In today’s world, you cannot rely on one website to post a job advertisement. If you want to reach candidates, if you genuinely want to increase your response rate, you have to post in many different places. Social media is the dominant choice, but good old job boards have a vital function as well. There are also country-specific pages that need to be taken care of if recruiting for a specific market. In this article, however, I would like to concentrate on social media, as we live in the age where 1,58 billion people in the world log onto Facebook daily, LinkedIn, being the most significant professional network on the Internet has more than 630 million members. Even AngelList long ago surpassed 50,000 accredited investors, who created their company’s profile there.
At my work in Bee Talents, all recruiters use LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services, and we all have recruiter accounts. This, by the way, was one of the most important investments our company made. In Eastern European, countries paying for LinkedIn is still rare, even among recruitment agencies. This gives us a competitive edge over them (same goes for our ATS, Lever, and several other tools).
Since we have those capabilities that others do not, it is a no brainer that we use LinkedIn first and foremost for most of our posting needs. Not only do we post an offer under the Jobs section, but we also use this tool when posting jobs on our feed and then we share each other’s posts to reach a maximum number of candidates. Even if you cannot access the professional suite of LinkedIn tools, go there anyway. Simply put, candidates are there.
Facebook and its groups are another resource that we use to share our offers. We specialize in IT recruitment, and seek Facebook groups associated with that sector (like this one) or with HR/recruitment, or even posting in specific university groups. This is meant to reach specific/potential candidates or other recruiters. Of course, we also post on our wall and share it with our networks for maximum exposure. Many companies undervalue the power of a more personal approach, but we see no conflict there. We can be both direct and personal when needed, and we can be professionally distant if need be.
Lately, I also started using Twitter when posting a job. We all know the restrictions of this medium (280-character length), but why not just post a list of some of the job perks to spice up someone’s interest and only then give a link to a job offer.
MeetUp
MeetUp, as we all know, is a site for meeting people of similar makeup and planning group activities. An excellent example of how such a MeetUpian job posting should look like can be found here. You need to find groups that are focused on sharing/offering job offers, or ones that group professionals looking for a meetup. Here is an interesting article by Johann Romefort on how to use MeetUp to power up your tech hiring strategy.
In short, organize a meetup, build a community around your company, and get people interested in what you do. My colleagues are doing it best at HR Meetup Poznań, a fantastic local forum of industry experts. Using MeetUp can be a two-way street. Post on the portal, invite and present the job offer in-person.
Quora
Quora is more straight-forward. You log in, click Add in the top right corner and share a link. Voila! Or you can use a more protracted, but more rewarding approach described here by Aliza Sherman on Mashable. It’s based more on creating and expanding your network through carefully chosen questions to answer any questions posted.
AngelList
On AngelList, you can post directly by clicking Post Job or Jobs and then Post Job. No brainer. It’s the impact of this portal that matters. Directed at IT professionals, it is excellent for when you need a candidate for a remote job. Candidates tend to apply more to remote offers that on-site ones. It’s helpful if AngelList is integrated with your ATS.
YouTube
In the end, I would like to mention a tool that many people associate more with cat videos than sourcing. I can test different tools for sourcing freely. One of them was YouTube, but what hit me the most was not the idea how to use it to find candidates, but how great it is to promote your brand (personal or your employers)! You can post short, engaging videos detailing aspects of the offer. A simplified scheme in France, a recruiting market I am familiar with, is to post a 30-or-so second video with the necessary information and to post the rest of the job offer in the vid description. Nice idea.
As recruiters, we need to follow the candidates everywhere they go. We cannot we must rely on several different mediums. We need to scour Quora, Twitter, and local ad websites. Usually, the more places we post, the better, but let’s remember to post in the correct and justifiable ones. Spam is still spam, and we want to reach our candidates in a meaningful way.