Social recruiting and more…Do you stand out from your competitors?

89% of recruitment companies used social media to recruit in 2011. The majority agree that social recruiting is a given in today’s market and should be a part of any recruiting strategy. Yet as the stats show (source: mashable) the vast majority of recruiters are using similar channels and employers are using those same channels to fill vacancies for themselves. In fact 80% of employers used LinkedIn to find talent last year.

So the challenge is not just about standing out from your competitors but showing clients why they should also hire you and not just do this for themselves.

Obviously getting your social platforms and branding right to make that all important first impression is pivotal, especially given that 14.4 million people used social media to find their current job in 2011. Yet, as great as a well designed fan page is, or hundreds of followers on Twitter looks, this investment means nothing if the process to convert this traffic into potential candidates doesn’t pull its weight. You should stand out from your competitors or add value to a process employers think they can do for themselves.

So where are the tipping points in this resourcing process that compliments your social media strategy?

2011 blog in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Keyword yourself to the top

Monitoring the keyword function in your Google Analytics can really help you to refine your websites search engine rankings.

As I touched upon in “Where does my traffic come from” you can utilise this information to refine your keyword list.

To refresh:

• Make a list of your ideal keywords for your business
• Cross reference this list with your analytics
• Which words appear?
• Which don’t?

Tip: I also put the keywords into Google to find where my website ranks

So now you have a list of keywords you need to improve on. You can invest in PPC campaigns which can be quite beneficial if you have a budget to do so. Yet there are some effective tips you can do yourself to help improve SEO that don’t cost a thing.

The Case study: After doing the keyword analysis and checking our Google rankings, I discovered that one of our core courses was not only non-existent in our keyword list, but it couldn’t be found on a 100 pages of Google!

My course of action:

LinkedIn contact details – my property or theirs?!

There was a time when an email/internet policy at work would just set out simple instructions around what was and wasn’t acceptable use. But that was before social networking and particularly the rise and rise of LinkedIn.

The argument around whether LinkedIn contact info belongs to you or the company you work for rages on and there is very little case law to help determine true ownership.

So instead we are asked to consider a few guiding principles that may help:

Where does your website traffic come from?

An essential question you need to be able to answer when analysing your website is: where is your traffic coming from? Answering this will help you make more informed marketing, PR, social media and website design decisions.

Some factors you can track through website analytics to help you answer this are:

You can’t have one without the other!

These days it’s almost impossible to become a successful recruiter if you aren’t a wiz at using your social media skills. Over 3 million people in the UK alone use LinkedIn and good recruiters use it as a tool to source candidates and clients. The majority though, don’t know what they don’t know and could be getting so much more from it than they realise.

Even if you are that social media ‘wiz kid’, that’s only half the story. If you don’t have credible, consultative headhunting skills, having the names of top talent is meaningless if you can’t confidently approach them to professionally present an opportunity.

Using these skills together is the key,  so learning them together makes sense.

Lander Associates has teamed up with LinkedIn expert Mark Williams (Mr LinkedIn) to create a unique training programme that combines LinkedIn and traditional headhunting techniques.

LinkedIn skills from setting up that ‘killer’ profile to discovering applications that you should be taking advantage of to really extend your network, go hand in hand with using a headhunting structure that gives professional credibility, managing even the most senior candidates with confidence.

Guest blog: Think you have your connections hidden?…think again!

Mark Williams  – ETN LinkedIn Training (commonly know as @mr_linkedin)

Understanding your LinkedIn Privacy Settings

If I had a pound for every Recruitment Consultant who asked me the following question, I would be typing this blog post on my new shiny (and complete unnecessary) iPad!;

“Should I have my connections browse open or closed?”

The answer is naturally influenced by who you intend to connect with and so individuals need to consider their specific circumstances before deciding but the following may be helpful;

Beyond Social Resourcing

     

The Recruitment Society launches in the Midlands!

The inaugural Recruitment Society meeting for the Midlands was held this week with a full panel discussion on ‘Beyond Social Resourcing – What next?’ Discussions centered around Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Whilst the first two were seen as a way of building your brand and establishing relationships, all members of the panel believed caution was required when approaching candidates for the first time via these sites.

Social media: Can’t keep up, won’t keep up!

I don’t know about you but I find the daily emergence of new social media trends can leave you a little overwhelmed and more to the point scrambling to keep up! Using social media in your organisation doesn’t have to be this way, think quality not quantity. There is no advantage in having every trend going only to be unable to keep up with it all or, more importantly, keeping up a high standard of quality. Think about what is important to your company and what will help you to achieve your goals. Take a look at the technologies and mediums you are currently using and asses their relevance to your business and your social media strategy.

Look at your current social media strategy and each individual tool you are using and think about issues such as:

•  How does it represent your company’s brand?
• Is it beneficial to your strategy?
• Can you keep up with its demands? If not will the quality suffer?
• Are you using it to its full potential? If not is it because it’s not as important in your list of social media priorities or could it be beneficial but you need the time to invest in it?
• Asses your networks to see if you are reaching the people/customers that you want to reach and if this approach helps you to develop a relationship with them
• Are the new trends you are considering going to be complementary to your existing strategy?

Once you have filtered out what isn’t working, you will be left with what truly matters to your business. Focus on these trends and use them to their full potential and you will see more benefit in keeping that quality, rather than trying to ‘keep up the with Jones’.

Posted by Rachel Gould