RCEuro Member Blogs

I attended the event Social Media in Recruitment at London and was dazzled about the whole bunch of information I got. In this first blog, I will write about the three most discussed social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I just bundled all the information I got and wrote down a conclusion of all three of them. See here we go...

LinkedIn is the professional network used to look for candidates. The two biggest groups represented on LinkedIn are white collars and young graduates so if that is your target group, get yourself a profile and start engaging! Not all people on LinkedIn are looking for a job, there are also professionals who are just using it as a tool to develop themselves professionally. But why not communicate with them also? One day they might be looking for a job and then you already have build up a relationship of trust with them. If you want to use it as a company, I would suggest to use Company Profile (customized version). Here you can adapt your content to your target group. A sales manager for example will see other content on the career pages as an IT-specialist.

Twitter is noise so this one is for keeping everyone up-to-date about anything you like. As a company you can choose to tweet about jobs or news or maybe both. What is suggested is to use feeds: One for the news and one for jobs.  People who do not like to be spammed with jobs, can choose not to see them. One thing you really have to do before starting to post jobs on Twitter is making sure that you have a proper career page. People still have to be attracted to your company after they have left the safe & sexy Twitterpage.

Last but not least, Facebook. I personally always felt a bit withheld to use Facebook professionally but Thursday I was provided with some new insights. What most people do not know is that the Fan Pages of Facebook are indexed by Google. When you set-up a customized Fan page (not that difficult apparently), you optimize the branding of your company. The more fans you have, the higher you will appear in search results. I concluded that Facebook is not necessarily used to look for candidates but that it is best used to increase your brand reputation and make your company more popular. And maybe, who knows, your very cool customized fan page is going to attract lots of talent from Facebook.

So now you know: LinkedIn to look for talent, Twitter to keep everyone up-to-date and Facebook to increase brand reputation.

To end with, I would like to quote Elkie Holland (She told her success story at the event). She compared the company website with ‘Your Home', you feel safe and comfortable there and all your ‘things' (information) are there. LinkedIn is the conference you attend; it is a very professional environment where you mainly want to network. Twitter is a cocktail party you go to, the casual yet still a bit professional place. You can laugh here but also talk about business things. Facebook is the pub, the most casual place. This not business, this is more fun and a place to share for example cows on Farmville. Eventually, you want everyone to come with you to the glue that holds everything together, ‘Your Home'.