25 hot social recruitment tips gulf jobs market

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25 Tips on How to Use Social Media to Make a Successful

Hire in the Gulf

by Kashif Naqshbandi, Director Gulf Jobs Market

co-author Alexandra Scherbich, Marketing Manager

Gulf Jobs Market

www.gulfjobsmarket.com | Phone: +44(0) 207 100 4537 | Email: [email protected] | Co Reg. No 06729972

Copyright © 2008 - 2011 This material may not be reproduced without the written consent of Gulf Jobs Market

Who Should Read This

HR Managers, Recruitment Specialists – Tips and advice on how to use social media effectively to

recruit and decrease your cost per hire

Business Owners, CEOs – Understand where and when to consider allocating resources for

utilising social media as a recruitment channel

Heads of Departments – Learn how to leverage social media to find great candidates for your

department

Team Leaders – Know when you should recommend social media to your HR department

What is Social Media Recruitment?

Social Media Recruitment – anyone who works in HR or recruitment is talking about it, but what exactly is

it? In short, it‟s a way of

“... enabling companies to engage, attract and hire relevant employees using

online communities and platforms where users share and create content and have

a common interest ...”

Benefits of Using Social Media Recruitment

Manage, Extend and Control Your Employer Brand Online. If you aren‟t writing about your

company, you can guarantee sooner or later someone else will be. By harnessing social media you

get to promote the good things that happen within your organisation and control the message your

brand wishes to convey to the outside world.

Increase Your “Offer to Placement” Ratio. Social media platforms enable candidates to interact

online with potential colleagues (i.e. your designated in-house social media manager) which should

have a positive impact on a potential recruit‟s decision to accept a job offer with your company.

Reduce Your Cost Per Hire. When planned, managed and implemented well, it can be an effective

way of reducing your cost per hire.

Huge Potential Reach. A creative social media recruitment plan, with the right incentives and the

right message to the right audience can reach an enormous pool of potential employees. None of us

are more than six degrees of separation away from anyone else in the world – that‟s incredibly

powerful!

Target Passive Jobseekers. Engaging with candidates via social media early will not only attract

candidates ready to make a move now, but also those who are still in a job and not planning to leave.

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25 Tips on How to Use Social Media to Make a Successful Hire in the Gulf

Concentrate your efforts on social media platforms which are widely used and have a large audience of

users. Currently there are 3 social platforms that are popular worldwide and have a big user base:

- A micro blogging platform with more than 200 million users. 100 million are „active‟ and half

of these log in every day, 40% of monthly active users do not tweet (Sept, 2011)

- A social networking site with more than 800 million active users, more than 50% of active

users log on in any given day, more than 2 billion posts are liked and commented on each day

(Sept, 2011)

- A professional networking site with 100 million+ registered users. 44% of visitors to LinkedIn

do so more than once a month. 70% of LinkedIn members are aged 25-54. (Jan, 2011)

Use a Targeted Approach. Don‟t use a „one size fits all‟ approach to social media recruitment. You‟ll need

to identify segments you are interested in and then target each segment with relevant messages.

Set up segment groups in the form of Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and Twitter profiles to match job

families or skills/interest groups. A good example is Cisco Systems who have separate Facebook pages

for Engineering, Finance, IT, Public Sector, R&D etc:

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Allocate Sufficient Resources. Assign one member of the team to manage social media regularly. He or

she will create and republish relevant content, respond to tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn comments

effectively, moderate the accounts and continually engage the audience as well as monitor competitor

activity and create reports on the impact of social media.

Facebook Fan Pages – Update, moderate, interact with, and respond to fans in a timely manner. Publish

content that is only available via Facebook as a way to continually engage and

retain these candidates. Share relevant links such as news items, industry

related articles, relevant videos on YouTube and invitations to events, careers

fairs in which your company participates, press releases if they are genuinely of interest to your audience.

Big Changes to Facebook - Engage or Lose Visibility. On the 22nd

September, 2011, Facebook

announced some huge changes (called „F8‟) which mean it is even more important to engage with your

audience on Facebook. They added a control in the top left corner of each post which allows users to

control what they see from you (they can even hide all updates from your page). More importantly,

Facebook uses its own “EdgeRank” algorithm to determine how „important‟ an update is. This is ranked by

“Affinity” – how often have they liked / commented / interacted with you / your posts?

“EdgeWeight” - the type of content shared (photos, videos and links have the best „EdgeWeight)‟.

“Recency” - the older an update is, the less important it becomes. Seems obvious!

Fan page updates with higher “EdgeRank” appear on a fans newsfeed and the ones with lower

“EdgeRank” don‟t make it to their feed unless users changed the sorting settings to view “Recent Stories

First”. So, share often and make sure the content engages your fans. If they don‟t engage with your

content then your updates will disappear from their feed even though they remain your fans, which renders

all your efforts pointless.

Capture Candidate Details on Facebook – create a welcome holding page for new visitors

with a form to capture their details. For example, invite them to sign up to your career related

newsletter. Don‟t forget to add a link for registering their CV. (Requires some coding)

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Incentivise Staff to Refer Through Facebook. Ask your employees to recommend jobs to their social

circles by “Liking” or “Sharing” it from your website or any of your career related social accounts. Introduce

a financial compensation for a successful referral. Facebook provides an ideal opportunity to use

employees‟ own networks to attract new staff.

Include a Branded Job Feed – add an extra tab to your Facebook page with the feed directly from your

careers site. As soon as a new role appears on the site it will be posted to the Facebook page directly.

Please, note that this requires some coding. See how Procter & Gamble do it:

Create Adverts on Facebook – drive traffic to your Facebook page with targeted adverts (target by

location, age, skills, interests, languages, education, etc.) Before posting an ad you will be able to see the

size of your target audience. Don‟t include a link to your website on Facebook ads but instead drive traffic

to your Facebook page where you will be able to convert your fans to employees later. Remember that

people are not looking for work on Facebook so your advert should be compelling and show them the

benefits and include a “Call to Action”.

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Create Twitter Profile(s) – create and share relevant news and content,

follow relevant „tweeters‟ and re-tweet (share) interesting tweets. Respond to

tweets in a timely manner. Don‟t be afraid to share the same content more

than once but make sure you change the message so that it doesn‟t look like SPAM. Content that performs

the best on Twitter is video and images. This type of content is highly re-tweetable, so leave

enough space in your message for the re-tweet, don‟t use all 140 characters otherwise your

message will be truncated and could be less effective.

Use Twitter Tools. There are numerous applications and tools which have been developed around Twitter

to help people target, monitor and automate the processes. Here are the ones we think are useful in terms

of recruitment:

“Hash tags” – this is a native Twitter tool to help you categorise your tweets by highlighting the most

important words you‟ve written (for example #UAE, #cloudcomputing). This will allow your tweets to be

easily found via Twitter‟s search engine. You can also use hash tags to identify, target & follow users who

tweet on a particular subject. Twitter etiquette is that if you follow someone, they‟re likely to follow you

back. Just remember to keep them engaged and the tweets relevant.

Hashtags.org - if you are going to use a hash tag, check which combinations of words are most popular

first by typing them into hashtags.org and use in your own tweets to generate more interaction.

Effectively Use People’s Bio (short personal description) on twitter to target relevant candidates. You can

use a free service here www.followerwonk.com to search within twitter bios by keyword.

Find candidates by location and skills which you are looking for in your potential employees.

Follow relevant Twitter accounts and around 30% of them will follow you back.

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http://www.followerwonk.com/



Tweetdeck – is a useful application recently acquired by Twitter. It lets you monitor several Twitter

accounts at the same time within one interface. You can personalise the interface to see columns which

are of interest to you. For example, you can see your feed for one account in one column, mentions for a

different account in another column and direct messages in a separate column. This allows you to easily

access and manage your accounts on twitter and be more efficient. Before posting your tweet you can

define which account you want it to be published from.

LinkedIn – Create and manage your own Company LinkedIn group and sub-

groups. Create LinkedIn groups specific to your target candidates. For

example, if your company specialises in the IT Security field, then create and

manage a LinkedIn group with a specific interest in information security. Once you‟ve built up a decent

sized group, you‟ll be able to identify those members who contribute most as potential hires for your own

organisation. Encourage your group members to post discussions and comments, post career related

articles and other interesting content in your group. LinkedIn groups often become cluttered with SPAM or

promotional messages so you need to moderate the groups to keep them free of SPAM otherwise

your members will stop opening email messages from your group or participating in the discussions.

Grow Your Network on LinkedIn. Build a strong network of good connections on LinkedIn for each

of your HR team members. The more connections you have on LinkedIn the more full names of contacts

you will be able to see and the more people you will be able to send messages to for free.

When you update your status on LinkedIn put a note “I am looking for a …..” and this message will be seen

not only on your timeline but also on timelines of everyone in your network. Use this sparingly as too many

updates could annoy people you are linked to, as they have an option of switching your notifications off.

Join and Contribute to LinkedIn Groups to broadcast your job openings to relevant job seekers. Identify

and join relevant groups on LinkedIn to announce your job openings to other members of these groups.

Look in the top right and change the search from “People” to “Groups” and perform a keyword search to

find relevant groups.

