As the importance of social media in recruitment firm’s marketing strategies continues to grow, businesses across the industry are refining their approaches across the platforms to maximise their ROI. However, whilst focusing on the areas that directly impact the engagement and visibility of your brand’s social media presence is incredibly important, many marketers are overlooking the need to train employees on social media best practice – from the basics, such as how to create and share posts through to more advanced areas like nurturing prospects.
Whilst employee advocacy programmes can be a fantastic way to help increase your brand’s engagement and contribute towards its business objectives, your firm’s employees must possess the knowledge and confidence needed to make this a success. And to do this, they should be provided with the necessary training.
From hosting workshops on how to optimise LinkedIn profiles to increase visibility and lead generation through to producing bespoke social media strategies, BlueSky PR has helped a number of recruitment businesses to enhance their employees’ skills and empower them to be proficient social media users.
If you are looking to provide social media training for your staff, here are some best practices for you to consider.
8 best practices for training your recruitment firm’s employees on using social media effectively
1. Establish your goals
What are the reasons for providing social media training for your recruitment firm’s employees? Are you educating them on your social media strategy? Are you looking to implement an employee advocacy programme? Or are you looking to increase your consultants’ client and candidate pipelines by ensuring that they integrate social media activity as part of their day-to-day routines? By clearly outlining your goals, you will be able to create a social media training programme that achieves them all.
2. Embed social media into your company culture
To be successful, social media needs to be embedded into your recruitment firm’s company culture from those working as consultants to the very top of the business.
You should encourage employee participation by providing them with ways to get involved, from providing input on content production to sharing their own successes on social media. This not only shows that you value employee contribution but this will also provide you with tangible examples to share on your firm’s channels and helps achieve social media buy-in.
3. What will your training course focus on?
How do you want employees to utilise social media? Are you focusing specifically on your recruitment consultants, or will all staff be encouraged to use social media? What will they be expected to be doing? Will they be amplifying brand content, posting the latest jobs, promoting services or cultivating relationships and generating new leads? And what platforms should they be active on? By answering these questions, you can create bespoke training courses focused on helping employees use social media effectively based on their job roles and the channels that are needed.
4. Find out employees’ level of social media knowledge
How confident are your employees at using social media? Find out by sending them a short survey to complete. This will provide you with insights on their level of proficiency. Ask questions such as what platforms do they currently use on both a personal and professional basis? What areas of social media would they would like to improve on? Do they understand the different ways they can post and interact with content across the different platforms? And how the algorithms work? This information will be extremely useful in creating training that caters towards their needs and can build upon areas of weakness.
5. Decide on a format
How will you carry out your training? Will you have workshops for each department or division of your recruitment firm? Will you host these outside of normal hours? Or produce them as on-demand webinars so that staff can watch it at a time convenient to them? Make sure you ask your employees which option they would prefer to maximise uptake and ensure that everyone is fully invested in it.
6. Devise your training course
Once you have gained all of the relevant insights needed and put the foundations in place, it’s time to create a social media training programme for your recruitment firm’s employees that addresses their needs. Make sure that you reward staff for participating and make it fun. This could range from branded certificates for completion of the training courses through to prizes for those who have scored the highest in any quizzes or tests that take place.
7. Don’t force employees to participate
Although it may be far from ideal, not everyone in your organisation may have the desire to engage on social media if it isn’t in their job description. To stimulate interest, it may be worth rolling out your courses to those who are passionate about social media and can act as advocates to highlight its benefits. This also enables you to test out your courses with those with a real interest in them and smooth out any issues before rolling it to a wider number of staff.
8. Measure results
You should have a clear idea of the results that you want to measure to be able to see the positive impact that the training course has had on your recruitment firm’s social media presence as well as on individual employees. For example, how many employees have participated in your training? Has your recruitment firm’s engagement rate and follower count grown? Has it driven new leads for your consultants? By using metrics such as these you will be able to see how beneficial the training has been.
Creating a social media training course in-house can be an incredibly time-consuming process. However, if implemented successfully it will be worth the time and resources as it will dramatically transform your business’s social media presence.
Author: Dan Stobbs
