Finding the right person to take over a role at your company is challenging. It often costs thousands of dollars just to fill one low- to mid-level position, and even more for management positions. That's why assuring that each hire you make is successful is of utmost importance in today's business world. Studies have found that new hires are one of the biggest factor in creating animosity and discord in the office. On top of that, in a 2014 survey done by BambooHR, it was discovered that one-third of the 1,000 respondents said they had quit a job within the first six months of starting it. Plus, more than 16 percent left between the first week and the third month of their new job. Along with being extremely costly monetary wise, this also creates discontent and confusion among the remaining members of your team. While the majority of businesses find success with new hires, if you're interested in some best practice techniques or are part of that minority that has struggled with onboarding new staff, try these 3 tips below.

1. Smooth Introduction

Making sure that your new hire has a smooth first week or two is excruciatingly important. Nothing is worse for a new hire to experience at your company than an aimless, unproductive and unstructured intro period. If nothing else, assure that they're at least busy with work, don't let them sit and stew about their decision! A good practice is to send out all of intro/contract/HR paperwork prior to the employee arriving on the first day. This simply allows both parties to be completely ready for the other as soon as the first day starts. Having experienced listless companies who ignored any onboarding procedure, there's nothing more frustrating. On top of dealing with paperwork prior to arrival, make sure you get your new hire to send through a quick bio and picture, so that you can familiarize them with your team. This allows both your hire and your team to be included in the process, as well as gives both familiarity right off the bat. Here a few other more obvious, but sometimes forgotten about details that need to be taken care of:

• Setup you new employees workstation before they arrive

• Establish short and long-term goals with the hire

• Make sure they have everything they need to be productive on the first day

• Have a meeting at the end of the first day to clarify any issues or just ask them how their day went

• Send them home with an organization-specific care package

2. Allow for Team Input

Allowing current members of your team into the discussions about the hiring process is a great way to get them involved. While serving many purposes, overall this practice is just to make sure that everyone on your team feels included. Also, you never know when a member of your team might have a connection to someone who may fit perfect with the organization. By including your team in the onboarding process, this gives the relationship with the new hire more potential to be a success. It does this by cutting away any resentment your staff may have about the decision. In theory it should allow your team to get any questions or concerns on the table prior to the new member coming onboard.

3. Setup Check-Up Meetings

Understanding your employees perspective is incredibly important. It's not good enough to simply make decisions for the company on your best judgement without consulting staff. The same concept applies to the onboarding process. Make sure that you're having check-in meetings with your new hire, as well as with your team. Hearing what they have to say will give you the opportunity to adjust on the fly and eliminate festering issues. A more formal way of doing this is through a formal questionnaire at the end of the first week. Include any questions about their thoughts on your orientation process and assimilation with the team and office. Not only will this allow you to identify any pain points that might reduce your new hire’s job satisfaction, but it also helps inform you about onboarding best practices for future hires. A significant amount of job turnover happens in the first couple of months, so assure that you're treating your new hire to a seamless onboarding process. – Don’t drop the ball after you make the hire. The onboarding process is just as critical as the recruitment process when it comes to optimizing hiring results. Smart hiring practices extend into your new hires’ first few months of employment, and recognizing that can save your company a lot of time and money.

Brands have been using user generated content in their marketing campaigns for a long time. By getting users and customers involved in campaigns and the content that is being shared, brands are able to get their customers more engaged with their brands, establishing a stronger connection with these customers. Companies can also apply this to their workforce and employees. By sharing content that employees make themselves, companies can actively encourage workers to share their own experiences. By doing this, employees can contribute to recruiting efforts and help grow a bigger and better team of employees while making their voices heard. So, what kinds of content can you get your employees to post?

Employer Hashtags

By encouraging employees to use an employer hashtag, you can easily track and view what your team is sharing on social media. You can simply click on the hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook or track it using a social media dashboard, and this will populate any posts using it. Using an employer hashtag can also be low risk - there is no need to hand over credentials for any of your company’s social media accounts. Instead, you are able to choose which posts you would like the re-post or share on your own profiles. This can also be a great way to track how your employees are feeling about work. If they are sharing fun content and positive experiences, you can be sure that they are enjoying working with you. If, on the other hand, they’re sharing negative experiences, you can catch issues as they happen and resolve them.

