Beyond social media marketing: banks can use social media for other things--a prime example being employment recruiting. Here's how to utilize social media to identify and attract high-quality job candidates.

• Author: Ramirez, Kendra

ARE YOUR BANK MANAGERS DRAGGING THEIR FEET when it comes to adopting social media? Perhaps, they feel that social media is just for "socializing," and it is not "serious" enough to be worth the investment. Or perhaps they agree that social media might have some legitimate marketing uses, but that such applications are inconsequential.

One tactic that marketers can employ to sell social media internally is to point out that it can be used for more than marketing, in this article, I will outline how social media can be applied very successfully to the important task of identifying and attracting high-quality job candidates.

I will provide tips below for incorporating social media into your recruiting efforts in order to bolster your employment branding strategy, save money on recruiting tools and find higher quality candidates.

It starts with a strategy

Before attempting to add social media to your recruiting strategy, you should clearly identify what you are trying to accomplish. Are you hiring? Are you preparing for future growth? Are you trying to stay connected with your company alumni? Your overall goal should be to identify the types of candidates you are looking to attract, then determine where those candidates might participate online.

In conjunction with a solid recruiting plan, it is crucial to examine your employment branding strategy. An employment brand is the way your organization's prospective applicants, candidates and employees perceive your bank as an employer. Last year the Employer Brand Institute surveyed more than 2,000 companies and asked them about the status of their employment branding strategy. Surprisingly, only 16 percent slated that they even have a clear employment branding strategy.

Once you have a solid recruiting and employment branding strategy in place, social media can be extremely beneficial in augmenting your efforts. Consider starting with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google profiles. The following sections outline several effective methods for strengthening your recruiting strategy and employment branding using these popular social media tools.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most "professional" of all of the social networking sites and it has over 75 million users. The median age of LinkedIn users is 41, and the average user has 60 connections. There are several ways to use LinkedIn for successful recruiting and employment branding:

Search: Use this capability in LinkedIn to search your network to find that next recruit or passive candidate. You can use the advanced search capabilities to search for candidates by...