1. Five steps for
crafting a killer social
recruiting strategy

2. Review and set goals
Introduction
Supercharge your talent brand
Harness the power of your employees
Engage with your talent online
Measure for success4
5
6
3 7
9
Conclusion10
Table of contents
LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 2

3. A strategic approach
to social recruiting
The modern talent leader is many things: a matchmaker,
marketer, salesperson, talent advisor, data scientist,
researcher and technologist. Modern talent leaders embrace
the recruiting innovations that have emerged over the past
decade – and none of these have been more powerful or
transformative than social recruiting.
At the intersection of recruitment and social media, social
recruiting is more than just using social networks to
communicate with candidates. It’s about actively listening,
participating and engaging with targeted groups and
communities, with a long-term view towards building
candidate engagement and your talent brand.
To be truly social, you need to build a community, facilitate
communication within that community, and rely on social
connections between community members to recruit.
And you’ll need a comprehensive, targeted, agile and
measurable strategy based on research and data.
But what makes a killer social recruiting strategy?
Here are five easy steps to developing one.
LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 3

4. 01 What is your team’s current approach to social recruiting?
02 What platforms are you using?
03 How are you communicating?
04 Who are you talking to?
05 Which tools are working and which aren’t?
06 What results have you achieved?
1. Review and set goals
Talk to your team and even some candidates about their
thoughts and experiences.
Next, identify your target audiences. These might include
potential candidates for key senior roles or university
students, who you want to reach out to as part of
your long term recruitment strategy.
Use the data you collected during the research to set
goals for your social recruiting strategy. These should
follow the SMART approach – specific, measurable,
agreed-upon, realistic and timely.
Here are some sample goals to get you thinking:
• Increase offer acceptance rate by X% in X months.
• Reduce attrition by X% in X months.
• Double the number of employees with an
optimised social presence.
• Increase Talent Brand Index1
score by X% in
X months relative to key talent competitors or
for high priority functions/regions.
Here are some sample goals to get you thinking:
1
Talent Brand Index measures attractiveness of companies as an employer
of choice versus peers.
LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 4

5. 2. Supercharge
your talent brand
Is your company seen as a great place to work? In today’s
competition for top talent, your reputation as an employer
is a key factor in whether a candidate will take your job
– or leave it. Your talent brand is the highly social and
public version of your employer brand that incorporates
what talent thinks, feels and shares about your company
as a place to work.
Investing in your talent brand can help you:
• Spend less on hiring.
• Boost retention.
• Influence the conversation with candidates.
Talent brand is a crucial consideration for your social
recruiting strategy. How can your actions on social media
contribute to a strong talent brand?
Five steps to creating a great talent brand
1. Get buy in: Make sure your CEO and senior
leadership team are on board. Leverage the
expertise of your marketing, communications
and IT colleagues.
2. Listen and learn: Audit your current talent brand
by talking to employees and candidates, and going
through the recruitment process step by step.
3. Craft your strategy: Decide how you will position
your company’s talent brand, set some goals
and road test your new messaging with current
employees.
4. Shout it from the rooftops: Promote your talent
brand by engaging with people in meaningful and
creative ways across various social media platforms.
5. Review and improve: Measure your progress
and adjust your approach as needed.
LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 5

