5 Social Media Tips for Recruiters, a la Obama

I’m not gonna get political here except to say that McCain is old as dirt. He knows nothing about the economy and even if he brings in Romney to be VP, I don’t think he would relinquish much control to the VP office.

As for Obama, his campaign’s been impressive at marketing the candidate but I’m afraid he’s just a bunch of hot air. Sure he gives a great speeches but I could see his lack of experience lead to the reversal of some policies that I believe are keeping us safe at home and my PATH train from blowing up as I commute to NYC every morning.

But I digress… the reason for this post is to point out a move by the Obama campaign to leverage social media to engage voters and drive site traffic; something employers need to better understand as they look to engage talent and drive traffic to their career sites.

If you’re looking for new ways to attract and engage talent and drive that talent to your career site to apply to jobs, watch and video or further engage in your employer brand in some other way, take a tip from the Obama camp. Leverage LinkedIn Answers.

What is Obama doing?
His campaign is asking questions related to their agenda. This is building interest in Obama, engaging voters, attracting them to the campaign’s site and probably generated new fund raising leads. Obama's question is currently featured on LinkedIn users' homepages. It leads to this question which links to this landing page on the Obama site.

What can employers do?
Simple. Here are 5 Social Media Tips for Recruiters looking to leverage LinkedIn Answers.

1. Be active in the LinkedIn Answers community and add value

Being an active member provides credibility. Remember, answering questions often provides better site traffic and branding than asking questions. Don’t ask questions like, ‘Anyone want to work in sales.’ Only answer questions if you can offer a decent answer.

2. Always include a link to your career site or relevant landing page

The Obama camp linked to a landing page with a lead generation for and video. This is a perfect example of what to do.

3. Never pitch.

We know. Your company is a great place to work. I’ll figure that out on my own. Let your answers stand on their own.

4. Try to get your employees involved, measure success and reward

Install analytics on your site so that you can see where you traffic is coming from, when an employee is responsible for answering a question and leading traffic to your career site, compensate him/her. Bonus the employee if he/she achieves an expert rating in any category.

It’s not as hard as you think to put value on career site traffic. Think about it. You can look into your job board stats and payments and figure out what you pay monster, cb or hotjobs per job view or site visitor.

Look into it. Figure out what you’re currently paying per visitor. Set aside some budget, taken from your job boards. Id suggest taking it from monster since hotjobs and cb are beating up on them and are therefore less flexible to day with pricing.

Take that added budget, put it aside for rewarding your employees’ efforts in linkedin answers that drive traffic to your career site. Review traffic at the end of the quarter and compensate those employees whom were most active or whom generated the most traffic.

5. Monitor the LinkedIn Answers RSS feed for terms related to your niche

With rss you can keep tabs on the questions and answers that are most valuable to you and most likely to provide the best return. Subscribe the high value feeds. This will keep you from having to search for topics all the some and sift through the same clutter.

That’s it.

Yahoo! Answers works well too, but I’ve found the LinkedIn audience to be less spammy, more engaged and more qualified.

If you have questions or something to add about your own experience with recruiting with social media and answer service like these, be sure to comment.

You can read the my answers on LinkedIn Answers here.

Comments

[amy rabinovitz]

Matt - do you know of any companies who have done this (or used other social media) successfully? I'm doing case studies on Marketing that Moves the Needle and I'd really like to include a case study of a company that is using social media successfully to recruit employees.

[matt]

Hi Amy,

Sudexo has been pretty active in blogging and they're pretty active on myspace and facebook. I can put you in touch.
http://sodexocareers.blogspot.com/

Honeywell was early in to blogging for recruitment but I think they may have scrapped it.

Cadbury-Schweppes had some great success with their blog.
http://tinyurl.com/4swe68

Connected Ventures got 954 comments on a video they posted to vimeo.com along w a link to their jobs. This is prob your best case study.
http://vimeo.com/173714

I know there's more. This is just off the top of my head.

Feel free to give me a call if I can help more.

Matt

[matt]

Also...

I just posted this question to LinkedIn Answers, 'What companies are most active in the use of social media like blogs, facebook, myspace, twitter etc. for recruiting?'

And within 5min I found out that The Roanoke Times uses Twitter, Cintas might be using YouTube and Target 'is all over Facebook.'

http://tinyurl.com/6ojar6

[Trish]

About.com announces the top 10 job boards list: http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm

Why would Hotjobs be on the botton when they have the most traffic? Maybe the list isnt about traffic but just different types of sites??

[matt]

Hi Trish. That list is alphabetical.

[Placement agency]

very informative. Nice article and very helpful for recruitment consultancy. I m regular read of your blog. I m also promoting recruitment consultancy "GlobalHunt" through SEM Techniques
keep updating your blog
Thanks & Regards,
GlobalHunt
http://www.globalhunt.in

[Pauline]

This is great!! If you are creative, you should check out: http://ckrinteractive.com