In the latest installment of our Social Recruiting Pro Tips series, we explore productivity with Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent. Lars breaks down the processes and tools that can make leveraging social recruiting and employer branding a time saver instead of a time demand. When contemplating moving forward with social recruiting, you may feel jittery about adding onto your already full plate. However, social recruiting can save both you and your company time in recruiting. Lars Schmidt suggests that the combination of a well-defined strategy and a set of productivity tools can make social recruiting a seamless part of your overall recruiting efforts. “Social recruiting can be to recruiting a lot like exercise is to health,” says Lars. “Do it right for 30 minutes a day and you can do everything else in your day a little more efficiently.” Once you’ve documented your social recruiting strategy, you’ll want to consider tools to help you with these discrete tasks. Lars breaks down social recruiting tasks into five categories. 1. Listen for Audience Needs True community engagement begins with consistent and active listening. In social, you need to know the right keywords and hashtags to monitor. Start with a brainstorming session with your team to define the skills and passions that are most closely aligned with your target audience. You’ll then need a tool to filter through the noise. A couple of tools to consider include:
- SocialMention – This free tool scans across all the major social networks and rates mentions based on reach and sentiment. After looking through the mentions with the highest rating, you can make decisions about what content to produce for your company’s social sites and your personal social networking handles.
- Sysomos – Check with your marketing or social media team to see if your company has a subscription to Sysomos or a tool like it. Sysomos is a paid tool that reveals insights about where your target audience spends their time on social channels and what topics resonate with them.
- Hootsuite – With this social media management platform, you can curate content from other sources, add your commentary and publish to multiple social networks.
- Canva – Social is a visual medium by nature. You’re scrolling through feeds on your mobile device and you’re attention is caught by compelling photos, illustrations and memes. Canva can help you find visuals and size them for specific social networks.