25 hot social recruitment tips-gulf jobs market

White Paper

25 Tips on How to Use Social
Media to Make a Successful
Hire in the Gulf

by Kashif Naqshbandi, Director
Gulf Jobs Market
co-author Alexandra Scherbich, Marketing Manager
Gulf Jobs Market

1

Who Should Read This

 HR Managers, Recruitment Specialists – Tips and advice on how to use social media effectively to
recruit and decrease your cost per hire

 Business Owners, CEOs – Understand where and when to consider allocating resources for
utilising social media as a recruitment channel

 Heads of Departments – Learn how to leverage social media to find great candidates for your
department

 Team Leaders – Know when you should recommend social media to your HR department

What is Social Media Recruitment?
Social Media Recruitment – anyone who works in HR or recruitment is talking about it, but what exactly is
it? In short, it‟s a way of

“... enabling companies to engage, attract and hire relevant employees using
online communities and platforms where users share and create content and have
a common interest ...”

Benefits of Using Social Media Recruitment

 Manage, Extend and Control Your Employer Brand Online. If you aren‟t writing about your
company, you can guarantee sooner or later someone else will be. By harnessing social media you
get to promote the good things that happen within your organisation and control the message your
brand wishes to convey to the outside world.

 Increase Your “Offer to Placement” Ratio. Social media platforms enable candidates to interact
online with potential colleagues (i.e. your designated in-house social media manager) which should
have a positive impact on a potential recruit‟s decision to accept a job offer with your company.

 Reduce Your Cost Per Hire. When planned, managed and implemented well, it can be an effective
way of reducing your cost per hire.

 Huge Potential Reach. A creative social media recruitment plan, with the right incentives and the
right message to the right audience can reach an enormous pool of potential employees. None of us
are more than six degrees of separation away from anyone else in the world – that‟s incredibly
powerful!

 Target Passive Jobseekers. Engaging with candidates via social media early will not only attract
candidates ready to make a move now, but also those who are still in a job and not planning to leave.

www.gulfjobsmarket.com | Phone: +44(0) 207 100 4537 | Email: kn@gulfjobsmarket.com | Co Reg. No 06729972
Copyright © 2008 - 2011 This material may not be reproduced without the written consent of Gulf Jobs Market

2

25 Tips on How to Use Social Media to Make a Successful Hire in the Gulf

#1 Concentrate your efforts on social media platforms which are widely used and have a large audience of
users. Currently there are 3 social platforms that are popular worldwide and have a big user base:

- A micro blogging platform with more than 200 million users. 100 million are „active‟ and half
of these log in every day, 40% of monthly active users do not tweet (Sept, 2011)

- A social networking site with more than 800 million active users, more than 50% of active
users log on in any given day, more than 2 billion posts are liked and commented on each day
(Sept, 2011)

- A professional networking site with 100 million+ registered users. 44% of visitors to LinkedIn
do so more than once a month. 70% of LinkedIn members are aged 25-54. (Jan, 2011)

#2 Use a Targeted Approach. Don‟t use a „one size fits all‟ approach to social media recruitment. You‟ll need
to identify segments you are interested in and then target each segment with relevant messages.

Set up segment groups in the form of Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and Twitter profiles to match job
families or skills/interest groups. A good example is Cisco Systems who have separate Facebook pages
for Engineering, Finance, IT, Public Sector, R&D etc:


3

#3 Allocate Sufficient Resources. Assign one member of the team to manage social media regularly. He or
she will create and republish relevant content, respond to tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn comments
effectively, moderate the accounts and continually engage the audience as well as monitor competitor
activity and create reports on the impact of social media.

#4 Facebook Fan Pages – Update, moderate, interact with, and respond to fans in a timely manner. Publish
content that is only available via Facebook as a way to continually engage and
retain these candidates. Share relevant links such as news items, industry
related articles, relevant videos on YouTube and invitations to events, careers
fairs in which your company participates, press releases if they are genuinely of interest to your audience.

#5 Big Changes to Facebook - Engage or Lose Visibility. On the 22
nd
September, 2011, Facebook
announced some huge changes (called „F8‟) which mean it is even more important to engage with your
audience on Facebook. They added a control in the top left corner of each post which allows users to
control what they see from you (they can even hide all updates from your page). More importantly,

Facebook uses its own “EdgeRank” algorithm to determine how „important‟ an update is. This is ranked by

 “Affinity” – how often have they liked / commented / interacted with you / your posts?
 “EdgeWeight” - the type of content shared (photos, videos and links have the best „EdgeWeight)‟.
 “Recency” - the older an update is, the less important it becomes. Seems obvious!

