Three Reasons Social Media is Vital for the HR World

Whether you’ve been involved in social media since the early Myspace days or it’s a bandwagon you’ve hopped on recently, there’s no denying that social media is no longer solely for millennials. Since the dawn of the internet, social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have become an integral part of our society, and this is particularly true for the business world. According to a 2016 study from CareerBuilder, the number of employers using social media to screen candidates has increased by over 500 percent of the last 10 years. This alone is proof that this isn’t a trend that will be going away anytime soon, and screening candidates is just one of many uses the HR has at its disposal when it comes to social media. By using the various sites listed above, you can improve your recruiting methods, increase employee engagement, and enhance your overall brand. Here’s how:

Recruitment

We’ve already discussed how popular of a notion it is to screen employees via social media. By evaluating a candidate’s presence on social networks like Facebook and Linkedin, employers can assess whether they have necessary skills to succeed at the job in question. In addition to giving the employer an insight into the applicant’s merits and contributions, they also get an idea about how they would fit culturally within the company. An online persona is by no means a great tool to judge a person’s personality through and through, but it can give employers a rough idea about what kind of person is applying for the job.

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In a similar fashion, job seekers can use social media to assess what a company is like before and during the application process. They can find job postings, learn about what a company does, get an insight into the company culture, and even reach out with specific questions. At Dominion, our primary social media sites are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We use Facebook to promote our company culture, LinkedIn for recruiting purposes and professional networking, and Twitter to share blogs and relevant articles to our target clientele. Any job seeker interested in a position within our company can get a pretty good idea about who we are by perusing these various social sites.

Employee Engagement

Even if your employees aren’t all active on social media, it can still be a great tool to engage with them internally. Social media sites are designed to be user-friendly and easy to understand, so whether your company has 50 people or 500, there are a number of ways you can use social tools to increase engagement. I’ve worked jobs where all employees were invited to a special Facebook page that would allow them to request shift changes, quickly and easily pass along relevant job information, and even tell fun work anecdotes. This was always a great tool to not only improve how we worked as a team but also brought us together as individuals. At Dominion, we’re a little too large to expect everyone to have and utilize a Facebook account. That is why we have a Google+ account that allows us to communicate company-wide details quickly and efficiently. This has proven to be a more effective tool than a standard intranet because all employees get notifications of postings whenever they log into their email. At the end of the day, you have to find what tools work best for your business, but rest assured, there is something out there for every type of business.  

Brand Enhancement

In line with the above practices, social media is a great way to improve your company branding and marketing. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, customers use social media to engage with businesses in many different ways. If your business doesn’t have a strong online presence, it’s going to be very difficult to keep up with your competitors. Social media allows you to communicate with potential clients and community-thought leaders in a non-invasive way. Whether you use Facebook ads as a way to advertise your product or Twitter as a customer satisfaction tool, social media is a great way to bring your marketing strategies to your target audiences’ home turf. People feel comfortable perusing their social sites of choice, so if you can get your brand to appear where they’re already spending time online, you’ll notice a big difference in online web traffic.

Now that social media is fully present in all of our daily lives, it’s up to HR leaders to utilize the (mostly free) tools necessary to achieve the above goals. Using these communication tools can increase business and improve the overall relationship between producer and consumer.