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The Recruiting Reel Andy Headworth

The Recruiting Reel Episode 4: How to Heat Up Your Talent Search

This episode of The Recruiting Reel is a must-watch for those interested in social recruiting. Andy Headworth offers tips on how to get more involved with your social recruitment efforts to attract highly qualified candidates.

Here’s the transcript of the episode:

Josh Tolan: Hey everyone, this is Josh Tolan, the CEO of Spark Hire, the leading video interviewing platform used by thousands of organizations around the world.

And this is The Recruiting Reel, a video series where we discuss real recruiting challenges with prominent recruiting experts so you walk away with actionable tips you can apply to your own recruiting.

The expert on today’s show is Andy Headworth, the Managing Director of Sirona Consulting. Andy is a best selling author, keynote speaker, and runs an award-winning blog focused on social recruiting. Andy helps companies improve their end-to-end recruitment strategy but focusing on new technologies, such as social media. So yeah, Andy knows his stuff.

The topic of today’s episode is How to Heat Up Your Talent Search. Naturally, Andy comes to the show with a social recruiting strategy that you must be implementing if you want to connect with the most highly sought after candidates for your organization. Take it away, Andy!

Andy Headworth: Hi, I’m Andy Headworth from Sirona Consulting, also the author of the new book “Social Media Recruitment”.

When it comes to sourcing talent, there’s one obvious area that recruiters can go to, and yet for some reason they don’t. Who best to ask where to engage similar-minded talent than in the groups of the talent you’re trying to recruit?

Go to the teams that you’re looking to place people into, and you can do this whether you’re an agency or a corporate, and ask them which social networks, which social communities, that they go to to talk to their peer groups.

The reason I do this is that we all have on average to latest stats, 5 and a half social networks each. So that means they’re not just all on LinkedIn or Facebook, there’s other communities they go to. These will be the places you need to go to recruit. Whether it’s Dribbble, Behance, Github, StackOverflow, or Meetup, whatever it may be, find out where it is, go and explore, set yourself a profile up, and start to engage with the exact audience that your peer group are looking to recruit.

Josh Tolan: Makes total sense right? Especially if you’re looking to connect with candidates with a very specific skill set. Don’t guess where to find them. Don’t spray and pray with your job advertising and social media postings. Talk to talent you’ve already connected with and find out where folks just like them are “hanging out” and become active in those social communities.

I want to thank today’s expert, Andy Headworth. I encourage you to check out his website at sironaconsulting.com and while you’re there, read their award-winning blog, Sirona Says. Follow Andy on Twitter @andyheadworth and connect with him on LinkedIn using the URL below. For more information on social recruiting strategies, check out Andy’s book Social Media Recruitment.

Thanks for watching The Recruiting Reel — for additional HR and recruiting content, head over to hr.sparkhire.com and subscribe to our newsletter. Also, follow us on Twitter, @sparkhire. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the newest episodes of The Recruiting Reel.

Thank again for watching and happy recruiting!

Josh Tolan

Josh Tolan is the Founder and CEO of Spark Hire, a video interviewing platform used by 6,000+ customers in over 100 countries.