Your Employees Presence on Social Media Can Benefit You

What do the CIA and Microsoft have in common? They both take advantage of their employee’s presence on social media sites as a way to leverage their recruitment process.  With the help of social media and your employee’s networks, you as an employer can do the same. Here are some ways to build your own personal recruitment army through the use of social media and your employees.

• Have employees contribute to company specific Blogs that gives potential hires a look at what it is like to work at your company, or how the hiring process works 

An example of this is Microsoft’s Jobs Blog.  Recruiters from Microsoft created this Blog for potential employees to get a behind-the-scenes look at Microsoft’s hiring process and careers.  It is also a place to check out the best tips and tricks for job hunting, resume writing, interviewing and working at Microsoft.

• Create a company Facebook page or group and have employees point potential candidates to those sites

Oracle has a company Facebook page for their company recruiting needs.  On this page they list company information, videos, hiring needs, events and talks about the Oracle campus.   

• Create a company Twitter account with your employee feeds feeding into it, or encourage your employees with Twitter accounts to post updates about company information and news updates

 Zappos.com is a perfect example of a company that uses Twitter in its recruitment process.  They have a dedicated page on Twitter where 198 of the Twittering Zappos employees’ most recent messages are fed. Employees tweet about what they are doing at work and about interesting resources dealing with Zappos.com.

•  Encourage employees to use employer rating sites like Glassdoor.com, Vault.com or Jobvent.com

Here is a post from AskBINC.com listing 10 of the commonly used employer ranking sites.  These sites provide an inside look into various companies by allowing those companies current and ex-employees to anonymously post ratings and reviews about life inside the doors of their workplaces.  

• Create alumni groups on social networking sites

Yahoo has set up the Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook with over 2,946 members who currently work for or have worked for Yahoo.  It’s a place for alumni to reconnect, network and share stories.  It is also a great place to let the members of the group know when your company is hiring. 

• Get employees to advertise the job on their LinkedIn profile by creating a status update when a new position open up or setup a Custom Company Profile on LinkedIn

This new feature on LinkedIn allows brands to set up their own profile page, which provides an overview of the business, as well as insight from current employees and recruitment agencies.  It also allows companies to add a tab for careers.

• Create a Youtube channel and allow employees to post videos about their experiences working there.  Add videos about your interview and on boarding process

Google does a great job at this with their Google Youtube Channel, where they post videos like this one An Inside Look At Google – Working at Google.

• Make a recruitment video or upload photos to a company career site and ask employees to share it with their networks

 Intel does this in their recruitment efforts.  On their career site they have a new interactive portion where visitors can see a short virtual representation of what the Intuit offices are like along with pop-up videos and photos

On Adobe’s career site, they feature a professionally produced video showing a day in the life of several Adobe employees. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, one of the videos shows a designer in San Francisco beginning his day surfing in the ocean at 6 a.m. and then follows him through his work day.

• Ask employees to include an RSS feed of your open jobs on their personal blogs and networking sites or add the Facebook Come Work With Me Application to their profile

The Facebook Come Work With Me application is for employee referrals and job searching. This application is for organizations that use the PageUp People as a recruitment management solution.  This application allows users to display jobs on their profile page for all their friends to view and apply to.

• Offer a bonus to employees who refer potential candidates
• Use your Blog as a job board and when a new job gets posted ask employees to push the link out to their Twitter network