Is Your Ego Affecting Your Social Media Recruiting?

When was the last time you checked yourself out? (I mean on social media not in a mirror!) If you haven’t done so for a while, then you may want to take a look, especially if you are in recruitment or talent/candidate attraction.
The reason is simple - prospective candidates ARE checking YOU out every day. This could be on LinkedIn after you have visited their profile (as long as you are not playing at being a Ninja), with the ‘Looked who’s viewed your Profile’. It could be on Twitter when you RT, Favourite or Follow them, or it might be Google+ when you add someone to a Circle. In fact it could happen on ALL the social networks you are on.
Every time you do an action on a social network, it notifies the recipient of that action of who you are - which means they get to see your profile to make a decision on whether they want to Connect, Follow, Circle you etc
So as I said, you are being checked out every day on social media. Could your own profile be affecting for social recruiting activities? Now do you want to take another look at your profile?

• Have you got a smiling head shot picture of yourself? Have you used that wedding picture, a cartoon, a picture of your dog, a funny picture, a logo, a holiday snap or any other picture that you felt looked good? Remember, if you are using social media for recruiting, this is the first thing that prospective candidates will see of you, AND we know how quick people make decisions based on images, don’t we?  You have a smartphone - get someone to take a good picture of you and upload it - it takes minutes, and will make a huge difference to your social profile.

• Does your headline tell people what you do? If you are a recruiter, do you actually tell people that or do you make them guess and hope you get lucky? Remember when searches are made on social media, people make decisions on you based on what they see on your headline (LinkedIn) or Bio. So why not make it easy and give them a clue - if you a are a recruiter, tell people what you recruit for in your headline or Bio. Just remember you only have between 120 - 160 characters for most of the social networks.

• Have you included any of the keywords for your target audience? What about common synonyms of those keywords? If your target audience are using them why don’t you? They will be searching for these words, because they associate them with their industry, so finding recruiters using them will surely be beneficial for you?

• Please remember, one of the biggest mistakes that people make with their Profiles, Headlines or Bio’s is that they write them for themselves! WRONG. If you are using social media for recruitment, then you need to be thinking about candidate attraction. That means it you need to think about what candidates would search for to find you and use those words, NOT the words you like to describe yourself with. These are two different things.

So park the ego for a moment and use the different social media platforms more effectively for recruiting.
The eagle-eyed of you may say that I could be utilising my Twitter banner image a little better to market myself/what I do. But social media is also about being individuals and having some fun at the same time, isn’t it. And anyway, there is nothing wrong with a bit of Star Wars 🙂

I work with recruitment agencies and corporates to help them understand and leverage the different social media networks to improve their recruitment strategy, recruitment process, candidate attraction, employer branding and content marketing strategy. If you require guidance, advice or social recruiting training, get in touch today.

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