Social recruitment: benefits, disadvantages, and opportunities for businesses

Social recruitment is a personnel selection methodology born from the profound transformation in Human Resources Management – HR – favored by the technological revolution and the irruption of social networks in talent recruitment. 

In addition to being a selection technique, it seeks to create long-term relationships with potential candidates that you wish to integrate into your business project. Thus, social recruitment adapts the sales marketing strategy through social networks to the selection of personnel, i.e., you go in search of the profiles you need to the place where they are. 

Therefore, it is essential that you know what it is, its benefits and disadvantages, and what opportunities it can offer to your project. 

What is social recruitment?

Social recruitment is a recruiting strategy to attract and capture internal and external talent in a company through social networks. It is a recruitment process that has been adapted to respond to new technologies and new channels of communication and exchange. 

This type of talent recruitment aims not only to find the ideal candidate for a job position but also to create long-term relationships with other profiles of interest. 

Social recruitment is born from customer-oriented sales marketing, so you must approach the process as a sale, selling your company as a workspace and opportunity. 

The candidate must know if your company can offer them what they are looking for. 

Remember that only when the offer meets expectations are win-win relationships created. To make it a success, you need to rely on the following 3 pillars. 

Developing your company’s employer branding 

That is, enhance your company’s employer branding within the Human Resources strategy – HR – through detailed communication about your activity, your corporate culture, the advantages, etc. 

Integrate technological solutions

Automating some stages of recruitment helps you avoid data loss and optimize your resources. You can achieve this thanks to ATS (Applicant Tracking System) software, which are selection process management systems that also improve the employee experience from the first contact. 

On the other hand, chatbots, known as chatbots or conversational bots, will automate routine operational tasks in contacting the candidate. 

Developing a social recruitment strategy

Understanding where the candidate profiles you are looking for are located, in which social networks they spend their time is crucial to offer a valuable offer. 

Keep in mind that people today are looking to develop a career plan and check if a company suits them, so how you communicate and where about your company is decisive. 

Social recruiting or the value of social networks in recruitment

In the same way that education is evolving with new educational and information access models such as ubiquitous learning, recruitment strategies have access, thanks to social networks, to precious information on potential profiles. 

Understanding their importance, you need to integrate them into your strategy by selecting the ones that best fit your industry, context, and objectives. There is no point in covering them all, you will lose time and efficiency, and it will not be suitable for your brand image. 

Currently, the most significant social networks in terms of social recruiting are: 

• LinkedIn -the professional social network par excellence-.
• Facebook. 
• Instagram. 

However, as we mentioned, depending on the profiles you need, you can opt for Twitter or even TikTok. 

Social recruitment: benefits and disadvantages

This type of personnel recruitment offers a series of benefits determined by the very nature of communication.  

• Fast, simple, and immediate communication.
• Cost reduction if resources are optimized through a strategy. 
• Increased visibility of your company. 
• Access to potential candidates who are not looking for a job. 
• Competitive benefit by accessing more candidates than the competition. 
• Pre-selection of digital natives. 
• Engagement of candidates before selection since those who respond to an offer have been able to get to know the company previously thanks to social networks. 
• High recruitment success rate, as the candidate is familiar with the corporate culture.  

The benefits are significant, although there are disadvantages, such as the difficulty of collecting and managing this large amount of information, which makes it difficult to segment profiles. Headhunters and recruitment agencies often combine social recruitment with Big Data solutions, which allow them to sift through large volumes of information. 

Another disadvantage, as we mentioned a few lines ago, is that it requires a strategy for promoting your employer brand. 

Think carefully about what content you want to convey -about your activity, values, vision, etc.-, how you want to communicate it, and to whom. 

Opportunities for companies through social recruitment

As we have discussed throughout this article, social recruitment is an effective way to attract talent but also to retain it. Please take note of the improvements it provides for your company. 

Improve the employee experience

An excellent social recruitment strategy improves the employee experience from the first contact with the potential candidate.  

Improve recruiter branding

It increases recruiter branding -or recruiter branding- thanks to the fact that you have to work on the popularity of the company’s brand to attract talent. 

Improve internal engagement

Use social recruitment for internal recruitment through a virtual bulletin board, a closed Facebook group, or a chat in which your teams can participate. 

Look for talent in them, and you will improve their commitment to your project. 

If at this point you are thinking about how to move towards a social recruitment strategy start by: 

1. Establish your company’s personal brand. 
2. Rely on HR professionals specialized in this dynamic. 
3. Generate conversation with your talent community to build long-term relationships. 
4. Offer a safe environment for selection tests thanks to Smowltech’s proctoring products that provide all the security you need, offering your candidates all the privacy and accessibility they deserve.  

Request your free demo, where we will share with you solutions that will surprise you.