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You know why you want a better mobile application process, and you’ve started down the path of promoting your employer brand and creating better job postings. But once you’ve put yourself out there, how do you find these new mobile candidates? Best-case scenario means the right candidates find you. But the best recruiters are active, looking for candidates constantly and directing them to the open positions they need to fill and building relationships for the future. This is where social sourcing comes in.
Social sourcing is using social tools to gather information about potential candidates beyond their resumes, based on available information online. This could include looking for people who may not be actively seeking work but display the necessary skills to be recruited. Some startups have devoted themselves to collecting and selling this information to recruiters, and we’ve recently seen the rise of the social sourcing engine, which takes information from various social and professional networks and makes it easy to sort, find and share among a talent acquisition team.
Mobile and Social: Peas in a Pod
For the business looking to get its mobile job application process in order, this means taking advantage of social media’s enormous potential for helping employers find candidates. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Vince, and Pinterest all had huge — around 20% — increases in usage from 2013 to 2014, and social media usage across the board is only expected to increase in the coming years.
All of these outlets are available on mobile, and they’re the things candidates are looking at constantly, making them the best place to advertise your job postings and make people aware of your employer brand. If you can get a candidate to see your opening while they’re checking their phone at the bus stop, and make it easy to apply in the small window of time they have; you’ve made the barrier to entry so much simpler. This is especially true of the passive job seeker, 85% of which would be willing to talk to someone about a new job opportunity if it came along.
Get Social, Get Hires
Recruiters and candidates alike are wising up to the potential of job searching through social and mobile. Candidates are making great use of job avenues online, with 73% of Millennials (most of which are heavily connected online) having found a job through a social network. LinkedIn is still the largest online source for recruiters, with 89% of them having hired someone through the service, whereas only 26% and 15% use Facebook and Twitter, respectively. However, job seekers prefer Facebook with 83% of them looking at Facebook for jobs while only 36% search on LinkedIn.
While recruiters prefer to recruit via LinkedIn, 83% of job seekers search for jobs through Facebook.
If you can’t afford recruiting services and want to get ahead of the employer competition, it seems like a sure bet to use social media to find your next hire. Use your social media accounts to promote not only your job postings but your brand by posting about things other than your openings. This could include talking about daily news, promoting statistics about the world of work, or in some other way making your account useful and interesting to candidates. That way, when you do post your openings, candidates are much more likely to look at them and mention you to their friends. Companies like Disney and PepsiCo have done great work in humanizing their employee brand.
Setting up social media accounts outside of the usual places like LinkedIn is an easy, relatively cheap way to promote your employer brand to candidates. Social sourcing analytics will help you find the best candidate online, but even if you can’t afford that kind of information, there’s no reason not to make your employer brand heard on social media, especially with how connected to the social media space is to mobile and the candidates found therein.
Finally, remember to track your social efforts. Measuring social recruiting efforts is much simpler than it used to be and many ATS offer tracking and measurement tools on the back end.
Don't miss out on the rest of our Better Hiring Through Mobile series:
Better Hiring Through Mobile: Why You Need a Mobile Application Process [Part 1]
Better Hiring Through Mobile: Ads to Engage, Brands to Inspire [Part 2]
