From employee highlights to engaging content, your LinkedIn page should be working overtime to attract the best employees.

While most businesses understand the power of social media from a branding and marketing perspective, many of their LinkedIn pages end up as little more than a glorified “About Us.”

LinkedIn may not be as colorful as Instagram, or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it is a dynamic platform with plenty of options for building media-rich and informative pages that make an impact on visitors’ views of your company.

If your goal is to attract top-level talent, impress potential customers, and drive conversations important to your business—a compelling LinkedIn company page is a must-have. The question is, how do businesses create better LinkedIn pages?

Here are seven ways to improve your company’s Linkedin presence:

1. Cover the page basics

Before you go too far, make sure your page has all the basic information in place to make it a valuable marketing channel for your company. That means including the:

• Company name and URL
• External website link
• Company details including industry, company size, company type
• Logo (300×300 pixels is recommended) and tagline
• Company description (250-2,000 characters), utilizing industry keywords.

A LinkedIn page without this information will feel incomplete—and according to HootSuite, completed Company Pages receive twice the number of visitors of those with incomplete pages. These pages are better optimized for search as well.

2. Populate your updates with branded imagery

You’ve spent time and money creating a visual brand for your business—show it off. Consistent use of your logo and colors within your updates gives your page a professional look and helps you stand out among the 30 million other pages on LinkedIn.

3. Use Showcase pages to highlight recent work

Whatever new projects, products, or campaigns your business is working on, use Showcase Pages to provide them their own voice. This not only gives your LinkedIn a larger digital footprint, but it ensures that each initiative has a dedicated page that you can use to target specific audiences—particularly helpful when recruiting talent for a particular role or team.

You can promote and optimize these pages with keywords, just as you do with your main page.

4. Use Career pages to appeal to great talent

LinkedIn as a whole can be used for a number of purposes—but Career Pages are now specifically where businesses can promote their company culture and newly opened roles. Use Career Pages to share the story of your company through videos, photos, and employee-created content. Pages like these will help potential hires understand who your business has already hired, and why.

5. Decide on a branding strategy for your page

If the content for your LinkedIn is all over the place and you can’t seem to get consistent engagement, first settle on a branding strategy. The strategy for establishing thought leadership—sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, product how-to’s, articles that reflect your mission—is different than the strategy for lead generation—sharing upper funnel and lower funnel content like tip sheets and case studies.

You can always change your strategy over time as your objectives shift, but don’t try to do everything at once.  

6. Write short and “spicy” updates

LinkedIn recommends you keep your updates “short, sweet, and spicy.” That means text that is 150 characters or less, with an eye-catching point of view or statistic, with relevant hashtags.

Other aspects of a quality update include: using a call-to-action, adding a quality image (in the range of 1200×627 pixels) that is branded and matches the messaging, with a vanity URL that you can use to track traffic.

Speaking of URLs: Links are important, and posts with links get 45% higher engagement than those without. That said, the occasional post without a link—meant to simply pass along a message, not send readers to your website or other landing page—can also have a big impact.   

7. Follow best practices for content engagement

It can be difficult to garner engagement for your posts—and engagement is how to expand your network to reach influencers, thought leaders, and talent. Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn include:

• Share effective, oft-shared content such as eBooks, SlideShares, infographics, case studies, how-to content, vivid visuals, and themed posts.
• Create targeted updates. You can alter your target audience by variables like geography, job function, seniority level, and more—and then post content that appeals to this narrower scope.
• Create your own, non-stock images, with stats and text embedded directly in them.
• Use free visual tools like Haiku Deck (creates excellent presentations for web sharing) and Piktochart (builds beautiful charts, graphs, banners, and other visual content).

An enticing LinkedIn page will make tapping into other people’s networks and finding great talent easy. Start thinking of your LinkedIn as an extension of your company brand, and you’ll no doubt find other ways to impress your peers, competitors, and future employees.

We talk to the woman behind one of the most successful localized TA communities, and it turns out being social in 2018 means straddling the online and offline worlds.

Online groups are no longer the domain of trolls and haters, there’s a whole world of cyber communities centered around skill/profession/interest that are galvanizing members to follow these passions, and even taking it IRL with meetups.