6. 3. Harness the power
of your employees
Employees are your unofficial marketers and social talent
leaders. In developing your social recruiting strategy,
consider how you can turn your employees into champions
of your recruiting efforts and talent brand.
This can also be an opportunity to get your human
resources managers and hiring managers involved in your
social recruiting strategy, and personally invested in seeing
it succeed. Train your team to use LinkedIn and other social
media to best represent your talent brand. Periodically
remind them of the opportunity and call out those doing a
really great job.
Five ideas for turning employees
into ambassadors
1. Help your team update their profile pages.
2. Get C-suite support to drive widespread
participation – for example, by sending
out a company-wide email.
3. Share authentic stories, pictures and company
events across a variety of media so your employees
(and followers) can repost and drive viral discussion.
4. Educate employees on your brand. The more
connected they are to the brand, the better
ambassadors they’ll be.
5. Measure engagement and create action plans
to build your foundation of engaged, enthusiastic
brand ambassadors.
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7. 4. Engage with
your talent online
Influence and excite through meaningful content
Online professional networks are the fastest growing source
of quality hires globally, and have become the second most
important source after internet job boards.2
Gone are the days when you could push your campaign
message out and watch relevant job applications fly in.
Today’s candidates expect a two-way conversation,
with context and personalisation.
2 & 3
LinkedIn Talent Solutions, 2015 Global Recruiting Trends:
3 Must-know talent acquisition trends.
Social media is the ideal platform for sharing relevant
content. Your social media strategy should incorporate
how you will use social media platforms to:
• Tap into passive talent. Social media can be
particularly effective for engaging and attracting
passive talent – which comprises 75% of the global
professional workforce.3
• Build a talent pipeline. Instead of maintaining
records manually, you can use tools such as Talent
Pipeline in LinkedIn Recruiter to aggregate, track,
contact and nurture talent leads.
• Advertise with aplomb. Advertising through social
professional networks lets you treat every job
posting like a branding opportunity.
75%
passive
talent
Global professional workforce
LinkedInTalent Solutions: Five steps for crafting a killer social recruiting strategy 7

8. Top tips to engage online
01
Target your communications – the more relevant your
message is to a particular audience, the greater its
impact will be.
02
Spark interesting discussions by asking questions,
offering advice and sharing stories rather than just
concentrating on jobs.
03
Use images, graphics, charts and videos to bring your
brand to life.
04
Partner with your marketing and communications
colleagues. They know how to build brand promises
and great content, and how to identify and reach
target audiences.
05
Create irresistible job descriptions by using standard
titles and keywords to help LinkedIn’s algorithm match
and deliver your job postings to the most relevant
candidates. Link to your Company Page and use
Sponsored Jobs to showcase key positions to
targeted talent.
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9. Your Talent Brand Index score rises versus your peers
and in the segments that you care most about.
Using the Talent Brand Index lets you measure your
branding efforts and see how well you’re reaching and
engaging professionals with your social recruitment
strategy. The index is based on the billions of interactions
that take place on our platform each year and uses reach
and engagement metrics to calculate your Talent Brand
Index score.
You can also measure your social recruitment strategy
on LinkedIn by tracking your Talent Brand Index score
over time, against competitors, across geographies
and across functions.
Talent Brand Index5. Measure for success
A modern talent leader lives and dies by the mantra,
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. To make
better decisions and truly build candidate engagement
with your talent brand, the social talent leader must
measure what they’re doing so they know what’s working.
There is a variety of tools, research and other metrics you
can use to monitor and better understand the impact of
your community building and communication initiatives.
Some key indicators of social recruitment strategy
success are:
In-house metrics
• Your offer acceptance rate goes up.
• Employee retention increases.
• Internal surveys confirm your employees are
excited about your company as a place to work.
Online metrics
• Traffic to your employee video stories goes up.
• You double the number of employees with an
optimised social presence.
A truly social and modern talent leader knows that
having numbers and data will not only help them make
better decisions, but also earn the trust of others in their
organisation. Based on this knowledge you can invest
your time in improving your strategy in the segments
that matter most.
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10. Conclusion
Over the past 10 years, recruitment has undergone more
change than in the previous 40 years. Talent leaders no
longer rely on business cards and cold calling – now they
can immediately engage warm candidates through social
media. But to successfully embark on your social recruiting
journey, you need a killer social recruiting strategy.
In developing your strategy, audit your current approach
and set some measurable goals and targets. Then craft
your strategy, taking into account how you can use
social media to:
• Supercharge your talent brand.
• Mobilise employees as recruitment and talent
brand champions.
• Engage your target audience through meaningful
content and conversations.
• Source and advertise through social networks.
"To be truly social ... you’ll need a comprehensive,
targeted, agile and measurable strategy based on
research and data."
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