Stacy Zapar gets you: it’s hard to find qualified social media marketing candidates for jobs. Luckily, Zapar, founder & principal strategist at Tenfold Recruiting, has some tips for how to hire the right personnel out of the masses of digital marketing “experts” seeking jobs with your company. Zapar shared her top three tricks for hiring a social media marketer in Firebrand Group’s Future of Social report:
- Post and Pray Doesn’t Work
Posting jobs on boards and hoping for the best quality candidates will show up for interviews will get you nowhere. “The best social media marketer for you is gainfully employed and up to their noses in work! They’re not trolling job boards all day and looking at current openings,” says Zapar.
- Sourcing is the Best Way to Find Quality Candidates
Instead of opting for the fruitless Post and Pray method, Zapar recommends actively sourcing to find the best social media marketer for the job. Zapar adds, “Identify the social accounts that are the best in the business…and do a little research to find the person or persons running those accounts and/or the strategies behind them.” Cross-reference these media mavens on LinkedIn to gain a better understanding of your prospects.
- Targeted Outreach is Key
Once you find a prospect, don’t ruin your chances at establishing a connection by sending a generic InMail message. Build targeted messages for social media marketers that remove barriers to entry and have a clear CTA to turn that prospect into an employee.
Take this customized outreach one step further and engage with prospects across their social channels. “You’ll get a much higher response rate using social media (especially for this audience!) or email rather than sending a generic message to their LinkedIn inbox,” says Zapar. “Approach recruiting the same way you would your social media marketing: be targeted, relevant, timely, and authentic.”
To read the entire Future of Social report in partnership with Social Fresh and Simply Measured, click here.