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Five best new ideas to sell recruitment

Social media has changed the way people find jobs, and here's how to take advantage of it

Alisa Cromer
Posted

Fewer jobs and lower recruitment ad revenues are affecting sales at most local media companies. By early 2014, 14 of 25 sites surveyed by Borrell were down by an average of 38%.  But some media companies are out-performing due to the use of a variety of new tools that help merchants find employees.

Fueling changes in the recruitment sector is the rise of social media and the success of referrals in delivering the best candidates. According to Career XRoads, referrals were the largest source (24.5%) of external hires by 2012, and are 2 to 3x more likely to to be hired. Take advantage of change by using these five new strategies for media to selling recruitment ads and services.

1. Post ads to social media as a service via TweetMyJobs

The variety of sites for posting includes LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The Washington Post has set up it's own  master Twitter account for jobs, with as many as 40 channels such as #DCjadminobs in key categories and up to ten Tweets a day. But the Post has had the most success from its more recent partnership with TweetMyJobs, reviewed here, which provides best in class social media posting by restructuring recruitment ads into searchable Tweets. Lift rates for jobs are 30% using this partnership, which they upsell via telemarketers. Don't forget LinkIn sponsored posts and page management for larger employers - employees will often search LinkedIn pages as well as the company website.

2.  Create company recruitment videos

Companies who are focused on recruiting the top employees need help establishing their brand message via video. Get testimonials from employees and upload the video to the ciients website and to YouTube.  One television site has even launched it's own recruitment video channel in its navigation bar.

3. Help create an employee referral programs via Jobvite.

Social media is the new word of mouth, and employees referrals are often the most successful programs to reach  passive job seekers who will then have a stakeholder within the company. So how to do this? The easiest way to create referral programs for customers - or for your own media company - is via Jobvite.  This platform allows employees to send "jobvites" for open positions to their social networks in a click. Reports allow management to see how many jobvites were sent and fowarded on which channels, and to recognize and bonus employees who have helped recruit. Kinney suggests in particular asking top employees to mine their friends, since management is looking for "people like them."

4. Use Jobvite to create a jobs area on the merchant's Facebook account.  If you are managing Facebook pages for your clients, make sure that recruitment is part of the strategy. Jobvite can create the companies own jobs area on the page.

5. Upsell to recruitment ad networks RealMatch.com and Aftercollege.com

Some fantastic new job networks have taken off besides TweetMyJobs. Ones we like and have reviewed on this site include RealMatch, reviewed here,and Aftercollege, featured in a case study here.   Both have shown incremental to substantial revenue gains from outbound sales departments upselling onto these networks.  SEM with mobile landing pages is another possibility for hard to find posiitions is another possibility.


Note: Referalong, The Washington Post's own  experimental social jobs board, launched in September  2013,  and mentioned at the 2013 MegaConference, which pays cash to people for referring jobs is currently on hold.

Alisa Cromer

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

jobvite, aftercollege, tweetmyjobs, washington post, shannon kinney, realmatch, recruitment, jobs, social media