By
Henrik Rydén
Group 1: Active candidates
For an employer, this is the “easiest” candidate group to reach and engage. These candidates are themselves actively looking for jobs and actively searching for opportunities.
Some active candidates are known to apply too optimistically, even for jobs where they may not always have all the needed requirements.
To improve the application quality among active candidates, it is important to have clear job titles, understandable grading levels, and clarity on whether the job is locally or internationally hired.
Group 2: Semi-active candidates
Semi-active candidates are generally happy where they are, but they have an eye on the job market. If something exciting comes up, they are all ears.
This candidate group is to an extent passive. They may not visit your career site as frequently as an active candidate, so you must ensure that the semi-active candidates see your job ads.
To have a job alert on your own career site, maybe an idea, however, remember that the more job alerts a candidate is subscribed to, the lower the open rate they have. A candidate may be able to set up a job alert and select expertise areas on your career site, but generally, these alerts are too generic and broad.
A better strategy may be to add your jobs to a nish job alert, allowing the semi-active to get jobs that match their profiles. These alerts have a higher open rate and as it is an accumulation of all relevant jobs on the market, they tend to also have a high engagement.
Impactpool offers the most sophisticated AI-matched job alert in the whole Impact sector. This job alert is only open for Impact companies/organizations, but if you fit the bill, it is easy to join.
Group 3: Passive candidates
Like the Semi-active candidates, the Passive candidates are satisfied where they are. The Passive candidate is also appreciated by the employer. The main difference between the semi-active and the Passive is that the Passive candidates rarely look for new opportunities.
In many impact companies and international organizations, it is the Passive candidates they want to reach and engage.
To catch their attention and to stay in touch with them, you need to be creative. Visibility in the right social media channels is effective.
What is social sourcing?
Social sourcing refers to finding active, semi-active, and passive candidates through social media, social platforms, and social networks for recruiting purposes.
On the other end, recruiters often use social media profiles, blogs, and online communities to find and search for candidate data and information. It is also often used for employer branding purposes and to build an image around the employer.
Why social sourcing?
Social media has become quite central in the way we live today. The first and last thing we do is to check our preferred social media channel.
Just the numbers confirm that. Facebook has 2 billion users, Twitter 328 million, Instagram 800 million, Snapchat 375 million, and LinkedIn 500 million!
The volume of individuals on these platforms makes it likely that you can reach your candidate through these networks.
By 2025, 75% of the workforce will be millennials. To attract and engage with them, sourcing through social platforms is essential.
There is a general global skill shortage currently. More than 40% of European, Japanese, Mexican, or Korean employees, feel that their skill levels do not correspond to those required by the job.
Employers report difficulty in filling jobs, suggesting that the skills are not available on the job market. 86% of organizations claim they have a shortage of leadership skills and in the succession plan of leaders.
Think mobile, mobile, mobile when crafting your message. Approx 60-80 % (differences between countries) of job seekers are searching for jobs on their mobile, through search engines, and social platforms. As much as, 72% go to a career site from their mobile.
The social channels contain a lot of data on your potential candidates. This user-generated data is crucial to explore different patterns of engagement from which you take well-informed decisions.
A data-driven approach and analysis to find the passive and active candidates you are looking for is the most efficient way to reach out to your targeted audience.
Sourcing through social channels will help you build your employer brand to stay relevant and attractive for your audience and create the image of your workplace has.
What is social sourcing used for?
68% of the Best-in-class organisations see the use of social media as critical to the recruitment strategy in comparison to all others.
Up until now the opportunity of using social media has been under-utilized. Social media is becoming more than only building an organisational brand, it is an effective way to find and reach out to large groups of talented individuals, to build relationships, to create an employer image and to engage with candidates.
How effective is social sourcing?
Organisations that used social media were dramatically more effective in time to hire (800%) and cost per hire (186%) versus organisations who do not use social networks (figure below).
Of the organisations working with social sourcing, 42% say candidate quality has improved. Additionally, 31 % saw an increase in employee referrals.
However 93% of companies use LinkedIn for recruiting whereas the activity is in other channels - 76% are active daily on Facebook, 51% use Instagram daily.
Only 18% of potential candidates are daily on LinkedIn.
The engagement online, together with some internal data such as: employee engagement, number of referrals and feedback from candidates on selection and induction process will be relevant data for interpreting the status of your employer brand and employer image. This is will give a fabulous insight on what steps to take next.
How to select what social platform is best for your next Social outreach campaign?
There are several ways to determine what social network to use and this is an area where Impactpool has developed many years of knowledge and experience.
Start by defining the recruitment persona, what profile are you looking to attract?
Identify the age of the audience you are targeting, e.g. if it is a young audience Snapchat is more effective than Facebook.
If you are targeting women, identify networks with a high engagement among women. Instagram is a good network to use if you want to target women.
What expertise are you sourcing? Different networks attract different audiences, twitter for example is known to attract journalists and politicians. So if it is a senior leaders or journalists you are looking for then Twitter may be the best pond to fish. If it is Human Resources professionals, LinkedIn may be better network.
If geography is important, it may be smart to use a network that targets the countries in need. Below is an illustration of LinkedIn’s user population around the world. If you are looking for talents in the USA, Europe and Canada, LinkedIn offers a good user base, if you are looking for candidates from Africa, Asia and MENA, other platforms have a higher ROI.
Two more ingredients to add to your selection of platform is the level of engagement and frequency.
Engagement refers to the level of interaction between users and content posted on social media platforms. This includes likes, comments, shares, and other forms of user-generated content. According to LinkedIn, members engagement with content is 15 times higher than engagement with job postings.
Frequency, on the other hand, refers to how often a user sees a particular piece of content on their social media feed. LinkedIn, which is a popular platform for recruitment related tasks, has a very low frequency (if you don’t look for human resources professionals, who tend to visit LinkedIn with high frequency).
As mentioned above 18% of the candidates visit LinkedIn on a daily basis.
Would you like to learn more about the social sourcing or get your jobs included in our job alert, please don’t hesitate to set up a meeting or a demo.
Use the contact form below.