How Google and Facebook Get into Sourcing

Social media sourcing is a concept in recruiting that arose almost immediately after the emergence of social and professional networks. In fact, this is a method of searching for new personnel that makes it possible to significantly simplify the process of researching candidates’ background based on what they themselves have indicated in their user profiles on social networks.

Generally speaking, there are two main blocks of tasks that Social Recruitment solves:    

• sourcing candidates and communicating with them;
• building and promoting the company’s HR brand.

Today, many companies have implemented social sourcing into the mandatory list of recruiters’ duties. The process is aided by special solutions released relatively recently by global development companies such as Google and Facebook, which help better sort out through hundreds, and sometimes thousands of profiles. In this article, we will discuss those solutions.

Google Sourcing & Tips

In 2017, Google launched a very useful solution for HR’s: Google Hire. With it, you can create and publish job postings directly in Google search and on specialized sites (for example, Glassdoor). As for candidate sourcing, user information can be automatically matched with resources such as LinkedIn, GitHub, Behance, Stack Overflow, a database of US patents, and other sources.

Google Hire also allows recruiters to implement the initial stages of an interview. In the framework of this software, you can create several interviewing levels for each position and add marks visible to the entire HR group. It is noteworthy that communication with candidates is conducted directly through Hire. All correspondence will be duplicated to the recruiter’s personal email address. And finally, this service provides a tool for creating templates for additional workflow automation.

As a supplement to Google Hire that you can use right now, we recommend the X-Ray search: a Google recruiting tool that requires the use of boolean operators. It provides extremely accurate Google search by specified parameters. To do this, you need to use one or a combination of the following boolean search tools:

• AND – for results with all listed keywords;
• OR – to cover the same results indicated by different keywords;
• “-” – to exclude unsuitable words or phrases from the search results;
• () – to indicate priorities and grouping;
• “” – to find exact occurrences of key queries;
• site: – to search a specific web resource;
• intitle: – to search titles only;
• filetype: – to search files of a certain type.

For example, if you need to find candidates for a JavaScript developer position with PHP knowledge in San Francisco on Facebook, this is what your request will look like:

site:facebook.com (“javascript developer”)(“PHP”)(“san-francisco”)

Facebook Sourcing & Tips

Generally speaking, among experienced recruiters, Facebook is considered a much more “fertile” place for social sourcing than LinkedIn. The fact is that we all visit Facebook more often than LinkedIn, not to solve problems related to social connections in business, but to simply relax browsing the news feed.

So, if you’ve started Facebook recruiting, you definitely need to master the very simple skills of working with a special Facebook tool for HR’s: Graph Search. This is basically Facebook’s internal search which offers advanced features for finding people by specified parameters.

First of all, if you are using the social network in a different language, you will need to change it to English in “Settings”.

And now you can start researching the results for search queries such as the following:

• people who work at [company]
• friends of people who work at [company]
• people who studied [smth] at [university]
• people who work at [company] and like [company]
• people who work at [company] and live in [city]
• people who studied at [school]

These graph.tips will help you use Facebook Graph Search with more confidence.

How Do Companies Get Started Using Social Media for Recruiting?

And now a few recruiting tips on using social networks to search for potential candidates for the desired position.

• Start actively using corporate profiles in social networks. If your corporate profiles in social networks exist only as a formality, you need to eliminate this oversight immediately. Social networks should be regularly filled with new content, and you should do everything possible to ensure that your account is getting new, “live” subscribers. This will increase the chances that your job postings will be seen as many people as possible without you having to work extra hard for it.
• Use the built-in social networking tools. Social networks offer a lot of integrated solutions for social recruiting. If we are talking about Facebook, it is impossible not to mention such an integrated solution as Facebook Careers. Here, if your page has a business status, you can post a job description, as well as set up a form for candidates to contact you.
• Invest in advertising. Sometimes it is properly configured Facebook or Google advertising that plays a crucial role in the successful implementation of your recruitment strategy. To do this, you just need to correctly set the parameters for selecting the target audience, and voila, the right people will see your job offer!
• Create a high-quality, attractive job description. Naturally, potential candidates for the position often find employment offers on social networks. And those who are looking for them purposefully can view several dozens of such proposals a day. Your task is to come up with a media sourcing strategy that will allow you to somehow stand out among other employers. For these purposes, we strongly recommend trusting the creation of a job description to professional copywriters.

Conclusion

We hope that our sourcing tips fully answered your question of how to hire the best candidates in the Google search engine and social networks such as Facebook. If you want to entrust the search procedure to true professionals, contact us at DNA325 recruitment agency. We actively use social recruiting in the selection of candidates for the desired positions. For this purpose, our company has specially launched channels in Telegrams: NonTech Jobs and Tech Jobs. In this way, due to the rapid expansion of our contact list, we are able to quickly close even complex technical vacancies.