Social networking sites started with students, and they continue to be very active on these sites.
Facebook was originally created for Harvard students to network and get to know each other, and it quickly branched out to other Ivy league schools. Competitors such as MySpace and bebo soon joined the scene, but they tend to attract a younger crowd. LinkedIn is used by experienced professionals, but its popularity is starting to pique the interest of soon-to-be graduates. While Facebook and MySpace usually contain information about the location of the next social gathering, don’t be too sceptical. Students use these sites heavily. You may even experiment with Twitter. Be creative - where there’s an audience, there’s a way to reach them.
Suggestions:
- Use Facebook to build a network of your upcoming batch of graduates so they have a chance to interact and meet each other before they start. Your current graduate group can monitor and help manage this group.
- Ask a star graduate to start using Twitter to “tweet” about interesting happenings at work and include a “follow me” link from your graduate recruitment site.
- Have recruiters and recent graduate hires post profiles to attract potential candidates, and link back to your careers site.
- Create a company profile on LinkedIn.
- Ask high profile employees to advertise jobs to their Facebook “friends”.
- Approach your social networking candidates with an honest, open dialogue. Most online communities will respect this and will be more willing to interact with you.
- Adopt the language and tone of the network (informal if necessary).
- Create a cool facebook application for students. For example, an accounting firm could create a trivia quiz about tax law.
- Take senstive information with a grain of salt
Find out more:
- Peopleshark wrote an excellent series on Twitter entitled: "Five days to Twitter literacy".
- Want to be join the web 2.0 revolution and get up to speed with social networking? Here are twelve easy steps.
- Build your Linkedin profile (video tutorial)
- Four required recruiting tools (Facebook, Linkedin, your blog and Twitter)
What is your experience of social networks and recruiting? Is it worth it, or is it just a waste of time? Please leave a comment and let us know what you think.
-Susanna
PS -- Our next post in this series is on "starting a recruitment blog".
** This post is an excerpt from Advorto's “15-minute guide to graduate recruiting”. You can download the full report for FREE.
-Susanna
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