Social media has become a popular digital platform. It remarkably impacts how we communicate and exchange thoughts with colleagues and friends.

In this competitive, digital era, it does not take more than a minute or two to harm an employer’s reputation. Therefore, human resources (HR) departments have to spring to their feet to identify those social media posts. Social media listening is helping HR in improving their hiring, marketing, and business strategies. The primary purpose of using a social listening strategy is to analyze sentiment: the share of voice, estimated reach, understanding of the right employee, the context of a discussion, etc.

This article is a complete walkthrough of how social listening tools can help increase HR’s productivity in hiring talent and monitoring recruitment. 

Read Also – What is Social Listening?

5 Benefits of using social listening in the Human Resource department

Although the reasons to start using social listening are endless for human resource (HR) teams.

Here is a list of some well-known benefits of social listening in the HR department.

1.  Acquiring Talent

The Human Resources (HR) department can extract numerous benefits from social listening research methods. 

In this social media era, people post almost everything on the internet through social media channels. 

So, if anyone searches for a job, they will post it on professional job search platforms. 

Today, most HR professionals have proficiency in utilizing social media platforms as a recruitment tool. 

In less time, they can filter the right candidate from those social media posts for an urgent vacant position. 

Tags like “job search” or phrases like “looking for a job,” “I need to switch my career,” or “start a new career” are some popular keywords for social listening tools that will capture and show to HR professionals. 

Once HR gathers the profiles and contact details, they will perform the employee screening. 

The HR team will start reaching out to potential candidates. They do this by responding to posts and tweets on LinkedIn or Twitter.

2. Finding Social Media Profiles of Relevant Candidates:

Social listening also helps in the digital profiling of different candidates. 

Online reputation plays a significant role in the lives of today’s digital users. HRs can use social listening to identify whether the candidate is relevant and has a reputed digital background. 

So, to do this, they can use social listening tools with phrases like “controversy topic” or tags like “trending” to check the behavior of candidates on social media. 

Social media profiles also enable HR professionals to understand the tastes and emotional side of candidates through their posts, comments, likes, and shares. 

The HR team must be well-versed in the candidate they are considering. HR should ensure that the candidate chosen will fit in with their current team. 

They dig deep through the social listening strategies to understand the candidate and whether the candidate will add to the company’s values and goals. 

Social listening tools also connect the dots about the candidate’s blog posts, articles, comments on non-professional social media accounts, etc. 

All these social listening insights merge to provide actionable insights to acquire the relevant candidate.

3.  Monitor Recruitment of Competitors

Competitors play a significant role in showing the brand’s position and what the human resources team is missing. 

Research on competitors helps gauge what the competitors are up to when hiring new team members. 

Social listening also helps in competition analysis. HR teams understand the technology their competitors are shifting to or the types of talent they are hiring from different social media sources. 

By actively listening to their competitors’ social media pages and posts, HR teams can learn what factors their competitors are recruiting. 

Again, it helps recruiters identify whether the competitors have approached the shortlisted candidates. 

In summary, social listening essentials provide you with an organo-verbal option regarding your competitors’ hiring procedures and strategies.

4.  Brand Reputation Management on Social Media

Online reputation has become a critical asset for brands and companies. In today’s cutthroat, competitive digital era, a tarnished brand reputation can jeopardize an organization’s hiring and overall revenue. 

Thus, social listening has a significant use case in monitoring and preserving brand reputation online. Traditionally, brand reputation was a vertical PR issue, and the marketing team used to take care of it in an organization. 

But in this information age, multiple departments have to deal with it. 

The Human Resources (HR) department is one of them. They ensure the potential candidates get the correct information and that no comment or post goes against the brand, which damages the reputation. 

Read also – What Can Social Listening Do for Your Business?

HRs use social listening tools and boolean search techniques to search for social media posts and comments that mention the brand name in context with the work environment. 

If the Human Resources team finds critical comments or posts that damage the brand’s reputation, the HR team should escalate the matter to social media specialists. 

To identify such issues through social listening, HR professionals can combine the brand name with keywords or phrases like “job is,” “work for,” “ex-employee,” “worked for,” “work as,” etc.

5.  Monitoring Industry

Today’s digital systems remain entangled with each other. 

We all hear about different brands in the news about the industry: online conferences, posts, legal updates, blogs, and publications. It helps everyone stay aware of the latest trends, happenings, and developments. 

Social listening is an excellent way for the human resources (HR) team to monitor and remain vigilant about brand-related news, blogs, articles, posts, etc. 

Again, social listening assists the HR team in reaching out to the right candidates through accurate content distribution. Suitable hiring content and news will help spark discussion and engagement with HR professionals over different channels.

Conclusion

We hope this article provides a comprehensive idea of what social listening is. It also emphasized how social listening helps the HR team streamline smooth hiring. 

You need to be made aware of social listening technologies and strategies to stay ahead of the competition. So, without delay, start leveraging the benefits of social listening today.