Mr. Ferrara

Human Resources, Recruitment & Training

Social Media Strategies for Hotel Employee Recruiting

By Jason Ferrara, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, CareerBuilder

Finding the right talent is going to be key as the economy rebounds and your business regains its footing. Some hotels’ employment brands have taken a hit in this downturn, though, and it will be imperative to promote your hotel as a great place to work so that you attract the right people. In addition, many properties will need to ramp up their hiring quickly as the economy rebounds.

One strategy that can address both of these challenges is to leverage social media as part of your recruitment mix. While social media isn’t a replacement for more traditional recruitment methods, with the high level of engagement it commands, social media has become more and more fundamental to overall recruitment strategy.

It’s no surprise. Social media is not a trend anymore; it’s a way of life. It continues to be increasingly pervasive as millions of users interact, share and engage using a variety of online sites. Some examples of the ubiquitous presence of social media in our daily lives include:

• 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites in 2009, up from 6 percent a year before that.(1)
• Facebook has 400 million users and 50 percent of them log in every single day.(2)
• Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity – ahead of personal e-mail.(3)

With so many potential employees using social media, why not be where your future employees may be? Getting online and using social media not only allows you to connect with candidates, but you can also use it to project your employment brand by creating a company page. The opportunities to capture talent are endless.

How to Use Social Media for Recruitment

With all this talk about social media, how do you actually use it for recruitment purposes? The following are some best practices:

1. Set a goal: Like any business initiative, setting a strategy before delving into social media is critical to success. Defining your goal for using social media is step one.

2. Master One Medium: Social media can be overwhelming, so aim to master one medium – a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog – before expanding to other platforms.

3. Manage Your Online Reputation: Social media is about word-of-mouth marketing. Use your online profile to discuss the unique benefits of working at your property, promote recognition the company has received and publish employee success stories.

4. Create a User Experience: Social media is about creating an open dialogue and building relationships with others. Create a space where current and potential employees can interact – sharing success stories about working with your organization – and responding to job seekers’ questions.

5. Listen, Learn and Engage: The most important thing you can do on any site is to listen to your audience – both what they are saying to you and what they are saying about you. Don’t be afraid to respond: There is no better way to build trust with your community.

6. Highlight Specific Jobs: Go beyond posting all your job openings: Provide talent unique information about the company itself. Help candidates understand why your company is the right place for them.

7. Visually Stimulate: Incorporate photos and videos on your site to get your audience’s attention. The visual stimulation will make your company stand out.

8. Boost Your Rankings: Having a presence on social media sites will organically boost your online profile in search rankings.

9. Prepare to Change: Be flexible to change. Social media is constantly evolving. Be on the lookout for new sites cropping up, and don’t be afraid to test the waters.

10. Promote Your Brand: Promote your presence once you are up and running on the social media platforms of your choice. Place links on your Web site, put them in your email signature, highlight them in marketing campaigns, and even send links to become fans, friends, or followers in application confirmation emails.

Getting started: sites to use for social media recruitment

Once you figure out the best practices for using social media recruitment for your property, you’ve got to pick out a few sites to get started on. It’s hard to talk about social media for recruitment without discussing three of the fastest growing sites – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are among the most popular sites recruiters and hiring managers use to help build their talent pipelines.

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service that lets you connect with friends, co-workers and others who share similar interests. As the second most trafficked Web site in the world, Facebook has more than 400 million active users. The average user spends more than 55 minutes on Facebook each day – giving your hotel plenty of time to engage potential employees.

Once you decide to use Facebook as part of your recruitment strategy, how do you get things rolling? You can do this through a variety of actions, including:

• promoting specific job openings
  
• listening to and recognizing “fans” of your page
  
• telling your company story with photos.

Not only do these actions help you promote your employment brand, but it also allows you to utilize the site to recruit potential employees. CareerBuilder can help you get started with this; we have an exclusive agreement with Facebook as an authorized reseller of recruitment advertising. We’ve helped more than 270 clients promote their job openings and recruitment brands on Facebook and those numbers keep growing. In addition, we offer customized consulting services to help you communicate with target talent on Facebook and a variety of social media channels.

Twitter

Twitter is a free micro-blogging site that enables users to send and receive messages – or “tweets” – of up to 140 characters. With 17 million registered users, (4) Twitter’s popularity has grown significantly since it launched in 2008.

You can get started on Twitter by introducing yourself to the overall community. From there you can promote specific job openings, see what other people are tweeting about your organization and post links to stories and press releases about exciting company news. You can also make your current employees brand advocates by having them showcase how great it is to work at your hotel.

Twitter’s benefits lie in its simplicity; the 140 character limit helps keep messages concise while its real-time feature makes it easy to push out job openings. This is more of a challenge on the employment branding front, but you can still link to articles and blog posts that promote what it’s like to work for your hotel in more detail. CareerBuilder utilizes Twitter to disseminate information to a variety of different audiences, including our employers, our job seekers and the news media. We often link to our blogs, such as The Hiring Site (http://www.thehiringsite.careerbuilder.com) to discuss trends, employment branding and much more.

LinkedIn

With more than 53 million members in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, LinkedIn is a free professional networking site that enables members to post their resumes, recommendations from friends and connect with other industry professionals.

LinkedIn doesn’t allow for users to “fan” or “follow” your hotel’s page, but you can utilize your connections to make new ones and source candidates by posting links to job openings, joining industry groups, messaging professional contacts through InMail and requesting introductions to potential candidates through mutual connections.

What other strategies are there?

In addition to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it may be beneficial to use lesser-known sites to promote your employment brand and post job openings. For example, think about how your hotel can best leverage Flickr, a photo-sharing site, or slideshare, a document sharing site. Can you share photos of your property? Presentations of career paths available at your hotel? Or how about YouTube? With so many options out there, you can experiment with ones that fit best with your hotel’s overall recruitment goals – changing things as you go.

Don’t forget about blogging, too. A blog or “Web log” is a Web site containing user-generated commentary, graphics and/or video. Blogging can help you attract candidates and build relationships with potential employees because it allows you to share information in a readily accessible way. Also, you can use other parts of your social media strategy, such as Twitter and Facebook, to direct job seekers and others to your blog. As I mentioned earlier, CareerBuilder actively does this by directing our clients and job seekers to relevant content on our blogs.

As each year passes, there will undoubtedly be new techniques and strategies that emerge to find the best people. Social media, while constantly evolving, is a space that many hotels are leveraging to strengthen their recruitment and branding efforts. Regardless of what your recruitment plans are for the rest of 2010, you’ll want to go social to connect with a wide audience of potential candidates and better promote what it’s like to work at your property.

References:
(1) Nielsen
(2) Facebook.com
(3) Nielsen
(4) Twitterscore.net

Jason Ferrara leads the development of strategic marketing for the Corporate Marketing team at CareerBuilder.com, the nation's largest online job site with over 22 million unique visitors each month and over 1.5 million jobs. Focused on the recruitment needs of employers, Ferrara is responsible for business-to-business strategy including communications, advertising, promotions, e-commerce management, customer lifecycle and loyalty, and sales support. Prior to joining the company, Ferrara worked as Director, Online Marketing for SPSS, Inc. He holds a MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Mr. Ferrara can be contacted at 773-353-2601 or jason.ferrara@careerbuilder.com Extended Bio...

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