Fan page updates with higher “EdgeRank” appear on a fans newsfeed and the ones with lower
“EdgeRank” don‟t make it to their feed. So, share often and make sure the content engages your fans. If
they don‟t engage with your content then your updates will disappear from their feed even though they
remain your fans, which renders all your efforts pointless.

#6 Capture Candidate Details on Facebook – create a welcome holding page for new visitors
with a form to capture their details. For example, invite them to sign up to your career related
newsletter. Don‟t forget to add a link for registering their CV. (Requires some coding)

#7 Incentivise Staff to Refer Through Facebook. Ask your employees to recommend jobs to their social
circles by “Liking” or “Sharing” it from your website or any of your career related social accounts. Introduce


4

a financial compensation for a successful referral. Facebook provides an ideal opportunity to use
employees‟ own networks to attract new staff.

#8 Include a Branded Job Feed – add an extra tab to your Facebook page with the feed directly from your
careers site. As soon as a new role appears on the site it will be posted to the Facebook page directly.
Please, note that this requires some coding. See how Procter & Gamble do it:

#9 Create Adverts on Facebook – drive traffic to your Facebook page with targeted adverts (target by
location, age, skills, interests, languages, education, etc.) Before posting an ad you will be able to see the
size of your target audience. Don‟t include a link to your website on Facebook ads but instead drive traffic
to your Facebook page where you will be able to convert your fans to employees later. Remember that
people are not looking for work on Facebook so your advert should be compelling and show them the
benefits and include a “Call to Action”.


5

#10 Create Twitter Profile(s) – create and share relevant news and content,
follow relevant „tweeters‟ and re-tweet (share) interesting tweets. Respond to
tweets in a timely manner. Don‟t be afraid to share the same content more
than once but make sure you change the message so that it doesn‟t look like SPAM. Content that performs
the best on Twitter is video and images. This type of content is highly re-tweetable, so leave
enough space in your message for the re-tweet, don‟t use all 140 characters otherwise your
message will be truncated and could be less effective.

#11 Use Twitter Tools. There are numerous applications and tools which have been developed around Twitter
to help people target, monitor and automate the processes. Here are the ones we think are useful in terms
of recruitment:

“Hash tags” – this is a native Twitter tool to help you categorise your tweets by highlighting the most
important words you‟ve written (for example #UAE, #cloudcomputing). This will allow your tweets to be
easily found via Twitter‟s search engine. You can also use hash tags to target users who tweet on a
particular subject. Twitter etiquette is that if you follow someone, they‟re likely to follow you back. Just
remember to keep them engaged and the tweets relevant.

Hashtags.org - if you are going to use a hash tag, check which combinations of words are most popular
first by typing them into hashtags.org and use in your own tweets to generate more interaction.

#12 Effectively Use People’s Bio (short personal description) on twitter to target relevant candidates. You can
use a free service here www.followerwonk.com to search within twitter bios by keyword.

Find candidates by location and skills which you are looking for in your potential employees.
Follow relevant Twitter accounts and around 30% of them will follow you back.


6

#13 Tweetdeck – is a useful application recently acquired by Twitter. It lets you monitor several Twitter
accounts at the same time within one interface. You can personalise the interface to see columns which
are of interest to you. For example, you can see your feed for one account in one column, mentions for a
different account in another column and direct messages in a separate column. This allows you to easily
access and manage your accounts on twitter and be more efficient. Before posting your tweet you can
define which account you want it to be published from.

#14 LinkedIn – Create and manage your own Company LinkedIn group and sub-
groups. Create LinkedIn groups specific to your target candidates. For
example, if your company specialises in the IT Security field, then create and
manage a LinkedIn group with a specific interest in information security. Once you‟ve built up a decent
sized group, you‟ll be able to identify those members who contribute most as potential hires for your own
organisation. Encourage your group members to post discussions and comments, post career related
articles and other interesting content in your group. LinkedIn groups often become cluttered with SPAM or
promotional messages so you need to moderate the groups to keep them free of SPAM otherwise
your members will stop opening email messages from your group or participating in the discussions.

#15 Grow Your Network on LinkedIn. Build a strong network of good connections on LinkedIn for each
of your HR team members. The more connections you have on LinkedIn the more full names of contacts
you will be able to see and the more people you will be able to send messages to for free.

When you update your status on LinkedIn put a note “I am looking for a …..” and this message will be seen
not only on your timeline but also on timelines of everyone in your network. Use this sparingly as too many
updates could annoy people you are linked to, as they have an option of switching your notifications off.

#16 Join and Contribute to LinkedIn Groups to broadcast your job openings to relevant job seekers. Identify
and join relevant groups on LinkedIn to announce your job openings to other members of these groups.

Look in the top right and change the search from “People” to “Groups” and perform a keyword search to
find relevant groups.


