The social listening tool is often positioned as a marketing tool for businesses. However, it is more of a business tool that is useful to all the arms of your organization. Social listening essentially allows you to track mentions of any keyword. It is upon you to decide what you want to use it for. You could track your brand mentions or updates about your favorite songwriter. You could also choose to track your brand mentions to get insights into the functioning of all your departments. Here’s how you could use social listening for human resources.
How Social Listening Helps with Human Resource Functions?
Social listening, when used for marketing, aids myriad marketing functions. Similarly, for HR, social listening can assist with most activities. These may include :
- Headhunting,
- Employer branding,
- Profiling, and
- Competitor analysis.
And before you ask me how, let me expand.
Social Listening for Head Hunting
Headhunting for candidates isn’t an easy task. This is especially true for industries with a high attrition rate. The HR team is constantly on the lookout for ideal candidates. Recruiting candidates that aren’t right for your company can be an expensive affair. You invest in recruiting, training them only to lose them in a few weeks or months.
With social listening, looking for candidates with specific qualifications becomes easy. It works a little like a boolean search. Say you are an IT recruiter and you are looking for someone proficient in JAVA. Feed-in the keyword “Skilled in JAVA” or similar keywords and run a search across mentions from platforms like LinkedIn. You can use social listening tools to run these searches across recruitment sites like LinkedIn, Indeed.com, Monster.com et cetera. With social listening, you can also add filters like language and location if you have a specific requirement for those too. This helps you find candidates with the exact specificity without you having to do much manual work. You can use the saved time to scrutinize the CVs and pick out the best candidates.
Social Listening for Employer Branding
If you thought branding was exclusively a marketer’s job you’re wrong. In order to attract worthy candidates, you need to attract them to submit their resumes. If a candidate doesn’t see a compelling reason to join your company they might not send in their resume. You need to have a strong employer branding in order to get the best candidates.
Social listening tools are the best to support your online reputation management function. This tool helps both your PR and HR team. PR can work with the mentions from customers. While HR deals with the comments posted by employees or potential candidates. A typical social listening tool allows you to read into the sentiments your employees profess online. They might not tag the official page, but a social listening tool will still be able to track the brand name across platforms. If you are looking to build a positive employer brand on the Internet, you will have to be careful about what your employees discuss in the office environment. Take notice of these pain points, reach out to your employees, and try to solve these pain points. Your employees can also boost your brand online.
Social Listening for Profiling and Competitor Analysis
Talking of branding, we know how consumers check reviews online before buying products. The presence of platforms like Glassdoor is proof that your potential employees are also customers in a way. They check online reviews about your company before applying. On the other hand, companies also check candidates’ information on sites like LinkedIn.
While checking a candidate’s social media profiles is a typical approach, you could take the help of social listening. Social listening tools help set up search queries. And with a search query, you can instantly view a candidate’s social media profiles. It also turns up the articles or blog posts written by them and other resources that belong to them. However, social listening tools can only track information that is public, so you may still need a detailed resume from the candidate. This profiling system can help you determine if the candidate offers the right fit for you.
In conclusion, social listening for human resources is one of the many uses of this tool. Social listening helps streamline the operations of other departments too. The idea is simple – tap into the data that your customers are providing, derive insights and start acting.