Social media sites are valuable sources of information for any recruiter. This is especially handy when you have to navigate in a highly competitive niche like software development. There is a massive shortage of talent in this space so that to find and hire the right candidate, you have to be very fast, proactive, and creative. In this article, we’ll share some free sourcing tools for social media channels that will help to boost your hiring process and set you apart from other technology companies. But first, let’s define what social recruiting is, and why it is booming in 2021.

What Is Social Recruiting And How Social Recruiting Tools Can Help?

Essentially, social recruiting implies utilizing various social media channels for recruiting new hires. Social recruiting is an integral part of recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketing can be defined as a recruitment strategy of attracting and hiring the best candidates through employer branding and communicating the organization’s value proposition.

Social recruiting goes beyond simple job posting on your company’s LinkedIn or Facebook pages. Smart hiring managers use social media platforms to build relationships, proactively search for top talent, encourage job seekers to engage with the company’s content, and motivate them to apply for their vacant job positions.

Some more benefits of social recruiting:

• Social recruitment is a less expensive recruitment strategy when compared to traditional methods of recruitment, such as paid websites.
• Social sites are good for showcasing company culture. 
• Social media platforms are nearly the only place to reach passive candidates otherwise unavailable.
• Social media sites are handy for employee referral programs. Use them to engage existing employees in the hiring process. 
• Social recruiting allows for more personalized connections with your potential candidates. 

The social recruiting tools make social recruiting easier and more streamlined. The novel recruitment marketing software can even help businesses demonstrate their employer brand and build strong relationships with potential candidates. 

To cut down on your research time, we’ve compiled a list of useful social media sourcing browser extensions that will enhance your social media recruiting strategy for free.

Free tools for social media sourcing

Improver.io: speeding up the pre-screening process

Matching candidate profiles with open positions can be overwhelming. Manually checking their skills and the requirements of the particular job listing is time-consuming. However, some social media sourcing solutions can help in automating this task. One of the most popular is Improver. 

This is a browser extension that automatically matches candidates’ LinkedIn profiles with your company’s current open positions. It can save tons of time. Also, the tool provides contact information to speed up communication.

What can go wrong: Improver can’t help to match profiles lacking data. So, you can potentially miss promising candidates.

AmazingHiring: collect all candidate’s data in a single profile

As can be seen in the Improver example, very often, just one social network can’t be a good source of information. You need to track the candidate’s digital footprint at multiple websites to collect all the data that will help assess his or her skills as well as providing the foundation for successful communication. 

AmazingHiring extension is a perfect solution for this task. The system builds an aggregated profile of a candidate, collecting information from multiple public sources. The list includes social networks, professional communities, job boards, etc. Find a promising lead on LinkedIn, get info from Facebook, Github, and other websites, find out the best ways to contact the person, start communication! Also, the extension can search for information from social networks based on an email. 

AmazingHiring can amp up your social recruitment efforts by quickly growing a talent pool for you with all necessary contact details included.

What can go wrong: the tool is tailored to a specific task of sourcing IT specialists. However, it can be potentially used for hiring in other industries as well. Read more about recruiting passive tech candidates.

Hunter.io: finding the candidate’s email

Having a candidate’s email is crucial for recruiters. An experienced professional’s LinkedIn inbox is most likely full of messages from recruiters, so it will be tough to attract their attention. Instead, it is better to use email to send a hand-crafted personalized new job offer. 

Hunter.io is a tool for discovering emails of people you want to contact. While it’s mostly used by marketers and sales reps, smart recruiters can also benefit from it. The process is straightforward: you need to get information about the current company of the person (or his personal website where an email can be attached), feed the URL to the system, and it will display the list of all email addresses associated with this domain. Most likely, you will find your candidate on the list.

What can go wrong: Hunter is free, but free users can see only 50 emails attached to a specific URL. If your candidate works in a big company, chances are his email will not hit the TOP-50 list. The paid version does not have this issue, though.

Crystal: boost the communication process

Another big issue that occurs during the hiring process is finding the right tone for a conversation with a potential candidate. Usually, you do not know this person and need to guess which messaging to apply to increase the ROI of the communication. 

Crystal is a digital communication coach that generates personality-based advice for any email you are sending. The system analyzes the person’s profile on LinkedIn, SalesForce, and HubSpot to tell his or her personality. The extension then gives real-time suggestions for emails.

What can go wrong: an algorithm can make a mistake, people still better understand other people. So try to not overly rely on insights Crystal if you feel that recommendations do not suit the particular situation.

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Final Thoughts 

Social recruiting is an effective and proven strategy to implement, and there are a lot of benefits to it. However, at first, sourcing on social media may seem like a time and resource-consuming process. Luckily, there is a bunch of handy and free tools available to make the social media sourcing process efficient, cost-effective, and fast. Automating your social media sourcing process doesn’t have to be the only upgrade to your recruiting strategy, that’s why we’ve prepared a list of the best free Chrome extensions every tech recruiter should know about in 2022, check it out here!

There are specialized software like Improver, Hunter, Crystal that aim at solving specialized tasks, and more universal solutions like AmazingHiring. To advance your social media sourcing strategy request a demo of AmazingHiring.