When talking to recruiters - inhouse or agency side - about social recruiting, I always get asked about content. Where do I find it, what do I share and how do I share it. I have covered this previously, but I wanted to take it a stage further and show an example of how I would do it for something I have no real knowledge of in recruitment. So if you recruit for UX / UI people it is your lucky day further down this post. 

This is something we cover on our Social Media Content For Recruitment Workshop- the next one is on the 1st May

One of the biggest issues in social media is finding relevant quality content to share with the right audience. There is no point regularly re-sharing ‘mainstream’ content like Mashable, TechCrunch, BBC News or even all the main ‘influencers’ on LinkedIn Today - there are already many ‘content sharing bots’ doing just that. To add value to your followers, friends, fans, readers etc you need to be giving people specific content that isn’t readily available. And that means doing a little detective work to find the content.

Some of the best content to share (because it is interesting and full of great ideas and opinion), are blogs - especially if you can find the ones written by the influencers and though leaders in the specific sectors you work in as a recruiter. 

If you are consistently sharing great relevant content with an audience you are trying to cultivate in your sector, it won’t take long for you to be recognised as a ‘go-to’ person to follow and engage with. As a recruiter that is gold-dust! Your reputation in your sector can grow quickly, and before you know it you start getting candidates and clients reaching out to you, to help them look for and find opportunities and candidates respectively.

As I said at the beginning, I wanted to use an example that I know presents recruiters with a challenge - User Experience People (also known as UX or UI).

So the objective for this example here is to search for and identify blogs, writers and influencers that produce specific content that would be interesting to UX / UI people. Then look at how you could put together a strategy around sharing content across your networks, and starting to positioning yourself as a UX/UI knowledge expert.

1. Go searching. You could search across Google (blog search), Twitter, Twitter Lists, LinkedIn, Discussion boards, Forums, StackOverflow, Slideshare, Blogs (most bloggers share a blogroll of other similar bloggers) etc. A great place for find people (and their blogs) is via Google+ communities. Do a UX or UI search on Google+, then hit the ‘Everything’ dropdown on the results page and scroll down to communities. You will see all the communities of UX people. Click on a community, then hit the Members link on the left. It will show you all the members of that community and all their details including their blogs, if they write one. Awesome tool!!!
    
2. Now compile a list of all the blogs.
3. Here is my list of UX / UI blogs I have found so far (told you, you were lucky if you recruit in UX /UI!!):
   

4. Now to start to use the content. First set up a RSS reader account (Google Reader is closing on the 1st of July so you will need to transition before then, if you are a Google Reader user like me!) likeFeedly (transition to Feedly from Google here) or Feeddler on the iPad (the latter is my favourite - I understand a stand alone web version is coming soon). Subscribe to all the RSS Feeds on the above blogs and put them all into a UX Blogs folder. You now have access to a huge archive of UX /UI content as well as all the latest content these blogs will produce. Here the screen shot shows you a small selection of these blogs I have added to  UX Blogs folder in my Feeddler:

   Note: you can subscribe to these RSS feeds via Outlook.You can also subscribe to them via email, set up a folder in your inbox, and set up a Rule to forward all the inbound posts to that folder to keep them organised. Personally I am going to hold tight for a couple of months to see what other products fill the RSS Reader vacuum going to be left by Google Reader.

5. Now is the time to start to share the content in a managed and timely way. There are many different ways of doing this (which we cover on the the workshops) but here are a few in this article. First the question is where are you going to share this content?
   Where is YOUR UX /UI audience? LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, your own Groups, your database, niche communities etc.Anyway you get the idea. Now not knowing the UX/UI market as well as a recruiter in that space, I will pick a few as an example. 
6. For this example I am going to use Hootsuite, and schedule some posts (time management is crucial to busy recruiters) to LinkedIn, Google+ Page  and Twitter. Add the posts to Hootsuite, and schedule them at different times during the day and night. You can use different tools to tell you the best times that your network are online, to maximise the biggest reach of your audience at the time.  You can easily schedule a weeks worth of updates from all this content you now have available. 
   As I said there are other tools to use like BufferApp and SocialOomph and Dlvr.it and IFTTT.
7. Do some research and make sure you add some specific #hashtags to the message (on Twitter and Google+ - yes G+ supports the use of #hashtags!) This will make it easy for people in the UI / UX sector to find your content.
8. Now to make sure you see more UX /UI content and to find all the people talking about it (on Twitter anyway), set up a search column on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck (“User experience” OR UX OR #UX OR #UI -#jobs). This will help direct you to more UK / UI people and blogs as well as allowing you to follow specific UX / UI people.
9. While I am referring to Twitter, jump onto Followerwonk and search Twitter bios (top left on the site) for UX and UI people as well - many have their blogs as their web link.
10. My final piece of wisdom here is a word of warning. When you find all these great UX/UI people - DON’T spam them with jobs. Build your reputation with them first, develop a relationship with them (on a relevant network) and earn their respect. They are a group of people that are very distrusting of recruiters (especially on LinkedIn!!)

Specialist recruiters have a much deeper knowledge of the sectors they work in, and are appreciated by the candidates for their expertise. What I have described above allows you to further demonstrate your knoweldge, expertise and understanding of your specific markets to a wider audience in your sector. Yes it takes a little time to do the homework and get it set up, but it will pay dividends in the future.

And if this has got you thinking a little different about the power of content in social recruiting, then why not take a look at our social media content for recruitment workshops - it is full of great advice like this.

We work with recruitment agencies and corporates to help them integrate social media into their existing recruitment strategy and recruitment processes. If you require guidance, advice or social recruiting training, get in touch today.

NEW for 2013 - Social Media Content For Recruiter Workshops - using the power of social media content to help reduce your advertising costs, build your digital brand and create new methods of candidate attraction. For more information go to the booking page here.

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