Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…These social media names have now become rather nominal as they effectively altered the way we perceive our online communication and interaction. Indeed, they say “it is not official until it is on Facebook”, a statement many would have found preposterous just a few years ago. Nowadays, however, social media has perpetrated not only individuals’ personal, but also professional lives. It is no secret that one can successfully use social media to look for and apply to jobs directly. Moreover, companies often tweet their internal positions on Twitter and one can also follow companies on LinkedIn in order to learn of job opportunities and much more. While certainly a great resource, social media needs to be approached with caution as once ‘social’, we are always ‘social’. It is, hence, my goal in this article to highlight our social media experience here at Project Resource and discuss both advantages and some incurred hurdles.
Project Resource Limited is a dynamic and fast-growing specialised recruitment agency, serving the construction, civil engineering and infrastructure industries. As Project Resource aspires to be the leader in its field, we realise that using social media can contribute to our success. As such, we now have active accounts on all of the main social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Each of these helps us achieve different goals, jointly contributing to the main message we seek to convey to both employers and job seekers. This message is clear: Project Resource was set up to be the most successful and professional recruitment business in the UK and we believe we are achieving this goal daily.
In particular, all of our recruitment consultants from both our Reading and Solihull offices have extended profiles on our LinkedIn page, which allows them to stay in touch with other professionals and colleagues. LinkedIn is an excellent resource for getting professional contacts and recommendations and also attracting skilled individuals to use a company’s services. Twitter, on the other hand, is ideal for posting live job opportunities that we currently hold. Once a follower, one can easily stay up to date with as many as 20 jobs that we post daily. This is really convenient for anyone looking for jobs in the industries that we specialise in. Lastly, our Facebook page is used to help build both professional and social connections. Facebook I find to be both the most influential and yet the most difficult to utilise. When creating our Facebook business page, our goal was to primarily attract individuals to come and work for us, i.e. our internal job vacancies. As such, within a couple of months we were able to get our first 50 fans mainly through word of mouth and posting entries on other relevant Facebook pages. However, our growth has been limited since. Having spent quite some time trying to figure out the situation, I came to realise that people are generally reluctant to joining small or less-known companies on Facebook mainly because they fear it may be scam. Indeed, as impressively large of a community as Facebook is, unfortunately, it seems to have little control over the pages that are being created on it. Therefore, we continuously strive to remain both professional and approachable. Luckily, during what I refer to as the second phase of our Facebook development (upon receiving our initial fans), we started getting more fans from outside of our original network. Individuals looking for jobs have now become fans, thus getting an opportunity to stay up-to-date with the multiple internal job vacancies that we post. In fact, one can now simply click on ‘work for us’ tab on our page to review and apply for our open job vacancies directly on Facebook. To foster further engagement, we also regularly run career-related contests. Our first contest featured a short quiz about Project Resource. Having answered all questions correctly first, the winner got a chance to get her CV professionally edited by one of our experts for free. Our second contest is soon to start, so keep an eye on it on our page. Certainly, we have many more plans in mind as we continue to develop and internalise our social media. We continue to hungrily explore online and other opportunities to bring you the latest news, opportunities and ideas, all of which can be found on our blog.
There is no better time to join our professional service be it for seeking a job, career advice or staying on top of recruitment views and news. For all this I am a fan of Project Resource, are you?
