Being everywhere and doing everything is not always the best strategy. If I’m honest it’s probably not a great strategy for anything these days! With recruitment resources stretched to their limits for most organisations, it can be difficult to try to keep up with the number of channels to market you could be using.
One of my recent posts, Mapping your way to sourcing success, outlined the fact that you really need to know your target audience. By knowing your target audience you can make informed and effective decisions on which channels are right for you. Some of the key steps that I take when recommending social channels to clients for recruitment purposes include……
1) Assessment of the Employer Brand
You should have a fairly good idea through engagement, pulse or EVP survey’s what you internal audience thinks of the organisation. To gain an understanding of what the external market’s view is, you can check out sites such as Glassdoor.com or the new Australian version jobadvisor.com or do your own primary research by adding a question to all of your screening forms or conversation asking the question – “what is your perception of what it’s like to work at company X?”. If you do this over a few weeks you’ll soon get a feel for what the perception in the market is of your organisation as an employer. By understanding this first, it will allow you to know what messages you either need to reinforce if positive or counteract if the perception is negative or untrue.
2) Develop a sourcing Channel map
Segmenting your target candidate audience and building your sourcing channel maps will allow you to speak directly to the candidates you need to, with the message you want to push out there as to why your organisation is the best place for them to be working at! To read how to build your sourcing channel map check out this post.
3) Know your objective
Before you do anything in the social space, you need to understand what your objective is specifically. Are you trying to attract candidates, show them what your organisation is about, share jobs, share information? Be specific as it will make content curation much easier if you can answer a simple Yes or No to if the activity you are doing will help you meet your objective. When defining your objective don’t use broad brush statements like – We want to seen as a good employer. Objectives can be:
- Communicate our EVP
- Show our culture (events, corporate & social responsibility, learning & development) through photos and videos
- Share informative and helpful content to potential employees
- Share market information
- Show our personality by not taking ourselves too seriously
4) Select your channels and platforms
Once you know which channels are right for your target audience (sourcing channel map) and you understand what your objective is, then you can start planning which channels are right for you.
Knowing which social channels your company is currently using will make your life a little easier as you may not need to build a new business case to use a platform you’re already using as a business. So do a search across the usual suspects such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc as you may not be aware that your organisation has a presence on a specific platform.
I’ve found that the majority of corporate organisations have YouTube and Facebook from a consumer perspective. Some may have a Twitter careers page and then there is usually a blank Google+ page that has been registered but not used as yet. More advanced organisation have utilised Pinterest for employer and consumer Branding and then there are a few that use Instagram, once again from an employer brand perspective.
5) Metrics
Before you start any activity, write down where you are right now. Things like what your employer brand is internally and externally – this may be through your engagement scores and sentiment in the market. It may be looking at the number of application you receive now. Knowing where your starting point is, will make it much easier to measure in 3-6-12 months time the impact your activity is having on your attraction strategy as well as which channels are helping you meet your objectives. There is no point putting resources, time and money into something if you’re not getting the return on investment.
Filed under: Attraction, Employer Branding, Engagement, Facebook, How to, Sourcing, Twitter
