Is Your Company Leveraging Employee Social Networks for Talent Acquisition?

December 27, 2012

It’s highly likely that your current employees are active on a variety of personal and professional social networks — LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and more. Additionally, it’s a safe bet a number of them are also part of networking and community groups within their respective fields. If you’re not making efforts to put all that social activity and networking to your recruiting advantage, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to extend your talent acquisition. In my post last week, I discussed the importance of developing your corporate brand to appeal to top talent. Your current employees play a huge part in that. After all, A players know (and attract) A players. Think about it — sales people know sales people, marketers know marketers, engineers know engineers, recruiters know recruiters, and so on and so forth. Referrals are an important part of any strategic recruitment strategy, but using social media will help you to extend beyond direct referrals. Leveraging employee networks can allow you to get referrals from referrals.

How do you leverage employee social networks to your recruiting advantage? Simple: Ask.

In addition to informing your employees of internal job openings and reiterating that you have an internal referral program (which you should), ask your employees to share the job, whether it’s the job posting or simply a quick announcement. All it takes is a few clicks to share a LinkedIn posting, send out a quick tweet, or Facebook post, and the majority of employees will be happy to help. Doing so will vastly extend your reach. Additionally, your talent team — as well as all internal employees — can help to build your company brand virally through social media. Have individual employees share ideas through blogging, networking, posting, and engaging their social networks. Doing so has solid benefits. For one, it will help to increase buzz, but wait, there’s more! Possibly even more important, your team will learn about new practices and strategies because they will be reading up before they write. I personally can’t tell you how much I’ve learned this year by keeping up with what’s new in the recruitment space from industry examples, blogs, influencers, newsletters, etc. Social media is a great way to share, so take advantage of your internal networks.

Director of Talent

<strong>Carlie Smith</strong> was the Senior Talent Manager, Sales & Marketing at OpenView. She worked directly with hiring managers and key stakeholders within OpenView and its portfolio to lead vital searches and provided process guidance on recruitment strategy, including talent identification, strategic sourcing, relationship building, and competitive intelligence. Currently, Carlie is the Director of <a href="https://www.circle.com/en">Circle</a>.