It’s Marketing Month on the COATS blog! This month, we’re looking at the many ways you can grow your business by growing your market share.
Last week, we discussed using social media to market to potential clients. Today, we’re looking at social media for candidates: not just how to bring in more of them, but how to attract better candidates, how to help existing candidates improve and how to help keep your candidates happy.
Job listings: This is a no-brainer. Most of your candidates are already on social media, so bring your job listings to them. Commenting on listings is a great way to get them noticed and to define your ideal candidate; if the opening is for a forklift operator, for instance, you could comment on that job posting with “This is a temp-to-hire position” or “If you’ve got reach truck experience too, that’s even better!” (We offer a value-added option that lists job openings on job aggregate boards as well as Facebook and Twitter.)
Better candidates: As social networking and recruiting has increased, recruiters have noticed something: the quality of candidates has increased, too. On this awesome infographic of the Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey shows, recruiters with a strong social presence tended to say that the quality of candidates they reach through social media has increased.
Improve candidates: Not only can you use social media to market yourself, you can use it to pass along links to articles and sites that help with job-hunting. If you’re despairing over how your applicants dress, post links to online articles about dressing for job interviews on your Facebook page and start a board on Pinterest showing what—and what not—to wear.
Customer service: Social media has definitely removed any shyness people might feel after having a bad experience. Down side: you’ll see comments that totally trash your business. Up side: You can take whatever useful advice is in that comment to improve your business, and you can let the commenter know that they matter to you and that you want them to have a good experience, and you can show others that you take customer service seriously for candidates. No contest!
Market research: You can head off potential problems by getting in front of your candidates’ needs, and social media is a great way to do that. On a regular basis, click through to the profiles of candidates who have connected with you to get a sense of their lives, their concerns, their interests, etc. You might notice some patterns that can help you tailor your processes, your job descriptions or your interviewing hours.
Those are just a few ways to use social media to market to candidates. What other ways have you tried, and what were the results? Let us know in the comments!