Whether you are marketing your product or your company, social media is a powerful tool. With 79% of applicants searching for jobs on social media platforms, taking full advantage of social recruiting is on any employer’s agenda.
Who is your most efficient asset for attracting new employees? The existing workforce. While you are designing a compelling social recruiting strategy, they may already be promoting your company on social media.
How can you encourage authentic social recruiting? Here are a few ways to motivate your employees to become brand ambassadors.
1. Highlight Their Personal Benefits
Social recruiting isn’t just about benefiting the company. It can help employees in many different ways.
- Establishing expertise – by sharing professional content on any social media platform, your team members are establishing themselves as experts, attract people with similar goals, and build on their professionalism. By doing that, employees advance their careers, build communities, and achieve personal satisfaction.
- Becoming a leader – by promoting their company, employees establish themselves as leaders and attract high-quality talent to join their teams.
- Professional career growth- by joining various professional groups on social media and establishing a presence, your staff can learn something new, hone their skills, boost expertise, and much more.
The key personal benefit for managers and team leaders is attracting superb talent to work on their teams.
Once your staff understands the importance of their recruiting efforts, you need to motivate them to share content. You can keep reminding your employees about the utter importance of such actions for their own good and the good of the company.
2. Capitalize on Personal Example
One of the best ways to encourage an employee is by setting a personal example. If you want the social recruiting project to succeed, team leaders and managers should be role models for the rest of the staff.
When your employees see leaders promoting the company on social media, they are likely to follow suit.
You need to find the best candidates for setting the social media advocacy tone in your company. Figure out which leaders already have an established presence on social media channels.
When these people share company-related content with their followers, the rest of the staff can have an easier time reposting.
3. Share Your Company’s Goals
Why should employees proceed with social recruiting besides fulfilling personal goals? Give them another reason by sharing your company’s objectives. Provide answers to the following questions.
- Why do you encourage social recruiting?
- What do you want to achieve with social recruiting?
- How can their actions help the company?
Without keeping your employees “in the know”, you can’t expect any genuine promotional efforts. Being transparent about your objectives can inspire participation and improve the company culture.
To throw some motivation into the mix, you can share reports to show how well employees’ social recruiting efforts help the company. The success of a socially active workforce can inspire other team members to join the campaign.
4. Don’t Force It
No matter how much you need your employees to promote the company, never make it their duty. Forcing the staff to recruit takes the genuineness out of the process.
When employees view social recruiting as a chore, they may not focus on it sufficiently, thus achieving worse results. Eventually, you may find their efforts useless or even counterproductive.
Remember, if you decide to incentivize social recruiting, you are walking an extremely fine line between duty and authenticity. So if you have to “push” your workforce to promote the company, do it in a gentle gamified way.
You could create a leaderboard showing employees who share the most content, get plenty of likes, shares, etc. People who climb top spots could get small prizes such as gift cards, time off, free lunches, etc.
5. Give them Tools
According to Allshore, remote staffing experts, For the social recruiting strategy to be successful, you need to give your employees the right tools to work with. Don’t expect all of them to create high-quality sharable content. The majority will only proceed when they have something to work with.
- Branded content – it’s up to you to provide articles, images, videos, and other content for the staff to share. You can give your team leaders and managers the materials for sharing on social media. The rest of the staff will just repost.
- Third-party content – Don’t forget to provide your employees with powerful third-party content as well. While branded content does wonders for brand awareness and recruitment purposes, third-party content can establish your employees as experts and grow their following.
You can also arrange webinars and training courses to help employees improve their presence on social media. This will encourage them to try the newly found skills to achieve company goals.
Make the content easy to share. Allow employees to have access to the content library on the cloud or in an internal hub. Remember, they aren’t likely to ask for the content. You have to hand it to them on a silver platter.
6. Allow Using Social Media at Work
Many employers frown upon using social media while at work. If you want to encourage social recruiting, you have to allow social media usage. While it may somewhat distract employees from their work-related activities, you can’t expect people to promote the company in their free time.
Instead of banning social media in the workplace, you may encourage the use of “stay focus” apps, such as:
- Toggle —a time-tracking app that helps users understand how much time they spend on different tasks.
- Motion — a Chrome plugin that generates pop-up messages with warnings when a user is visiting a distracting site.
- Rescue Time — an activity-tracking program that shows how much time users spend on productive vs unproductive tasks.
Take Full Advantage of Authentic Social Recruiting
While authentic social recruiting is hard to achieve, once it starts working, you and your employees can enjoy impressive benefits.
Even if your company has thousands of employees, it’s possible to encourage social recruiting by clear communication, the right focus, and suitable tools.
Eventually, your company will get access to high-quality talent while your employees will enjoy stronger personal brands.
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