Recruitment as a business proposition is quite an old process and has many best practices that are relevant to India, but social recruiting is relatively a new twist to the things on the ground. While social hiring too is all about building relationships, it can be a challenge if recruiters are not technology-savvy.

Recruiters must be smart enough to involve both the left and right brain. Because it is not just about human beings and their selection, it is also about technology and the choices you have in applying technology. However, like in real world, here too, trust and familiarity are essential to building a robust talent pipeline, that has many rightly-qualified candidates for various positions, and who have a sense of kinship with a specific employer/recruiter.

While traditional relationships in the real world depend a lot on your interpersonal skills, time and commitment, networking using Social Media can remove this hassle, by using technology as an effective medium to establish connections. Social recruiting can be a boon to any recruiter who is looking to spread the word about a possible position, far and wide. A good recruiter should be able to cater to an organization’s immediate opening and build a database to provide to the talent pipeline. In short, they must be able to use the right tools, get the right people and make the right connections using the right tools.

These 3 rules should help you build your social recruitment database:

• Use your company website to launch the job specification. Use job boards; use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter; and find the smaller social networks related to your regions, industries, and functional specializations, and spread the word around.
• Be aware that each position requires a different approach to packaging and positioning the message.
• Have multiple social-networking accounts. Use web tools like Hootsuite, which will help you post updates simultaneously to all his social-networking accounts.

Get the right people with the right content Immaterial of whether you are using LinkedIn, Facebook or Job fox Boost, your messages or content should be humane and convincing enough for the prospect to feel that you are THE person who will help them advance their careers.

• Make each message Personal. Just like in any personal conversation, tell them all the right things you heard about them and then talk about the job fit that they have.
• Give the right information. This is not just the job specification; it is also about what kind of career advancements and lifestyle enhancements that the job can offer.
• Become the pseudo mentor. For building long-term relationships, and ensuring that your talent pipeline never goes dry, don the role of a mentor. Keep communicating to your network, immaterial of whether a suitable vacancy is available or not.
• Oh, oh, Not too much. Don’t overdo the communication part and don’t flood their inboxes. Keep your messages short, yet informative and make sure an automated solution is in place that probably reaches your network, once every 2 days.
• You are their success mantra. Mentoring your prospects is all about giving them the confidence that you are genuine about their successes. By building a sense of community and by positioning yourself as one who committed to them, you make their loyalty and reduce attrition.

Make the right connections. Now that you have a large pool of prospects, it is effortless to go overboard with your clients. However, before you do that, check their candidature. Google your chance and surf for all the information that is available online, about them. Whet through all the personal and professional information that you see about your prospect, but exercise caution and lots of discretion. Look at the person as a whole and do not build biases or positive opinions based on what you see online. Most organizations are very cautious while forming opinions on job performance and while discounting a candidate for a job, based on online information. After all these checks and re-checks, email them. Finally, use your judgment to make an informed choice of candidate for the position, and your social recruitment efforts should become a useful tool in your recruitment space.