Instagram Takeovers

With over 500 million monthly active users, this is a great platform to reach out to tons of potential new employees! Using Instagram, you can showcase what life is like at your company. Instagram has introduced more ways to share content, including a 60 second video limit and a new feature called Stories, which lets you upload content for 24 hours. With a 60 second video, you can share things like employee profiles or quick clips of quirky office traditions. The new Stories features gives you the freedom to upload more casual content, because after 24 hours, this disappears! When you create Stories on Instagram, you can also create quick doodles on images and videos that you share. This means that you can include more fun and casual clips without having to stress too much about whether they fit into.

Employee Blog Posts

While social media posts are quick, fun, and easy to consume, blog posts can be a great way to get a deeper look into the days of your employees. By asking your team to write about their own experiences, you can let them feel like they are making a big contribution. By reading through different perspectives, prospective applicants can get a better sense of the work environment as a whole. Blog posts can also be used to help walk job seekers through what your recruitment process looks like. When these job seekers have this knowledge and have a better idea of what they can expect when applying for a position at your company, this can encourage them to apply! Using employee-generated content saves you time creating content yourself, engages your employees, and helps to reassure potential applicants that what they’re seeing and hearing is genuine. With social media becoming a bigger and bigger part of our world, incorporating marketing practices into your social recruiting can help you connect with potential new employees.

Be sure to add regularity to your strategy to reel in the recruits.

For today’s job recruiters, social media is an indispensable resource. Platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook allow you to source top talent, which contributes to the success of your company in a big way. But when it comes to social media recruiting, simply showing up is not enough. Above all else, your recruiting strategy on any web platform needs to be consistent. Specifically, you need consistency in the aesthetic, narrative, schedule, and engagement of your posts. Otherwise, you risk damaging your recruiting outcomes in a few ways:

It deters prospective applicants

One of the first things that your recruits will do before submitting their applications is evaluate your web presence. This means that blogs, social media, and websites will be scrutinized. However, social media can influence an applicant more than other channels. It does this by demonstrating your general likability, engagement in the relevant discourse, and can demonstrate a high-functioning internal structure through marketing efforts. The latter is where consistency plays an especially major role. If your company appears to lack support in the marketing and branding areas, an applicant may abandon any thought of applying to work with you because of the perceived hardship—unless, of course, they would be hired to foster these missing elements.

It fails to attract highly talented applicants

Failure to incorporate consistency in your social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn, may translate into failure to get your vacancies noticed by desirable applicants. One such area of consistency is in profile completeness (for your recruiter and company profiles alike). It’s essential to thoroughly complete each social media profile you make. On LinkedIn, this includes things like peppering your page with relevant and concise keywording, which can then be used to promote certain jobs to certain demographics. For more tips on how to make your profile more complete, check out these recommendations from LinkedIn.

It discourages relationship building

While brand and aesthetics might be the more obvious facets of consistency, communication is also a big one. Consistent communication is the primary way in which you will build relationships with prospective applicants. Left unchecked, your connections will write you off or may even become suspicious of rare and impersonal messages sent their way. Before that happens, make a concerted effort to cultivate relationships on social media through direct messaging, interacting with posts, and sharing insights and information. Just be sure not to overdo it! Not sure what to say? Monster has some insights that can help you break the ice.

It confuses your audience

Across all marketing channels, your ‘look and feel’ needs to be consistent with your logo displayed in an obvious place. Forgoing this basic marketing tactic can lead to utter confusion among prospective applicants as well as the general public. They aren’t likely to spend much time at any given page in general, but if you make them spend that time trying to discern whether they’re at the right page or not, you’ll likely forgo repeat visits or application follow-through.

If you do find yourself with an inconsistent presence across social media, don’t get too discouraged. It can be fixed! However, it’s important to address this issue before you put much of your resources into recruiting. And by that, we don’t mean limiting yourself to one channel (“Consistency is guaranteed if there’s only one, right?” Wrong!). While you may have little control over these marketing adjustments yourself, you can bring the issue to the table and work with your social media and marketing team to design an enticing web presence to attract new talent. 

