Challenges of Social Recruiting and why you cannot rely completely on it

Challenges of Social Media Recruitment

Social recruiting could have been a new concept a few years ago, but not anymore. With new and innovative recruitment techniques gradually replacing the conventional methods of sourcing and screening candidates, social recruiting too has a significant role to play. If you are a recruiter looking to hire candidates for your 2020 recruitment and are considering social recruiting as an option, this blog can give you an in-depth insight into the challenges involved with this technique.

What is Social Recruiting?

Social recruiting is the use of social media platforms to hire candidates into a firm. Social media pages can be used as talent databases or for advertising your job requirements. This technique involves using blogs, social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. to find information about potential candidates, and use the same to target such candidates that match your job profile.

Benefits of Social Recruiting

Just like other time-tested methods, social media is fast becoming an essential tool for HR professionals to meet their recruitment numbers. Some of the many benefits are:

• Easy to view social media accounts of potential candidates
• Learn about the extracurricular interests of students
• Insight into the awards and achievements of the individual
• Learn about their connections and check whether any current employee from your company is an alumnus of the same institution
• Have a better reach as you can access the accounts of a number of individuals

Challenges with Social Recruiting

On the surface, social recruiting might seem an easy route to connect with potential candidates, allowing you to hire top talent and meet your recruitment numbers. But like other contemporary recruitment techniques adopted by recruiters, social recruiting too has its own set of challenges. These include:

• Gaining candidate attention: Even after posting about your campus recruitment with a detailed job description on all the social media platforms, grabbing the attention of potential candidates can be a challenge. It requires a lot of planning, constant updating and communication on these social platforms to ensure that candidates actually turn up for your campus placements.
• Gauge the interest of students: Often, candidates may visit your social media pages and learn about the job vacancy but may not visit your website and proceed with the initial application process. It is difficult to gauge the interest of such students and understand whether they will sit for the placement or not.
• Communicating directly with students: Initiating a direct communication with potential candidates visiting your social media pages is still a challenging job. For instance, you will not be able to send direct messages on Twitter and LinkedIn to the users who are not connected to you.
• Balancing recruitment and brand recognition: It is extremely difficult for a new recruiter to  strike a balance between recruitment exercises and creating a brand recognition for your company. Also, with social media being the favorite platform of students to post both positive and defamatory comments about a company, building a positive image in the eyes of such talented students is indeed a tough job for new players.

Social recruiting can be an option for you, but is not a completely reliable mode of candidate recruitment for a new recruiter. It requires immense planning and caution to build your brand on this platform and also recruit individuals from them. If you want to hire top talent efficiently for your 2020 campus recruitments, you can approach Pod.ai . We have the  expertise and resources to help you hire the best talent and also meet your recruitment numbers. Visit us at https://pod.ai/employers to learn more about our services.