Like everyone else, recruiters are trying to understand how social media impacts the way they have traditionally conducted business. As they get started they’re trying a number of approaches when they find niche social media communities for specialized professionals: they’re posting jobs for free on LinkedIn and Facebook starting discussion threads or making other posts either related to a specific job opening or on other, sometimes frivolous, topics that aren’t really of interest to your members. They can clutter up the conversations on your site and turn off your members.
So, how can you give employers the social media exposure they want, in a way that doesn’t clog your communities with job ads, ensures those recruiters get better value, AND helps support your paid job board program?
If a paid ad on your job board is automatically sent to Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter, then you’ve just given the employers the exposure to your social media communities that they wanted – and they get their job in four places (possibly more, if you’re part of a job board network) and they only had to enter it once. You’re also going to keep the employer from being viewed as annoying by your members. Your social media outlets can remain focused on discussion. Any jobs visible from your social media outlets will also be found on your job board.
Plus, in addition to getting their job on those social media outlets there are still all the other reasons why a job on your career center is a better way for them to recruit:
- Associations market their career center regularly to ensure a steady stream of candidates
- Unlike your social media outlets, the career center is visible to a larger audience including those not yet engaging much with social media.
- On many association job boards, job seekers have set-up alerts to be notified via email when new jobs match their criteria
- Typically, while a job posting is active on the career center, employers can search the association’s resume database
By ensuring all jobs go through your job board, your members and prospective members can always go to your job board if they want to see all the relevant job listings available. Otherwise, they’d have to make sure they check your Facebook page, your LinkedIn Group, your Twitter stream, AND your job board if they don’t want to miss something.
When you establish your career center as the starting point for getting open positions visible to as wide an audience as possible, employers and recruiters will have better results in finding the best candidates. Plus, if they are interested in doing more with your social media outlets, then engage them as content providers and coordinate with them to create discussion topics that are more meaningful to your members, such as interviewing tips, work-life balance issues, etc. Those discussions will position the recruiters to be viewed as helpful resources, which will further improve the benefits they receive from engaging with your community.
