Social media sourcing is not a new concept; recruiters have been using Linkedin to find new talent for years. While using other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter may seem time consuming, with the correct methods you can use them to find a goldmine of untapped talent. Finding new sources of high-value workers has become increasingly difficult but with a little effort, social media can turn into a key source for new candidates.
Tapping into your Audience
An important thing to consider when sourcing your social media base is that they are already engaged with your brand from the start. If they are following you, they are already engaged and interested in what you have to offer. Because of this, you can interact with candidates that may only consider an offer due to their opinion of you. Some sites, such as Twitter and Linkedin, allow you to search through followers for applicable candidates. Twitter, for example, has an advanced search feature that supports location searching, standard Boolean (AND, OR, NOT) and also allows you to search by hashtag.
Here is an example using Twitter’s advanced search. You can see I am searching for all words “Java”, “Developer”, and “Job”. All of these will show up in the tweets I search. I also picked English as the language and California as the location. Note that if you have enough engagement with your followers you can insert your twitter handle within the “Mentioning these accounts” section. You also can modify the date to show only more recent tweets.
You can also do similar searches via Google using Boolean, if you are more comfortable with search engines. For example:
site:twitter.com Java Developer California
Using these tools you can create a search to find users who are talking about the skills, jobs, and positions you are looking to fill. You can also use tools like Tweetdeck to search through Twitter with a more user-friendly interface.
Finding New Platforms
While Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram are large hubs for finding potential candidates, there are a handful of resources that people talk about less often. Youtube is one source that has a large number of extremely skilled users that put out content showcasing their skills. For example, if you are looking for a specialist in web development, try looking up web development tutorials on Youtube. You will find a plethora of users you can contact who are knowledgeable in their field and are often enthusiastic about it.
Reddit is another underutilized resource. Conveniently, Reddit has communities based around interests and topics. These are called subreddits. Using the web developer example again, there are subreddits for webdev, HTML5, CSS, and CSShelp. There are many more relevant groups, you just have to take advantage of the search function to find them. Once within these groups, you can either send a direct message to a user you are interested in or just make a post informing the users about your job opening.
Reddit is very easy to search. Select the search bar at the top and search for the topic you are interested in finding subreddits for. From there, enter any of these subreddits that seem relevant to start your search.
When looking for programmers and developers, GitHub is an amazing resource. Searching through GitHub can be a bit intimidating if you have never done it before. Within the search bar you can search by location, programming language, and number of followers. For example, if you wanted to find people near Minneapolis that program in Javascript and have at least 5 followers, you would search:
language:javascript location:Minneapolis followers:>4
From there, you can find users that have quality examples of their content who fit the job you are trying to fill. As you can see, there are sorting methods to help you look through these users. I suggest sorting by ‘Most Followers’ to find the strongest repositories.
In Conclusion
It is important to remember that anyone who follows you on social media is already interested and engaged with your brand. Use these followers to find high-quality candidates who are already inclined to engage with you. There are also many underutilized resources for finding candidates such as GitHub, Reddit, and Youtube. Try thinking outside of the box when using online communities to find candidates. There may even be niche, small forums in corners of the internet that are entirely untapped!