Magnet or Repellent – What’s Your Social Recruiting Style?

Whatever line of business you’re in, take a look at social media usage amongst your peers. You’ll quickly see two distinct personality types – those who are like magnets, attracting people and interactions with ease; and those who seem smothered in repellent, rarely generating any kind of response or interest with their social posts and unable to generate any kind of social momentum.

Now let’s think of you and your role as a recruiter. Which would you rather be – a magnet for potential candidates… or a repellent?!

This is of course a rhetoric question. We all want to be magnets for potential future hires. We all would like a growing following of relevant professional contacts. We all would love to have a network of people who help us reach out to a wider candidate audience in our hour of need. But how do you ensure you’re someone who attracts professional contacts with magnetic dynamism on social media?

If you’ve read much about social recruiting and social media effectiveness, you’ll undoubtedly have read of the need to focus on engagement and building rapport. But how do you do that in practice, what could you start doing today that would enhance your magnetism?

Where To Start?

Let’s start where we should always start – and that’s to say by thinking about our end-customer: the business professional, our potential hire. What would make them want to follow a recruiter – or engage with them – on social media? I put it to you that successful business professionals are interested in:

• Staying on top of the latest industry developments that impact on their career
• Knowing about new tools and services that will help them to do their job more effectively
• Gaining insights about salaries and career development opportunities in their niche
• Building a network of valuable business contacts
• Saving time

Stop for a moment and see if you can add a sixth point to the above – it may just help you to reach out to your audience in new ways that prompt strong levels of candidate engagement. If you can’t think of one now, be sure to return to this point once you’ve incorporated the rest of these suggestions into your social recruiting approach.

What Not To Do? 

Now let’s consider what a lot of recruiters do on social media:

• Talk about their own company and its successes
• Postmany open vacancies
• Ask if anyone knows someone who might be interested in…
• Seek recommendations or endorsements

Look at the first list of bullet points – and now again at the second. Is there any overlap here? Any connection between what lots of recruiters are doing on social media and what would make potential candidates want to follow them or engage with them? None right?? The only candidates likely to be drawn to these types of recruiters on social media are those who are the most desperate and who need to find work urgently. Does that sound like the type of candidate your business wants to prioritise reaching?

This of course is the characterisation of recruiters who are repelling business people with their social media activities.

To become someone who attracts professional interest like a magnet, we need to instead focus on sharing content and contacts that will best serve the needs of our prospective candidates. This invariably means ensuring that most of our social media activity has nothing to do with our own company, but rather you’re sharing whatever is going to be of the most value to candidates. This could include:

• Sharing news articles, industry editorials and reports that are highly relevant to our target candidate audience
• Sharing ideas for being more effective as a professional in the sector you’re targeting – including sharing links to tools and services that could genuinely make a difference in their daily lives
• Sharing career resources that you find online that you feel are highly relevant to candidates in this sector. This will almost certainly send candidates to a website other than your own, but the bond with you is being strengthened with every such share
• Recommending valuable contacts in your industry who you know to be active and engaging on social media

When this is combined with activities that help get you onto the radars of suitable candidates (eg. following them, liking their content, commenting on their posts, making introductions) it will result in you building up a network of business professionals who view you as selfless. People who look out for your updates and value your insights. People who will become indebted to you and want to repay everything you’ve done for them. People who will react and help you when you do reach out with an urgent hiring requirement. That’s the type of magnetic social recruiter you want to be – so make a commitment to change your social activities this week and the results will soon follow.

Tony Restell is Founder of the talent networking site Social-Hire.com and a longstanding entrepreneur in the online recruitment market. You’ll find him engaging with recruiters and candidates on Twitter on @tonyrestell.