The localization of internet groups is an interesting turn for the technology synonymous with globalization and anonymity, but it could be a great one. People who once lamented the disappearance of in-person interaction may now dry their tears and logon, or at least that’s what one social recruiter predicts.

Kasia Borowicz started on the localization trend three years ago and is now seeing great returns in the network of Polish recruiters she built from scratch out of a UK basement. We sat down with Kasia ahead of her session at Hiring Success 18 EU to understand what this new trend means for recruiters and what businesses need to do offline to stay relevant online.

Is there a secret to building online communities?

My guiding principle of social media is to think: would I do this on my personal channel? A personal channel is usually about conversations and multi-level interactions where you like, comment, tag, crowdsource, and stay in touch, whereas business channels almost exclusively broadcast their own needs and send mass messages.

To steer away from the latter, I always suggest starting groups. Groups give you the opportunity to share your content, but more importantly, they provide a space for your community to be social together.

What are you into right now?

Something that has caught my eye recently are local online communities. I started a Facebook group for Polish recruiters three years ago, just me in a basement hoping for one or two likes, now it’s 2,300 active people.

Groups like mine are springing up all over. I’ve seen recruiter groups pop up in Germany, Spain, Israel, Estonia, and more. I think it’s really positive that a global phenomenon like the internet is helping people connect locally and learn in their native languages.

However, even though these groups are local, they welcome recruiters from wherever. So someone who wanted to ask about recruiting norms of a particular area could learn from practitioners who work there.

How does recruiting vary by region?

When I first got into sourcing it was in the British market. To be honest, my English wasn’t so good. I’m from Poland originally, and it was, shall we say, obvious. Not just in my accent, but in how I held conversations. In Poland, we don’t do small talk. If you ask someone how they are doing, you better be ready for a 30-minute answer, because you’re about to hear about their whole life.

Once I moved to London and became accustomed to British norms, the cultural mishaps began happening, funnily enough, when I talked to candidates back in Poland. One of the main differences I noticed was salary discussions. For British candidates, the money talk happens before the offer, whereas Polish candidates expect compensation negotiations to start post-offer.

Some people look at these differences and want to say one is wrong and one is right, but when you look at these particulars as a product of culture, each method makes sense in context.

Do you have any networking tips for the wallflowers out there?

I don’t think of myself as a natural networker. I often get really nervous, but what helps me is preparation, not just memorizing LinkedIn profiles – which I do as well – but thinking about what I want to learn at a particular conference or event. Once I know my objective, I start posting about it on my social media and see if anyone else is having similar conversations, and then I reach out to those people. There may still be moments where I’m standing alone, or feel a little awkward, but I find that making those online connections pre-conference helps a lot.

What’s the number one way people mess up social recruiting?

I think it’s a misconception that social recruiting is tied to the online world and social media in particular. A job advert doesn’t become “social” just because it’s posted on Twitter or Instagram; there has to be an enjoyable human interaction that earns the label “social recruiting.”

To make your recruiting truly social, you have to turn away from the expectation of tangible results and put time into building relationships. Social media is one avenue for building your community, but for me, true social recruiting happens when we shut down the computer and go talk to candidates.

By now we’ve all seen the 2013 Gallup report on employee engagement, The State of the American Workplace. Words that come to mind when I re-read the report:  bummer, disheartening, bad news.  But I also wonder: what exactly did we expect? Look around you, managers, and you’ll see disengaged employees with the Zombie stare, some with the sour look of the disappointed, a few with the overly positive, can-do smile, trying desperately to make things work. A lot of this is the fault of a poor connection between managers and line-of-business employees and it inevitably trickles into a broken recruitment and communication process with potential candidates. The good news? We can change these statistics. It’s in your power to take control of your recruiting process and employer brand. The truth is most job seekers are looking for more than salary when they decide to apply to work at your company.

Can employee disengagement and bad branding be prevented? Can HR and Leaders learn to bring people back to productivity? Absolutely. Will it be tough? You know it. Will it be worth it? Yes, a thousand times. How do you start? Let’s take a closer look at employer brand.  Are you true to it in your hiring and recruiting process? How your employees represent the company’s mission and brand is as important as anything Leaders or HR says in the hiring process. Make sure the stories align well and is accurately reflecting your current brand and the overall mission.