James Pointon is a content marketing specialist with a passion for social media. Currently, James is supporting OpenAgent, where he uses his knowledge for online promotion. You can connect with James on LinkedIn.

Your employer brand plays a huge role in helping job seekers decide whether or not to apply for a position. After all, 75% of job seekers consider employer brands before even applying for open jobs. With 79% of job seekers likely to use social media during their job search, it's important to think about where social media and your employer brand meet. Living and working in an increasingly digital world, there are more and more opportunities to connect with job seekers and show them why it's so great to work with your company. An important thing to consider is the audience you're trying to reach - this will help you identify which social media channels you should focus more of your effort on. We've done posts on using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to build up your employer brand. To wrap up our series, we'll be having a closer look at two platforms that could help you connect with niche candidates: Pinterest and Snapchat. Pinterest's audience is predominantly made up of women, and Snapchat's users skew younger - if you're looking to target or connect with either of these groups, getting on these social media networks could give you a big boost in exposure and relatability.

Pinterest

Pinterest has over 110 million active users and is the social media network of choice for women aged 18 to 34. With an engaged user base that spends an average of 98 minutes on Pinterest and views 2.5 billion pages each month, there's (growing!) opportunity for you to connect with potential employees. Thanks to how easily users can share photos and visuals on Pinterest, it's a great way to show off your company and the people who work there. By creating Pinterest boards with different themes, you can share more targeted content. For example, you can create a board that lets visitors "Meet the Team" by pinning photos of your employees with quick bios. You could also create a board showing off your cool office space, what a day in the life of different roles is like (how about one for your IT team and another for Marketing?), or even a board about all of the fun perks your company offers. Did you know that 80% of the activity on Pinterest is made up of users re-pinning existing content? As people more often re-pin content rather than create it, other users help you do the sharing. You can take advantage of this by getting your employees to jump start the sharing by liking and re-pinning your posts. This should be particularly easy if you're showing off the employees themselves or the fun things they get to do at work!

Snapchat

Valued at approximately $18 billion, Snapchat has quickly become a big player in the social media landscape. With over 150 million people using the mobile app on an average day, Snapchat isn't just for teens anymore (though the majority of its users are under 24). Snapchat's introduction of Live Stories (which let people see events unfold around the world from different perspectives) and Discover content (which is produced by a number of media companies partnered with Snapchat, including Buzzfeed, The Food Network, and CNN). With Snapchat, you have the opportunity to show off your company in an informal way - Snapchats are typically quick, casual photos or videos with captions, doodles, and stickers added. Snapchats photos and videos are typically 10 seconds or less, however you can use these to create a Story, which is viewable for up to 24 hours. Using your story allows your friends to engage with you at their leisure. Use your Story to Recently, Snapchat introduced the ability for organizations to create custom Snapchat geofilters (filters that appear based on the user's location). One way to encourage your employees to act as advocates for your employer brand is to build Snapchat geofilters for your office, allowing them to show off a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to work for your company. Users are more engaged on Snapchat that other platforms, so when your employees send Snapchats about your company, their friends are likely to see it. Before you get started with Snapchat, it's important to note that it can be a lot harder to track metrics or see the immediate impact of what you're doing. Unlike other platforms, everything is self-contained in Snapchat - you aren't able to share links that send the audience directly to your Careers page. This limited functionality also means that you may get less information to work with. While you can see the number of friends (potential viewers) you have, exactly who has viewed your Snapchat Story, and the number of people who have taken a screenshot of one of your Snapchats (meaning that they're saving it for later), Snapchat doesn't offer comprehensive reports like Facebook's page Insights and Twitter Analytics.

Catch up on our posts

This is the third post in a series looking at how your company can use social media for employer branding. Check out our posts looking at Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as Twitter and Instagram.

Want to get started? Click here to get working on your employer brand with Jobcast today!

Did you know that 79% of job seekers use social media in their job search?

The list of social media networks just seems to keep growing, and with a growing emphasis being placed on creating a strong employer brand, it might be tempting to jump on all of them. Before you do this, it’s important to consider that each of these networks will reach a different type of person and will require different types of content. To find success, you’ll need to identify which social media platform aligns with your brand and culture and also lets you connect with your target candidates?

