Talent Acquisition Strategies to Attract and Retain the Best People, Tim Hughes

A lot is written about using social media to sell, but not a lot is talked about using social media to attract and retain staff.

How to attract and retain staff by the strategic use of social media

I'm not talking about using LinkedIn job ads, or Twitter to put out job ads, I'm talking about using social media as a strategic platform that will actually remove the effort and cost of that.

We have a client in Canada that has stripped out of the cost of recruitment ads and recruitment consultants, purley by being social .... on social. I should point out that they have done this in a market where they couldn't get enough candidates. A brave move, but it paid off.

Research shows that the Covid 19 pandemic will have a massive impact on the movement on staff, Sixty-one percent of full-time employees want new jobs this year, and the Great Resignation shows that they’re taking action and abandoning companies in droves in search of better opportunities.

How do you get ahead of this?

How does this work?

First you need a strategy

Here at DLA Ignite, the first thing we will do is work with you to create a social media strategy. I'm sure that marketing has one already, this is a strategy at Board level, so the C-Suite understand the strategic need to be social. This isn't some drawn out process, we do this now in a few hours. We can map your "as is" process and "to be" position and get your Board understand what it means to have social media, not as a tactic, but as a strategy.

Now we need to empower your team with social

Next we empower your team with social. We teach and coach your employees how to "look good" on social media, so people are curious about the people and the business.

We then explain how to influence the people you want to influence. In the sales world this is about connecting with the people you want to sell to, in the Human Resources (HR) world, this is connecting with the people you want to hire. Or growing your influence in companies where there are people you want to hire.

Thirdly, we teach and coach your team how to create content. This isn't brochures, this is content that explains your great culture and your team(s) will do this in an authentic way.

Only 12% of employees trust what companies say about themselves, which is why you must activate your teams to talk on social.

What happens is that people see this content and they say "I want to work there".

This will mean that people who are not looking for work will see the content and will apply. As we all know it is trying to unseat the long stayer and the committed from the competition which is difficult, but social will do this.

NB: A side effect of this is that you will get leads, a client was telling us yesterday about how people in their marketing team had people "walking towards them and saying tell us about what your company does".

As a business your only unique are your people and their experiences.

How do you start?

Often we start with HR departments, as they are the team that are driven to do this, but the more people you have doing this in your business the better.

Start small and start with a pilot and build out from there.