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Start contributing to the group by answering questions. You‟ll familiarise yourself with the tone of

conversations in the group and let group moderators understand that you are a useful addition to the

group. Not every group allows job postings. Check group rules for each group first to avoid eviction from a

group. You‟re less likely to be evicted from a group for posting jobs if you are a regular contributor to the

discussions.

Link to Your Social Media Profiles from Your Website. Place a link to your careers related Facebook

page, Twitter account and LinkedIn group on your corporate website (and especially your career related

pages) to encourage visitors to follow you across these platforms.

Remember that not every visitor to your website will apply for a job during their visit. As you have already

spent effort and resources to gain these visitors, encourage them to follow you so you can use these

channels to attract and convert them into employees later.

Share Content Often. Keep your audience engaged by sharing or publishing timely, relevant and

interesting content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

If you have a corporate blog, publish regular articles about the latest news and innovations in the industry

you recruit for, salary expectations and other interesting subjects to keep your audience engaged. For

example, you could create a series of blog posts about a typical working day of employees in each of your

departments. This will give your potential employees a better understanding of your corporate culture and

future responsibilities. You can also ask your audience engaging questions to encourage them to

participate in conversations. Candidates don‟t like empty accounts or pages with out-dated information. If

there are no current updates they‟ll assume the account is dead. If you fail to get engagement your

updates will lose their visibility and all your efforts in using social media will have been wasted.

Interlink Social Media Profiles. Encourage people to follow you

across multiple social media platforms. For example, include a link to

your Facebook page on your Twitter profile.

When someone follows you on Twitter, set up an automatic message

to thank them, and ask them to also join your LinkedIn Group or Facebook page. There are a number of

(paid) tools that you can use to do this, including http://sendible.com and https://www.socialoomph.com.

Create an automated “Welcome” message in your LinkedIn group containing information about your

company and links to your other social media profiles. Your potential recruits should be able to choose

their favourite social media channel.

Don’t Just Broadcast Job Openings. Candidates are less likely to respond to such promotional

messages because they could think they are coming from an automated system. And you know how they

hate bots! Instead of using social platforms just to advertise your vacancies, use them to carefully

demonstrate that your company is a great place to work in. Create a culture where your employees want to

share positive things about working for you on your behalf and not because you tell them to. It will be more

powerful and trusted if recommendations are coming from your employees rather than your company.

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https://www.socialoomph.com/



Direct Candidates to the Career section of your website. Once the candidates are attracted it is equally

important to let them easily apply for jobs with your organisation.

Your career site should be the hub for all your social media recruitment channels. You should continue to

engage potential candidates once they land on your site from social media channels to convert them to

applicants and employees.

Include “Share this”, “Add This”, “Tweet This” and “Like This” buttons on each of your job vacancies, blog

posts, videos and other content.

This will help candidates easily share interesting information

with their social networks directly from your career site.

Don’t Make the Hiring Decision based solely on social profiles of candidates, as they are used primarily

for personal purposes and could contain information which you as a potential employer might not like.

If all recruitment decisions were made solely on the basis of social profiles of future employees more than

a half of hires would never happen.

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This image is courtesy of Reppler

http://www.reppler.com/



Recent research findings from Reppler suggest that 69% of hiring managers rejected a candidate based on

what they found on the social profiles. Judging the candidates “fit and personality” from their social

profile is not the best strategy. Telephone interviews and psychometric profiling tests are a more

profound strategy to understanding if the candidate will fit into your organisational culture.

Avoid a Reputation Crisis. Give feedback to unsuccessful candidates. Each applicant should receive a

notification with the status of their applications to avoid disappointments.

Even if applicants were not successful you should notify them that they will not be invited into the next

round of recruitment process. Social media makes it very easy for dissatisfied individuals to share their

experience with their network. Something as innocent as not responding to candidates could lead to a

reputation crisis. The messages in social media spread very fast and could become viral. To avoid any

crisis situations and negative publicity it is better to take pre-emptive measures.

Don’t Forget to Measure the Effectiveness of your social media

recruitment campaigns. Google Analytics is a great free tool which will

give you a deep understanding of your social media ROI. You can track

visitors to your career site as well as track „conversion goals‟ and

engagement.

Which social media platform performs the best?

Google Analytics enables you to set up „conversion goals‟ such as candidate applications from your

website and identify which social media sites they came from. You can set up goals for anything, but to

start with, just keep it simple and track applications, CV uploads and newsletter subscriptions.

Which content was the most engaging? Where did these engaged users originally come from?

