Social media, both internally and externally, is mixing with the “traditional” method of finding work online – and by extension then with traditional methods of advertising jobs online. New social media consultant firms are delivering programmes designed to expand a potential employer’s arsenal of recruiting tricks.A social media marketing consultant used to be someone who sold your brand in the social media, normally by helping you infiltrate the right networks and chatter streams in the right way. Now the international social media consultant is also someone who helps you navigate the streams of job seekers and professional networks out there, all potentially fruitful ground for adding to the personnel of your company.
The international social media marketing consultant is able to use the same techniques as he or she applied to developing the reputation of your brand in the social media, to make your company a more attractive place for high quality candidates to come and work.
Specifically corporate social media sites like LinkedIn offer an excellent overview of the ways in which social media has added to the recruiting mix for successful companies. Looking at the recruiting habits of large organisations, you can see where the techniques advocated by the international social media consultant slip into the recipe.
Hewlett Packard, for example, does a major amount of recruitment either internally or through traditionally cultivated (i.e. not online) networks and recruitment associations. Where these methods fail though, HP is a long term user of LinkedIn – normally using the site to connect with known professionals it has been unable to find by other means.
The international social media marketing consultant can help an organisation to find highly qualified individuals by cultivating a specifically targeted list of contacts – industry experts whose own contact lists include many high calibre candidates whose CVs span a wide range of appropriate roles. Of course this is one of the major benefits of social media – once you’re in, you’re in and it only takes a request to your immediate network to spark a series of cascading referrals for people well suited to your requirements.
The international social media consultant can also utilise similar techniques to find people not immediately known to the organisation, but who may be a perfect fit for a particular role or need. By targeting your social media presence in the professional social media you can align yourself with potentially fruitful grounds for getting candidates come to you looking for work.
Social media for professionals encourages positioning by tags, in much the same way that search engine indexing is done by keywords. Your international social media marketing consultant can develop a presence for you in the right professional circles by targeting the tags, interests or even known employers whose business interests coincide with your own.