claims and theirs.

Update Your Company Profile Regularly

One mistake many companies make is creating a LinkedIn profile and then forgetting about it for months or years. A company profile should be an ever-evolving tool you use to attract talent, and that means changing it as your organization changes and grows. The more up-to-date your profile is, the more you show that your organization pays attention to detail and is interested in engaging with potential candidates and their followers.

Furthermore, if your profile looks like it hasn’t been touched in a year, any party who might be interested in working for you may very well assume you aren’t interested, which means you could very well lose a great candidate. So, make sure to keep that profile fresh.

Leveraging social media to attract new talent is no longer a quirky thing techy companies do. It’s become part of the norm, so if you want to be able to compete with all the other companies trying to attract the same talent as you, then you need to go to where the candidates are and give them what they want. Remember, showcasing your company’s culture and employee stories is vital to capturing the attention of the talent you’d like to hire.

About the Author: Megan Ritter is an online business writer based in Los Angeles, California. As a guest author, her writing covers social media, business communications, finance management, and technology.

Image: Twin design/BigStock.com

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