In Google Analytics, you can set up „micro-conversions‟ on your website to see how often people interact

with your content such as downloading content, viewing videos, liking or sharing on Facebook and sharing

on LinkedIn and Twitter. You‟ll also be able to see which external sites and sources produced the most

shares/likes/applications so you can focus your resources and budgets in these areas.

Did you know you can track Facebook „Like‟ and Twitter „Share‟ buttons and then use Google Analytics to

identify the best performing channels and areas for improvement? If you would like to know more

information on this subject you can find good articles here (Please ask your development team if you aren‟t

sure how to implement this).

Don‟t forget to push through the „referring‟ site from Google Analytics into your candidate management

system in order to track the number of placements achieved using each social media channel.

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Things to Remember Before Launching the Social Media

Recruitment Campaign

Social Recruitment is NOT Free

It is a common misconception to believe that Social Recruitment is free. It could be tempting to turn to

social media as a way to reduce recruitment budgets, but this can easily become a false economy. You will

still need to dedicate time and resources to learning, planning, implementing and managing your social

recruitment channels. As your awareness grows, so will your commitment to social media. Without proper

management, using social media for recruitment can become a waste of time and resource. Timely and

knowledgeable responses should be part of the strategy for your campaigns to be effective.

Creating Accounts on Social Media isn’t Enough

You need to find and attract your target audience and keep them engaged. Your channels need to be up-

to-date and worth following. Content is king. You will need to regularly share and create engaging and

interesting content in the form of news and career articles, videos, photos, industry related events, etc. You

have to post meaningful content that the community will read, interact with and share with their network.

Not Everybody is on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

Social media is an emerging concept in the Middle East and, like the rest of the World, not everybody is

using it. If you have an urgent job vacancy or need to reach hard to find candidates it shouldn‟t be your first

choice.

You will be Competing for People’s Attention

The sheer volume of interaction, paid and unpaid messages, paid adverts, banners, sponsored messages

makes social media a very cluttered and noisy place. You really need to stand out to attract their attention,

as people become less perceptive to notice updates. Also, bear in mind that the main purpose of visiting

social networking sites is not to find a job but to interact with social circles. So, to stand out you will need to

make your messages really compelling.

Recruiters Dominate Some Social Media Sites

A disproportionate number of recruiters and HR people use certain social networking sites. For example,

1% of all visitors to LinkedIn are responsible for 25% of its visits. 66% of visitors to LinkedIn only visit the

site once a month, averaging just 7.3 minutes a month (March, 2011)

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LinkedIn® is a registered trademark of LinkedIn Corporation. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. Twitter® is a registered trademark of

Twitter Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The information presented is subject to change without notice. Gulf Jobs

Market (a trading style of Dubai Jobs Market Ltd) assumes no responsibility for inaccuracies contained herein.

No Time for Social Media? Let us Handle Your Recruitment

Gulf Jobs Market has become the destination of choice for local and regional candidates

looking for their next role and for recruiters looking to hire talent in the following industry

sectors:

Oil and Gas

IT and Telecoms

Accounting and Finance

Banking and Financial Services

Gulf Jobs Market is well used by regional companies and recruiters and has created a

reputation for delivering highly relevant Executive, Senior and Mid-level candidates.

How We Can Help You If you are looking for crucial members to your team but don‟t want to pay big recruitment fees

or invest time and resources into social media, Gulf Jobs Market is an easy to use platform

which allows you not only to attract highly relevant and qualified candidates but also manage

applications effectively using our state-of-the-art technology.

As part of the service we offer job adverts and CV Database access so you can target active

and passive candidates at the same time. Quote the “Whitepaper” and receive a 15%

discount on any listed product.

Three Reasons to use Gulf Jobs Market:

Decrease the time to hire – 72% of candidates are based in the GCC and can be

interviewed straight away

Find relevant candidates – by being specialist in few sectors we deliver the best talent

in each of our industries because we focus our marketing around niche skills

Simplify your recruitment – our easy to use system will help you efficiently find top

candidates in seconds

Key Demographics and Statistics

208,056 Monthly Unique Visitors

1.2 Million Monthly Page Views

326,074 Jobs by Email Subscriptions

203,984 CVs in the Database

What Our Customers Say:

"Easy to Use and Great Value for Money" "We used Gulf Jobs Markets‟ job posting and CV search package to fill some key IT and

Accounting roles within Exceed Gulf.

The response was fantastic and we are planning to offer positions to at least 3 candidates.

The site is easy to use and great value for money"

Recruitment Manager

Exceed IT, UAE Sept 2011

Contact us:

Kashif Naqshbandi

Phone: +44(0) 207 100 4537

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @GulfJobsMarket

Facebook: GulfJobsMarket

LinkedIn: Gulf Jobs Market

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