Then look at the employee experience – What employees do everyday, the actions they take, and how they perceive the actions of their managers and top management.  As Blue Ocean Strategy Institute co-directors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest in this month’s Harvard Business Review, focusing on the acts and activities of management and employees is critical to understanding how a company operates. Actions, as our moms have told us, do speak louder than words, and in the world of work they separate good managers, and great companies and truthful branding, from the mediocre. My latest piece on Dice.com provides more information on just how much technology is changing in the world of work for leaders and hiring practitioners around the globe.

Then look at how you’re hiring: think candidate experience.  Do you force job seekers through a maze-like microsite for career opportunities, then fail to acknowledge their applications with an email or letter (spoiler alert: approximately 70% of hiring companies are in this camp)?  Do you put people through tests and five phone screens, then never follow up? If so, you’re doing damage to your brand. Smart companies know better: they’ve begun to adopt new technologies to streamline the hiring process: video, digital interviews, social recruiting and more.

A few more things can make or break employer brand and candidate experience:

Communicate throughout the process. If you do a phone screen, give feedback.  If a candidate comes to your career site, acknowledge the visit with an email explaining your hiring process. Technology is available now to make these steps easy; there’s no reason not to do it, unless you want to damage your brand.

Think like a candidate. Another timeless reminder: treat others as you’d like to be treated. This Golden Rule is especially important if you want to ensure good candidate experience. And why wouldn’t you?

Be a person first, an HR manager second. People want to deal with people. Make your hiring process as personal as you can. You’re not dealing with robots (just yet at least).

Set expectations. This is part of the communications process but it deserves a call-out. Don’t leave people hanging; let them know what your process is, when they can expect to hear back, how quickly you’re planning to make a decision.

Candidate experience is a two way street. Make sure yours is good and true to your brand, or you are setting the brand up for damage both upfront in the recruiting process and to your internal employees and stakeholders. It’s easier to maintain a good reputation than it is to rebuild it. Employer brand and candidate experience are linked, and they matter greatly to recruit and retain your talent.

This article was written by Meghan M. Biro from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.

Making yourself stand out amongst hundreds of job applicants these days is not easy. That’s because we’ve all been taught time and again to follow the one-page cover letter template. However, why limit yourself from being seen and heard by doing what everyone else is doing? We live in a fast pace world where social media allows us to work past the gatekeepers of communication. A short and concise cover letter is easier to read than a long and dry one.

If done right, social media can be the key that opens the door to your next job. See how these 5 individuals used social media to grab the attention of their desired employers:

5. Pinterest Resume & Cover Letter – Jeanne Hwang really wanted to work at Pinterest. What better way to relay her zealousness and qualifications than with a Pinterest board? At a quick glance, you get the idea that she’s smart, adventurous, and highly motivated. On closer inspection, her education and experience back up her initial impression. Hwang knows her way around Pinterest, demonstrated by her aesthetically pleasing and carefully placed pins.

4. Creating a Cover Letter Website – Though not social media, Alice Lee utilized the internet by making her own website to communicate to Instagram why she should be hired. The website is simple, but beautiful, illustrating her great ability to design and build a web page in just 2.5 days. She doesn’t explain how she’s a self-starter, she shows it through mock-up ideas and images. Lee didn’t get the job, but she did get an interview and land herself a position at Path.

3. Introducing Yourself with Facebook Notifications – Morgan Brown made it clear he wanted to work at Facebook by utilizing its popular features. He joined the “Future Facebook Employees” group, used his status updates to display his skills and experience, and tagged companies he worked for. He even made due with Facebook’s fun applications, like “throwing a sheep” at the HR Director.

Finding the right candidate for a growing company can be a challenging task regardless of your industry. As a growing skincare and mineral makeup company, we knew we had a receptive group of knowledgeable beauty and brand enthusiasts right at our fingertips in our social media audience. However, reaching this potential gold mine of candidates would mean targeting them with the right message, at the right time. Working closely with our Corporate Recruiter, Cassandra Murray, we developed the following social media recruiting strategies, and you can repeat them!

1) Integration is Key: To attract the best candidates the key for us was to seamlessly integrate our social recruiting strategy into our current content marketing strategy which focuses on beautiful images and highly shareable content.  It’s important to blend our recruiting posts in with our existing content for a positive and cohesive brand message for both potential candidates and our customers.

2) Customize Your Message: Our talented designer created a beautiful image that we knew would appeal to our recruiting target –  beauty lovers and industry professionals. Since at any given time we are recruiting for several different positions, we kept the message simple and direct while providing a link that referred interested candidates to more detailed information. Keeping the message simple, pretty and concise helps the post be more “shareable” and less like a fussy ad. We had several fans share our recruiting image with comments like, “Great opportunity for Esthetic graduates!” We couldn’t have asked for a better genuine endorsement!

3) Timing is Everything: As with all posts in the social media world, there is a fine line between providing regular and relevant content and bombarding followers with posts that can be seen as spam. Since “We’re Hiring” posts are relevant to just a small portion of our followers, they can teeter on the edge of being spam-like to the majority. So instead of posting on our organization’s fan page every time there is a new opening, we plan our recruiting posts once a month. This keeps our followers engaged and loving our content and leaves the daily posting of openings to relevant job sites managed by our Corporate Recruiter.

By implementing these strategies we’ve seen a surge in qualified applicants while maintaining our loyal social media fan base and staying true to our brand. Using social media for recruiting has helped attract candidates who are already passionate about what it is that we do which can make a world of difference when it comes to finding the right match.

Amy Foster is Digital Community Coordinator (Digital Commerce & Media) at gloProfessional, a cosmetics and skincare company dedicated to providing our customers with what we call beauty with a higher purpose.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates and make the right hires.

3. Tech Marketing firm, ePrize showed their love for Samantha Bankey over Instagram. As told by Mashable, Samantha was highly engaged with the company’s Instagram never missing the opportunity to comment or like a photo. This is a long-term love affair. Samantha interned with ePrize over the summer but no fulltime positions were available, when a job opened up nearly a year later in May they made the position available to her.

Samantha had to tell me about getting a job offer via Social Media:

“The great thing about my story is that it really shows the culture and atmosphere that ePrize has. It’s a very fun, vibrant place to work. It’s their job to develop relationships with brands so they can help with their digital presence. They do a lot of work through social channels (like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on) so what better way to practice what they preach than to get employees involved?”

If your company is a tech-marketing firm, use those core characteristics as a main function in your communication with candidates. If you’re engaging them over social media, and getting more involved than the typical surface level communications, candidates will know you’re dedicated to the work you do and surely accept your offer – Samantha did!

2. 42Floors, a startup merging tech and real-estate, proclaimed their affection in a love letter, I mean job offer, for Dan Shipper on their blog. 42Floor states clearly why they want Dan to join their team, he’s a gifted developer, he’s started multiple companies of his own, he’s a talented writer, a cornerstone in the hacker community – oh and did I mention at the time he was only a sophomore in college? Well, he was. But this didn’t stop 42Floors Co-Founder Jason Freedman from attempting to court Shipper in a very public way. Shipper decided not to take the job, but what makes this job offer unique – besides the fact that it’s totally public – 42Floors stated even if he turned down the job they’ll support his endeavors. On top of that the job offer has no expiration date, so if Shipper changes his mind 42Floors will open its doors to him.

The heart wants what the heart wants. If you’re sure the candidate is THE ONE for the job, you have to do whatever it takes to recruit them to work for your company – even if that means being patient. 

1. Do you believe in love at first sight? CEO of YouTube Chad Hurley sure does. He offered Feross Aboukhadijeh a job over Twitter within 14 hours of Aboukhadijeh releasing YouTube Instant (a site he took only 3 hours to build!) Aboukhadijeh is in the business of developing great programs, a skill YouTube did not want to miss. Aboukhadijeh ended up turning down the offer and is currently working to make websites faster and more reliable with his own startup peerCDN. Despite turning down the offer, a public display of affection from the CEO of YouTube is something anyone would feel great about.

