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5 Location-Based Social Media Tips For Your Recruiting or Staffing Agency

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Social media has given recruiting companies and staffing agencies a host of new ways to find the right candidates.  As a result, more firms today are leveraging staffing or recruiting software that integrates data from the biggest social networks – think LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

While it’s true that the biggest networks will hold the largest candidate pools, even more (and sometimes more job-ready) candidates can be found by exploring networks you may not have considered.

I’m talking about location based social media.

You’ve probably heard of location based social sites like Foursquare where users check-in to share their locations, activities and tips on special spots with others.

Leveraged correctly, these networks can become powerful staffing and recruiting tools.  Here are 5 easy ways to start:

  1. Find Candidates At Events – You’ve got a booth at a job fair or trade show and you want to attract candidates to come by.  You can keep track of candidate check-ins to the show and offer invitations for people to check out your kiosk.
  2. Provide Tips To Check-ins – Perhaps you represent a staffing agency that works with numerous candidates for temp hiring.  You can encourage prospects to check in to your location by offering valuable interview tips in return.
  3. Keep Track Of Your Competitors – Are people checking in with your competitors?  You can follow candidates’ traffic to your competitors and then encourage them to check out your location as well, i.e., “Searching for a job?  Check out Recruitment Solutions for the best job search options.”
  4. Engage Your Facebook Followers – Invite your fans to check in to your offices through Facebook Places, the network’s own location based check in application. Your Facebook business page updates can then draw attention to the buzz of activity surrounding your recruiting firm or staffing agency.
  5. Track Ideal Candidates – You’re looking for sports-minded candidates for your fitness equipment company client.  How do you find such candidates?  Try monitoring local fitness-oriented check-ins where ideal prospects might be spending time, such as rock climbing clubs or triathlon events.  Then let those candidates know you’re hiring.

And, of course, with the right staffing or recruiting software, you can integrate activity from each of these social channels seamlessly into efforts.

To learn more about how your recruiting or staffing agency can best take advantage of location based social media, and how our social media enabled staffing and recruiting software can help, contact us or request a free demo.

Smart Phones and Filtering Employees

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The two businesses that are most focused on not missing opportunities are Stock Trading and Staffing.

With record unemployment rates, staffing businesses are swamped with potential candidates.  Although this might seem like a good thing,  it can be a quick way to miss your golden ticket opportunitiy to place a prime candidate.

When they have a job to fill, many staffing companies have very organized candidate on-boarding procedures and workflows to separate the wheat from the chaff rather than blunder through an arduous placement processes .  But no matter how organized your business is, things can still slip through the cracks.  Here are 2 quick steps to help your business quickly filter candidates through the on-boarding process without any fancy “proceduralizing” using the most common small business tool: the smartphone.

1)      Say you have a quick phone call with a potential candidate while you are running to your CPA to drop off those dreaded tax returns.  While riding the elevator at your wealthy CPA’s office, open up your LinkedIn App which you have already downloaded for your iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Palm.  Simply search for your candidate, just checking to see if they have “recommendations”.  If they can’t manage to get a recommendation then you might not want to recommend them for a position.  This is the first line of defense.

2)      Use a Staffing Software which allows you to access your candidates and customers online. Bond Adapt has a mobile option where your recruiters can quickly find records in your database, update the records and perform common tasks such as logging calls.  These types of applications remove “remembering stuff and logging it when you get into work” a non-essential skill.

You Can’t Ignore Social Recruiting Hyper Growth

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Still in doubt about whether your recruiting software has to interface with LinkedIn and other social media engines? Still wondering, in other words, if social media recruiting is right for your staffing agency?  Check out these numbers:

  • 89% of American companies use social media for recruiting.
    • 82% use LinkedIn.
    • 50% use Facebook.
    • 45% use Twitter.
    • 64% use more than one social media network.
  • 64% of those companies report that they’ve hired through social media in the past year.
  • 55% of those companies plan to invest even more time and money into social media recruiting.
  • 82% of American job seekers use social networks in their job search.
    • 35% use LinkedIn.
    • 75% use Facebook.
    • 40% use Twitter.

 

A few comments are in order.

The first is (I hope) obvious: being social media savvy is a must for staffing and recruiting professionals. Your competition is out there, candidates are out there, people in your network are out there, so you have to be there. Often – as in every day.

The second is also obvious: networking is still the #1 way to find good candidates. And social media is a superb tool for networking. Lunches, phone calls, coffee meetings, trade shows, and all of the other old networking tools are still important and, to some extent, irreplaceable. But social media is, I would say, the most important networking tool in your arsenal.

The last point: note the discrepancies between companies and users when it comes to Facebook and LinkedIn. To me, it seems as if companies are investing heavily in LinkedIn while the candidates are spending a lot more time on Facebook. Isn’t recruiting via Facebook an opportunity that isn’t being used as much as it can?

If you have a good answer to that last question, please leave a comment below. In the meantime, make sure that your staffing and recruiting software is hooked up to social media!

Have You Integrated Your Staffing Software Into Your Social Media Hiring?

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staffing software and social mediaThe year 2012 offers great news for recruiting firms and staffing agencies.  According to Jobvite’s 2011 survey, 67% of the 800 people surveyed said they plan to increase hiring this year.  That’s up from 55% in 2010.  Knowing that the hiring tide is beginning to swell, those companies that invest in recruiting and staffing software incorporating social media will be the leaders of the pack.

Why do we say this?  Consider this statistic from comScore:

Over the last 4 years, time spent on social media has increased from 1 in 12 minutes to 1 in 5.

It’s clear that for both candidates searching for positions and hiring professionals seeking to fill permanent and temporary jobs, social media is a channel that can’t be ignored.