7

Start contributing to the group by answering questions. You‟ll familiarise yourself with the tone of
conversations in the group and let group moderators understand that you are a useful addition to the
group. Not every group allows job postings. Check group rules for each group first to avoid eviction from a
group. You‟re less likely to be evicted from a group for posting jobs if you are a regular contributor to the
discussions.

#17 Link to Your Social Media Profiles from Your Website. Place a link to your careers related Facebook
page, Twitter account and LinkedIn group on your corporate website (and especially your career related
pages) to encourage visitors to follow you across these platforms.

Remember that not every visitor to your website will apply for a job during their visit. As you have already
spent effort and resources to gain these visitors, encourage them to follow you so you can use these
channels to attract and convert them into employees later.

#18 Share Content Often. Keep your audience engaged by sharing or publishing timely, relevant and
interesting content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

If you have a corporate blog, publish regular articles about the latest news and innovations in the industry
you recruit for, salary expectations and other interesting subjects to keep your audience engaged. For
example, you could create a series of blog posts about a typical working day of employees in each of your
departments. This will give your potential employees a better understanding of your corporate culture and
future responsibilities. You can also ask your audience engaging questions to encourage them to
participate in conversations. Candidates don‟t like empty accounts or pages with out-dated information. If
there are no current updates they‟ll assume the account is dead. If you fail to get engagement your
updates will lose their visibility and all your efforts in using social media will have been wasted.

#19 Interlink Social Media Profiles. Encourage people to follow you
across multiple social media platforms. For example, include a link to
your Facebook page on your Twitter profile.
When someone follows you on Twitter, set up an automatic message
to thank them, and ask them to also join your LinkedIn Group or Facebook page. There are a number of
(paid) tools that you can use to do this, including http://sendible.com and https://www.socialoomph.com.
Create an automated “Welcome” message in your LinkedIn group containing information about your
company and links to your other social media profiles. Your potential recruits should be able to choose
their favourite social media channel.

#20 Don’t Just Broadcast Job Openings. Candidates are less likely to respond to such promotional
messages because they could think they are coming from an automated system. And you know how they
hate bots! Instead of using social platforms just to advertise your vacancies, use them to carefully
demonstrate that your company is a great place to work in. Create a culture where your employees want to
share positive things about working for you on your behalf and not because you tell them to. It will be more
powerful and trusted if recommendations are coming from your employees rather than your company.


8

#21 Direct Candidates to the Career section of your website. Once the candidates are attracted it is equally
important to let them easily apply for jobs with your organisation.
Your career site should be the hub for all your social media recruitment channels. You should continue to
engage potential candidates once they land on your site from social media channels to convert them to
applicants and employees.

#22 Include “Share this”, “Add This”, “Tweet This” and “Like This” buttons on each of your job vacancies, blog
posts, videos and other content.

This will help candidates easily share interesting information
with their social networks directly from your career site.

#23 Don’t Make the Hiring Decision based solely on social profiles of candidates, as they are used primarily
for personal purposes and could contain information which you as a potential employer might not like.

If all recruitment decisions were made solely on the basis of social profiles of future employees more than
a half of hires would never happen.

This image is courtesy of Reppler


9

Recent research findings from Reppler suggest that 69% of hiring managers rejected a candidate based
on what they found on the social profiles. Judging the candidates “fit and personality” from their social
profile is not the best strategy. Telephone interviews and psychometric profiling tests are a more profound
strategy to understanding if the candidate will fit into your organisational culture.

#24 Avoid a Reputation Crisis. Give feedback to unsuccessful candidates. Each applicant should receive a
notification with the status of their applications to avoid disappointments.
Even if applicants were not successful you should notify them that they will not be invited into the next
round of recruitment process. Social media makes it very easy for dissatisfied individuals to share their
experience with their network. Something as innocent as not responding to candidates could lead to a
reputation crisis. The messages in social media spread very fast and could become viral. To avoid any
crisis situations and negative publicity it is better to take pre-emptive measures.

#25 Don’t Forget to Measure the Effectiveness of your social media
recruitment campaigns. Google Analytics is a great free tool which will
give you a deep understanding of your social media ROI. You can track
visitors to your career site as well as track „conversion goals‟ and
engagement.

Which social media platform performs the best?

Google Analytics enables you to set up „conversion goals‟ such as candidate applications from your
website and identify which social media sites they came from. You can set up goals for anything, but to
start with, just keep it simple and track applications, CV uploads and newsletter subscriptions.

Which content was the most engaging? Where did these engaged users originally come from?

In Google Analytics, you can set up „micro-conversions‟ on your website to see how often people interact
with your content such as downloading content, viewing videos, liking or sharing on Facebook and sharing
on LinkedIn and Twitter. You‟ll also be able to see which external sites and sources produced the most
shares/likes/applications so you can focus your resources and budgets in these areas.

