Making a digital appearance on multiple platforms is essential in today’s digital age. Exposing your company’s personality and culture helps draw in candidates for open positions. Once you draw them in, effectively engaging them can help turn those candidates into productive new hires.

According to a recent study done by SHRM on social recruitment, 82% of recruiters are using social media as a means to recruit passive candidates. With such a large number of recruiters in the social media pool, developing a successful strategy is imperative. Below are four best practices to help build a strong recruiting strategy in the competitive social media market.

  • Understand Your Audience – In order to understand which social media platforms would be best to post a job opening, companies need to first understand where their ideal candidate would be found. Survey current employees or applicants about how they found the job posting. It is likely that people with the same qualities will be found in the same digital space.
  • Highlight Specific Positions – If you are looking to fill a job that has specific skill requirements, using social media is a good option. Posting generic job descriptions will yield resumes in the hundreds, if not thousands. This creates MORE work for HR professionals and the longer it takes to sift through resumes, the longer it takes to get the vacancy filled.
  • Showcase your Company’s Best Qualities – Allowing your current employees to share their experiences and thoughts about your company is a smart tactic, if and only if, it sheds a positive light. Choose the right employees or teams to access your company’s social media accounts. Be sure to establish guidelines of the do’s and don’ts of posting online. Optimally, you want to see your company’s culture conveyed in a manner that is enticing to potential candidates.
  • Continuously Monitor Social Media for Issues and Opportunities – There are a variety of tools that can help you monitor your social media presence. Utilizing one of these tools can help connect your company with potential employees and also search for relevant content to share. Hootsuite hootsuite.com is probably one of the easiest social media marketing dashboards available.

Using some of these social media strategies can help you find the right candidates for your positions. The more effective you become in social media marketing, the quicker you will be able to fill vacant jobs and increase productivity within your organization.