It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Social media is by now a recognised way of keeping in touch with your
customers and business partners. But it also offers a lot of  potential when it comes to finding employees.

Dan Schawbel offers seven secrets to getting a job using social media. Don’t spend too much time on sending out CVs and cover letters, he advises. Instead, get yourself out there: use Twitter; make your LinkedIn profile as attractive as possible; advertise on Facebook. Even – and this is the most off-the-wall suggestion – create a video of yourself and post it  on YouTube.

Schawbel’s view is that in an economic downturn, you need to sell yourself as much as possible. But what of businesses? Are you making the most of social media to find the best people to fill your posts?

While some companies are already looking for candidates through LinkedIn, or using Second Life to conduct recruitment fairs, these activities still only play a small part in most businesses’ recruitment strategies.

It would be foolish to abandon tried-and-tested strategies for recruiting employees in favour of social media. But it’s worth putting a toe in the water. Traditional methods of recruitment, such as advertising in newspapers or hiring recruitment agencies, can be costly, cumbersome and time-consuming. Using social media potentially enables you to cut out the middleman and find the right candidate more quickly.

There’s a good chance that once you’ve started recruiting this way, you won’t look back.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.