Did you know you can track Facebook „Like‟ and Twitter „Share‟ buttons and then use Google Analytics to
identify the best performing channels and areas for improvement? If you would like to know more
information on this subject you can find good articles here (Please ask your development team if you aren‟t
sure how to implement this).

Don‟t forget to push through the „referring‟ site from Google Analytics into your candidate management
system in order to track the number of placements achieved using each social media channel.


10

Things to Remember Before Launching the Social Media

Recruitment Campaign

#1 Social Recruitment is NOT Free

It is a common misconception to believe that Social Recruitment is free. It could be tempting to turn to
social media as a way to reduce recruitment budgets, but this can easily become a false economy. You will
still need to dedicate time and resources to learning, planning, implementing and managing your social
recruitment channels. As your awareness grows, so will your commitment to social media. Without proper
management, using social media for recruitment can become a waste of time and resource. Timely and
knowledgeable responses should be part of the strategy for your campaigns to be effective.

#2 Creating Accounts on Social Media isn’t Enough

You need to find and attract your target audience and keep them engaged. Your channels need to be up-
to-date and worth following. Content is king. You will need to regularly share and create engaging and
interesting content in the form of news and career articles, videos, photos, industry related events, etc. You
have to post meaningful content that the community will read, interact with and share with their network.

#3 Not Everybody is on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

Social media is an emerging concept in the Middle East and, like the rest of the World, not everybody is
using it. If you have an urgent job vacancy or need to reach hard to find candidates it shouldn‟t be your first
choice.

#4 You will be Competing for People’s Attention

The sheer volume of interaction, paid and unpaid messages, paid adverts, banners, sponsored messages
makes social media a very cluttered and noisy place. You really need to stand out to attract their attention,
as people become less perceptive to notice updates. Also, bear in mind that the main purpose of visiting
social networking sites is not to find a job but to interact with social circles. So, to stand out you will need to
make your messages really compelling.

#5 Recruiters Dominate Some Social Media Sites

A disproportionate number of recruiters and HR people use certain social networking sites. For example,
1% of all visitors to LinkedIn are responsible for 25% of its visits. 66% of visitors to LinkedIn only visit the
site once a month, averaging just 7.3 minutes a month (March, 2011)

LinkedIn® is a registered trademark of LinkedIn Corporation. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. Twitter® is a registered trademark of
Twitter Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The information presented is subject to change without notice. Gulf Jobs
Market (a trading style of Dubai Jobs Market Ltd) assumes no responsibility for inaccuracies contained herein.


No Time for Social Media? Let us Handle Your Recruitment

Gulf Jobs Market has become the destination of choice for local and regional candidates
looking for their next role and for recruiters looking to hire talent in the following industry
sectors:

 Oil and Gas
 IT and Telecoms
 Accounting and Finance
 Banking and Financial Services

Gulf Jobs Market is well used by regional companies and recruiters and has created a
reputation for delivering highly relevant Executive, Senior and Mid-level candidates.

How We Can Help You

If you are looking for crucial members to your team but don‟t want to pay big recruitment
fees or invest time and resources into social media, Gulf Jobs Market is an easy to use
platform which allows you not only to attract highly relevant and qualified candidates but
also manage applications effectively using our state-of-the-art technology.

As part of the service we offer job adverts and CV Database access so you can target
active and passive candidates at the same time.

Three Reasons to use Gulf Jobs Market:

Decrease the time to hire – 72% of candidates are based in the GCC and can be
interviewed straight away
 Find relevant candidates – by being specialist in few sectors we deliver the best
talent in each of our industries because we focus our marketing around niche skills
 Simplify your recruitment – our easy to use system will help you efficiently find top
candidates in seconds

Key Demographics and Statistics

208,056 Monthly Unique Visitors
1.2 Million Monthly Page Views
326,074 Jobs by Email Subscriptions
203,984 CVs in the Database

What Our Customers Say:

"Easy to Use and Great Value for Money"

"We used Gulf Jobs Markets‟ job posting and CV search package to fill some key IT and
Contact us:
Accounting roles within Exceed Gulf.
Kashif Naqshbandi
The response was fantastic and we are planning to offer positions to at least 3
Phone: +44(0) 207 100 4537 candidates. The site is easy to use and great value for money"

Email: kn@gulfjobsmarket.com Recruitment Manager
Exceed IT, UAE
Twitter: @GulfJobsMarket Sept 2011

Facebook: GulfJobsMarket
Some of the Clients Using Gulf Jobs Market
LinkedIn: Gulf Jobs Market

25 hot social recruitment tips-gulf jobs market

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Featured

Featured (20)

25 hot social recruitment tips-gulf jobs market