If you have been monitoring your source of hire in the last couple of years, you have most likely noticed the trend. There is more and more hires  and placements made from the candidates sourced from the social media. If you didn’t notice this trend jet you might want to look into the way you are measuring your source of hire, or you are simply non-existent on the social media sites.

The social media enables you to attract candidates that would never ever apply for your job advertisements. Those are the Passive Candidates that you can reach only by sourcing. Social media help greatly in that task. It enables you to ‘speak’ to them directly. It gives you an unique chance to ‘sell’ them your vacancy.

The way you go about selling your vacancy can be direct and indirect. The less direct you are, the harder to reach candidates you attract. Here is how recruiters approach the social media:

Level 1. Publish our jobs in recruiters tweets, LinkedIn status updates and Facebook profile.
- This is the closest to the job advertising model so recruiters are comfortable with that straight away. The problem is that it gives nothing for candidate that he cannot see on the job boards. In fact most of the candidates will feel their ‘space’ in the social media is invaded. Hence the results are similar to the job board advertising, just a new set of candidates have been reached.

Level 2. Mixed amount of the original content and jobs data is published in recruiters tweets, LinkedIn status updates and Facebook profile.
- The original content created by the recruiter gives reason for following, connecting, and responding to the recruiters content. Engagement level grows from the candidates as the amount and the quality of the recruiters content. Recruiters who publish interesting industry data get ‘listened to’. Those that include their personal views get interacted with. Talking to the passive candidates, what else could you have asked for?

Level 3. Time to own the conversations – your own blog!
- Social media is great. The more relevant quality content you publish the more Passive Candidates you are attracting. More often than not the other recruiters will join in. And poach from your candidate pools. Remember on social media you don’t really own anything. When you build your talent community, by simple providing them with the content they are looking for, it is time to bring them all to the environment you control. On your own blog you control what content gets published and what not. You have the full control of everything! Publishing in the social media and bringing the conversation to your own controlled platform puts you in power. Here you can control that your talent community is not just ‘stolen’ by your competitors.

Level 4. Your talent community becomes Alive!
- At some stage your talent community will have its own voice. Your role is more on the moderation and support side. The content contribution of the community you have attracted in the social media and brought to your own platform outgrows your own and takes the life of its own. The recruiter needs to step back and provide a platform for the candidates to communicate freely. It can be online in the shape of the Forum, or a blog network or offline in Open Evenings, Breakfast Briefings or any offline networking event. A barbecue or flashmob would do as well!

The higher level (on the scale above) of the recruiters social media evolvement enables talking to a larger group of possible candidates. Not all of the people engaged will ever become a candidate. Some people are just happy where they are. The longer it takes you to get to them, the less other recruiters they are talking to. If you talent community grows your main job actually becomes keeping them aware that you actually exist and are actually hiring. Your activity actually gets far less demanding and gets back to where a recruiter starts – just publishing your jobs, in your own pool of candidates on a platform you control.

It does take a lot of effort, and it doesn’t happen overnight though…