How HR Can Utilise Social Media

Social media has become a key part of everybody’s lives, both inside and outside of the workplace. It has changed the way we communicate, with social networking websites allowing us to send and receive information instantaneously. As we move towards an ever more digital world, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to utilise social media platforms to amplify their brand voice, expand the reach of their company image and improve employee engagement.

There are many ways that HR can utilise social media. Typically, HR have used social media functionally for recruitment and outreach. Though we will discuss how this remains an effective hiring strategy, social platforms offer a host of other functionalities for HR to utilise in their day-to-day operations both internally and externally.

Internally, socials can be utilised to improve employee engagement through different HR processes such as onboarding and internal communications. Externally, social media can be used to amplify your corporate image and company culture alongside marketing and PR efforts. HR software and HRMSs can even make it simple to integrate social media into HR processes.

This all sounds great, right? Right. But… to ensure that social media communications do not harm your organisation’s reputation, HR should develop and implement strong social media policies.

Contents:

• Using Social Media to Improve Communication
• Internal Comms
• External Comms
• Using Socials to Better your Recruitment Strategy
• Utilising Social Media to Ensure Smooth Onboarding
• Improving Employee Engagement Using Social Media Recognition
• Guidance for Your Organisation’s Social Media Policy

Using social media to Improve Communication

Internal Communications

Effective internal communication is a key factor in developing high levels of employee engagement. When there are clear, open communication channels throughout the workplace, employees are able to share and receive information efficiently. HR can utilise social media to better their internal communications in the workplace, providing platforms for easy engagement between team members.
Using socials for internal comms can benefit a workplace greatly as it speeds up the rate at which your people can connect with each other. This can provide a boost to employee engagement as they are no longer waiting excessive amounts of time to find out information. In turn, this can also improve their productivity by producing more motivated staff, as they feel confident in being able to get the information they need in a timely manner to get their job done effectively.

HR software with social media integrations simplifies internal communications. The company dashboard can be used to integrate with different social platforms that allow employees to find information and communicate with each other with ease. Integrating a private Facebook group directly from your HRMS, for example, could be a fun way to improve employee engagement and foster a community in your organisation. Utilising your HRMS with employee self-service in this manner means that employees are able to access these lines of communication whenever, both from your internal HR software and social platforms to increase employee engagement.

See how our HRMS can help with your internal communications using our employee relationship management software.

External Communication

The use of social media can also enable HR improve their external communications. For HR, this is all about defining their brand, and increasing engagement with other businesses, partners and potential candidates and job seekers.

LinkedIn is a social platform that human resources use to improve their brand with external communications. Posting pictures or clips of your workplace or company-wide events can engage different corporate target audiences, depending on the content. HR can utilise social media for external communications in this manner to maintain and improve your organisation’s image and brand reputation.

Social media can also help to improve your reach with external communications by having internal clients share your posts on platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. This can help to expand your reach, and in turn allowing more people see the kind of company you are but also increase the likelihood of attracting more passive candidates.

Using Socials to Better your Recruitment Strategy

Post on social media pages to recruit the right people for your workforce

Social media is now a key component to most organisation’s recruitment strategies, from simple messages to creative content. Social media enables employers and recruiters to reach out directly to potential candidates, simply by sending them a message. So called ‘social recruiting’ affects how potential applicants find job adverts, apply for positions and view your organisation. Utilising social media to recruit can improve the engagement of candidates throughout the hiring process.

Developing a social media recruiting strategy is essential if you want to remain competitive in the recruitment and hiring process. A social media recruiting strategy should include Human Resources identifying what social platforms the candidates that you are wanting to attract use most frequently. If your ideal candidates use Linkedin more than Twitter, create data-driven posts that are going to have the most engagement. Creative social recruiting strategies can engage passive candidates, increasing the number of applicants when a vacancy arises.

By utilising a targeted social recruitment strategy, you can maximise the engagement your posts will get and are more likely to improve employee engagement in the workplace long-term by hiring like-minded, motivated employees. For example, recruiters could post videos to show the day-to-day working environment in your organisation and attract applicants.

Perform social media screening checks

Many recruitment and hiring processes include conducting a social media screen check on candidates. Though this may seem like a standard step, integrating social media checks is often overlooked in the hiring process, particularly if you need a new hire fast. For HR, utilising social media to gain a more comprehensive understanding of a new recruit can ensure that the information a candidate has provided is accurate and that the individual will fit into your organisational culture.

Background checks may be integrated as a part of your social media policy, recruitment strategy and process. By performing a social media background check, you can also increase employee retention rates as it means that you are able to find out if they are the right fit for the job.

Utilising Social Media to Ensure Smooth Onboarding

Social media plays a vital role in onboarding, as it allows for communication between newly recruited staff and their team. Human resources can utilise social platforms to create an online community, whereby new employees can contact their co-workers with ease. It provides a more interactive method of workforce management for new recruits and encourages employee engagement from the start of their journey.

XCD’s HR software can help improve the onboarding experience. Our HRMS can help to facilitate a community between new hires and current employees with employee self-service features, helping them to build relationships with their colleagues.

Improve Employee Engagement Through Social Media Recognition

As we know, a huge facet of employee engagement is about recognising your employee’s achievements. When HR does this, it makes employees feel valued and more engaged, fueling them with motivation to do even better next time.

Highlighting Training Achievements

HR managers can also use social media to boost employee engagement and make them feel more motivated by showcasing the training and development of your workforce. Promoting training can improve the image of your organisation by showing that you care about the development of your people, and help recruiters to demonstrate your company culture to potential candidates.

Training programs can be integrated with your social media strategy. Social platforms allow you to post and share any training programs you have booked, or allow you to share potential training programs that you believe might be of use. You can track how your employees engage with training and development using XCD’s learning and development solution from within your HRMS software. This enables HR to see how many employees are completing required training, and utilise internal social media comms to send out reminders.

Performance Recognition

HR can also use social media to recognise fellow employees and team members achievements. This is a great way to improve employee engagement, motivation and even retention. Posting your employees’ achievements on public platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter shows that you are proud to show off your staff. Productivity is often boosted by positive reinforcement, therefore sharing your employees great ideas online as means of praise can motivate them to continue trying their best.

Using XCD’s HR software, you can automate HR workflows in regards to performance management. Use performance management software to track and manage your employee’s performances. It allows you to easily spot when an employee is performing well and enables you celebrate their achievements publicly on both internal and external social media channels.

Guidance for Your Organisation’s Social Media Policy

Creating a company-wide social media policy can be tricky for HR teams. Internal and organisational social media channels are more simple to guide, however, it becomes tricky to ensure your employees are upholding the company brand on their social media accounts for personal use.

A good rule of thumb is that those who are authorised to speak on the behalf of the organisation should follow organisational social media guidance. For instance, recruiters who use their personal LinkedIn to post job advertisements should avoid engaging in controversial debates which may damage your company’s reputation.

Dell have a great example in their company social media policy: “All team members are encouraged to speak about the company and share news and information, but only authorised and trained spokespeople may speak on behalf of Dell Technologies and issue official company responses.”

Social media is no doubt an effective tool for HR to utilise in many HR processes.

From recruitment to performance management, social media can be utilised by HR to improve external engagement and employee engagement with an organisation. Communicating effectively with other organisations, employees and job seekers using social media enables HR can bolster company morale and productivity.

To discover how social media can be seamlessly integrated with your HRMS software, book a demo with XCD today.