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- What this thing called engagement in social media channels means and how to build an effective way to make it beneficial but not too time consuming for our company?
- What are passive candidates? How to reach and activate them and why should I even do so?
- Is there any room for job ads in social media channels?
- What do I have to change when I distribute to the channels that actually are build for different levels of engagement?

For example, these questions are really relevant when we discuss how to utilize corporate and external social media channels as a tool for talent acquisition.

Such as:

- communities
- forums
- blogs
- groups
- and all the the other niche channels with targeted audience

The reason to do so should be also clear, and quite often it is to attract passive candidates. You want them to join your talent communities and you also want them to spread the word on behalf of you in their networks and the end result of course you want relevant candidates to apply to your open positions. Please also remember to think how you measure your success and how you define your priorities.

What is the most important thing for your company?

• - Do you need to speed up your recruitment process?
• - Do you need less but better quality applicants?
• - Do you receive an enormous CV spam from job boards?
• - Do you want to reduce current cost per hire?
• - Is some particular region the pain in the ass for your recruitment team?

So what you want to achieve?

To understand what kind of opportunities there may be for your company you have to understand well the behaviour of your target audience. Who do you want to reach and where can you reach them? And it is not less important to understand how they behave in those places where you want to reach them. That is not always easy when you use a lot of different channels and you need to do quite much research and communicate with the owners and administrators of the channels. I know this pain, because that pain is the reason we wanted to build a solution to take the burden away from our customers.

Nowadays you can hear that many recruiters talk about the passive candidates and how they try to reach them through different ways of sourcing. And that is totally nothing new, headhunting is and has always been a process to target passive candidates, but now there is just so many more tools and channels to make the process more efficient and effective. And actually ,what is the best part, you can build relationships between your company and the candidate, not between a headhunter and the candidate. And you can reach them in a much smoother way. It is easier to know when they are interested to talk with you, not only when you want and need to talk with them. So when you talk about a passive candidate, you talk about a person who is not currently actively looking for a job, so it is impossible to reach them through job boards.

There is a lot of talk about engagement, but not so much talk about what that really means.How to build different ways and layers (depending on the level of interest) to help the target audience engage depending on the channels and the behaviour of the people in your target audience? What I mean is that those who actively teach about the use of social media are normally super-active on those channels and they can easily forget the fact that they are the minority of all users, they are in the group of 2-10% (depending on the channel) from the total audience (participating by commenting and discussing). But most of the people consume social media channels as they would be broadcasting channels. You may ask why they actually do so, why don’t they just read news in the papers then? So one of the biggest reasons is that the majority of social media users want to be part of industry related communities because they can use it as a source of relevant real time information about the topic they are interested in. Topics and discussions are validated by key influencers of the industry which is really great when there is so much information available. And they (including me) think that “when I have time and there is a need I can reach the like minded people through the community”. People just don’t take that next step so often. Those hand picked, quite often recommended, open positions that you hear about in these channels are also often filtered for them by admins so even if you are not in the job hunting mode you will get notified if there are interesting opportunities in the field you are interested in. That is something people really value, based on the studies, if you are not too pushy and you follow the rules set up by the channels and the admins.

So what does this mean for the companies? I will try to summarize it. If and when you use job ads as a part of your talent attraction strategy, build it to be part of your employer branding strategy. That is really important aspect to make it really effective. If you have an interesting company (which I am sure you do), it is really great to support it by position based talent attraction strategy. That is the way you can spread the word also in external social media channels and increase your audience dramatically, and not meaning the total number of it but reaching the right audience. So please, do not only rely on your corporate channels, people you are looking for are not there yet. Help people to engage in different ways in different channels. They can do it by liking, following, bookmarking, sharing, ordering a news letter, you name it. Don’t make it difficult for them, because if you do, your competitors will make it easy. War of talents is already here, believe me. Help them to consume your message where they are and how they wish, empower the people you want to reach by giving best tools and making sure that they know about your great company and the interesting positions you can offer just for them. Make it as relevant and personal as it can be. Think how they can take the first step and from this first step build a journey(s) in which someday they can be an employee of the year in Your company.

If you have anything to comment or ask about please comment in here or drop me a line, I am happy to share my thoughts, join the discussion: LinkedIn group – Direct Recruitment Strategies or contact directly http://uk.linkedin.com/in/akikakko