New recruiting roles: The social media sourcer
4 mins, 34 secs read time
WANTED: Social media gurus with a sales and marketing mentality, who keep up with the latest trends and social platforms and have a knack for connecting with people.
Key Responsibilities: Understanding company’s talent needs; developing new and creative strategies to engage and attract both active and passive candidates through social media; managing company’s career-based social profiles; measuring the effectiveness and outcomes of the social sourcing strategy to drive continuous improvement.
As the recruiting function continues to evolve, companies find themselves embracing new tools and strategies to attract the very best candidates. But it’s not just the technology that has changed—the very nature of the recruiting team has, too, creating the need for specialized sourcing positions. This is where the highly anticipated new position of Social Media Sourcer comes in. This role joins other newer roles on the recruiting team, including Candidate Experience Manager, Employer Branding Specialist, and Talent Operations Manager.
Bridging the gap between recruiting and job seeking
As you’ve probably noticed, the role of social media in recruitment has grown considerably in recent years and shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, recent research from SHRM shows that 84% of companies now use social media as part of their recruiting strategy, compared to just 56% in 2011. The study also revealed the main reasons companies leverage social recruiting, including attracting passive candidates, increasing brand recognition, and targeting job candidates with a specific skill set.
And on the flip side, more candidates are turning to social media to find new opportunities. According to Glassdoor, 79% of job seekers use social media as part of their job search, and this number jumps to 86% for millennials plus those in the first 10 years of their careers. So as social media continues to be used by job seekers, employers must get savvy to this and meet them where they are.
But, let’s be clear—there’s much more to leveraging social media as a recruiting tool than just posting a link to your careers page on Twitter and expecting the best candidates to click and apply. Your use of social media needs to go beyond simple postings and tie into your larger talent acquisition strategy. That’s why more organizations are appointing designated resources like a Social Media Sourcer to develop and manage a social recruiting plan and measure its effectiveness in driving interested parties to your careers page and site in general. Beyond simple job postings, it’s the Social Media Sourcer’s job to share valuable content that would appeal to job seekers, like interview tips and resume & cover letter-writing guidelines as well as various content that casts the company and industry in a good light, all in an effort to keep potential candidates as interested, engaged, and informed as possible.
To be most effective, the Social Media Sourcer must keep up with the latest technologies and platforms to help them reach the right candidates through social media. Tools provided by Entelo and Network Monkey can help find candidates ready to make a career change, leveraging social data to identify qualified talent. And tools like Simppler can help them search current employees’ social connections to identify their peers who may be a good fit for an open role.
Sourcing both active and passive candidates
Social media is a great way to reach everyone in the talent pool. And by everyone, we mean both active and passive candidates. But while it may be easier to connect with active candidates, it’s just as important to build relationships with passive candidates—those individuals who are rather satisfied in their work and are not out there looking for a new job. With about 75% of the workforce falling into this group, companies have a huge opportunity to tap into this pool to find qualified candidates.
But the obvious point here is that this group of people is probably not actively surfing careers pages and job boards. So this is where your Social Media Sourcer comes in, acting like a marketer as they engage with talent and compel them to want to join the team. LinkedIn allows the Social Media Sourcer to search the profiles of individuals who would be a good fit for a role and then easily connect with them using personalized messaging. And, Twitter enables them to hold regular open discussions and question & answer sessions to interact with candidates and paint a picture of what it would be like to work at the company.
Why you should consider hiring a Social Media Sourcer
Today’s candidates are largely comprised of millennials who are increasingly demanding a more customized experience in everything they do. That said, they expect a more personalized recruiting process. They don’t want a generic email blasted to everyone, but rather relevant, targeted content delivered on the networks in which they work and play. They want to know up front what a company can offer them, how working there can help them grow as a professional, and the type of work culture and environment they can expect.
This reality requires a new approach to provide the real-time content and real-world insights that resonate with these modern candidates. The Social Media Sourcer is key to developing such strategies and ensuring social media is strategically used to connect with these candidates in the way that best resonates with them. Case in point: Don’t be the last one of your competitors to devote a dedicated resource to this critical task!