It can be hard to decide which platforms your employer brand should have a presence on, and maybe even harder to figure out what kind of content you should be sharing on each of these social media networks.

In order to help give you a clearer idea of the social media landscape, we’re dishing out some posts and having a look at some of the biggest social media networks, including ways you can build them into your social recruiting strategy and elevate your employer brand.

In our first post, we took a closer look at Facebook and LinkedIn. This post will focus on the two of the easiest platforms to connect with candidates on: Twitter and Instagram. 

Twitter

Twitter users send out an average of 500 millions tweets each day. Due to Twitter’s format of serving out bite-sized pieces of information (140 characters per Tweet), it’s a great channel to constantly be sharing and taking part in conversations, both with your customers and job seekers.

Start talking to others and growing your employer brand by engaging with accounts that mention you, joining regularly-occurring Twitter chats, and even hosting Twitter Q&A sessions! As Twitter runs in realtime, it may seem fast-paced at first, but this quality gives you the flexibility to share content again and again. Since information can flow so quickly on Twitter, be sure to take advantage of its media options – use images that will catch people’s eyes (Tweets with photos can get up to 313% more engagement!) and test out videos.

One of Twitter’s biggest impacts on social media was bringing the #hashtag mainstream. Develop a hashtag for your employer brand (check out Hootsuite’s #HootsuiteLife and Starbucks’ #ToBeAPartner) to use when you share out employer branding content, and encourage your employees to use it as well! This allows job seekers to search through the hashtag to see real examples of how your employees are talking about your company.

Instagram

Instagram recently hit a milestone, reaching 500 million monthly active users. These users are very active, posting an average of 70 million photos every day. If you are looking to hire young millennial talent or are thinking about long-term hiring, Instagram is where you should be. It’s considered the most important social network among young people (the same young people who will be entering the workforce soon).

Did you know that 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual? It’s really true, a picture is worth a thousand words. Using Instagram, you don’t have to stick to words – you can easily show off what a day behind the scenes of your company is like. Take it one step further and mix in a few videos! Instagram recently extended their maximum video length to 60 seconds, which you can use to do quick office tours or lightning profiles of employees.

Engage your current employees by taking the same branded hashtag that you’ve introduced on Twitter and bringing it to Instagram. Get your employees to share their unique, real, and candid perspectives, and engage them when they do! When you like, comment, and even repost photos using the hashtag, this will encourage them to share more and more (which means all of their followers will keep seeing how great it is to work for you!).

Want to hear more?

Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll have a closer look at Pinterest and Snapchat. For now, click here to get working on your employer brand with Jobcast today!

Did you know that 76% of companies have indicated that social media is their go-to method for sharing and growing their employer brand?

With so many different social media networks and so many different audiences to reach, it can be a little overwhelming figuring out where to start building your employer brand. In order to prevent yourself from become discouraged by all of the different choices in front of you, it’s important to identify one or two platforms to start off with. By choosing key channels to focus on, you will be able to use your time and resources more effectively. Once you feel that you have a grasp of a platform, you can begin to introduce a new network into your employer branding strategy.

Each network offers you different ways to share content and engage with online communities, so how do you figure out which social media network you should start off with?

To help you out, we’ll be posting an overview on some of the most prominent social media networks right now and share some examples of how you can use them to build up your employer brand. The first post will focus on the two of the most popular platforms: Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Facebook

Facebook is likely the first thing that pops into your head when you think of social media. With over 1.65 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great channel to connect with tons of people.

With a company page on Facebook, you have the ability to share status updates, photos, and videos that highlight what working at your company is like and what your culture is like. Beyond the basic features, you also have the ability to add Facebook Apps (like Jobcast) to your page. With these applications, you have much more flexibility – you can host contests, create photo walls, or even host your own Careers site right on your Facebook page!

You can also take advantage of individual networks and groups on Facebook to help build your brand. You likely have a Facebook profile, as do your recruitment team and employees – use these networks to spread the word about your company to your Facebook friends! By leveraging these networks, you can greatly expand your reach and make passive candidates more aware of who you are, what you do, and what types of opportunities you’re offering.

• Jobcast tip

  : Images go a long way toward engaging people on social media – make the most out of your Branding options with Jobcast. Through your Jobcast Dashboard, you can add banner images to the top, side, and bottom of your Careers Page on Facebook. You can even go one step further and add a video showing off your company to the sidebar! Click here to watch our video tutorial on Branding.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has solidified its status as the social network for business and professionals, with over 433 million people signed up on the platform. LinkedIn is widely used and one survey showed that it was also the most effective social media network to find new employees.

On LinkedIn, people can follow your Company page, which means that status updates and announcements will appear in their LinkedIn feeds. You can also position your company as a leader in your field by having your employees publish insights and opinions on news and developments in your industry. Just like you can on Facebook, you can also create and join Groups on LinkedIn.

Engage your current employees to boost your employer brand on LinkedIn – they are 70% more likely to engage with the updates on your company page, which means that their own connections are more likely to see these updates too! These employees’ profiles can also act as a source of information for job seekers doing research on your organization and the different opportunities you offer. You can also invite employees to join LinkedIn Groups, where they can start discussions about working at your company and other topics that interest them.

• Jobcast tip: you can add your personal LinkedIn profile to Jobcast and share out new job openings automatically just like you can with your company page. Check out this video tutorial to get set up Autosharing!

Want to hear more?

Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll have a closer look at Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. For now, click here to connect your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to Jobcast today!

Your Facebook Page is your secret weapon. You can quickly communicate your brand on a channel that most of your target audience is already on. You can recruit passive candidates and convert your employees into brand ambassadors! It’s also a great marketing platform. For smaller businesses with a less-developed website, Facebook has most of the required functionality you need!

1. Make sure your images stand out!

Are your images bold, engaging, and effective? If not, they risk being scrolled past and buried in the graveyard of uninteresting status updates. It only takes a second to catch someone’s eye, but less than that to scroll right on by. Check out this quick guide on what makes images pop! Need more reasons? Here’s a list that explains how visuals improve your social media results.

2. Pin a Facebook Post!

A pinned post to your Facebook page is the first piece of content that most visitors will see. Yet, many people do not even know this functionality exists! There are many different uses for a pinned post – read the article.

3. Update your Cover Image!

Like the pinned Facebook Post, make sure you’re using your Cover Image to the fullest potential! Many pages tend to create a single cover image and never change it: this is wasted potential! This article shares 12 creative ways you can use your cover image. Inspire a purchase with delicious visuals! Promote a specific product. Feature some fans, or celebrate moments – the possibilities are endless.

4. Add a Call To Action button!

Most third party applications don’t work on Facebook Mobile. There’s also a set number of tabs you can have visible on your home page that don’t get buried under the More tab. The Call to Action is a quick fix that lets you present the very best of your digital assets up front and centre, on both desktop and mobile devices. Here’s how!

5. Accumulate Reviews!

Honest reviews left by third parties (your clients!) on a neutral website where you cannot edit your own reviews, are the most valuable digital artifact your business can have. Reviews increase conversions, improve SEO rankings, and provide a significant boost to your brand reputation. Reading reviews is the preferred method of researching a business. Ask your customers to leave you one! Looking for more tips and tricks? Check out these helpful links:

• Social Media Image Size Guide, June 2016 edition

• 53 Graphic Design Terms Explained For Marketers

Do the images that you share on social media stand out?

Are they unique, bold… effective?

Creating and sharing clever image-based content can engage your audience on a personal level because people have a stronger emotional response when they are shown instead of told. 

The more job seekers relate to you and your company, the more likely they are to want to work for your company. In this article you’ll learn 4 ways to connect with job seekers using social media images.

#1: Share Your Knowledge With Infographics

The human brain processes visual content 60,000 times more quickly than text, which is probably why we love infographics so much. Infographics allow you to communicate large chunks of information in a captivating and social media friendly way.

For example, this infographic on the nitty gritty of resume formatting by Resume Templates 101 works as both an excellent tool for job seekers and a way for the company to get their name and brand out there.

To make a compelling infographic for social recruiting, you’ll want to pick a topic that you know well and will be of interest to your desired candidates, use some great stats and charts, and conclude with call to action encouraging them to check out your open jobs.

