What is Community Management
Before we start talking about how community management can be used as a tool for recruiting, let’s clear things up: community management is not the same as social media marketing. Community management is more about building and maintaining relationships with past and current customers. A “community” can exist on the internet, on different social media platforms and other forums, not just physically. This is different from social media marketing where the company is pushing the brand out and sharing their content in order to attract new business, without really engaging with the audience.
Community management is a way to engage with customers, whether that may be responding to unhappy customer Tweets, or measuring interest of a potential new product. Overall, it’s a place to communicate openly with your customer base. Community management can be a space where there’s a lot of brand loyalty too. Loyal customers can follow their favorite businesses and stay engaged long after purchasing the product. This leads us to recruiting using community management. What better employee than one who already loves your brand? The loyal followers, the community you’ve built, is a great pool of passionate candidates to approach when looking for that next new hire.
Ways Community Management can be used for Recruiting:
Cut Down on Time Spent Searching
When simply posting a job opening on a hiring website, it is guaranteed employers will receive applications from people who actually have no idea what the company does. To cut down on the amount of time spent weeding through those candidates, go to your community first. Social media can be a tool for community management. Here, there are people who are willingly following your brand because they like it, and want to see more from you so why not ask if they want to be a part of the company?
Customer Insight
Another pro to hiring a customer is the insight and feedback they could provide. As users of your product, they are able to express what works and doesn’t and feel more empowered to change what doesn’t work in order to improve the product. Since they were customers themselves, they can also have the potential to connect with customers better.
Find Candidates that Fit in the Company Culture
By using social media to create a community, employers are able to advertise their company to show the culture and atmosphere too. Posting on social media outlets about company events and just what the day to day looks like can be a great way to show off and attract like minded candidates. With SMEs, company culture is extremely important, and by looking for candidates in a pool where everyone has similar interests, it will make the integration process much smoother.
Happy Recruiting!
Now, get out there and dust off your Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin. With these powerful channels of communication, you’re most likely going to find some promising candidates. The bigger the community you’ve built, the bigger the pool of candidates too. So if your company doesn’t have a community yet, let’s start building!
