Many of the social media analysts, recruiters and top human resource consultants completely agree with the fact, that the growing reach of social media and big data is highly influencing recruitment trends in the industry. The conventional recruitment processes are now seem to coexist with the new age recruitment practices, when it comes to finding the perfect hire for the job.

Considering the widening demand-supply gap created to find skilled talent for the job, many human resource professionals are now using advanced metrics to identify skilled professionals, mainly through social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

The social media arena is now experiencing a flood of job opportunities and is reaching out to talented professionals across the globe. Sometimes cold calling also helps recruiters connect with talent at the other end of the globe.

Companies lately offer exciting referral schemes to employees who bring in people from the same educational background and unique skill sets to meet job requirements and expectations of the employer.

See: 8 Job Apps and Web Tools that will get you hired

Increasing usage of Big Data

Big Data helps to easily identify top performers on job and filter these candidates from the norm with advanced metric systems. The recruitment practices are now shifting from conventional to data- supported HR model across companies.

HR analytics is the new buzzword at Mahindra & Mahindra. The company is now tapping into employee data and deploying HR analytics to understand, how a perfect hire can drive more RoI (Returns on Investments) on human capital.

Big data seems to be drawing increasing attention from the human resource fraternity; however the final objective lies in analyzing the structured and unstructured data to find important answers to questions that influence workforce productivity.

You can also identify the potential leaders in the workplace by analyzing big data, keep a tab on the impact of training programmes conducted vis-à-vis productivity and reduce workforce attrition in certain cases.

Though social media makes it relatively easy to find the right talent at your fingertips, “not all skilled people are active on social media networks  or are looking for professional job change,” Rajeev Bhardwaj, Vice-President of Human Resources, Sun Life Financial Asia Service Centre told The Hindu Business Line.

Bhardwaj added, “Social media is also a key to reach out to the passive job seeker, somebody who is not actively looking for a job, even though they may be better qualified and employable than most others. How one connects with such talent is an interesting and an important aspect of the talent selection chain.”

Tips on social media recruitment strategies

Here are some tips on the social media recruitment strategies to follow, that target the passive job seeker and you might just hit upon a talent trove for your organisation.

1. Twitter can prove to be highly efficient social networking platform, provided you know how to maximise the reach of your hashtags in terms of numbers and geography. At times, you can ask employees to spread the word out about the potential opportunity and it works much faster.
2. Use LinkedIn Recruiter’s page – LinkedIn is the first choice for recruiters into social media recruiting, which is done through a paid product provided by the career platform. Also approach candidates who actively participate in LinkedIn groups, while being extremely careful about the content you post company branding will determine how your organisation is viewed by talented employees willing to join the firm.
3. Use Facebook’s search feature effectively. It is very helpful to try and find someone who has friends at the company you’re looking for.
4. Go for Paid Advertising – Assured results with a strategy that is far more effective than posting an ad in a newspaper is paid advertising. You can also unleash the power of targeted Facebook advertising to create ripples in the market about the job opening and invite some really good CVs in your database.

Nonetheless, there are always tools like Google+ and Pinterest that come to your aid, when everything else fails. Planning carefully a social media recruitment strategy for your company works in the longer run and can help target the right audience through time.

 Also read: Job Forward: Make Social Recruiting Easier