Hey @freethefeross! Loving YouTube Instant… http://feross.net/instant/ Want a job?

— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) September 10, 2010

Aboukhadijew told me this about his experience:

“Getting a job offer over Twitter from YouTube’s CEO, Chad Hurley, was an amazing and unique experience. At first, I wasn’t sure if the offer was real or not, and the tweet almost got lost amidst the noise of my Twitter stream (especially because YouTube Instant was going viral and I was getting lots of mentions!). But once I realized that it was a real job offer, I was excited and couldn’t believe my luck! If you’re recruiting over Twitter, definitely have the CEO make the offer, and be careful to not make Twitter your only recruiting method since I almost missed the tweet! If you don’t hear back in a few days, I would definitely follow-up with an email.”

The instant acknowledgement of his craft is proof YouTube is always keeping an eye out for new great talent, and they recognize it when they see it. Remember the market is competitive, if you’re proactive about attracting the talent you want on your team you’ll be a step ahead of the competition.

There you have it, three awesome stories of job offers being made over social media. The social recruiting climate is changing, if you can attract, source and engage candidates over social networks why not complete the process there too? Corporate Interview Processes, move out of the way – social media is in town!

I was immediately impressed when I saw @HarrodsCareers responding personally to hundreds of employment related tweets. This Twitter handle wasn’t simply a feed of automated job postings. There was person behind @HarrodsCareers, a person putting candidates first and boosting the already amazing brand that is Harrods. I had the pleasure of chatting with Nicole McLennan, the Social Media Resourcing Coordinator and Jenny Parry, Head of Resourcing at Harrods, and this is what they had to say about their social media recruiting strategy.

How did Harrods make the decision to use Social Media in their recruiting strategy, and why? 

After the success that Harrods has had on Facebook and Twitter combined with the retail industry move towards social recruiting, we saw an opportunity to give our company a voice and reach out to potential candidates; social media would give us the platform to build relationships with people, share stories, photos, interesting information about our company all the while providing friendly advice and support. We started small with a Twitter account and a Harrods careers page on LinkedIn, crafting an ideal balance to get the backing from across the business, with the aim of attracting talented candidates that are passionate about Harrods.  We wanted to portray Harrods as a place of work with as much pride as we have for the store, to allow people to experience Harrods as an employer in way that was far reaching beyond our careers website.

How has Harrods benefitted from this? What has this done in terms of amplifying and creating an employer brand?

Being on social media has opened up a useful avenue for us to communicate with prospective candidates, as well as past and present Harrods employees. It’s been an arduous process adopting social media into the overall recruiting strategy, but a year on we are seeing the benefits on multiple levels. We are better able to communicate our company and employer values as well as improve our recruiting process by taking on board feedback and being connected to candidates through a real-time platform like Twitter.

Before we launched on social media, a lot of effort went into re-branding our employer brand and Twitter and LinkedIn have provided a space in which we can truly showcase all the amazing benefits and career development that Harrods has to offer. Now more than ever, it is essential to cement your presence alongside competitors, and what better way to do it than through such dynamic mediums? It’s important to be innovative and explore communication technologies because it allows you to look at your offering from a generational perspective which helps our progress. 

What is Harrods’ “Hiring Philosophy?”

On one hand, our hiring philosophy at Harrods is striving to provide a service-driven process in which we highly value candidates’ feedback to make the recruitment journey as friendly and as positive as possible, regardless of the final outcome. On the other hand, we focus on behavioral skills rather than just weighing up technical skills. The right attitude is highly valued, combined with different kinds of skill sets and experience. 

What does it mean to be a Harrods employee? 

Being a Harrods employee means different things to different people, but at its core it means going above and beyond in everything you do. Our motto is “anything is possible” and through cultivating a culture of excellence we have a strong company ethos of exceeding expectations. Working here can seem intimidating, but we believe that the development of employees is just as important as, if not essential, for the development of the business as a whole. We wouldn’t be able to achieve high standards without investing our people. Being a Harrods employee means passion, opportunity and growth. 

Harrods’ move towards recruiting over social media demonstrates the rise of social recruiting. If we can learn anything from Harrods, Nicole and Jenny it’s that big brands need to be dynamic and responsive if they expect to get the best candidates. By responding to each interaction Harrods shows they care about their people from the very start.

