So you’ve heard of LinkedIn, Facebook and even Snapchat as a means of recruiting top professionals via social media, but what about Google+?
This may come as a surprise to you, but Google+ is somewhat of a secret (yet effective) recruiting anomaly.
It has more active users than LinkedIn, offers rich profile data and gives you access to highly valuable candidates niches.
And the best part? It’s completely free and easy to use.
Here’s everything you need to know.
Top reasons to use Google+ to recruit
Putting aside the points I’ve already highlighted, Google+ has a multitude of other rich benefits waiting for businesses like yours to tap into.
- Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ attracts more tech-savvy professionals and enables you to locate people with the right credentials, Including education, experience and qualifications.
- LinkedIn creates a very polished image of a candidate as they know they’re being judged by thousands (and even millions) of other users. Whereas Google+ will give you a true insight into the professional’s personality by showing you the types of posts and comments they publish on a daily basis.
- In theory, Facebook and Instagram are focused on images, Twitter is focused on expressing thoughts and Google+ is all about the user’s personality. That’s quite a powerful tool when making an important recruitment decision.
- Google+ has the added benefit of integrating all of the important aspects of its search engine into its offering, so you can tap into a whole wealth of information on a professional. You also have the added benefit of being able to contact other Google+ users and starting a video conference to conduct initial interviews.
How to set up a company Google+ profile
You should treat Google+ like a LinkedIn profile or company page by focusing on the keywords and information included.
This platform basis itself on information and content, so it’s important that you feature loads of interesting pieces, relevant links and keywords in your posts.
Don’t forget to also include links to all of your social media profiles to help you boost your presence across all avenues.
Another element to consider when setting up is to use a quality profile and cover pictures. Depending on what type of business you operate in, it’s up to you whether you choose a professional image or a more relaxed friendly one. As a rule of thumb, you can never go wrong with a clear, smiling, professional image of yourself.
When you write your tagline, introduction and bragging rights, use keywords associated with your industry which your target audience will be searching for.
If you were an electrician company, you should include keywords like ‘electrician jobs’, ‘electrician needed’ ‘best electrician company in Sutton Coldfield’ and so on.
Optimising your Google+ profile for success
Once you’ve got your new profile set up, you need to think about connecting with the right people. Just like LinkedIn, It’s important to build a circle of relevant applicants which you can tap into when the time comes to advertise a vacancy.
This doesn’t mean that you should restrict yourself to just job hunters. Connecting with different professionals by occupation, job position or industry can come in handy later down the line when they’re looking for a new challenge.
You can then send emails to all of the people added to a certain circle, which will give you a bigger audience to advertise to and enable you to develop personalised communications with individuals. The users will be notified if you add them into a circle, but won’t have any idea about which one you’ve added them to.
Remember, you don’t have to wait for people to accept your connection request, Google+ allows you to send messages regardless. So, it’s about having that proactive way of working to go out and make contact without having to wait around before adding them to your circles.
To find the right professionals, simply select the People and Pages tab under the search bar, insert relevant keywords and you’ll find relevant users.
The next step towards optimising your Google+ recruitment strategy is to utilise Google Hangout.
Unlike any other social media channel, you can seamlessly add people to a circle, entice them with a nice job offer via email and set-up a hangout session to discuss the opening in more detail. What’s more, you can even record the Hangout session and analyse the candidate in greater detail later on.
Finally, posting relevant content about your latest job openings or other advice articles will boost your presence on Google Search too.
Outranking your competitors will undoubtedly give you the edge and make it a lot easier to attract the very best.
Summary
Hopefully, this post has inspired you to start considering the benefits of Google+ as a recruitment tool. The key message here is to give it a try.
While I can’t guarantee that it’ll work for your particular business – research certainly suggests there’s a good chance it should. And seeing as it’s free, there’s certainly no harm in trialling it for a month or two. Who knows, you may just find yourself a top candidate without having to spend a penny.
Good luck!
For similar social recruitment tips, check out some of our previous posts: