You already know that social media represents the quickest—and cheapest!—way to reach your target customer, and you’ve increase sales by joining in. Now some companies have created a new trend by using social media to attract employees.
It’s true: the techniques used to reach out to new customers can also be used to find employees. Both activities involve branding; but while advertising uses branding to promise great value to customers, HR creates a brand based on your company’s reputation as a great place to work.
Ben Bars is the head of Brighter, an employment agency located in Sydney, Australia, and he advocates ‘employment marketing’. This concept combines human resources with marketing to help companies find qualified employees.
“HR is starting to…behave like marketing,” Bars commented during an interview, adding that employees already use social media to spread the word about their workplace. Word-of-mouth works because “the individual’s voice is real and authentic.”
Social media can give your company a larger base of potential employees. Brighter research in Asia shows that 84% of all fully-employed people would consider other job offers. Companies can use social media to tap into this pool by identifying qualified people and forming relationships with them. The potential employee benefits by the ability to research the company’s work culture.
HR departments are using social media more often, but most companies still avoid the medium. Businesses worry about ideas that lack established protocol, and it’s true: HR is different when it uses social media. Instead of a potential employee approaching a company for employment, the process is turned on its head; the company approaches qualified candidates. It might be a good idea, but a lot of companies are wary.
But continued avoidance of social media will be impossible for advertisers, and as time goes on, HR will have no choice but to embrace the trend. The truth is that their employees are probably discussing them on social media already, thus constructing a brand by default.
Bars suggests that companies edge into the process by watching conversations that take place on social media and job sites. This is risk-free way to understand the process and to construct their own brand so that they can attract the best employees.
