Part 3 of your recruitment software health-check series is here –and we’re getting social.

After reviewing how to check if your ATS is secure and how to manage passive talent, we’re now looking at whether your Applicant Tracking System is ready for social recruiting.

1. Can your ATS offer social job sharing?

The joy of social recruiting is the potential for increased visibility of your vacancies. Share a job on your organisation’s professional social networks and 100 people might see it. If just one of those people then shares your update on their network, a further 100 people could see the vacancy.

Suddenly, you could be reaching thousands, possibly more, of job-seekers and passive candidates organically.

If your Applicant Tracking System can offer you social job sharing, the process of posting your jobs across your social networks can be significantly streamlined. You should have the option to view all your linked networks, and to simply tick the boxes of those to which you want a particular job shared.

What’s more, you can also connect your personal social platforms, so members of your team can quickly and easily tick those boxes to share vacancies on their own LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook profiles.

The result? A cost and time-effective way of increasing the organic reach of your job opportunities to your network of potential candidates and beyond.

Checklist:

• Yes, my Applicant Tracking System offers me the ability to share my vacancies to my organisation’s professional network
• Yes, my ATS also offers me the option to share vacancies to my personal network
• Yes, my ATS lets me do this quickly and easily

2. Can you offer your candidates the option to apply via LinkedIn?

No matter how slick you make your application process, candidates will usually still need to fill out a form or two.

But what if your candidates could apply for a job role using their LinkedIn profile? What if, instead of having to fill in their past experience and skills, those fields could be automatically populated by their LinkedIn profile content?

If your ATS really is ready for social recruiting, it should offer an ‘Apply with LinkedIn’ feature.

In a nutshell, this tool reads a candidate’s LinkedIn profile (they must be logged in for this to work) and formulates a CV based on their LinkedIn career history.  This process saves the applicant time and, particularly for mobile applicants, it’s an incredibly quick and easy way to apply for a role.

Let’s imagine the alternative of trying to fill out an application form on a phone for a moment: predictive text typos, tiny buttons, clumsy fingers… it’s the stuff of online recruitment nightmares.

Checklist:

• Yes, my Applicant Tracking System allows candidates to apply with their LinkedIn profiles with one touch of a button
• Yes, my ATS automatically populates an application form with candidates’ LinkedIn profile information
• Yes, I offer jobseekers a quick and easy way to apply for roles without having to fill out multiple application forms

3. Can your ATS support social posting?

In essence, social job posting does what it says on the tin – automatically posts your jobs to Facebook and Twitter once they’ve been approved and are live.

But there’s so much more. Using a Facebook plugin (does your ATS offer this?) allows you to create a social jobs portal in your candidates’ native digital home.  A strong example is the MND Association, which uses Facebook as a secondary careers portal for volunteer recruitment very effectively.

The value of using a Facebook careers portal plugin is that you’re positioning yourself as a digitally-minded, progressive and engaging employer. In the MND Association’s case, the Facebook plugin helps them to encourage potential volunteers to find out more about opportunities without having to leave their social network.

Checklist:

• Yes, my Applicant Tracking System can automatically post my jobs to social media
• Yes, my ATS provider can support me with a branded Facebook careers presence to enhance my candidate attraction and engagement
• Yes, my candidates can view and share jobs on Facebook quickly and easily

Social recruiting – as easy as 1,2,3?

We’ve looked at three ATS social recruitment features in depth in today’s recruitment software health-check. They can significantly aid your candidate attraction and engagement strategy, and if your ATS provider doesn’t currently offer them… Well, you know who to talk to 🙂

But as well as the clever tech, it’s important to take a moment to answer these three questions for really effective social recruiting:

Checklist:

• Yes, I know where my audience for particular vacancies spend their time. I can identify that Facebook is the right channel for some opportunities, whilst LinkedIn is a more appropriate social network for others.
• Yes, I am clear on my organisation’s social media policy, as are my colleagues. We have clear guidelines around issues such as publicly responding to comments from candidates or sharing third-party content.
• Yes, we are mindful of new social platforms and technologies that a younger generation of candidates may be using when they enter the jobs market. We’ve considered where they are going to be on social and how will they be expecting to engage with potential employers.

And that concludes our third ATS health-check of 2016. ‘Til next time.

Find out more

Lessons from the User Group: Social media recruitment 

Shining a spotlight on 3 social media channels

The secret to great candidate experience