#2: Use Behind-the-Scenes Shots to Show Company Culture

Job seekers see your logo on their social media feed and maybe they’ve even had a look at your Career Site, but there’s so much they still don’t know about your company culture.

How exactly do you treat your team? What office antics go on behind the scenes? Who are their potential new colleagues and what are they like?!

Give job seekers a glimpse of the people and culture that make your company a great place to work with candid images and behind-the-scenes pictures from your company.

This helps candidates to better visualize your talent brand, so they can better connect with your company culture on a personal level.

#3: Action Shots

Invite Jean-Claude Van Damme to your next staff party and take a ton of photos then post them on Instagram!

Just kidding… Unless this is something that you can actually pull of and then by all means go for it!

But in all seriousness, action shots spark the imagination and encourage engagement in a major way.

Use this to your advantage.

When deciding what photos to use, whether stock imagery or photos of your employees, try to select images that suggest movement to spark job seekers imagination.

#4: Just Add Quotes

Quotes layered over photos are an engagement double threat.

You capture your audience’s attention with the image and then get them to slow down a bit and reflect with the quote so that they spend more time with your content.

First choose a quote that will resonate with your desired candidates and represent your company’s values. Then carefully style your post so that both the image and quotation font are cohesive with each other and your brand.

With focus and intention, your images can elevate your social recruiting content to a whole new level! To take it even further, try out Jobcast’s latest feature, Job Cards.

Job Cards allow you to attach images and video to the job posts you share on social networks. Learn more about Job Cards here.

Surefire tips for upgrading your recruitment style.

With social media use in the professional world having become standard, many companies are using it as a valuable recruiting tool. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer employers a pool of prospective employees that they may fail to reach through traditional, often passive, methods.

One survey from 2014 suggests that a whopping 93% of employers are or are planning to recruit employees via social media platforms. What does this figure mean for us? It means that there is a treasure trove of anecdotal data with regard to what social media recruiting strategies work, which brands have enjoyed the most recruiting success, and what methods garner the most user engagement. Following the examples set by major corporations like Home Depot, Nestlé, and Cadbury, here are a few major ways to help your recruiting campaign take off.

1. Promote Sharing

A cornerstone of the social media experience, sharing can help your recruiting efforts travel far and wide. Encourage your followers to retweet your posts or tag friends who they think would be interested. When you get some sharing activity going on, take a page from Nestlé’s book and thank your grassroots marketers!

2. Take the Campaign Cross-Platform

For professional recruiting purposes, LinkedIn tends to be the go-to platform. LinkedIn users are there to network, job seek, showcase their skills, and promote their companies. So it’s an obvious choice. But will it yield the most success? Not necessarily. Stand alone, LinkedIn is more effective for recruiting than Facebook or Twitter, but if you want to maximize your recruiting success, use at least all three platforms. You’ll have a hard time finding a company that only uses one platform these days, and for a good reason.

3.Interact with Followers

Social media pages are a flurry of activity. Posts and comments filter through at all hours of the day. Use this activity as an opportunity to reach out to users directly and publicly. Home Depot sets the stage on this front, with its rapid-fire responses to user comments and questions. Your followers will appreciate you going the extra mile by showing you care.

You can even take it a step further by signing your posts. While many companies’ social media pages aren’t handled by their CEOs, it’s a pleasant surprise to drop in every once in a while. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, while not necessarily used to recruit employees, does a great job of adding her personal touch to platforms no one expects her to engage with directly. A simple “-H” at the end of her posts and tweets makes them stand out from tweeting-as-usual.

Marriott put its own spin on personalized interactions will their “Career Chats.” Career Chats are essentially Q&A forums in which the public can ask questions about Marriott employment, and receive real-time answers from Marriott employees who use their real names.

4.Peacock, Just A Little

Show off your company’s unique attributes through consistent social media posts. Just try not to sound like you’re bragging too much! Share what your company can offer its employees that many others don’t. Do you have extended parental leave? Do you offer student loan repayment? Or perhaps your company offers less tangible benefits, like a comfortable office culture, diverse employee base, or a superior work-life balance. Dell’s social media pages boast the community culture it fosters, highlighting the genuine appreciation the company has for its employees. To further the impact of your posts, add another layer of human element a la fast-food giant Taco Bell. Taco Bell succeeds in highlighting company culture through sharing photos of their employees—at all levels—enjoying themselves at work. Whatever it is that sets you apart, your followers want to hear about it.