Jenny Parry (@JennyParry79) is the head of resourcing at Harrods.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform.

1. Consider Pre-Employment Skills Based Testing: One of the most common practices in the Human Resources profession is to implement pre-employment testing. Whether you’re looking for a specific skill set or personality each test can be tuned to fit specific needs of your company. Knowledge is power and the more knowledge you have about a potential candidate can make the difference in a long-term hire versus a mind-numbing zombie.

2. See Them in Action: I call this technique Shopping for Employees. Learn to think outside the box on this point. In the past I have gone out and essentially headhunted new recruits for the position I was trying to fill. If you’re hiring for a retail job, head out to your nearest Wal-Mart or competitor at 2 am. Find the nicest, most customer-service prone employee and flip them your business card, let them know you’re hiring and give them a few reasons why they should come work for your company as opposed to their current employer. Sometimes seeing candidates in action will give you a real idea of how they interact with complete strangers when no one is looking.

3. Phone Screening: An unscheduled phone interview gives you the surprise advantage. You’ll get the best reaction from a potential candidate when they’re not expecting your phone call. This will allow the recruiter or human resources manager to gain better insights on the initial reaction to how a potential candidate treats a stranger. We all hate bill collectors and telemarketers, but the ability to treat everyone with respect even through the telephone shows a lot about a candidates demeanor.  Hit them with a double whammy and use a unknown number to really get a sense of how they treat anyone and everyone on the fly.

4. Situational Interviews: Pose them with situations that they might’ve been involved with in past jobs and see how they would respond. A lot of companies already do this, but in order to get someone who is willing to stay for the long haul really drill down exactly what you are wanting in an employee then hold them to those exact standards upon hiring.

5. Leave Out the Closed-Ended and Probing Interview Questions: What do these situations really tell about candidates? Asking hypothetic questions that aren’t relatable to the job won’t tell you a whole lot about the candidate besides how well they’re able to BS an answer. Instead, use situational questions and get down to the real facts behind how a candidate will act in real-life situations that happen in your company. These types of questions will tell you much more then probing/closed ended questions will tell you.

If you follow these five easy suggestions your department will soon find their quality of hire on the rise and the number of zombie employees on the decline. How does your company hire better quality employees?

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs, Huffington Post and SmartBrief. When she talks, people listen. Image Credit Ely Tran.

SmartRecruiters is the Hiring Platform. Everything you need to source, engage, and hire top talent.

We live in a digital world where every question, criticism, and kudos can be found online. Companies have broadly recognized the power of social media for advertisement, brand differentiation, and customer service. However, there is also the potential to be globally publicized in a not-so-flattering light. These highly visible PR fiascos may indicate poor financial health or even worse, that the service your company provides just stinks.

On that note, we can’t just “shut Twitter down” when things have gone awry. People pay to utilize services like Angie’s List, but to research a company’s reputation and level of service there are many consumer satisfaction forums such as Yelp!, Twitter, Facebook, and Google. All will certainly point you in the same direction at no cost. Everyone is now a researcher due to the massive amount of information right at our fingertips; whether it’s to check out a potential candidate, a product, a recruiter, an employee, a prospective client, an employer, and the list goes on and on.

The similarities between a corporate brand and a recruiting brand don’t stop there. Our candidates are our customers. They will shout from Twitter mountaintops about how wonderful or horrible their experience was with you. A candidate could possibly vent on their personal Facebook or LinkedIn page, advising their hundreds or even thousands of connections and friends that they should run (not walk) in the other direction when considering that particular staffing agency, recruiter, or company.

My background in the restaurant biz taught me early on that a satisfied customer will tell one person, but someone who had to wait twenty minutes before a waitress even came to their table will tell thirty people about their experience. Protect your reputation! Since flawed humans run this machine, less than ideal circumstances will inevitably present themselves. What kind of response and empathy that the slighted individual receives is an opportunity, quite simply. It’s a chance to show you care, that you’ll do whatever it takes to make it right, and it’s important to impart that what they think and feel is valid (whether you agree or not).

