Are you looking for some new ideas to simplify your social media recruiting?

Do you wonder how to use social media to attract, engage and hire candidates?

We asked the pros for one social recruiting tip businesses need to know today. Here’s their advice to help you pump up your social media recruiting –

#1: Find Your Audience First In Social Recruiting

Andy Headworth

Social media is an infinitely large place to try and recruit in. When starting with social recruiting the first thing you need to do is to narrow this down, with specific focus on the types of candidates (your audience) you recruit.

Establish which social media platforms they are both present and active on, and start with them. Once there, build your position as knowledge experts first, recruiters second, by contributing and sharing great relevant content and engaging with your audience.  You will quickly establish yourself as the go-to recruiter in your sector sooner than you think.

Andy Headworth,  Social Recruiting Strategist & Managing Director of Sirona Consulting

Follow Andy on twitter at @andyheadworth

#2: Master and Balance 3 Interrelated components

John Sumser

In order to do social recruiting, you need three things – jobs, traffic and a place to host the intersection of the two. The difference between social recruiting and old fashioned job board style sourcing is that you are responsible for all of the pieces.

The way you get people to come back is by giving them something that they value while they look at your jobs. That’s really hard to get right. The thing you have to care about is what matters to the audience in order to get what matters to you.

John Sumser, HRExaminer

Follow john on twitter at @JohnSumser

#3: Go Where Your Audience Is

Todd Raphael

Don’t be sucked into a given tool just because you perceive “everyone is using it.” Use social media where the audience you want to reach is hanging out.

If that’s Quora, Great. Facebook, Great. Pinterest, Great.

Heck, it may even be in person, at alumni events or bars or networking events. I’m always a little suspicious when I hear that “are the cool people are doing it..”

Todd Raphael, Editor in Chief at ERE Media

Follow him on twitter at @ToddRaphael

#4: Look for Consistency and Accuracy In Candidate’s Online Profiles

Kevin W. Grossman

Employers, HR pros, recruiters and hiring managers should ensure that applicant online profiles are as consistent and accurate as possible across all social points of presence.

In other words, whoever they say they are and whatever they say they’ve done and they do is close if not the same, on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+ and the many other industry and association niche networks and communities they might belong to. Looking for consistency and accuracy is key.

Kevin W. Grossman, Writer and Founder of Reach-West

Check out Kevin’s recently published tech job hunt handbook and follow him on twitter at @KevinWGrossman

#5: Learn to Communicate with Candidates on Social Media

Jonathan Campbell

To get the most out of social recruiting, you should look at the potential of social media in 3 ways:

1. The web is a database of candidates with social media accounts, profiles and web pages. Learn how to search for them.
2. Over 50% of all time spent online is on social media sites. If you want to influence people these days, you need to have a strong brand presence within your niche on social media sites.
3. There are more ways to communicate with people then just email and the phone. Successfully using Twitter, for example, could be as simple as tweeting someone to say hi, then taking it further offline.

Recruiters need to know how to use these channels to communicate with potential candidates which means both knowing what to say and exactly how to send it.

Start with this simple framework: Database, Marketing & Communication and Social Recruiting will start working for you.

Jonathan Campbell, CEO of Social Talent

Follow Jonathan on twitter at @socialtalent

#6: Start Developing a Short and Long Term Strategy

Jessica Merrell

Social Recruiting is Interactive; you can’t just post and pray on social media.  Building a recruiting strategy that will last when it comes to social media is one that involves many moving parts.  This means developing content, conversation, and community in a number of different social platforms, that suit your target candidate audience while driving job seekers to either your talent community or careers page.

Different positions dictate a different strategy as well.  Recruiters need to insert themselves into candidate and job seeker ecosystems using targeted blog posts, resources like employer branding videos, and Twitter hash tags & chats.

Companies must begin developing recruiting strategies for the short term as well as long term to develop a candidate pipeline where through your influence, thought leadership, and interactions you drive candidate populations and their friends to open positions.  Like consumer marketing, candidate marketing involves many touch points along the way.  Social recruiting uses these very engaging platforms to help facilitate these interactions bridging the gap between the job seeker and the recruiter when they are actively looking for work.

Jessica Merrell, Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs 

Follow Jessica’s tweets at @blogging4jobs

#7: Get Your Basics Right

Jorgen Sundberg

There are still a lot of recruiters and HR professionals out there who are either hesitant for social recruiting or simply don’t feel comfortable with the new platforms. When beginning with social recruiting, it’s important to understand the platform, have patience and get the basics right.

For example “when recruiting with twitter, you need to make sure that your job tweets contain a searchable, easy-to-recognise hashtag, an obvious description of the position, and a link to an accompanying page which describes the opening in more detail.”

Jorgen Sundberg, Founder and Director of Link Humans

Follow him on twitter at @JorgenSundberg

What are your thoughts? What social recruiting tactics have worked for your business? Please share your hottest social media recruiting tips and questions in the comments box below.