5.It Doesn’t Have to Be All Recruiting, All the Time

As you might expect, success in social media recruiting is positively correlated with the size of your audience. And what is one of the best ways to build your audience? Broaden your content. Companies that are in the habit of posting text-only, recruitment-oriented posts are more likely to experience follower attrition. Other companies, like Cadbury, have adopted a more holistic approach to publishing content. For example, Cadbury’s ongoing campaign (#FreeTheJoy) features photos and videos from users sharing their joys. While not strictly chocolate-related, such media is successful in bolstering follower counts. Cadbury melds this hashtag-happy campaign with regular relevant product posts, such as recipes that use Cadbury chocolate. Their multilayer approach has paid off in multiple areas from marketing to community engagement, and as a result, also in recruiting.

Big companies can offer a vast amount of insight into structuring effective social media recruiting campaigns. While you can gain inspiration from them, one of the most important elements to remember is creativity and originality. Those are the aspects that your prospects will remember, and what will help your branding stand out from other campaigns.

David Grover is a Communications Manager at Timeo, a useful tool for businesses in the UK. He’s also a freelance career coach, who’s always eager to share his experience. In his free time he enjoys travelling.

In today’s world, consumers are bombarded with marketing messages on a daily basis. From old-fashioned print advertising, to television, radio, mobile, and online advertising, the average person has become accustomed to the bite-sized sales pitches companies are putting out there, and most of them have learnt to tune them out. While you still need to market in the traditional ways for those consumers who are actively seeking your product or services, building a brand story and focusing on word-of-mouth advertising will help your business stand out from the pack.

In order to achieve  word-of-mouth advertising, businesses need to earn it by living up to your brand’s promise and always giving your customers excellent service. A happy customer who eagerly tells others about your company and services is known as a brand ambassador. There is another source of possible brand ambassadors that many businesses overlook however – employees.

Happy and engaged employees are an excellent source of brand ambassadors, especially on social media. If you’re ready to realize the potential of your employees as brand ambassadors, you can get started with a few easy tips.

Make it easy

Do you restrict your employees from engaging in social media at work? That’s going to make it hard for them to be brand ambassadors online. Smart phones mean employees have access to their social media accounts whenever they have their phone, so restricting it on company computers isn’t necessarily stopping them from checking in on Facebook. Obviously you need to have some procedures in place so that your star employees aren’t playing games online all day, but consider allowing your employees a little freedom in this area. You might just be surprised at how little it affects productivity (if anything, it might actually improve it!)

If you’re serious about utilizing the power of social media in your marketing, also consider using hashtags to make it easier for employees to endorse your company and culture online.

Choose the right people

Some of your employees are blogging, tweeting, and active on Instagram already. Others might prefer to avoid the social media platforms altogether. If you’re building a team of social media ambassadors, you want those people who are already comfortable in that realm, and already have a network in place.

Talk about your plans at a staff meeting and see who might be interested.

Give them the knowledge (and the power)

Once you’ve chosen your team of ambassadors, invest in training on how to best handle any negative comments that might occur on social media. Have guidelines and procedures in place so everyone is on the same page. Let them conduct their own research on other companies who are succeeding in the social media space. And finally, give them the autonomy they need to be successful.

Your customers are social-media savvy enough to detect canned responses and insincerity, and they won’t respond well to a team of ambassadors who can only work within the confines of your marketing templates. Let your team be authentic. Let their personalities shine. Having a few rules in place is a must, particularly with regards to profanity, political statements, and religion. But beyond those basic guidelines, your ambassadors need the freedom to be themselves in order to be successful.

Notice and reward success

Once your team becomes more active on social media, you need to measure results. If something isn’t working, you need to know about it so your entire team can brainstorm new strategies. And if something is working and working well, you need to highlight it! Sing the praises of that ambassador. Offer some kind of reward system, and duplicate that successful tactic where appropriate.

Zoe Anderson is a writer with an interest in business issues and trends. Zoe is also an employee of StudySelect.