In 2016, a troubling and unsettling statistic emerged from the trenches of the IT industry: A whopping 83{ed162fdde9fdc472551df9f31f04601345edf7e4eff6ea93114402690d8fa616} of mid-level or high-level employees would leave their current job if recruited by a company with a better reputation. As we enter into 2017, the question everyone is asking is this: How do I keep my best rising-star employees from jumping ship to another company? How do I attract good applicants to enrich my company, and use my brand to beat out the competition?

I am a firm believer that social media and online recruiting platforms are going to define the IT recruitment landscape in the coming years. Any worthy candidate in the industry is going to have a strong presence on social media, and these are the exact people you want to recruit. To attract the best talent, unless you are a huge multi-million dollar company already, you can’t just depend on your company’s branding and expect potential employees to come to you. You have to reach out and go where the tech-savvy talent is, and that’s online networking platforms.

Informal Branding on Social Media is more valuable than your company account

Every company needs to have a presence on social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the list goes on. However, you don’t just need to recruit through your company’s formal social media accounts. People on the job market trust their friends and company employees far more than they trust the abstract, large voice of the company itself. Amazingly, only about a third of recruiting companies ask their employees to post about the company on their personal social media accounts.

People on the outside trust word-of-mouth far more than official company memos. A great strategy is to get your employees to post their genuine thoughts and mention positions the company is looking to fill online to their friends and acquaintances. This way, your recruitment umbrella will stretch much further, and usually, encompass way more talented candidates than the random people who respond to official company “Now Hiring” memos. Your employees’ voices on social media is a key aspect of your company’s branding, and you need to use this megaphone to your best ability.

Recruitment on Formal Online Platforms

Personally, I think casual social media like Facebook and Twitter often attracts more talent than formal job search platforms, because you attract people who are connected to those whom you trust, and the platforms aren’t saturated with other job seekers and recruiters. When you enter a platform specifically for recruitment, you risk being overwhelmed by the competition, and you are also only seeing one specific side of a potential recruit’s personality: the side they present for recruitment. If you can see someone’s content on Facebook or Twitter, you see more of their true personality, and you can better analyze what they might bring to the company as well as what weaknesses they have.

Despite this, networks like Meetup, LinkedIn Talent, iCIMs, and Jobvite can be useful for recruiting. Mainly, you should be using them as a supplement to your recruitment tactics, not the biggest aspect.

Sources:

https://blog.beamery.com/recruiting-statistics-2016/

http://www.cio.com/article/2915834/careers-staffing/13-top-recruiting-software-platforms.html#slide6