For Hiring Professionals:

The Jobvite survey revealed strong trends toward increasing social media as a hiring tool.  These numbers help tell the story:

  • 89% of companies say they will recruit through social media this year
  • 55% will increase their budgets for social recruiting
  • 64% have expanded their social recruiting to two or more channels

Of the top 3 networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), LinkedIn is the clear favorite for hiring professionals – 87% of respondents said they use LinkedIn. About 55% of companies use Facebook and 47% use Twitter.

These statistics reinforce the need for staffing software.  With its rich functionality of integrating social media into staffing processes, software automation makes connecting with candidates easier and faster.

For Job Candidates:

Whether temporary or full time, job candidates have found social media a powerful tool in their searches for new positions.  According to the Jobvite study, nearly 64% of companies found candidates through social media.

And as social media becomes more intrinsic to people’s lives through added apps and new platforms, the dominance of job boards and career sites may wane.  In 2011, candidate quality scores for those acquired through social networks measured 7.0 on a 1-10 scale, vs. 6.8 for hires found through career sites and 6.1 for candidates from job boards.

In other words, the higher quality candidates you’re seeking are more likely to connect with you via your tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts than ever before.

These numbers reinforce the 2012 mantra – social media for hiring professionals and candidates is not only popular, but smart.  The companies that incorporate staffing software with social media to stay connected to candidates and clients will have a leg up on their slower competitors.

And those candidates who use social media to find hiring opportunities will have better chances of beating other job seekers to the punch.

Interested in moving your recruitment firm or staffing agency to the next level?  For more information on how you can make your hiring processes more efficient, check out our blog post, Social Media Enabled Software That Drives Successful Staffing And Recruiting.

Social Media Enabled Software That Drives Successful Staffing and Recruiting

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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, You Tube, WordPress, Blogging — that we are in a new era of multi-channel, highly-personalized, news, lifestyle and information distribution is enough to make a good recruiter or staffing professional cry.

So much chafe, so little time…

How do you manage all of those streams of information? How do you easily and effectively search for candidates across so many different sources? How can you possibly track all of your own job order related postings and activities to determine what works and what doesn’t? There aren’t enough hours in the day. And you don’t have the time to waste — you have orders to fill. You need solutions that reduce your effort, while helping you separate the chafe (all the junk out there on the Internet) from the wheat (all the good candidate and employee information you need for recruiting).

Enter Bond International Software and its three staffing and recruiting software packages: Bond Adapt, Bond eEmpACT and Bond StaffSuite.

Each of these three products is uniquely designed to help harried staffing and recruiting professionals better manage their time by reducing the effort it takes to keep up with virtually anything related to social media and your staffing and recruiting business.

For example, from within Bond software you can record candidates’ online profiles on LinkedIn and other social media sites so that you can develop a better understanding of their fitness for your job orders. You can also easily send job postings from within the software to your own site and, at the same time through RSS feeds, to your own social media sites to aid in recruiting with less effort.

But there’s more. It’s not enough that you can track candidates or customers through their online social media profiles or post jobs or send news via RSS feeds. With Bond recruiting and staffing software you can also develop and implement tracking and reporting that helps you understand the effectiveness of these efforts. You can determine the ROI of your social media campaigning.

Like to find out more? Call us at 800-318-4983 or click www.bond-us.com for more information. We look forward to helping you put social media to work for you!

Will LinkedIn’s New Recruiting Tool Replace Job Boards?

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Keep that recruiting software tuned into LinkedIn. The online professional network is about to get better for recruiters, job seekers, and – yes – even employed professionals not looking for a new job.

LinkedIn’s new tool, which is scheduled to launch in just a few months, is called “Talent Pipeline.” It’s an add-on to LinkedIn Recruiter, which is already one of the best online recruiting tools out there. Supposedly, companies will also be able to use Talent Pipeline as a free-standing program, but I have a hard time imagining anyone using it that isn’t already using Recruiter.

With one of the largest databases of working professionals or passive candidates, this new tool could seriously displace job boards.  Instead of job seekers chasing jobs, LinkedIn will make it easier for recruiters and staffing professionals to find and engage the select few qualified candidates they are most interested in.  No more looking for a diamond in the rough as recruiters and staffing professional will now be able to sort through a field of diamonds and transfer the best candidates to their own staffing or recruiting software for nurturing.

Here are the Talent Pipeline highlights:

  • One Stop Shop. Leads from virtually any source will be culled, organized, and updated in one place. The recruiter, of course, gets to set the search and organizational parameters. The program will also enable you to develop one profile from many sources, so data from John Smith’s company won’t be separate from the data drawn from his LinkedIn profile.
  • Easy Sharing. Despite their penchant for competition, independent recruiters know that sharing information is the lifeblood of their work. Recruiting companies and recruiting teams also benefit from well-developed internal information networks. Talent Pipeline promises to provide easy-to-use-and-customize sharing platforms.
  • Intuitive Interface. From the demos I’ve seen, the profiles are full of crucial information but still easy to read, even at a glance. And the program as a whole seems to be fairly easy to pick up. No doubt, LinkedIn (and others) will release a bunch of free training videos when the new service comes online.

I can imagine some recruiters saying, “But I already do all that via LinkedIn and other recruiting software.” That may be true, but I’ll bet that it takes a lot of time and effort to get the important data from two, three, or more different programs. Like a lot of great software, Talent Pipeline promises nothing terribly new in terms of outcome, but a much easier way to achieve that outcome. (Need an example? Look no further than Microsoft Word. Almost everything I produce with Word could be done with a typewriter, editing pen, and some basic graphics tools – or three different programs. Word simply makes it a lot easier to get the product I want.)

Maybe I’m excited about Talent Pipeline because I’m a staffing software geek. But I’ll bet that, in just a few years, recruiters around the country (and world) will wonder how they got along without it – kind of like word processing programs today.