The internet is a place where people will jump on the bandwagon or abandon ship. After all, they’ve never met you and how else can you evaluate a total stranger? WORD OF MOUTH. Yes, I used the caps…it’s that important.

Your candidates want a way to find you easily, view the positions you’re currently recruiting for, check out the company culture, reach out to you publicly, and interact. Respond to each one of them! Everyone can see if you’re quiet, extroverted, or completely invisible. It’s sort of funny to look at inactive social media accounts. A public presence is well, missing, and that is noticeable.

Make an impression and acknowledge all who inquire, even if they’re not currently a fit. Maybe a few years down the road they’ll be your hottest candidate and they’ll remember how you treated them. This person took the time and interest to say, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing and I want to be a part of it.’ It is pure courtesy to reach out and say, ‘Thank You.’

Colette Resnikoff is a jobseeker in the recruiting and staffing industry with years of experience at Hire International, ManPower and SmartDog. Consider hiring her, or at the very least, follow her on Twitter: @IWannaGetUHired!

SmartRecruiters opened a recruiter marketplace to provide transparency and integration to the values of recruiting services. We display such recruitment firm statistics as CV to interview rate, average time to source, and hiring percentage, as well as, customer reviews and more!

As part of my meetup group (Social Media & Leftover Booze: a think tank happy hour about how social media is changing our world), Bill Boorman shared some words of social recruiting wisdom at the SmartRecruiters headquarters. I’ve known Bill for a long minute, and have always been very impressed with how he aptly leverages new technology to reach great talent.

From connecting with people he had yet to meet on LinkedIn in 2003 (before people were even using the term “LION”) to staffing Florida’s Hard Rock Cafes by targeting people of the area who liked The Rolling Stones on Facebook (before recruiting apps were selling Facebook ads) to using foursquare in finding where a competitor’s engineers liked to drink coffee then putting up a sign outside the coffee shop that read “Sick of Working for (Competitor’s Name)” to becoming the first company in the UK with the @ symbol in its officially registered name, it is clear that Bill Boorman breathes social recruiting knowledge.

Discussion centered around social media ads, specifically on Facebook and Twitter. When it comes to social media updates vs. paying to promote updates, Boorman explained, “News, intrusion, spam are all about relevance.”

The business models of today’s social networks depend on ads. The challenge lies in not hindering the end users’ experience while creating the most sustainable ROI for the advertiser. With ads entering all our newsfeeds, advertisers must respect, indulge, and cultivate the interests of their audience.

“It is my job to be in touch with the audience,” said attendee Lexie Forman-Ortiz, SmartRecruiters Community Manager. “Their interests are my interests. I want to share information that’s relevant to them. The best way to learn is to listen.”

Social media is about news consumption of the topics you care about from the people and brands you trust. To grow a brand on any social media channel you need to provide remarkable content to the relevant audience. If your content is not relevant, people unfollow and unlike. So in essence when promoting updates, if your content is not relevant and remarkable, you are paying people to unfollow and unlike you.

“Targeting is not random,” explained Boorman. “Promoted posts, stories, suggested pages are all based off of your interests or the assumption you have related interests to whatever the product may be.”

The people you want to reach – what do they do all day? What content can you share that will make their life easier? i.e. If they are hiring, you should share content that makes hiring easy.

Once you have created the remarkable content and identified the relevant audience, you must tailor to the medium.

“There are distinct personalities for each channel,” says Boorman.

“On Facebook, users spend more time looking at single pages, so your ad can be longer, more detailed, more visual,” summarized attendee Joe Hanson, inbound marketing professional. “Whereas on Twitter, users are quickly scrolling through 140 character tweets, so your promoted text needs to catch their eye quickly.”

“The good advertisers provide good content,” says the audience. “The great advertisers provide great content,” says the target consumer. “That’s just what I needed – Thank You,” says the new customer.

David Smooke writes because he is hungry. If you have a great interest in social media, join Social Media & Leftover Booze. If you have great interest in recruiting, join SmartUp: Elevating Innovation in Hiring. If you have great interest in the next generation of recruiting software, (including targeted Facebook Advertising) use SmartRecruiters.