To put it bluntly, social media is not a “set it and forget it” marketing channel for anything, including recruitment marketing. That said, there are many opportunities to leverage social media channels such as Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, LinkedIn accounts and blogs to extend the reach of your recruitment marketing messages and to target qualified candidates. However, there are also risks to consider.

Opportunities:

• Maintaining one or more social media profiles will expand the online channels through which potential candidates can “discover” your organization (SEO, link sharing, referrals, etc.) and provide valuable opportunities for candidates to then stay connected and “follow” your organization over time (based on the quality, relevance and frequency of published content). This is a large part of the value organizations receive from creating and maintaining a blog, Facebook fan page, Twitter account and/or YouTube account for recruitment marketing.
• Social media provides opportunities for your recruiters to initiate and/or contribute to online conversations about specific topics that are aligned to the specific skill sets being recruited for. Essentially, social media provides you with an opportunity to create a highly targeted discussion online that will serve as a magnet, attracting potential candidates and exposing their potential qualifications. While this is true for most social media channels, it is something that LinkedIn is specifically positioned very well to do through their Groups and Questions/Answers features.
• Social media provides additional channels for an employer to distribute actual job listings, separate from broader recruitment marketing messaging or online discussions. For example, organizations are purchasing job listings on LinkedIn (much like a traditional job board) and purchasing recruitment ads on Facebook that can be highly targeted based on Facebook’s specific user demographics/interests.
• From a pure technology and creative perspective, the addition of a social media dimension to your overall recruitment marketing strategy will provide many unique/custom opportunities to extend the reach and value of existing recruitment marketing collateral, Web assets and events.

Risks:

• Committing to the ongoing responsibility of regularly posting fresh content is hard for any marketer in social media, and this will be a challenge for recruitment marketing as well. If the frequency of social media posts is sparse, your follower numbers will quickly decline and they may choose to never come back.
• Posting in social media is an ongoing creative writing exercise. Many organizations fall into a habit of posting the same type of thing over and over again, giving followers little value in the social media relationship. Social media posts need to be relevant, timely and somehow unique for an employer’s social media profile to gain traction and attention. Given the additional responsibility of frequency noted above, this is often a hard thing to achieve.
• Participating in social media will inevitably produce feedback and questions from your followers posted publicly to your recruiters on a variety of topics, including comments from disgruntled past employees and questions from potential candidates on pay, benefits, work experience, etc. Because of this, organizations must develop a policy for engaging in these conversations and afford the required time to continually monitor for them.

Because social media is a continuously evolving marketing channel, it will require your ongoing attention and planning to successfully leverage this tool in your recruitment marketing efforts. In fact, I also recommend that you pay close attention to what others are doing right and/or wrong in social media since oftentimes the most valuable lessons are learned through the successes and failures of others. Good luck!

- Korre Johnson